The mid-twentieth-century New Novel in French literature denotes a set of loosely connected tendencies toward a structurally different conception of the literary text but of man's place in the modern world too. In their consideration of the possibilities of literary mediation, the New Novel authors were significantly motivated by the media of photography and film. With the cultural context in mind, New Novel examples by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, and Michel Butor, as well as the theoretical reflections of these authors on the new type of literature, the first goal is to show the importance of the phenomenological tradition that played a role in the New Novel's emergence. The somewhat mutually uniform understanding that the aforementioned authors of the new novel had about photography and film, therefore, rests on specific theoretical assumptions. Although the aforementioned authors envisioned their New Novel as a path to a more “authentic” experience of the contemporary moment, which in itself is very speculative, their relationship to the world still proves to be a continuation of what dominated the French thought throughout the twentieth century. Although the unreserved trust in the liberating or saving character of film and photography when it comes to the loyalty of the representation proves naive, especially with some historical distance, it allowed the New Novel authors to see and come up with something truly new in literature. An analysis of the concept of the surface in photography, film and, above all, the figurative language of the New Novel, as well as a reflection on how realism should be understood, suggests that different forms of mediation (in this case, those present in photography, cinema, and literature) can sometimes encourage each other to productively self-reflect. Still, such encounter may, as in the case of the New Novel, also result in a mystification of what one has in principle attempted to explain.