One of the Last Arch-Modernists.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, French artist and pioneer of the “new novel” died this past week aged 85. Robbe-Grillet had one of the most maddeningly difficult world-views of the 20th century. His cold prose, disdain for conventional narrative structure, and emphasis on experiential memory set his work part from even his most similar contemporaries. Though still somewhat obscure to the United States, Robbe-Grillet maintained a dedicated following (one hesitates to call it a “cult” following, since much of what usually constitutes such fandom could hardly be translated to his target audience) in Europe. His work was especially privileged by the New York intelligentsia of the 1950s and 1960s. 
Robbe-Grillet was one of the darlings of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review. My first encounter with his work was through the Alain Resnais film Last Year at Marienbad (1962). At this time, I was slowly working my way through the major films of the “French New Wave” of the late 1950s and early 1960s. My early exposure had been to the energetic, youthful movies of this type of film making. Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Goddard’s Breathless (1960) were the ur-texts: stylistically bold, partially-autobiographical, and awash in the American influences of post-WWII Europe. That said, I was almost wholly unprepared for Last Year at Marienbad, which largely represents the opposite end of the tendency. Here, high modernism is obscurity. Europe remains the realm of the detached aristocracy. Obtuse art, deadening leisure and shear brooding prove an equally mesmerizing, which is to say “wholly appropriate,” response to the horror of life after Hitler and the Holocaust as did youth, America, and playful revolt.
Last Year at Marienbad was an international success - art film a la lettre - and it remains a core text of classes on European Cinema. Robbe-Grillet was a director as well, helming many shorts and a few features (the most readily available of which is La Belle Captive [1983]). As compared to his literary texts, his film work begs re-distribution, re-appraisal, and general re-discovery.
I am slightly less familiar with Robbe-Grillet the writer, as many of his texts are not easy to come-by in English translation. My personal encounter with that aspect of his work is almost solely with Snapshots (originally 1962). This collection of pieces - not stories, per se, but analytical situations - is done as non-narrative prose. Robbe-Grillet furnishes absolutely precise descriptions of objects and spaces. Little more. This experimental approach totally befits the structuralist turn in modernist thought and proves that analytical writing had literary value beyond the endless passages of Proust.
I am angry at myself for only re-assessing the great modernists (Antonioni and Bergman included) at their times of death. The fact that this entire generation is now quite old means that the living voice of the most prominent artists, critics, and writers of the 1950s and 1960s does not have all that long to go.
A sound clip of Jealousy from UbuWeb.