![]() ![]() The 19th- century novel is, in fact, no more realistic than one by Robbe-Grillet each is as artificial and invented as the other. That so many of these writers still strike reviewers and critics as odd, difficult, and "experimental" (i.e., "anti-novelists"), rather than as constituting the mainstream of fiction for at least the past 30 or 40 years, proves the point of For a New Novel (1953), that our view of the novel continues to be derived from our somewhat misguided conception of 19th-century narrative: "life-like" characters with believable motivations and psychological substance familiar settings and stories that observe the "logic" of time and place. The remarkable thing about modern fiction is that it asserts this characteristic quite deliberately, to such a degree that invention and imagination become, at the limit, the very subject of the book." This remark by Alain Robbe-Grillet accurately represents, not just his own fiction, but that of other French "new novelists" (Queneau, Pinget, Butor, Simon, Sarraute, Sollers, Roche), as well as that of such other contemporaries as Beckett, Borges, Cortazar, Calvino, Goytisolo, Sorrentino, and Hawkes. ![]() Precisely that he invents, that he invents quite freely, without a model. ![]() HAT CONSTITUTES the novelist's strength is By JOHN O'BRIEN JOHN O'BRIEN is the editor of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. ![]()
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