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Robbe-Grillet's Métaphoricité Fantôme, Thomas D. O'Donnell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Alain Robbe-Grillet made his initial reputation among French writers not only through his controversial first novels, but also through a number of essays published collectively under the title of Pour un Nouveau Roman. In these essays, Robbe-Grillet pronounced an absolute condemnation of metaphor in the novel; this condemnation has since been prominently featured in theoretical arguments focusing on "zero-degree" writing. However, Robbe-Grillet has since written fictions which are hardly consistent with his earlier doctrine, and Topologie d'une cité fantôme appears, if anything, to embrace metaphor, and thus to point to a new direction in Robbe-Grillet's work, a direction closer …