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Published in 1957, as the nouveau roman was rising on the Parisian literary scene, Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel La Jalousie [Jealousy] produced in many of its first readers a reaction of puzzlement and consternation. One critic from the newspaper Le Monde believed that "he had surely received a copy whose pages had been mixed up by the printer, that it was a jumbled mess" (qtd. in Robbe-Grillet "Order" 3). La Jalousie, in many ways, can be said to illustrate Robbe-Grillet's modernist, if not postmodernist, bias against classical realism and narration,1 his view that "tellfing] a story has become strictly impossible [raconter est devenu proprement impossible]99 (33). Making these remarks in an article aptly entitled 'On Several Obsolete Notions," published the same year as La Jalousie and republished a few years later in his influential 1963 manifesto For a New Novel, Robbe-Grillet made clear his intention to renovate both the novel form and the critical reading practices used in approaching the genre as a whole.
Few readers answered Robbe-Grillet's call for a radicalization of the novel, however, and the question of how one can or should read La Jalousie's unruliness, its intentional challenge to hermeneutical containment and cognitive mastery, still remains open. The question of how to respond to La Jalousie-a question that the novel itself allegorizes or stages in several key scenes-is not just an intellectual or epistemological challenge but also an ethical one. The following pages re-examine the reception of Robbe-Grillet's work from such a perspective, identifying the forms of readerly responsibility that the novel stages and elicits, as well as evaluating the very possibility of meeting the text's ethical and interpretive demands in such a way.
Confronted with La Jalousie's unruliness, some critics in effect ignored it, proceeding with well-established modes of inquiry in an attempt to impose a fixed meaning on the text. In his 1963 work The Novels of Robbe-Grillet, Bruce Morrissette offered the first systematic and explanatory study of the novel, basing his reading in part on the authority of its jacket blurb, which he faithfully paraphrased as follows:
The story with its three characters-the husband, the wife, the presumed lover-is "narrated" by the husband, a tropical planter who, from the vantage points in his banana plantation house, surrounded on three...