Bleeding the Thriller: Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Intertextual Crimes

Abstract

If self-conscious textual experimentation distances Robbe-Grillet from more orthodox crime writers, his taste for sadoerotic murder and his obsession with form place him among the most challenging practitioners of the genre. This essay argues that crime in his work is both the absorbing project of a complex subjectivity and a manipulable, mass-produced stereotype; further, that detection is both the search for a perpetrator and a metaphor for the process of interpretation associated with the act of reading within the instability of language. While Robbe-Grillet demonstrates that the textual representation of crime creates myths of a rational, unified self, he is dependent upon such representations for his subjective indulgence in the violence of sadoerotic fantasy. An examination of crime elements in certain key texts will illustrate both his formal subversion of generic stereotypes and the inevitability of narrative participation in the mise-en-scène of desire where what is prohibited is always present. Elements from crime fiction within self-reflexive, pluralistic texts form a network which reflects a self in process, both fixed and liberated at the limits of reading and rationality.

Je rêvais volontiers au massacre de mes camarades de classe…les corps gracieux aux jolis visages tendres avaient droit à de longs supplices, liés aux troncs des marronniers dans la cour de récréation.

(Alain Robbe-Grillet)¹