As he states in a short biographic note at the beginning of the “Postface” to his radio play, “Communications”, in Le Théâtre des Métamorphoses:It must be said: however accurate, however factual such details might be, and despite their compliance with accepted autobiographical practice, they offer the reader strictly nothing of interest.

[7] After graduating from the Paris École Normale d'Instituteurs (teachers' college) in 1953, he taught reading and writing in a boys' primary school until 1961, then at a boys' high school in Paris where he also taught literature, history, science, and geography until 1977,[8] and finally as visiting professor where he gave courses and conferences on his theory of the French New Novel in universities worldwide.

Ricardou published his first book of critical theory, Problèmes du Nouveau Roman[11] (1967), in the “Tel Quel” collection (Le Seuil, Paris).

Nevertheless, a statement he made many times throughout his lifetime should be emphasized: the reason he devised his theory was to understand the fiction which came, partially beyond his conscious determination, from the act of writing itself.

Instead of an approximate and inadequate translation, one might propose as a paraphrase a sentence from Ricardou's 1971 conference at Cerisy,[14] “Birth of a Fiction”: “The generative operations of similitude and of selection by overdetermination, far from restricting a supposed creative aptitude, are in fact the machinery whereby an entire production of elements and relations becomes possible”:[15] Ce que personne, de nos jours, ne devrait méconnaître, (...), c'est avec quelle force les directives d'écriture, funambulesques maintes fois quelques-unes il est vrai, loin d'interdire, ainsi que les naïfs le croient, les mouvements de la pensée, lors confondue sans doute avec le vague à l'âme, savent offrir à l'invention, au contraire, et parce qu'elles lui posent, tout simplement, de très exacts problèmes, les meilleures des chances.

Mieux: telles supplémentaires structures, non seulement elles permettent d'obtenir, et beaucoup plus qu'on ne l'avoue, ce que fors elles on n'eût jamais conçu (et c'est pourquoi mieux vaut, que n'a-t-il susurré (si un temps suffisant, du moins, m'est consenti, je le ferai paraître un soir pour Mallarmé),[16] de préférence à tout pyramidal recensement d'un univers imaginaire, fournir la stricte analyse des matérielles relations par lesquelles un poète imagine), mais encore, tel est le dos caché du mécanisme (...), elles conduisent quelquefois à produire des idées strictement étrangères, peut-être, à ce qu'on se figure avoir émis.

However, impressed as he was in 1955 by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Le Voyeur, then by Michel Butor’s L’emploi du temps or Claude Simon’s Le Vent: Ricardou soon adopted and considerably adapted the model of the early “Nouveau Roman”, with its non-realist, “creative” use of description, the interest of which, Ricardou put it, in a much-cited formula, lay less in “l’écriture d’une aventure” than in “l'aventure d’une écriture”.

It was a technique, with voyeuristic male fantasies to boot, that Ricardou quickly made his own, and one he develops, with more rigor and ingenuity than ever apparent in his mentor, in his first novel, L’Observatoire de Cannes (Minuit, 1961).

Traditional plot and character, conspicuous by their absence, were replaced by an intricate quasi-musical web of textual and intertextual variations on selected motifs.

To start with, the titles on the front and back cover were not the same (La prise/La prose de Constantinople), inaugurating the wordplay that would characterize the entire novel, whose pages and chapters were unnumbered.

As he explained: Nothing, one day, seemed more imperative to me than the project whose fiction would be constructed not as the representation of some preexistent entity, real or imaginary, but rather on the basis of certain specific mechanisms of generation and selection.

[15]Called by Lynn Higgins a superbook which “not only exploits its points of departure (puzzles, material givens of the cover design, generative wordplay), but also explores the enigmas of its own evolution and takes responsibility for meanings produced”,[19] La Prise de Constantinople led the way toward a new kind of composition: the polydiegetic novel, i.e. “a text that combines different “stories” taking place in what are a priori incompatible space-time worlds.

Frère Jacques, décalé, la répétition avec une constante d'irrégularité: le récit, c'est ça.His emblematic painting, done around 1960, which hung over his writing desk for the rest of his life and may be seen in many of the photos of him taken to illustrate articles in the press (see “Infobox” above), was a depiction of this process which he described as “a procedure of duplication (or “rule of repetition”) integrating a constant of irregularity”.

With each shift in focus, sharp edges, acute angles, with each shift in focus, sharp edges, acute angles, paradoxical perspectives appear in an incomplete pattern that pervades the mind, with each shift in focus, sharp edges, acute angles, paradoxical perspectives appear in an incomplete pattern that pervades the mind and accredits the idea that there exists some point in that space from which it is possible simultaneously to perceive the convergence of rhythms of the whole configuration and to penetrate its arcana in every sense with each shift in focus.As Leslie Hill summarized the novel in his review of the first four volumes of L'Intégrale Jean Ricardou:Taking literally Flaubert’s remark about wanting to write “un livre sur rien”, Ricardou undertook to generate an entire novel if not from “nothing”, then at least from nothing other than its material instantiation.

[18] While continuing to work on his novels, Jean Ricardou regularly published shorter pieces, essays and fictions, in various literary reviews, including the NRF (Nouvelle Revue Française), Critique, and Tel Quel, where he became a member of the editorial board in 1962.

The story is an outrageously improbable quest, however, whose vicissitudes are determined by word-play, by permutation of letters and of geometric shapes, and by the exigencies of its theoretical and didactic purposes.

According to the cultural ideology prevailing at least until the end of the 20th century, with this “division of work” the two disciplines were separate, one excluding the other:Apparently today it seems that one has a choice only between two incomplete attitudes: either the “naive” (the artist, let's say, who “creates” without much thought [...] or the “sterile” (the professor, let's say, who thinks a lot without much “creation” [...]).

The Théâtre des Métamorphoses was to be followed, in 1988, by two collections of stories, published by Les Impressions Nouvelles] La Cathédrale de Sens and a new edition of Révolutions minuscules with the addition of a long “preface”.

The other collection, a new edition of Révolutions minuscules, includes an extremely complex and technically sophisticated piece with the title “Révélations minuscules, en guise de préface, à la gloire de Jean Pauhan”, a 99-page narrative which opens with a long, meticulously written prose-poem about the game of bocce (pétanque) and develops from there, through all sorts of inextricably interwoven formal procedures and constraints, into something dizzyingly more complex, supposedly written by Ricardou's supposed twin sister, thus qualified to speak for him, ending up with what might be construed as a meditation on the meaning of life, love, writing and dying.

[29]In Problèmes du Nouveau Roman, rather than examining the usual overt or covert imposition of some realistic or psychological meaning and/or its supposed relation to the biography of the author, Ricardou devotes his analyses to the problems of description, metaphor and writing itself, as they are implemented in the production and organisation of the French New Novel, which he famously defines as no longer the narration of an adventure, but rather the adventure of a narration: "Non plus le récit d'une aventure, mais l'aventure du récit".