Magritte’s Captivity in Robbe-Grillet’s La Belle Captive: The Subjugation of the Image by the Word

Abstract

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel La Belle Captive, which employs seventy-seven paintings by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, is offered as a "collaboration," a playful interchange between word and image. Robbe-Grillet, who used the paintings variously as generative material and companion or counter-text to his written text after Magritte’s death, provides in La Belle Captive an occasion to explore the relationships between verbal and visual text. The novel may be understood to demonstrate a fundamental relationship of inequality between word and image, a relationship of violation rather than collaboration between equal partners.