I resume and I sum up 
John Sturrock
- La Reprise by Alain Robbe-Grillet
The first novel that Robbe-Grillet wrote, Un Régicide, had a quotation at the start from Kierkegaard, an out of the way source for an agronomist turned writer who gave an impression of never having known a moment’s metaphysical unease in his life. It came from The Seducer’s Diary: ‘One might have said that this man passed through life without leaving any trace . . . and one might even claim that he had no victims.’
‘This man’ was Kierkegaard who, in the Diary, practised what he defended as a ‘necessary deception’ by misrepresenting himself there as a seducer. What Robbe-Grillet will have liked most about this is letting on that you’re a deceiver even as you go about your deceptive business.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Other articles by this contributor:
The Man from Nowhere · Burying André Malraux
Le pauvre Sokal · the Social Text Hoax
print layout
tell a friend