Ghosts in the Mirror by Alain Robbe-Grillet

“I myself have done much to promote these reassuring idiocies, and have now decided to refute them because I feel they’ve had their day: within the space of a few years they have lost any shocking, corrosive, and therefore revolutionary force and have been assimilated as received ideas, fueling the spineless militance of the fashionable journals, yet with their place already prepared in the glorious family vaults of the literature textbooks. ideology, always masked, changes its face with ease. It is a hydra-mirror whose severed head quickly reappears, presenting the adversary who thought himself victorious the image of his own face.”
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”And sot hat’s all that’s left of someone, after such a short time—and that goes for me too, soon enough, no doubt: odds and ends, frozen gestures, disconnected objects, questions in the empty air, a jumble of random snapshots with no real (logical) sequence. That’s death…So to construct a narrative would be a more or less conscious bid to outwit death. The entire system of the novel in the last century, with its cumbersome machinery of continuity, linear chronology, causality, noncontradiction, was actually a last-ditch attempt to forget the disintegrated state we were left in when God withdrew from our souls, an attempt at least to keep up appearances by replacing the incomprehensible explosion of atoms, of black holes and impasses, with a reassuring, clear, unequivocal consteallation woven so closely that we’d no longer hear death howling between the stitches, amidst broken threads hastily reknotted. No objection to this grandiose, unnatural project?…No objection, really?”
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”…the taste of defeat, along with the paradoxical sense of freedom you feel at the collapse of your own nation.”

-Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1984