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His first nouveau roman [‘new novel’], Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes [The Erasers] (1953) eschews conventional storytelling, anthropomorphizing meanings and psychological motivations, instead focussing on ‘the adventure of language’. Food, drink and the places they are consumed are part of a strategy of subverting literary realism, noir conventions and classical tropes as Robbe-Grillet seeks to deny readers narrative satisfaction. However, the interpretative multiplicity of eating and drinking counters such intentions, notably in frequently food-premised mises en abyme (including and exceeding the famous tomato quarter), intended to encapsulate the narrative but full of leftover political, social, cultural and psychological meaning. Robbe-Grillet’s subversion of Oedipus Rex and its scenes of nourishment (and its withdrawal) along with references to hunger point to characters and a narrative fuelled by lack. Constructs of gender and of class distinction are revealed in Robbe-Grillet’s representations of food and drink, as are coercive and excessive effects of capitalism in everyday life. Descriptions of eating and drinking are shown to have ambivalent remainders of trauma (from the Second World War and the impact of consumer culture). Re-thinking the novel through its representations of eating and drinking shows how writing and reading – like feeding – are necessarily transformative, multiple and conflictual processes.

This chapter surveys the early dissemination of the nouveau roman in Britain, beginning around 1957. First, the nouveau roman’s main British publisher, Calder & Boyars, is introduced, with consideration of that publisher’s broader activities and ideals; particular attention is paid to its transnational contexts. There is mention too of the nouveau roman’s other British publishers, including Faber and Jonathan Cape. Then the different publishing formats used by Calder & Boyars for the nouveau roman are discussed, with analysis of visual presentation. The chapter then turns to the ways in which Calder & Boyars mediated the nouveau roman in promotional copy and in the search for new audiences; reference here is made to modernism, Existentialism, the notion of the literary ‘classic’, detective fiction, pulp fiction, cinema, theatre, television, and radio. The chapter concludes with two case studies that typify the nouveau roman’s complex status for British readers, first looking at Samuel Beckett’s relation to the nouveau roman, and then narrating Calder & Boyars’s ‘French Week’, in which the publisher organized a British speaking tour for Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Nathalie Sarraute.

In surveying the reception of the nouveau roman in Britain from its initial emergence in the late 1950s, this chapter begins by looking at the various names given to the phenomenon of the nouveau roman, and their significations. The predominance of Alain Robbe-Grillet and his notion of chosisme is considered. Then a number of vituperative conservative critiques are discussed. Existentialism, the nouvelle vague, and modernism are shown to be major points of reference in the reception of the nouveau roman. The chapter concludes with two codas. The first considers the edges of a reception history of the nouveau roman in Britain by looking to creative responses from the cinema (Tony Richardson, Peter Brook), visual media (Martin Vaughn-James, Ian Hamilton Finlay), life-writing (W. G. Sebald), and music (Harrison Birtwistle). The second looks at the adoption of the nouveau roman in British academe, and the rise of Theory.

This chapter shows how the narrative form and obsessive focus on objects of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s early fiction—his chosisme—was adopted in three novels published in Britain in the 1960s. In Brian W. Aldiss’s Report on Probability A (1968), Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out (1964), and Denis Williams’s The Third Temptation (1968), Robbe-Grillet’s literary innovations become a means of reflecting on the end of empire. First, Robbe-Grillet’s broader reception within the context of the end of empire is surveyed. Then the three novels in question are analysed in turn. The chapter concludes by considering how new literary forms and new world-historical forms might line up in the work of Aldiss, Brooke-Rose, and Williams.

Chapter One engages with Barthes’s discussion of a classical distance from worldly objects and of a modern – nouveau roman-esque – chosisme (which is predicated, Barthes says, upon a certain proximity between people and things) in order to bring the landscapes of Proust’s novel into relief. The chapter also reads Barthes’s paradoxical integration of Proustian elements within his own writing on the nouveau roman as a reflection – a rewriting – of the liminal (the simultaneously classical and modern) texture of À la recherche itself.