NONFICTION - May 14, 1995

LA BELLE CAPTIVE by Alain Robbe-Grillet with Rene Magritte, translated with an essay by Ben Stoltzfus (University of California Press: $35; 245 pp.) “No one would (today) dream of praising a musician for having composed some Beethoven, a painter for having made a Delacroix, or an architect for having conceived a Gothic cathedral. Many novelists, fortunately, know that the same is true of literature.” With these words Robbe-Grillet, foremost practitioner and proponent of the nouveau roman , began his now-40-year-long assault on the outmoded fictional devices of psychological depth and anecdotal plot. Confining themselves to the surfaces of life that Robbe-Grillet thinks is the only realm credibly investigated by language, his novels have been described as written in a kind of cinematic dream-prose. Indeed he has also scripted and directed numerous avant-garde films; best-known in this country is his scenario for Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad.” Fans of that film will undoubtedly enjoy this “collaboration,” a halting, lurid, elegant narration constructed around and against 77 paintings by Magritte, the most “classical” of the surrealists. Magritte’s world is so thematically pure and instantly recognizable that Robbe-Grillet (and the reader) can employ it as mise en scene without simply re-imagining it in words. If the pleasure of the text and pictures is not sufficient, the translator boils just about everything else into 60 pages of breathless commentary. More valuable are the 21 additional Magrittes appended to this supererogation.