La belle captive

Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Belle Captive was published in 1975 and illustrated with 77 paintings by Rene Magritte. Robbe-Grillet has not chosen Magritte's paintings to mirror his text. Rather, he uses them as pretexts for the novel, letting them generate themes for an imaginary discourse that parallels their imagery, glosses them, contradicts them. Robbe-Grillet simultaneously comments on Magritte's paintings while taking advantage of them to parade his own favorite themes: play, eroticism, subversion. Magritte's rejection of illusionistic perspective and his transgressions of the normal boundaries between animal, mineral, and vegetable worlds, - rocks float like clouds, birds grow like leaves - is analogous to Robbe-Grillet's rejection of the conventions of fiction. In place of storyline, plot, and flesh-and-blood characters, Robbe-Grillet gives us a fragmented discourse, a plot that frustrates expectations, and a proliferation of characters whose identities remain problematic. The technique emphasizes the story of telling rather than the telling of a story. As readers of La Belle Captive we are invited to join in an inventive new game, unifying the separate entities, making the pictures speak and the text see. We share Robbe-Grillet's pleasure in the mysterious, poetic, and ludic in Magritte's art, and play with the cultural myths that painter and novelist both parody.