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…