Alain Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth is, in many ways, more Kafka than Kafka. Most of the time you have no true idea of what’s going on – but that’s precisely the point. The structure isn’t linear, the tense flits between past and present, characters appear and disappear at will, and in many ways every page seems like the previous though you know it is different.
In this way it seems to me as if Robbe-Grillet has created the narrative equivalent of a labyrinth, and by doing so has found a way to transfer the lost soldier’s emotions onto the reader. You need stamina and a thick skin to read this, but in many respects it’s worth the effort – especially when it starts to undo all you think a story should be…
For those of you who don’t know, Alain Robbe-Grillet was an important figure in early 20th Century literature, a contemporary of Samuel Beckett. Here’s Wikipedia: “Alain Robbe-Grillet; (18 August 1922 – 18 February 2008) was a French writer and filmmaker. He was one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman (lit. ’new novel’) trend of the 1960s. His writing style has been described as “realist” or “phenomenological” or “a theory of pure surface”. Methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects replace (though often reveal) the psychology and interiority of the character. The reader must slowly piece together the story and the emotional experience of jealousy, for example, in the repetition of descriptions, the attention to odd details, and the breaks in repetitions, a method that resembles the experience of psychoanalysis in which the deeper unconscious meanings are contained in the flow and disruptions of free associations. Timelines and plots are fractured, and the resulting novel resembles the literary equivalent of a cubist painting. Yet his work is ultimately characterized by its ability to mean many things to many different people.”
