ROBBE-GRILLET AND MODERNITY: Science, Sexuality, and Subversion

Featuring two remarkable first-person interviews with the major contemporary French man of letters, this work investigates the relationships between Alain Robbe-Grillet's experimental writing (novels, picto-novels, autofictions, films, and essays) and developments in a number of fields of contemporary inquiry - new sciences (quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and contemporary biology, among others), poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminism.
Bringing together "the ghosts in the apparently contradictory pair of science and sexuality," Raylene Ramsay suggests a connection between concepts of the world as "complementary" and "chaotic" and the sado-erotic character of Robbe-Grillet's work. At this intersection, she argues, the analogy sheds light on both the obsessive nature of Robbe-Grillet's metaphors and on the troubling presence of sexual violence in postmodern texts.
Ready-made language and myth imprison all writers (and readers), she says, insisting that Robbe-Grillet is the conscious prisoner of his fantasies. She describes his creative work as a perilous personal adventure through "the turbulent zones of the unknown and the aleatory, an unblinking look at the unseen 'chaos' in the world and the blind monsters in the self." At the least, she says, his journey through history, human time, and desire is the text of his own life.