It was a literary movement, but rather a movement of things, a tendency of the real. The unspoken meeting of a generation of novelists as different was that common substrate, impersonal: experimentation with new forms of writing. For the writer is no longer trying to be faithful, truthful, in relation to a world beyond, or being his expression. It was creating the world, to invent. Unveiling the implicit forms of matter, in this case writing, as the carver who follows the wood grain.
These writings Robbe-Grillet, ranging from 1953 to 1963, try to think of this experimental, active core, the conditions in which the New Novel unfolds; that already lived in Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Flaubert, and then we find in Beckett, Roussel, Bousquet, and others.
This movement breaks a tradition that goes from Balzac to Sartre, which ruled the character, history, metaphor, held in a naturalist, humanist and tragic vision. Of the bourgeois novel, the one that expressed the Age of Man, its dominance in the world, the novel of the commitment (of art) with the Revolution, against which Robbe-Grillet reaffirms that the only commitment of the writer is with their own mutations of their art, their practice.
In New Novela man still exists, but it can not grasp things, escape him. Its action is not concerned at all. The objects no longer belong to you, do not talk about him or her speak. And often the modern writer does not have much to say and do not know quite how to say. Describe what you see, and that's all, and the description is no longer the framework for an anecdotal content, but the same movement of writing. Objects and beings are there, and that presence is the only truth of the story. Hence the reader suffers continual disappointments. But Robbe-Grillet says: If the reader has trouble sometimes oriented work in the modern novel, also lost sometimes in the very world in which he lives, when everything around you gives way, old buildings and old standards.
Mutations that are ours. This lack of guidance and this soil that yields is our habitat, our present. And today, as always, no shelter and weather. The problem, as someone said, is that outside the house is cold.