SOURCE: “Writing on the Ruins in Les Derniers Jours de Corinthe: From Reassemblage to Reassessment in Robbe-Grillet,” in French Review, Vol. 70, No. 2, December, 1996, pp. 231-44.

In the following essay, Ramsay examines Robbe-Grillet's pastiche of autobiography, myth, memory, literary text, and history in Les Derniers Jours de Corinthe. According to Ramsay, “The text sets out to consciously stage, deconstruct, indeed to ‘ruin,’ both its own generative mechanisms and the monsters and the sirens lurking in the writer's subconscious.”

Nous écrivons, désormais, joyeux, sur des ruines

—Alain Robbe-Grillet, Les Derniers Jours de Corinthe, 1994.

In this “new autobiography,” a writing of the self characterized by self-consciousness about the “impossibility” of any such definitive self-reconstitution, according to Robbe-Grillet, the reader is embarked, once again, on a ludic, intertextual journey through the ruins of humanist enlightenment, of tragedy, and of autobiography. Guided/lured by the pure and false Ariadne (alternatively, Mina, Marianic...