The Hybrid Theater of Robert Pinget

The theatre of Robert Pinget was acclaimed at the Avignon Festival till the 1980s, until it became in spite of itself a representative of the theatrical avant-garde greeted by numerous critics and academic texts. It appears, however, that Pinget’s theatre was the victim of a real misinterpretation. Adventurous life, where romance and destiny mingle, lay the foundations of pingétienne irony, this search for personal tone subjects to uncertainties and other contradictions Robert Pinget’s affiliation with Max Jacob’s is an attempt to approach the avant-garde, but to turn away from it in a subtle way in the last moment. This waltz-hesitation of Pinget will be the basis of a tendency to put this work in the “new novel” or the theatrical avant-garde. The literature of Pinget can be considered as a form of the art of the escape the expression of an incessantly renewed amazement through an acousmatic voice. It is through the theory of the double and the quest for secrecy that we can now reposition Pinget’s theater in the perspective of a classical theater on the very margins of the avant-garde and a striking example of an ontological incomprehension between adaptation and the message left by the author.

The End and Afterlife of the Nouveau Roman, 1971–82

This chapter talks about Nouveau Roman, which was once again given collective visibility in the form of a décade at the Château de Cerisy–la–Salle in July 1971. It details the event that was devoted to “Le Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd'hui,” in which the organizers assembled five of the seven novelists who appeared on the famous photo of the Nouveau Roman: Robbe–Grillet, Claude Simon, Claude Ollier, Robert Pinget, and Nathalie Sarraute. It also recounts Nathalie's attendance at Gilbert Gadoffre's Rencontres in Loches, where she delivered a short paper titled “Is Proust Topical?” and took active part in the ensuing discussion. The chapter discusses the differences with the Nouveau Roman, structuralist theories of language, and the French left on the matter of Israel that revived Nathalie's long-standing resistance to arguments from authority. It mentions Nathalie's publication of “Fools Say” in 1976, which explores the politics of verbal categorisations.

Nouveau Roman

The ‘Nouveau Roman’ or ‘New Novel’ is used to refer to a literary and critical movement in France during the 1950s and early 1960s. Later, more experimental developments in the late 1960s and early 1970s will be labeled the ‘New New Novel’. Although the Nouveau Roman quickly became associated with the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget, to name only the most notable, it never crystallized into so dogmatic an ideology of literature and art as had the Surrealism of André Breton during the 1920s and 1930s.

La presencia de la materia epistolar en la obra de Robert Pinget. Irrealización y desaparición de la misiva en Le Fiston y Lettre morte

El presente artículo se propone analizar la presencia de la materia epistolar en la obra de Robert Pinget. Autor imprescindible del Nouveau Roman, el escritor instrumentalizó el dispositivo de la carta a favor de las prácticas de ruptura de e ta renovación literaria, a fin de vehicular la expresión de una conflictuada subjetividad. En el ámbito de la experimentación teatral, Pinget convierte la ausencia epistolar en herramienta para un nuevo théâtre de la voix. El análisis del díptico narrativo-teatral Le Fiston y Lette morte (1959) nos permitirá mostrar cómo se problematiza la misiva para convertirla en práctica irrealizable que hace más compleja la enunciación literaria y destruye la representación teatral clásica.