The big news of the day for me was not Castro resigning (after all Raúl is taking over, which is like putting Fredo Corleone in charge of the family), but that Alain Robbe-Grillet died.
Robbe-Grillet was monumentally important to 20th Century literature if for no other reason than forcing literary jockies to defend adherence to standard prose. But in spite of his detractors, he did something most writers including myself can only dream of: he invented his own style, his own form. Let’s face it, in an age where so many of us are just ripping off Bukowski or Kerouac or Plath or Hemingway or god knows who else, or everyday some other jackass uses the term “meta-fiction” to describe their half-assed memoir, here was a deranged Frenchman who said, “Nah bullshit, your creative writing workshop rules, these are all bullshit.” He threw it out the window and started over.
Depending on who you ask, some say he was a genius, others a hack just thumbing his nose at literary convention. Most often, people attacked him for his penchant for describing every object in a room (often multiple times throughout a novel), setting up a complete and total scene. For me, he was Thelonious Monk or Jackson Pollock or David Lynch. He showed you the possibilities of the art you aspire so much to create.
For that alone I salute the man. I always got lost in Robbe-Grillet’s novels. They wound and coiled like a snake, dragging you into this unreality he crafted so perfectly. In every novel, there is that one device you can point to as stunning and groundbreaking. There is In The Labyrinth with its repetitive scenes, slowly revealing the slight nuances and differences, the changes in perception that occur in spite of the repetition. It is an addictive story (in spite of R-G’s rejection of the concept of a story). Or The Voyeur, where you see the entire story in the killer’s circular mind, where even the lies he has convinced himself of shield the truth from the reader, until the ghastly details are finally revealed. Even The Erasers, his most straightforward novel (relatively), has that wonderful twist of an investigator tracking down a murderer who might actually be himself.
All of these books were a huge influence on me. The Love Book has a few stories directly influenced by Robbe-Grillet’s experiments. The way time keeps shifting in “The Fabulous Omar” is something I learned from The Voyeur and In the Labyrinth. In “On Time,” the concept of Daniel’s brain ‘lying’ to him, covering up memories, hiding things that are at the root of his time fixation was inspired by Robbe-Grillet giving the reader an omniscient look through the eyes of his character (who is not the narrator, but in many cases a vehicle for the reader to witness things).
So needless to say, I’m sad to hear that Robbe-Grillet is no more. Unfortunately, no one wrote the obituary the way it should’ve been done:
“Alain Robbe-Grillet died today. He died in bed. Next to the bed was a lamp with a yellow cord that ran down the back of the nightstand. There was a dead fly smashed against the lampshade, forming a figure eight…”