Alain Robbe-Grillet, novelist, film-maker and essayist, was best known as a vociferous apologist for the nouveau roman and the scriptwriter of Last Year in Marienbad.

He was a major figure in the avant-garde of the 1960s in Paris, and he never abandoned his polemical defence of innovative forms of literary and cinematic practice.

He was born in 1922 in Brest, one of two children. His father ran a small cardboard box business, and both parents were what he later described as “right-wing anarchists”. Although the end of the Second World War left him with no desire to pursue the politics of his family, he retained the perverse and non-conformist stance towards life that he saw in his parents’ political allegiance, which they maintained even during the 1950s.

There were no obvious signs of a future literary vocation either in his schooling or in his university studies. He was educated in Paris but took his baccalauréat in Brest, specialising in mathematics. Trained as an agronomist in the Institut national d’agronomie, he spent the war years as a student (1942-45), and also did a stint in the Service du travail obligatoire, during which he was seconded to a tank factory in Nuremberg (1943-44).

His first literary contacts were made during his time working for the French National Institute for Economic and Statistical Information, but it was not until 1949 that he wrote his first novel, Un Régicide. Composed during his spare time as an employee in a centre for artificial insemination, and written on the back of the genealogy of a Dutch bull, the manuscript was refused by Gallimard, and remained unpublished until 1978.

Between 1950 and 1951 he worked in various French colonies as a research agronomist, and it was on his way home on sick-leave from the French West Indies that he wrote Les Gommes (The Erasers). The novel was accepted by the Éditions de Minuit and published in 1953.

The Éditions de Minuit was an important focus for the new kind of experimental writing that emerged during the 1950s and eventually supplanted the postwar Existentialist climate represented by Sartre and Camus.

It was in this atmosphere that Robbe-Grillet’s work found its niche, and in 1955 he took up a full-time job as a reader for Minuit, helping to promote the work of Samuel Beckett and championing a number of the writers whose names were associated with his under the banner of the nouveau roman, such as Michel Butor and Claude Simon. Almost all RobbeGrillet’s own work was published by Minuit. Le Voyeur (The Voyeur) appeared in 1955 and La Jalousie (Jealousy) in 1957.

His literary points of reference were relatively unconventional for the time: Kafka, Raymond Roussel and Italo Svevo, and his preferred childhood authors were Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling.

Robbe-Grillet’s disconcerting novels included deadpan but disorientating accounts of the Brittany coastline (Le Voyeur) and of a banana plantation (La Jalousie), but also hinted at adultery, paedophilia and murder. The labels chosisme and l’école du regard were coined in an attempt to categorise this new form of writing.

Critical controversy was in the air: Robbe-Grillet was taken up and defended by the young Roland Barthes, and he himself contributed a number of articles to the magazine L’Express. In them he propounded ideas about literature that seemed to undermine the basic precepts of the novel as he attacked the notions of character and plot, and lambasted the idea of commitment in literature. In their place he promoted a view of the novel as a purely verbal construct, and literature as a field of linguistic and structural invention rather than a vehicle for human insights or social truths.

Towards the end of the 1950s all this converged around the nouveau roman for which Robbe-Grillet became an energetic and self-appointed spokesman, and a number of his essays appeared in book form as For a New Novel (1963). His unusual combination of polemic and formalism helped to give literature a new role, contesting established ideas and received opinion purely by means of its use of language and structure rather than by explicit counter-argument.

Although he was a signatory of the Manifeste des 121 in 1960, protesting against the use of torture by the French army in Algeria, he rejected the role of the writer as political and social commentator in the mould of Gide or Sartre. In his view, the writer should challenge ideologies and orthodoxies by treating ideas as no more than the raw material of literature to be played with and reinvented through the way he strings his sentences together and constructs his fictions.

What makes all this more than empty formalism is the sheer polemical energy of Robbe-Grillet’s creative enterprise, and the spirit of euphoria — and sometimes paranoia — in which it is carried out. His surface descriptions and flawlessly constructed sentences are nevertheless marked by obsession and haunted by a sense of some other reality which is never quite revealed.

More novels followed during the 1960s — Dans le labyrinthe (In the Labyrinth, 1959), La Maison de rendez-vous (The House of Assignation, 1965), and his writing began to make use of popular literary genres, such as the murder mystery. Robbe-Grillet also embarked on a new career as a cinéaste at this time. It was launched by his role as the author of the script for Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961) which won the Golden Lion in Venice and was the object of much perplexity and debate.

Robbe-Grillet’s first film, L’Immortelle (The Immortal One) appeared in 1963, and was followed by TransEurop-Express (1966, in which he starred with his publisher, Jérôme Lindon), L’Homme qui ment (The Man Who Lies, 1968), L’Éden et après (Eden and After, 1969), Le jeu avec le feu (Playing with Fire, 1975), La belle captive (The Beautiful Prisoner, 1983), Un bruit qui rend fou (The Blue Villa, 1995) and others. His own films never achieved the celebrity of Marienbad but they had a certain critical success, and in 1982 the Ministère des relations extérieures took the unusual step of issuing the collected films of Robbe-Grillet in a boxed set (now very difficult to get hold of, unfortunately). He continued to make films long after he had virtually ceased writing fiction.

Film also led to Robbe-Grillet’s invention of a new literary genre, the ciné-roman, which can be read as both the script for the film and an alternative, written version of it. A number his films exist in this parallel form.

In yet another new departure, he also produced a number of books in collaboration with painters and photographers, including Rêves de jeunes-filles (Dreams of a Young Girl with David Hamilton, 1972), La belle captive using paintings by Magritte (1976) and a volume with original lithographs by Robert Rauschenberg (1978). In 1972 Harrison Birtwistle used the text of one of Robbe-Grillet’s short pieces collected in Instantanés (Snapshots, 1962), for his piece La plage: eight arias of remembrance for soprano and five instruments, first performed in Sheffield.

Towards the end of the 1960s Robbe-Grillet’s films and novels began to acquire an overtly erotic and sadistic content, although an erotic focus on women’s bodies had already been evident in his earlier work. His preoccupation with surface rather than meaning, writing rather than subject matter, made this engagement with sexual issues problematic and provocative, and in 1974 his film Glissements progressifs du plaisir (Successive Slidings of Pleasure) was put on trial in Italy for the offence of outraging public decency — much to Robbe-Grillet’s own personal outrage.

From then on, his writing began to show signs of a much greater suspicion of his reading public, including the reading public of the nouveau roman itself. In 1984 he published the first volume (Le Miroir qui revient; Ghosts in the mirror) of his semi-autobiographical trilogy, in which he sought to confound the supporters of the very principles which he had campaigned to establish, but which by then had become widely accepted within academia. The turn to autobiographical writing was a polemical gesture aimed at keeping the spirit of controversy and invention alive, and in Robbe-Grillet’s hands this shows as a mix of frank confession, half truths, fiction and overt fantasy.

From the 1970s onwards Robbe-Grillet held a series of posts as visiting professor in a number of North-American universities, one of which led to a commission to write a novel introducing increasingly complex elements of grammatical construction for the benefit of foreign students of French. The outcome is one of his most engaging texts, published in its academic guise as Le Rendez-vous, and subsequently by Minuit as Djinn (1981).

He celebrated his 80th birthday by publishing a novel (La Reprise), a ciné-roman (C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle) and a collection of essays (Le Voyageur) in which his simultaneously provocative and engaging vigour is undiminished.

True to his genius for the unexpected, he was elected to the Académie française in 2004. He subsequently refused to wear the obligatory green uniform with accompanying sword, thus delaying his official induction while the rules were reviewed. Shortly after his election, the publication of his wife’s diaries from the early years of their marriage attracted a certain amount of attention through their frank account of their sexual activities.

His novels are widely available in English translation (including one by his fellow novelist, Christine Brooke-Rose) and were published and championed in the UK by the publisher John Calder.

His role as an honorary academic made him an excellent commentator on his own work in interviews and at colloquia. Alongside all his other activities he also built up a large collection of cacti which he kept at the château in Normandy where he lived. He married Catherine Rstakian in 1957. As well as her diaries, she published two volumes of erotic fiction under the pseudonyms of Jean de Berg and Jeanne de Berg. They had no children.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, novelist, film-maker and essayist, was born on August 18, 1922. He died on February 18, 2008, aged 85