Djinn

While teaching at New York University, Robbe-Grillet was asked by a colleague, Yvonne Lenard, professor of French at the University of California, to write a didactic and practical text: a novel that would serve as a manual for learning French, on the premise that the pleasure of fiction would help learners understand the language far better than scientific or journalistic texts.

Robbe-Grillet accordingly set out to write a text in the form of his usual fiction, but specifically adapted for use in French as a Foreign Language courses. He wrote Le Rendez-vous, with eight chapters corresponding to the eight weeks of a university term, presenting grammatical difficulties in a logical teaching order along with supplementary exercises. The longer version was published under the title Djinn, un trou rouge entre les pavés disjoints. Each chapter discreetly addresses a specific point of French grammar, growing progressively more difficult as the reading advances: grammar, spelling, syntax, vocabulary and false friends are all covered. The gradual progression allows learners to test their own advancement, encouraging repeated returns to the text to uncover the connections between episodes, all the more so as the novel reads like a detective story. Its title, Djinn, plays both on the genie of language and on Victor Hugo’s poem “Les Djinns,” whose stanzas grow longer as the poem progresses — not to mention the novel’s narrator, Jean, a name pronounced, in the American manner, like “Djinn.”