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nouveau roman
Nouveau Roman and the isolated setting
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Is it a necessary convention of the form that the protagonists are isolated? In Jealousy the action takes place on a plantation buried deep within the jungle, In the Invention of Morel, the protagonist lives on a disease-ridden island completely cut off from the mainland. The film, Last Year at Marienbad takes place in a hotel from which the characters cannot escape.
Why is it that the originators of this influential form felt compelled to invent situations that compelled the characters to remain trapped? Was this a lack of imagination (probably not) or a direct consequence of their need to create a credible narrative setting to support the circular, dead-ended plots?
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Later descendants of the form have been able to develop more robust and flexible approaches to plot construction that facilitate the same result. I'm thinking specifically of Archangel: A History of the Great War, by Canadian filmmaker Guy Madden, or The plays of Richard Foreman (Eddie Goes to Poetry City, as only one example among many).
Photographic still from the film, Archangel by Guy MaddenProtagonists as slaves at the edge of the universe
Characters within the nouveau roman are prisoners in a space that is strictly limited by the author. Traditional novels are set in the world in fact the effective recreation of the real world is considered a mark of novelistic success. In the Nouveau Roman, action takes place in a strictly limited domain whose boundaries one never sees but one is always aware of. Any attempt to escape is frustrated with either a spatial turn back upon itself or time travel that returns the action to a point before the attempted escape began.
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Music based on The Invention of MorelBackground on Archangel and rarely seen film by Guy Madden
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