The Nouveau Roman, which means "new novel" in French, was a type of French book written in the 1950s and 1960s. It was different from traditional types of stories. Émile Henriot created the name in an article in the French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957. He used it to describe writers who tried new ways of writing each time they created a novel.
Overview
In the mid-1950s, a group of writers called Nouveaux Romanciers, or "new novelists," began to gain attention. Vivian Mercier identified Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Nathalie Sarraute as the main members of this group. These writers became well-known for their novels and for writing about their methods of creating stories. Over time, critics added other writers to the group who had published with Les Éditions de Minuit under Jérôme Lindon. These additional writers included Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Claude Ollier, Robert Pinget, and Claude Simon.
The writing style of the Nouveau Roman group had different approaches, but it often avoided using traditional elements such as a clear timeline, a clear story, clearly defined characters, or a narrator who knows everything. These authors were influenced by writers like Dostoevsky, Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Woolf, and Kafka, as well as by films.
Theory
The earliest writings that explained the Nouveau Roman movement were four essays written by Nathalie Sarraute. These essays were collected in a book titled L'Ère du soupçon (The Age of Suspicion) in 1956. Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor also wrote essays about the novel’s purpose and future. Their works were later gathered in books called Pour un Nouveau Roman (1963) and Essais sur le roman (1969), respectively.
Robbe-Grillet disagreed with many traditional aspects of the novel, such as focusing on stories, actions, characters, and ideas. He believed earlier novelists were outdated in these areas. Instead, he proposed a new idea for the novel, one that centered on objects and the world around them. According to his theory, the ideal Nouveau Roman would focus on describing things in a unique way, placing more importance on details of the environment than on stories or characters.
Jean Ricardou further explained the Nouveau Roman movement and wrote his own novels as part of it. His theoretical works include a book titled Problèmes du Nouveau Roman. He also wrote novels such as L'Observatoire de Cannes (1961), La Prise de Constantinople (1965), and Les Lieux-dits (1969). Ricardou organized and led several conferences about the Nouveau Roman, including a 1971 event in Cerisy. The discussions from this conference were published in two volumes titled Nouveau roman : hier, aujourd’hui. These writings helped people better understand the history of the movement. Before his death in 2016, Ricardou was working on a book of interviews with Amir Biglari, in which he discussed the Nouveau Roman movement.
Nouveau Roman and cinema
The Nouveau Roman style influenced movies, as writers Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet participated in the Left Bank film movement, which is sometimes called part of the French New Wave. They worked with director Alain Resnais to create successful films such as Hiroshima mon amour (1958) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Later, they directed their own films.
French classes in North America during the 1960s and 1970s often included books by Nouveau Roman authors, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie (1957), Michel Butor’s La Modification (1957), Nathalie Sarraute’s Le Planetarium (1957), and Marguerite Duras’ Moderato Cantabile (1958).
List of central writers and later figures
This information comes from the book Les nouveaux romanciers : étude critique and the book La littérature française du XXe siècle. The scholar Benjamin Libman has stated that the Nouveau Roman had a major impact on Susan Sontag and how postmodern fiction developed in the United States.