When, in the 1960s, theorists of the New Novel, led by Alain Robbe-Grillet and then Jean Ricardou, undertook a complete spring-cleaning of the fusty conventions governing fiction, they enthusiastically dismantled and discarded previous notions of intrigue, characterisation, psychology, orderly thematic development in time, spatial coordination, plot resolution and closure, recognising fiction only as facture, that is, primarily the use and manipulation of words in a text. In this, they were themselves developing ideas inherent in the work of predecessors such as Jarry, Roussel, Valéry, Proust, Joyce, Borges and various Surrealists, but their theoretical approach demolished far more systematically the existing canons of literature. Words and tropes formed by words were henceforth to be the origin and generators of all fictional production, and theme and subject matter were demoted into being merely another element of the text.

A difficulty arises here that has been the source of many disputes and divisions of opinion. Words used by the writer of fiction do not come to the reader pure and unencumbered, but inevitably, in some way, charged and contaminated with our thoughts and feelings about what is ‘real’, and by our propensity to impose cognitive patterns on experience. Problems concerning logic, time, belief, perception and representation in literature all stem from this contamination. New Novelists, in consequence, all tread the slippery line between mere ludism, or word-play, or even ‘oulipism’, on the one hand, and a relapse into convention on the other. As a result, thematics were a constant source of contention among devotees of the new writing, for whom theme and ‘subject’ were the product of language, and not to be privileged in any way. For purists such as Jean Ricardou a battle had constantly to be fought to restore the primacy of the text itself.

The innovative work of the novelist, Claude Simon, provided Ricardou with an excellent opportunity for demonstrating his theories. However, resistance to Ricardou's rigidity soon developed, typified by Denis de Saint Jacques's intervention, ‘L'Obstination réaliste’, at the Colloque de Cerisy in 1974, and by the comments of participants in the New York colloquium on the New Novel in 1982. Simon's writing is still at the centre of the debate, as Ralph Sarkonak emphasises in the Claude Simon series of the Revue des lettres modernes inaugurated in 1994.