Reading Order
Les GommesLes Gommes Reading Order
Les Gommes (The Erasers, 1953) by Alain Robbe-Grillet is the founding novel of the nouveau roman (New Novel) — a detective story in which the detective Wallas, sent to investigate an apparent murder, commits the murder he is investigating (an Oedipus rewriting), narrated with the obsessive, precise, non-psychological attention to objects and surfaces that became the hallmark of the movement. Robbe-Grillet's revolutionary contribution was to strip the novel of everything that the nineteenth-century realist tradition had added to it: psychology, symbolism, social commentary, authorial moral judgment, and conventional narration. What remained was description — the precise, geometric, almost scientific inventory of objects and spaces that constitutes the surface of the world. Les Gommes was followed by Le Voyeur (1955), La Jalousie (1957, generally considered his masterpiece), and Dans le labyrinthe (1959), each becoming more formally experimental than the last. Robbe-Grillet also wrote the 'theoretical' manifesto Pour un nouveau roman (1963) and directed several films, most notably Last Year at Marienbad (1961, screenplay, directed by Alain Resnais).
Where to start
Read Les Gommes first as an introduction — it is the most accessible of the nouveau roman works because the detective structure provides a conventional framework, even though Robbe-Grillet dismantles that framework from inside. Then read La Jalousie (1957) — it is the masterpiece, and the formal radicalism is more extreme; the jealous husband whose presence is never mentioned narrates his observation of his wife and her neighbor with obsessive geometric precision. Read Pour un nouveau roman (1963) for the theoretical account.
Complete Les Gommes Book List
- 1Buy
Les Gommes
Alain Robbe-Grillet·1953·Start here — the detective structure provides a framework; the most accessible nouveau roman entry point - 2Buy
La Jalousie
Alain Robbe-Grillet·1957·Jealousy — the masterpiece; the absent-present narrator; more formally radical; read after Les Gommes - 3Buy
Le Voyeur
Alain Robbe-Grillet·1955·The Voyeur — between Les Gommes and La Jalousie in formal development; the traveling salesman and the missing girl - 4Buy
Dans le labyrinthe
Alain Robbe-Grillet·1959·In the Labyrinth — the most formally extreme novel; a soldier in an unidentifiable city; read after La Jalousie - 5Buy
Pour un nouveau roman
Alain Robbe-Grillet·1963·The theoretical manifesto — Robbe-Grillet's account of what the nouveau roman is and is not trying to do; read after the novels
Les Gommes — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the nouveau roman?
The nouveau roman (New Novel) is the label given to a group of French novels from the 1950s and 1960s — primarily by Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Marguerite Duras — that shared a rejection of the conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel. The main targets were: the unified, psychologically coherent character; the plot with conventional causality; the authorial moral judgment on events and characters; and the symbolism that made objects 'mean' something beyond themselves. The nouveau roman proposed instead: attention to surfaces rather than depths; description rather than narration; formal experiment rather than conventional structure; and the abandonment of the author as omniscient god of the fictional world.
What is Robbe-Grillet's obsession with objects?
Robbe-Grillet's insistence on the precise geometric description of objects — their dimensions, positions, textures, colors, without symbolic interpretation — is both a formal program and a philosophical position. Against the Sartrean claim that objects become repulsive and nauseating when their contingency is recognized, Robbe-Grillet argues that objects are simply there: they do not signify, they do not menace, they do not mean. The obsessive description of objects in his novels is an attempt to restore objects to their pure presence, stripped of the human projections (symbolic meaning, emotional resonance, psychological significance) that the realist novel had loaded them with.
What is the Oedipus connection in Les Gommes?
The Oedipus myth runs through Les Gommes as a structural frame: Wallas, the detective, is sent to investigate the apparent death of Dupont; he asks everyone he meets for information (like Oedipus asking witnesses to his father's death), gradually approaches the truth, and finally — at exactly the same hour of the day that the murder was supposed to have occurred — shoots Dupont (who is not dead), fulfilling the murder he was sent to investigate (as Oedipus kills Laius). The novel begins with a quotation from Sophocles and ends with the tragic recognition. But the Oedipus frame is not psychological — it is purely structural, a mechanical destiny rather than a fate arising from character.
What is the significance of the title Les Gommes?
Gommes are erasers — the rubber erasers that Wallas spends the novel searching for in a specific Parisian shop. The search is completely peripheral to the investigation, a detail that the plot has no use for; its inclusion demonstrates the nouveau roman's refusal to organize the fictional world around plot significance. Everything in the world has equal status — the important and the trivial, the investigation and the eraser hunt — because the author's selective attention (which would give importance to the investigation and not to the eraser) has been suspended. The erasers also suggest erasure — the text is erasing the conventions of the crime novel even as it uses them.
What is Last Year at Marienbad?
Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is a film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Robbe-Grillet — a film in which a man (X) claims to a woman (A) that they met the previous year and agreed that she would leave with him; whether this is true, whether A remembers or has forgotten, and whether any of the events shown actually happened is deliberately left unresolved. The film is the most famous practical demonstration of the nouveau roman aesthetic in cinema — the rejection of conventional narrative causality, the refusal to distinguish memory from fantasy from present reality, and the obsessive geometric attention to the surfaces of the hotel in which it is set. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet had a prolonged dispute about what the film 'means.'
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