ANTINOVEL

also called nouveau roman (French: new novel), avant-garde novel of the mid-20th century that marked a radical departure from the conventions of the traditional novel in that it ignores such elements as plot, dialogue, and human interest. Starting from the premise that the potential of the traditional novel had been exhausted, the antinovelists sought new avenues of fictional exploration. In their efforts to overcome literary habits and to challenge the expectations of their readers, they deliberately frustrated conventional literary expectations, avoiding any expression of the author's personality, preferences, or values. They rejected the elements of entertainment, dramatic progress, and dialogue that serve to delineate character or develop plot. The term antinovel was first used by Jean-Paul Sartre in an introduction to Nathalie Sarraute's Portrait d'un inconnu (1948; Portrait of a Man Unknown). The term has often been applied to works by Sarraute, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, and Michel Butor, and is therefore associated with the French nouveau roman of the 1950s and '60s. In place of reassuring conventions, these French authors offered the reader more demanding fiction, presenting him with compressed, repetitive, or only partially explained events whose meaning is rarely clear or definitive. In Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie (1957; Jealousy), for example, the narrator's suspicions of his wife's infidelity are never confirmed or denied, but their obsessive quality is conveyed by the insistent repetition of details or events, which take the place of a chronological narrative. Though the word antinovel is of relatively recent coinage, this approach to novel writing is at least as old as the works of Laurence Sterne. Works of the same period as the nouveau roman but in other languages, such as the German novelist Uwe Johnson's Mutmassungen ber Jakob (1959; Speculations About Jakcob) and the British author Rayner Heppenstall's Connecting Door (1962), share many of the characteristics of the antinovel, such as vaguely identified characters, casual arrangement of events, and ambiguity of meaning.