Image and Narritivity: Robbe-Grillet’s La Belle Captive

Abstract

A novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet and René Magritte, containing more than seventy-five of Magritte’s paintings and a text by Robbe-Grillet, La Belle Captive (1975) illustrates the procedure Jacques Derrida describes in reading photographs: the story does not precede the telling. Magritte’s paintings have no syntagmatic or diachronic element, no chronology. Paintings cut an event from the temporal continuum, removing it from any prior or sequential events which might imply causality. For Robbe-Grillet, to engender a narrative from paintings allows him to replace the "generative idea of chronology that is continuous and leading to an end"—permitting him to create a narrative without prior referent.