Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference (Cambridge Studies in French)

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Nathalie Sarraute, who died in , is now regarded as one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century. Initially hailed as a leading theorist and exemplar of the nouveau roman, she has come to be regarded as an important author in her own right with her own distinctive concerns. In this major new study of Sarraute, Ann Jefferson offers a fresh perspective on Sarraute’s oeuvre – her novels, her outstanding autobiography Enfance and her influential critical writings – by focusing on the crucial issue of difference which emerges as one of her central preoccupations. Drawing on a variety of critical approaches, Jefferson explores Sarraute’s fundamental ambivalence towards differences of various kinds including questions of gender and genre. She argues that difference is simultaneously asserted and denied in Sarraute’s work, and that the notion of difference, so often celebrated by other writers and thinkers, is shown in Sarraute’s work to be inseparable from ambiguity and anxiety. Ann Jefferson is Fellow and Tutor in French at New College, Oxford. She is author of The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction (), Reading Realism in Stendhal (), and co-author of Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction (, rev. edn ). She also co-edited the Pléiade edition of Nathalie Sarraute’s complete works ().

CA M B R I DGE ST UDIES IN FRENCH   NATHALIE SARRAUT E, F I CT IO N AND T HEO RY

         : Michael Sheringham (Royal Holloway, London)  ; R. Howard Bloch (Columbia University) Malcolm Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford), Terence Cave (St John’s College, Oxford), Ross Chambers (University of Michigan), Antoine Compagnon (Columbia University), Peter France (University of Edinburgh), Christie McDonald (Harvard University), Toril Moi (Duke University), Naomi Schor (Harvard University)

Recent titles in the series include   Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse   The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction      (eds.) Reading Paul Valéry: Universe in Mind  .  Proust, the Body and Literary Form    Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion   Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony   Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities   Gender, Rhetoric and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing A complete list of books in the series is given at the end of the volume.

NATHALIE SARRAUTE, FICTION AND THEORY Questions of Difference

ANN JEFFERSON

          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Ann Jefferson 2004 First published in printed format 2000 ISBN 0-511-03443-1 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-77211-7 hardback

for Mike

We can find no scar, But internal difference, Where the Meanings, are. Emily Dickinson

Contents

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

page xi xiii 

Introduction 

                         

   

Difference and dissension ‘Differences’ and ‘différends’ Difference denied Beyond compare



  

Subjectivity and indistinction Self and other Differential systems



    

Abjection into art Abjection Words Scenes of narration Art

 

                        Minds, bodies and the new unanimism Psychology Representation Writing



Sexual indifference Women, human beings and writing Gender and the gaze Women writers Identifications

ix

        



  

 Criticism and ‘the terrible desire to establish contact’ Generic differences Authority, heresy and reading Strategies for contact Criticism and/ as fiction



Same difference: reprise and variation Fiction and autobiography Variations: repetitions and difference Internal breaches



        

        Death and the impossible difference

Notes Bibliography Index

   

Acknowledgements

Many people and institutions have contributed to this book. The stimulus for rereading and rethinking Sarraute’s work came initially from my involvement with the Pléiade edition of the Œuvres complètes, and I should like to thank my co-editors, Valerie Minogue, Arnaud Rykner and Jean-Yves Tadié for their comradeship, insight and encouragement over the several years of that venture. Sadly, it is too late to thank Nathalie Sarraute herself as she died while this book was in production, but her generosity and trepidation helped in equal measure to guide my own responses. I should also like to record my gratitude to other Sarraute specialists whose work has invigorated and set standards for my own, and I would mention in particular Françoise Asso, Sheila Bell and Emer O’Beirne. The participants at conferences on Nathalie Sarraute in Tucson, Arizona and in Aix-en-Provence also helped to enlarge my horizons. Others who deserve thanks for listening, commenting, suggesting and informing are Mike Holland, Alice Kaplan, Catriona Kelly, Mark Lee, Karen Leeder, Toril Moi, Michael Sheringham, G. S. Smith, Galin Tihanov, Wes Williams and the two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press. I am grateful, too, to the Warden and Fellows of New College and to the Modern Languages Faculty, Oxford both for granting leave and for helping to sustain an atmosphere of enthusiasm for research and discussion. I should also like to thank the Taylor Institution Library, The Bodleian Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris for their help in making their resources so readily available. Parts of this book have appeared in different versions in Romance Studies, L’Esprit créateur, Narrative Voices in Modern French Fiction: Studies in Honour of Valerie Minogue on the Occasion of her Retirement, edited by Michael Cardy, George Evans and Gabriel Jacobs (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, ) and Women Voice Men: Gender in European Culture, edited by xi

xii

Acknowledgements

Maya Slater (Exeter: Intellect Books, ). I gratefully acknowledge their editors’ permission to reuse that material. Finally, this book has been written for Mike – who makes all the difference.

Abbreviations

T PI M P FO EVM VLE DLI UP E TNTP I O OC ES

Tropismes Portrait d’un inconnu Martereau Le Planétarium Les Fruits d’or Entre la vie et la mort Vous les entendez? «disent les imbéciles» L’Usage de la parole Enfance Tu ne t’aimes pas Ici Ouvrez Œuvres complètes L’Ère du soupçon

‘Ce que je cherche’ ‘Ce que voient’ ‘Conversation’ ‘Dostoïevski’ ‘LeÈre’ ‘Flaubert’ ‘Forme’ ‘PV’

‘Ce que je cherche à faire’ ‘Ce que voient les oiseaux’ ‘Conversation et sous-conversation’ ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’ ‘L’Ère du soupçon’ ‘Flaubert le précurseur’ ‘Forme et contenu du roman’ ‘Paul Valéry et l’Enfant d’Éléphant’

xiii

Introduction

Nathalie Sarraute is tireless in her appeal to a common experience: the inner world which she represents in her writing is, she insists, a world that we share, a world in which differences as they may appear on the surface simply do not count. No other writer asserts this commonality more strongly than Sarraute. And yet at the same time, she presents this shared experience within a frame that is equally assertive about its novelty, in other words, about its difference. The claim for sameness is made in terms and forms that simultaneously advertise their difference from what has gone before. This creates a curious paradox which is one of the factors that give Sarraute’s writing its characteristic and uneasy vigour, and the energies produced by this tension seem inseparable from the anxiety that is palpable everywhere in her work. One senses in Sarraute a constant worry about the ways in which sameness and difference will be construed by those to whom her appeal to shared experience is addressed. There is a fear that sameness will be traduced as an assimilation into something alien, and an equal dread that difference will take the form of rejection and exclusion. Questions of sameness and difference are inextricably associated with anxiety in Sarraute. And yet, paradox and dread notwithstanding, there appear to be no other terms available to her for thinking experience. This places her fair and square within the literary tradition of the twentieth century. Nathalie Sarraute and the nouveaux romanciers with whom she was for a while associated, were making a deliberate attempt to respond to what Alain Robbe-Grillet called ‘l’époque [. . .] du numéro matricule’ [‘the age [. . .] of the regimental number’],1 and to find ways of representing the condition of anonymity in which its subjects live. For Sarraute this anonymity is coterminous with ‘le foisonnement infini de la vie psychologique et les vastes régions à peine déchiffrées de l’inconscient’ which we all share (‘L’ère’, p. ) [‘the infinite profusion of psychological existence and the vast and barely explored regions of the 



Introduction

unconscious’ (p. )].2 By the mid-twentieth century when Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet were making these claims, the novel had long since ceased to be a celebration of unique individuals or a mapping of social, characterological or even physiological differences, as it had been in the nineteenth century. If Balzac or Zola could claim scientific status for their elaborate fictional taxonomies, and if Flaubert could write of the novelist as being ‘like God’, their twentieth-century counterparts sought neither to categorise nor to master. Proust’s narrator awakens on the opening page of À la Recherche du temps perdu to a world in which he remains in a state of radical disorientation as he charts the detail of his failure to recognise either the times or the places in which he finds himself. Gide presents his readers with situations devoid of any of the criteria to make the judgements which the behaviour of his characters nevertheless seems to invite. And one of the more sensitive and thoughtful of his characters is eventually driven to suicide because meaningful differences have vanished, and life appears as a series of infinitesimal gradations where the ‘line of demarcation between being and nonbeing’ can erupt quite arbitrarily at any point.3 Moreover, if Sartre chides himself at the end of Les Mots for having written of the ‘unjustified existence’ of his contemporaries in La Nausée while exempting his own,4 this is because, broadly speaking, literature’s mission in the twentieth century has been to implicate itself in the phenomena it portrays, rather than stand above or to one side of them. In existential terms, literature and its creators have sought to participate in and to be indistinguishable from the undifferentiated world which they depict. At the same time, it is precisely in this sense that literature claims to differ from most other discourses which tell us how the world is, for these appear from the perspective of literature to be based on a hubris of nonimplication, particularly at the level of language and form. What makes literature distinctive in the modern world is not its exemption from the conditions of existence, but its awareness of itself as part of them. Selfconsciousness rather than mastery marks the literature of the twentieth century. And the consequence of self-consciousness has been innovation. As the major novels of the twentieth century show, an awareness of fictional form has led to radical change in those forms; and in the process a different kind of difference from the one that marked the nineteenth century has come to be the hallmark of the literary. The prospect of writing a sentence as banally conventional as ‘La marquise sortit à cinq heures’ [‘The Marquise went out at five o’clock’] has the modern novelist quail: ‘le cœur lui manque, non, décidément, il ne peut pas,’ [‘his

Introduction



heart fails him, no, he simply cannot bring himself to do it’] writes Sarraute (‘L’ère’, p.  [p. ]). But where Valéry and Breton had invoked the sentence as grounds for abjuring fiction altogether, for Sarraute it acts as a goad to produce something different. The commonality inscribed in conventional fictional forms can only be read as cliché in the twentieth-century novel, and invoking a shared field of reference in these terms becomes nothing more than a sign of unthinking replication. Instead, difference becomes the index of self-consciousness, the guarantee of literature’s awareness of its own implication in the things it speaks of. And it is this paradox which Sarraute’s work exemplifies in a particularly acute form. Paradox, as I have already suggested, tips over into anxiety in so far as the text’s appeal to sameness at the level of psychic content and its assertion of formal difference both assume an other to underwrite its claims. Sameness and difference become entangled with alterity when the text comes up against the readers whose response it so urgently demands. The twentieth century had already moved the reader to the centre of the literary stage: Proust claimed that his readers would be not so much readers of his novel as ‘les propres lecteurs d’eux-mêmes’ [‘the readers of their own selves’], the book being no more than ‘le moyen de lire en eux-mêmes’ [‘the means of reading what lay inside themselves’].5 Gide saw the whole business of writing as one that was necessarily completed by the reader for whom the prime interest of reading was precisely the participation in the text that it required of him: ‘L’histoire requiert sa collaboration [du lecteur] pour se bien dessiner,’ [‘the story requires his [the reader’s] collaboration in order to become fully apparent’] he wrote in his Journal des Faux-monnayeurs.6 And Sartre, too, saw the reader as the ultimate component in the literary enterprise. ‘[L]a lecture est création,’ [‘reading is creation’] he affirmed, meaning that the reader’s task is to ‘create’ what the writer merely ‘reveals’.7 For Sartre, to write is necessarily to write for the reader, to respond to what he calls the reader’s aspiration, and to offer him the chance of enacting his own freedom. Yet for none of these writers did the reader’s alterity pose any serious problem. As far as Proust is concerned, the work is either written in the language in which the reader reads herself, or it is not. The instructions for the corrective or completive moves that Gide demands of his reader are written into his text. And for Sartre writing offers the chance of release from the alienation which reader and writer share. Sarraute, however, is painfully aware of the reader as an other whose rules of engagement and interpretation do not necessarily tally with



Introduction

those that her own writing proposes. The reader’s alterity – his or her difference – is perceived as a potential threat to the patterns of sameness and difference for which the text is seeking the reader’s endorsement. This problem does not just haunt the writing of the text or motivate the formal experiments that Sarraute devises, for it is also acted out in the situations that her works depict. The encounters between characters staged in the novels rehearse these fears over and over again in scenes of mutual incomprehension, misrepresentation or outright negation. It is rare in Sarraute’s fiction to find two characters who see things the same way; and yet this is what each of them longs for from the other, and what the text desires of its readers. Instead, the inhabitants of Sarraute’s fictional world find themselves forced into frames imposed on them by others, or absorbed into beings whose nature is repugnant and alien to them, or else simply obliterated and rejected. Sarraute’s subjects find it hard to hold out against a difference in viewpoint which they can experience only as oppression or exclusion. In foregrounding the problem of readerly recognition by this means, Sarraute may go some way towards mitigating its worst effects by implicitly inviting her readers not to make the same mistakes as her characters. But at the same time, in an era where we are constantly urged to acknowledge our differences (differences of gender, ethnicity, and so on) and to embrace alterity, Sarraute reminds us how risky any encounter with an other is, and also how strong the desire for an echoing voice can be. The result in her own writing is a constant and constantly uneasy engagement with issues of difference, whose very anxieties produce the contradictions and reversals which give her writing its peculiar stamp. It is these issues and the contradictory and inconsistent forms that they take which this book seeks to explore, as it traces the moves by which Sarraute’s writing swings between a fear of difference and an acknowledgement of its necessity. I shall not be using a single theory of difference to chart these swings, partly because no one theory would seem to be capable either of accommodating the variety of its manifestations, or of adequately accounting for the anxieties with which the phenomenon is associated in Sarraute. Moreover, while difference could be said to have been a central component of a great deal of thought in the twentieth century, the concept has been deployed in a whole range of quite distinct and not obviously connected contexts. In the preface to his Différence et répétition, Gilles Deleuze claims that the subject of his book is ‘in the air’, and in support of this claim he goes on to cite phenomena as varied as Heidegger’s increasing preoccupation

Introduction



with the philosophy of ontological difference, structuralism’s basis in differential systems, and the contemporary novel’s concern with difference and repetition both at the level of explicit theorisation and at the level of actual technique.8 Tempting as it might be to pursue the philosophical approach to difference as something that would encompass all these other approaches, philosophy inevitably leaves out of its concerns the manifestation of difference as it impinges on the social, that is to say on human relations. This is the sphere with which the novelist is traditionally concerned, and it is a tradition which Sarraute continues and elaborates. However, what marks Sarraute out in this tradition is her acutely developed sense of what it means to invoke difference within this context of social and human relations. For this reason it seems sensible to take Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale as a starting point for thinking about difference, since, whatever its limitations (and I shall come to some of these), it treats language primarily as a social fact. Saussure’s langue is ‘the social part of language’ which exists only by virtue of a contract between members of a given community.9 ‘Semiology’, the science of signs which he envisages as the umbrella discipline for his structural linguistics would, he says, study ‘la vie des signes au sein de la vie sociale’ [‘the role of signs as part of social life’], and thus constitute a branch of social psychology and of psychology in general (p.  [p. ]), that is to say precisely the social and human relations with which the novel has traditionally been concerned. And indeed, the scope of the project and also the confidence with which it is articulated have striking echoes of the fictional programme set out in the ‘Avant-propos’ of the Comédie humaine. Saussure and Balzac each promise an all-encompassing schema that will both emerge from, and offer an explanation for multiple differences. Balzac, for instance, describes his project as one that will provide a comprehensive mapping of differences: La Société ne fait-elle pas de l’homme, suivant les milieux où son action se déploie, autant d’hommes différents qu’il y a de variétés en zoologie? Les différences entre un soldat, un ouvrier, un administrateur, un avocat, un oisif, un savant, un homme d’État, un commerçant, un marin, un poète, un pauvre, un prêtre, sont, quoique plus difficiles à saisir, aussi considérables que celles qui distinguent le loup, le lion, l’âne, le corbeau, le requin, le veau marin, la brebis etc. [Does not Society, in accordance with the various milieus in which its effect is exerted, make of man as many different men as there are varieties in zoology? The differences between a soldier, a worker, an administrator, a lawyer, an idler, a scholar, a statesman, a shopkeeper, a sailor, a poet, a poor man and a priest,



Introduction

are, albeit more difficult to grasp, as significant as those that distinguish the wolf, the lion, the donkey, the raven, the shark, the seal, the sheep, etc.]

But, he continues, underlying all these surface differences there are basic principles of organisation which it is the novelist’s task to reveal. So, he rhetorically asks: ‘ne devais-je pas étudier les raisons ou la raison de ces effets sociaux, surprendre le sens caché dans cet immense assemblage de figures, de passions et d’événements’ [‘ought I not to study the reasons, or reason for these social manifestations, and discover the hidden meaning in this immense collection of figures, passions and events.’]10 There is a similar combination in Saussure of a concern with differences in conjunction with a search for underlying principles. On the one hand, he says, ‘Le mécanisme linguistique roule tout entier sur des identités et des différences’ (p. ) [‘The mechanism of a language turns entirely on identities and differences’ (p. )]; and on the other, language is wholly a matter of principles most of which – like Balzac’s ‘hidden meanings’ – are unknown at a conscious level to its practitioners: ‘Une langue constitue un système; [. . .] l’on ne peut le saisir qu’à la réflexion; ceux-là mêmes qui en font un usage journalier l’ignorent profondément’ (p. ) [‘A language constitutes a system. [. . .] Its workings cannot be grasped without reflexion. Even speakers who use it daily may be quite ignorant in this regard’ (p. )’]. Both Balzac and Saussure assume that the apparently chaotic variety of surface phenomena can be explained by the recovery of some underlying system or set of principles which will map out the world in terms of meaningful differences, but which are available only to the novelist (Balzac) or the linguistic theorist (Saussure), and which those engaged in these phenomena exemplify, but do not themselves necessarily grasp. The broad similarity between the two projects (Balzac’s and Saussure’s) lends support to the idea that Saussure’s semiology might have relevance to the novelist seeking to map the social world in terms of meaningful differences. In many ways we see Sarraute’s characters seeking to enact just this kind of approach in her novels: their passionate attention to the phenomena of social relations turns them each into versions of Roland Barthes’s ‘structural man’ and his counterpart, homo signficans. In an early essay on structuralism Barthes presents the phenomenon (of structuralism) not as an all-embracing theory, but as an activity entailing a certain set of mental procedures and suppositions. Its object is man as the maker of meanings (homo significans), and its practitioners (typified as ‘structural man’) are those who use the procedures of structural analysis in order to

Introduction



produce simulacra or imitations of social and cultural reality which will reveal how its meanings work: ‘La structure est donc en fait un simulacre de l’objet, mais un simulacre dirigé, intéressé, puisque l’objet imité fait apparaître quelque chose qui restait invisible, ou si l’on préfère, inintelligible dans l’objet naturel’ [‘Structure is therefore actually a simulacrum of the object, but a directed, interested simulacrum, since the imitated object makes something appear which remained invisible or, if one prefers, unintelligible, in the natural object’].11 Both Sarraute as novelist and the characters in her fiction are perpetually engaged in trying to work out – and often precisely in terms of quasi-structural differential oppositions – what the conditions of intelligibility are in the world which she depicts and they inhabit. The virtue of Barthes’s gloss on the structuralism for which Saussurean linguistics provided the model is that by turning the theory into an activity he reinstates the individuals whom Saussure had excluded, and through this move structuralism itself becomes a part of the social life which it simultaneously seeks to make intelligible. To this extent Barthes quietly undoes the mastery that seemed to keep the differential system of structuralist theory separate from the phenomena it presents. This question of mastery is one also addressed by Derrida in his discussion of what he calls ‘différance’, which, like Barthes’s structuralist activity – though with different emphases – presents difference as a process rather than as a protocol or a blueprint: Tout dans le tracé de la différance est stratégique et aventureux. Stratégique parce qu’aucune vérité transcendante et présente hors du champ de l’écriture ne peut commander théologiquement la totalité du champ. Aventureux parce que cette stratégie n’est pas une simple stratégie au sens où l’on dit que la stratégie oriente la tactique depuis une visée finale, un telos ou le thème d’une domination, d’une maîtrise et d’une réappropriation ultime du mouvement ou du champ. [In the delineation of différance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field. Adventurous because this strategy is not a simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics according to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field.]12

Differences here can never be pinned down, and différance itself undermines key oppositions such as the ones between the sensible and the intelligible, or between speech and writing; it is poised between the temporal and the spatial senses of the word différer, and between the active



Introduction

and the passive senses of the suffix -ance. Différance is a more radical version of structuralism’s theory of difference than Barthes’s structural activity in the sense that while it is a process which produces effects of difference, differences as such are never available to be grasped or definitively mapped. Derrida everywhere foregrounds the elusiveness of the differential phenomena which structure our systems of meaning. And in other discussions of difference, he compounds this shifting quality by showing how oppositions are constantly undermined, first by the fact that they always entail a hierarchisation of their two terms and, second, by a tendency that the repressed term has of turning out to be integral to its opposite in any oppositional pair.13 While Derrida excludes human subjects from his discussion of these effects, his account of the instability of differential phenomena parallels a discovery which is repeatedly made by Sarraute’s characters, and which is integral to her own writing in its attempts to grapple with the organising principles behind social experience. Nevertheless, Derrida’s arguments about difference remain ultimately philosophical and are not presented primarily as relevant to human and social relations. For all his claims about the inevitable lack of mastery entailed by différance, he avoids placing theories of difference in situations where their articulation could be seen in the context of human and social effects, particularly as they are experienced by individuals.14 For this kind of approach one needs to turn to a different kind of thinking about difference. One of the earliest critiques of Saussurean linguistics came from V. N. Volosˇinov who challenged Saussure’s conception of the social on the grounds that it excluded the individual.15 For Volosˇinov, like his co-theorist Bakhtin, the individual subject operates the language system within a social context which is always and unavoidably one of social – and linguistic – conflict. As a consequence, the particular language system that is mobilised by a given speaker in a given context is always just one, socially marked, language system that is inevitably at odds with others. Linguistic differences are inseparable here from social differences, and differences of both these kinds have to be negotiated by individual subjects every time they speak. The social and the individual are not the mutually exclusive alternatives that Saussure presented them as being, and every utterance is always perceived as an active intervention in a social situation. Seen in this light, all language use has what the English language philosopher J. L. Austin calls an ‘illocutionary force’, that is to say that a speech act is precisely that: an action performed by the utterance itself.16 The absence of mastery here comes from the

Introduction



speaker’s inextricable involvement in a social situation, and from the fact that speech is always an event, an intervention within such situations, rather than a detached, constative comment on them. As I have already suggested, this sense of implication in the phenomena it portrays is crucial to Sarraute’s writing. But more than this, the notion that speakers activate different discursive systems, and that speakers and discourses alike are bound to find themselves in relations of conflict with other speakers and other discourses, is a major feature of Sarraute’s world. Difference in Sarraute is frequently presented as an aggressive – or at least assertive – differing from, and not just as a noteworthy – if occasionally disorientating – difference between. For this reason theorists of difference who deal with difference as dispute or conflict would seem particulary helpful in illuminating difference as it features in Sarraute’s work. I have mentioned Volosˇinov and Bakhtin, but I shall also be evoking the work of Lyotard and Girard, both of whom – though from different perspectives – explore difference as conflict. Lyotard’s concept of the différend addresses the notion of difference as dispute or dissent where difference arises out of the incommensurability of two versions of reality. More precisely, he is interested in those situations where one party has available an idiom or what Lyotard also calls ‘procedures for establishing truth’ which simply do not accommodate or recognise the experience or reality of the other party.17 Conflict here exists because the terms of reference invoked by each party are not of comparable orders, and the differences at stake are differences that result from the mutual non-recognition of different discourses or idioms. This is difference of a different kind from the one implied in the binary oppositions of Saussure’s structural linguistics, and it seems much more closely adapted to social reality and questions of human relations than Saussurean theory. Certainly, the conflict that results from the non-recognition of certain types of experience within established idioms is an integral aspect of the worlds that Sarraute portrays in her work; and in their dealings with others her characters are constantly alive to the possibility of falling victim to the kind of différend described by Lyotard. There are, however, theories of difference that treat the assertion of difference itself as a kind of speech act or as an intervention in a situation whose effects are largely conflictual. For in many social situations an assertion of difference is tantamount to an act of exclusion. This is the scape-goating logic that Girard sees at the heart of sacrifice, and it means that for him difference has inevitably to be seen in relation to the violence that is associated with it.18 The connection between difference



Introduction

and exclusion is also central both to feminism and to theories concerned with racial difference. Moreover, unlike the theories of difference that I have discussed so far, including those which one might call socially interventionist, both feminism and post-colonial theory speak from a position of difference. The prime concern of feminist theories is to explore the social and political consequences of various definitions of sexual difference: biological, social, essentialist or cultural. Definitions of sexual difference prove to be inseparable from the social and political circumstances in which they are formulated. One of the chief merits of Simone de Beauvoir’s Deuxième sexe is the way she brings out the political stakes in the construction of sexual difference by showing how woman is invariably presented as the ‘Other’ of man. Sexual difference, she argues, is constituted so as to make woman both dependent upon and relative to him: Elle se détermine et se différencie par rapport à l’homme et non celui-ci par rapport à elle; elle est l’inessentiel en face de l’essentiel. Il est le Sujet, il est l’Absolu: elle est l’Autre. [She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, the Absolute: she is the Other.]19

To define sexual difference by defining woman as ‘other’ is to oppress and exclude. Whether one responds to this by opting to affirm difference, demanding recognition for what has hitherto been marginalised in women’s history, women’s work and women’s writing (as do Gilbert and Gubar, and Showalter, for example), or whether one refuses to accept the modes of thought within which sexual differences are conventionally constructed (as do Cixous and Irigaray), feminist thinking is constantly faced with the way in which difference in the field of gender entails some form of exclusion. It is this potential for difference to be used as grounds for exclusion that Sarraute is particularly sensitive to in her work, even though it is never applied specifically and concretely either to women or to racial ‘others’. As a Jew both in Tsarist Russia and in Occupied France, as a foreigner in France (by virtue of her Russian birth), and as a woman, Sarraute’s own experience would seem to have provided her with ample grounds for understanding difference in these terms. The biographical information she provided for the Chronologie in the Pléiade Œuvres complètes makes issues of inclusion and exclusion a recurrent motif: her father was given special dispensation to live in Ivanovo-Voznessensk,

Introduction



which as a Jew he would not normally have been entitled to; but as a consequence of the socialist activities of his brother, Ilya Tcherniak was obliged to leave Russia altogether in ; in  Nathalie Sarraute was excluded from the bar because she was Jewish; in the following year her husband was threatened with the same fate for having a Jewish wife; and in  she had to go into hiding after being denounced to the local police for being the daughter of a Jew. Sarraute always denies the relevance of these experiences to her writing, just as she also resolutely opposes any suggestion that she might be seen either as a woman writer or as a feminist one. Both notions are anathema to her and she objects strongly to the notion of an ‘écriture féminine’ (as we shall see in Chapter ). But if she rejects the overt content of her Russian, Jewish, female identity, Sarraute nevertheless retains an acute sensitivity towards the structures of difference as exclusion that these multiple marginalities encounter. So that, as far as theories of difference are concerned, the broad – that is to say, broadly political – assumptions of feminist theory highlight the more general way that any invocation of difference can operate in the social sphere to the disadvantage of those to whom it is applied. Much the same could be said of the ways in which racial differences are invoked to construct an image of the Orient or the racial ‘other’ to the advantage of the coloniser and to the detriment of the colonised. As Robert Young writes, ‘colonial discourse does not merely represent the other so much as simultaneously project and disavow its difference.’20 The attempt to represent racial difference has proved inseparable from attempts to assert the mastery of the coloniser and enforce control over the colonised races. The implied social agenda of these discourses of difference is palpable here, demonstrating that theories of difference do not necessarily just describe social realities, but can intervene within those realities with real social effects. For this reason, then, without seeking to retrieve Sarraute for a reading of her work in terms of race or gender, an understanding of the ways in which theorists of these issues are confronted with questions of difference can be helpful in underscoring this dimension of Sarraute’s own engagement with questions of difference. This brief survey of recent theories of difference is intended in the first instance to illustrate the range of approaches, emphases and applications that the term ‘difference’ has been associated with. My purpose, however, is not to try and identify the ‘best’ theory of difference by playing different theories off against each other, nor even to select the



Introduction

one most applicable to Sarraute. This book is not a defence of a particular theory of difference whose worth might be proven by testing it out against the work of a particular writer. Nor am I seeking to suggest that Sarraute herself has an implicit theory of difference which could be brought to light by comparison with theories whose arguments are formulated in explicitly conceptual terms. Indeed, while I am proposing that questions of difference are central to Sarraute’s work, I would not wish to suggest that ‘difference’ has a single meaning or thrust within her work. If I have cast my net as widely as I have in the preceding pages, it is because the different senses of the term ‘difference’ in the different theories I have discussed all seem to have resonances in Sarraute’s work or to illuminate particular aspects of it. In what follows, I shall be drawing on most of these ideas, but not programmatically or systematically: different ideas about difference are not mutually exclusive and it would be both absurdly distorting and unnecessarily limiting to scrutinise each one separately by applying it to a single strand of Sarraute’s writing. So, although I shall be dividing Sarraute’s work up under three broad headings of difference (difference in human and social relations; physical and sexual difference; generic difference), within each of these categories we shall encounter several kinds of difference as they surface and circulate in the discussion. The headings are as much as anything a matter of convenience, and within the ostensibly tri-partite structure of the book, there is also a spiral at work in which ideas re-emerge and are explored in different contexts and within different sets of associations. The first chapter explores the way in which, by virtue of the context of human relations in which it appears, difference comes to be conceived as dissent in her work. Chapters  and  make the reverse journey as they chart the means by which Sarraute’s characters seek to break down the barriers imposed by differential systems, despite the risks of assimilation and contamination involved. The following two chapters examine the various strategies by which the differences entailed in physical and gendered existence are transcended in Sarraute’s writing as a condition of making writing itself possible. And Chapters  and  address the role that the differences between the genres of criticism and autobiography on the one hand, and fiction on the other, play in creating the appeal to commonality. In the course of my discussion I shall be drawing on the whole body of Sarraute’s writing with no particular regard for either chronological or generic differences (except where these are the specific focus of my concerns, as in the discussion of the critical and autobiographical writ-

Introduction



ings). This is because Sarraute’s preoccupations remained remarkably consistent over the years, as she herself acknowledged on a number of occasions,21 and the most rewarding approach, consequently, would seem to entail treating her work as a set of variations on a number of recurrent themes, rather than as a continuous chronological development. (Chapter  specifically addresses the question of theme and variation in Sarraute’s writing.) And yet in speaking of themes here, I would want to avoid the suggestion that this book is a study of ‘the theme of difference’ in Sarraute, for difference is an issue which her writing constantly worries at in a process of anxious and active thinking, rather than something that it treats as a solid given. Difference in Sarraute, then, is neither a theme nor a theory. Instead it makes more sense to regard it as a preoccupation which surfaces in all aspects of her writing, regardless of their genre or status. For this reason I shall also be drawing on biographical information and extra-literary sources such as interviews where this can illuminate or develop the discussion. Those readers in search an account of a particular text should use my index to track it down. (And I should perhaps admit in advance that I have little to say here about Sarraute’s theatre.) However, my argument constantly comes back to the question of writing itself, since the literary enterprise is central to Sarraute’s project, albeit in numerous and self-contradictory guises. For on the one hand, writing is figured as the arena in which differences can be erased and as the means whereby the degrading sameness of assimilation can be redeemed. And yet on the other hand, it repeatedly exposes the writer to the danger of encounter with the other and requires recourse to a variety of strategies to work against the consequent threat of misperception or rejection at the reader’s hand. There is a ceaseless demand in Sarraute’s writing for a recognition of its own difference, even as it constantly holds out the possibility of an erasure of all difference as something that separates and divides. And all the while it repeatedly returns both writer and reader to the internal difference that is the breach at the heart of things. This breach is both the place where writing finds its necessary impetus, and the painful experience which readers are invited to share. The upshot (if there is anything as simple) of all of this would seem to be that difference and sameness never remain where they appear to have been found. There are twists and turns at every stage of Sarraute’s work which, while continuing to keep them central, displace and unsettle the very terms in which she presents it.

  

Difference and human relations

   

Difference and dissension

Il n’y pas de moyen terme entre l’admission et l’exclusion. [There is no middle way between admittance and exclusion.]

(Entre la vie et la mort, p.  [])

‘    ’  ‘     ’ Reading Sarraute is often a deeply disorientating experience. Characteristically, the opening page of a Sarraute novel pitches one into a situation in which nothing is immediately explained, and where the unnamed and unidentified participants exacerbate the reader’s sense of disorientation by expressing themselves in the form of questions: Soudain il s’interrompt, il lève la main, l’index dressé, il tend l’oreille . . . Vous les entendez? . . . (VLE) [Suddenly he pauses, raises his hand, his forefinger in the air, he strains to catch the sound . . . Do you hear them?] Elle est mignonne, n’est-ce pas? Regardez-moi ça . . . regardez-comme c’est fin . . . (DLI ) [She’s sweet, isn’t she? Just look at that . . . see how fine it is . . .] – «Vous ne vous aimez pas.» Mais comment ça? Comment est-ce possible? Vous ne vous aimez pas? Qui n’aime pas qui? (TNTP) [‘You don’t love yourself.’ But what does that mean? How is that possible? You don’t love yourself ? Who doesn’t love whom?]

Who is “il”? Whom or what can he hear? Does “elle” refer to a person or an object? And, as the last question puts it, who does not love whom? Furthermore, in each case we are not told to whom the question is addressed and what their role in the situation is. Although the novels go on gradually to clarify the situation so that anyone who has read Vous les entendez? or «disent les imbéciles» will be able to sketch in the details of the 



Difference and human relations

core scene that is evoked in each case, Sarraute’s works nevertheless sustain their initial uncertainties by concentrating on the murkier aspects of human consciousness and on the more elusive and unknowable aspects of relations with others. By Sarraute’s own definition, the ‘tropisms’ which are her subject matter constitute the undefinable and barely perceptible elements of the human psyche: ‘Ce sont des mouvements indéfinissables, qui glissent très rapidement aux limites de notre conscience,’ [‘They are indefinable movements which slip very rapidly on the borders of consciousness’] she writes in the preface to L’Ère du soupçon.1 And yet, although she strips away most of the more familiar points of reference that readers might expect to find in a novel (there are no names, no physical description of characters, no plot, no social and material setting for the action), Sarraute does nevertheless provide elements of a User’s Guide to her writings. First of all, there are the critical essays which have accompanied her work at regular intervals; and second, her novels contain a high level of self-commentary to direct the reader along the unfamiliar paths of her world. And these readers’ instructions are almost invariably couched in terms of opposites, so that in speaking of the unfamiliar and undefinable tropisms in her preface to L’Ère du soupçon, for example, Sarraute proceeds to contrast them with the very definable feelings with which we are much more familiar: ‘ils [the tropisms] sont à l’origine de nos gestes, de nos paroles, des sentiments que nous manifestons, que nous croyons éprouver et qu’il est possible de définir’ [‘They lie behind our gestures, the words we speak, the feelings we manifest, which we think we experience and which it is possible to define.’] This gives us an apparently perfectly straightforward set of oppositions that contrast the (unknown) tropism with (well-known) feeling, the undefinable with the definable, and the manifest with the almost imperceptible. Indeed much of the interpretive apparatus that Sarraute provides her readers with is couched in oppositions of this kind and would seem to constitute a mode of writing that maps out the world in terms of starkly delineated polarities. The lines of her critical arguments are remarkably clear, and differences are plainly and unambiguously formulated: the inner life of the tropism is real, the external world of physical and social realities mere appearance; psychology is the proper stuff of fiction and not Balzacian or Hemingway-esque descriptions of physical exteriors; formal innovation in writing is the only genuine realism, repetition of realist convention is empty formalism, and so on. These oppositions run very deep into the structure of the Sarrautean universe, and would

Difference and dissension



appear to offer a cast-iron guarantee both of its stability and of its intelligibilty. And yet critical writing on Nathalie Sarraute is marked by some curious instances of what for the sake of argument I shall call misreading, and this suggests that things are perhaps not quite as clear as might at first be assumed. These readers have not just missed a point or gone slightly wide of the mark; but, despite Sarraute’s flagging of apparently obvious difference, they have quite dramatically got hold of the wrong end of the stick. In a world where black is repeatedly defined in terms of its oppostion to white, critics – and often it’s the most loyal and enthusiastic – nevertheless mistake one for the other. To cite just a few examples: Claude Mauriac, one of Sarraute’s most vociferous and devoted champions, reads L’Ère du soupçon as an attack on psychology (when, of course, it is just the opposite), from which he has to have her subsequently and contradictorily retreat.2 Mary McCarthy, who had energetically promoted Sarraute for the Prix International de Littérature which she won in , ends her long, positive and otherwise perceptive review of the highly self-reflexive Entre la vie et la mort by claiming that the writer’s ‘double’ succumbs to the lure of social values, and that everything between the two of them (writer and ‘double’) ‘is upside down’.3 This skews the conclusion of the novel and McCarthy is unable to explain how the double comes back for his vital role at the end. Or again, Stephen Heath (who is not alone in this reading) takes the wordgame played by the child in the train in Entre la vie et la mort as a positive sign of his future destiny as a writer, an interpretation which is corrected by Sarraute herself in her talk at the  colloquium on the nouveau roman. Here she roundly asserts that the opposite is the case: ‘cette attention, cette sensibilité aux mots, ce goût pour ce genre de jeux, ne suffisent nullement à prédire qu’il sera un jour un écrivain’ [‘this attention, this sensitivity towards words, the liking for this kind of game do not in any way suffice to predict that he will one day be a writer’.]4 These ‘corrections’ of critical misreadings are a recurrent feature of Sarraute’s own critical activity (be this in the form of essays, lectures or interviews). Their perplexed exasperation at the waywardness of critics implies that there is a single ‘correct’ reading of her work, that the truths of her writing are self-evident to those who do not wilfully close their minds against them, and that the differences she articulates speak unequivocally for themselves. However, the elucidation provided by Sarraute’s own critical commentary never seems to succeed in settling matters definitively, and for



Difference and human relations

this reason the infernally unstable round of her polemic continues. One is led therefore to ask what lies behind this repeated marking of difference in Sarraute, and why it does not work. Why, in short, are differences so problematic? As a first response one might note that differences for Sarraute are not what they are for that great architect of difference, Saussure. She has none of the equanimity he displays when he asserts that language consists of differences without positive terms.5 For him, difference is an ordering principle that constructs the linguistic and cultural world and makes it intelligible. For her, difference never seems to succeed in ordering the world it is called upon to map out, because it is a matter that turns out to be inextricably entangled with issues of value and allegiance, which function according to some mysterious principle other than that of intelligible distinctions. In Sarraute’s work positive and negative signs are inexplicably reversed when they change context. As the narrator’s alter ego comments in Enfance: Chez toi les signes s’inversent. C’est ainsi qu’Adèle, et aussi Véra, disent de toi avec une certaine nuance de mépris . . . ‘Oh, elle n’est pas difficile, elle mange n’importe quoi’, ce qui laisse entendre que les continuels refus de nourriture et les fantaisies capricieuses de Lili sont le signe de son tempérament délicat . . . Comme d’ailleurs sa santé fragile est une qualité, chez toi la bonne santé est la marque d’une nature assez grossière, un peu fruste. (E, p. ) [In you the signs are reversed. That’s why both Adèle and Véra say of you, with a certain note of contempt . . . ‘Oh, she isn’t difficult, she’ll eat anything,’ which implies that Lili’s continual rejection of food and her whims and caprices are the sign of a sensitive temperament . . . As, moreover, her delicate health is a quality, while your good health is the mark of a rather coarse, crude nature. ()]

All the signs here are caught up in another system, one based on allegiance rather than stable intelligibility. Because of Véra’s devotion to her child, everything connected with Lili is automatically granted positive value: difficulty, which in principle carries a negative charge, becomes a positive mark of sensitivity when it is associated with Lili; good health, which in principle carries a positive charge, becomes a negative index of a coarse nature if it is Natacha’s. It is as if there were some higher instance which translated qualities and entities into tokens of something else, a different order of things where the differences are so radical that the distinctions produced by the first ordering principle (easy vs. picky, sickly vs. robust) cease to carry weight and are made inoperative.

Difference and dissension



A similar mechanism is at work in the contrast between the bergère and the leather armchairs of Le Planétarium. Alain Guimier wants a bergère for his flat, whereas his mother-in-law thinks he and his young wife would be better served by the armchairs that she offers to buy for them. The two items stand at opposite poles in what turns out to be much more than a simple binary opposition of social and cultural connotation. In fact, difference in Saussurean terms becomes instead dissension or discord, where the differences at issue are so radical and so extreme that they constitue something much more like the différend explored by Jean-François Lyotard in his book of that name.6 The bergère and the leather armchairs cannot inhabit the same world. Their opposition does not structure a universe or make it intelligible, so much as constitute a sign of the existence of two incommensurable universes. Discrimination on this issue imposes choice, and choice inevitably becomes a test of allegiance. It is Gisèle, Alain’s wife, who is put to this test when she finds herself caught in the middle, between two worlds: the world of the bergère that she shares with Alain, and the world of the leather armchairs that she shares with her mother. The significance of the objects cannot survive translation into the world of the other, because of the inexorable logic whereby the existence of two opposing objects entails a choice between two incompatible outlooks. In choosing one object over the other Gisèle is choosing a world, adopting a perspective, affirming an allegiance; and consequently rejecting a set of values, refusing a perspective, withdrawing allegiance and negating a world. This negation is made peculiarly vivid when, having opted for the armchairs and her mother’s perspective on things, Gisèle suddenly sees the world she shared with Alain stripped of all reality. It becomes like the one in a play she once saw where the characters, who appear so full of life as they enjoy themselves aboard a luxury liner, turn out to be dead without their realising it: elle s’était vue, elle les avait vus tous deux, elle et lui, comme les autres les voyaient, sa mère, les gens vivants . . . Ils étaient morts. Ils sont morts tous les deux, embarqués ils ne savent comment, entraînés, emportés sans connaissance vers Dieu sait quelle région des morts . . . un rêve, tout cela, les bergères Louis XV, les vitrines des antiquaires, des visions qui passent dans la tête des gens évanouis, des gens noyés, gelés . . . (P, pp. –) [she had seen herself, she had seen the two of them, as others, her mother, the living, saw them . . . They were dead. They are both dead, embarked they don’t know how, swept along, carried away without their knowing it towards God knows what country of the dead . . . a dream, all that, Louis XV bergères,



Difference and human relations

antique-shop windows, visions that cross the minds of people in a swoon, of people drowning, frozen . . . (pp. –)]

She is suddenly caught up in a radical shift of perspective which removes her entirely from the one she had originally espoused in Alain, a perspective which had, on the contrary, seemed to bring alive a world that was previously half dead: C’était curieux, cette sensation qu’elle avait souvent que sans lui, autrefois, le monde était un peu inerte, gris, informe, indifférent, qu’elle-même n’était rien qu’attente, suspens . . . Aussitôt qu’il était là, tout se remettait en place. Les choses prenaient forme, pétries par lui, reflétées dans son regard . . . (p. ) [It was curious, this sensation she often had, that, without him, in the past, the world had been a bit inert, grey, formless, indifferent, that she herself had been nothing but expectation, suspense . . . As soon as he was there, eveything fell back into place. Things assumed form, moulded by him, reflected in his glance . . . (p. )]

In entering Alain’s world she had had the impression of being able for the first time to see meaningful difference, but it was at the cost of a painful separation and a terrifying alienation from the one she had previously inhabited: blottie contre lui, elle avait vu sa mère, jusque-là comme elle-même incernable, infinie, projetée brusquement à distance, se pétrifier tout à coup en une forme inconnue aux contours très précis. (p. ) [huddled up to him, she had seen her mother, who, until then, like herself had been uncircumscribable, infinite, abruptly projected at a distance, suddenly petrified in an unfamiliar form with very precise contours. (p. )]

As the perspective is abruptly switched from one world to the other, Gisèle discovers that the real principle of difference is not that of binary oppositions which map out a world, but the harsh rule of incommensurable alternatives where worlds are negated rather than mapped, and where the consensus that sustains signifying systems of the Saussurean variety is replaced by division and separation. The logic that leads from differences to the radical dissensions of the différend presupposes allegiances which in turn impose painful separations on those implicated in them, and the words arrachement [wrenching, tearing away] and déchirement [heartbreak, lit. ripping] repeatedly mark this event in the experience of Sarraute’s characters. In entering Alain’s world, Gisèle is making a choice that tears her away from her mother (‘c’était cette même peur, cette même sensation que maintenant, d’ar-

Difference and dissension



rachement, de chute dans le vide’, p. , [‘it was this same fear, this same sensation as now, of being wrenched away, of falling into the void’ (p. )] my emphasis). And in stepping back into her mother’s world, Gisèle discovers that nothing ensures the impossiblity of separation: ‘Il n’y a fusion complète avec personne’ (p. ) [‘Complete fusion exists with no one’ (p. )]). To adopt the rest of the world’s view of Alain is to be torn just as devastatingly from him as she had previously been from her mother: ‘L’arrachement, l’affreuse séparation va se consommer’ (p. , my emphasis) [‘The wrench, the frightful separation will soon be complete (p. )]. The difference of the différend turns out to be a terrifying separation; and for Sarraute the word différer [to differ] has a perilous synonymy – as well as a sinister near-homophony – with the word déchirer [to rip, tear]. Difference in Sarraute’s work, then, refers less to the reliable effects of binary oppositions (the differences without positive terms of Saussure’s signifying systems), than it implies a painful differing (as when one agrees – or not – to differ) from another. Or rather, to see a difference in the world (between black and white, for example) is inevitably also to differ, to break a bond with another – with all the terrifying consequences that follow. A child tries her hand at critical discrimination, and says of a piece of sculpture: ‘Ça fait penser à la sculpture crétoise’ [‘It reminds me of Cretan sculpture’]; but as a result she is brutally savaged by her father (he bites her) in punishment for what he can only see as an assertion of her underlying difference (VLE, p.  [p. ]). The child’s remark cannot be read as an innocent index of aesthetic taxonomy; it can only be taken as mockery, as provocation, an attack on the world (the father’s) where such terms have currency. So that the attempt to map the aesthetic world in terms of meaningful differences (Cretan vs. other forms of sculpture) is turned into the site of a radical différend, as demonstrated by the ferocious response from the father. The most extended exploration of this mechanism can be found in the episode involving the poupée de coiffeur in Enfance. In this episode the child Natacha discovers difference in a scene which definitively constructs difference as part of a logic of betrayal and rejection, the différend and its consequent ‘déchirement’. The young Natacha is out with her mother, sees a hairdresser’s doll in a shop window and is captivated by it: ‘tout en elle [la poupée] était beau. La beauté, c’était cela. C’était cela – être belle’ (p. ) [‘everything about her [the doll] was beautiful. Beauty – was that. That was what it was – to be beautiful’ (p. )]. But making this judgement about the doll turns out to entail a différend between Natacha and her mother which is defined by the latter as betrayal: ‘Un



Difference and human relations

enfant qui aime sa mère,’ she says, ‘trouve que personne n’est plus beau qu’elle’ (p. ) [‘A child who loves its mother thinks that no one is more beautiful than she’ (p. )]. For in wishing to apply the term ‘belle’ to the model, Natacha finds that she is misappropriating it from her mother who regards herself as having exclusive rights to it: Elle avait dû m’amener . . . sans jamais l’exiger . . . elle m’avait sûrement incitée, sans que je sache comment, à la trouver très belle, d’une incomparable beauté . . . (p. ) [She must have led me . . . without ever demanding it . . . she had certainly incited me, without my knowing how, to consider her very beautiful, of incomparable beauty . . . (p. )]

For Maman the word cannot be made to serve two mistresses: either she is beautiful, or the poupée de coiffeur is. To do as Natacha does and discriminate between different kinds or degrees of beauty, is to reject and betray: il m’apparaît maintenant clairement que je ne m’étais jamais demandé si maman était belle. Et je ne sais toujours pas ce qui m’a poussée ce jour-là à m’emparer de ce “Elle est belle” qui adhérait si parfaitement à cette poupée de coiffeur, qui semblait être fait pour elle, et à le transporter, à essayer de le faire tenir aussi sur la tête de maman. (p. ) [I now see clearly that I had never asked myself whether Mama was beautiful. And I still don’t know what incited me, that day, to seize upon the words, ‘She’s beautiful’ which suited the hairdresser’s doll so perfectly, which seemed to have been made for her, and to transport it, to try and fix it on Mama’s face. (p. )]

The result of this exercise is a simple and quite explicit comparison: ‘comment ne pas le voir? . . . c’est évident, c’est certain, c’est ainsi: Elle est plus belle que maman’ [‘how could I not see it? . . . it’s obvious, it’s certain, it is so: She is more beautiful than Mama’] (my emphasis). Comparisons are a way of establishing differences which are then duly registered. Maman is assessed against the model (earlobes are contrasted, the relative curve of lips noted, eyelashes are measured), and she is found wanting: less beautiful. As the narrator’s alter ego comments, Natacha’s error was precisely to have compared her mother to others and placed her within a single system of differences: ce qui avait dû l’agacer, c’est que tu l’avais tirée d’où elle se tenait . . . au-dehors, au-delà, et que tu l’avais poussée parmi les autres, où l’on compare, situe, assigne des places . . . elle ne se mesurait à personne, elle ne voulait avoir sa place nulle part. (p. )

Difference and dissension



[what must have irritated her was that you had removed her from where she was . . . outside, beyond, and that you had pushed her among the others, where people compare, situate, assign places . . . she didn’t measure herself against anyone, she didn’t want to have a place anywhere. (p. )]

Natacha had forced her mother to enter the world of others, just as Gisèle had suddenly seen herself in the eyes of the world, observed by others amongst others. Maman’s response to Natacha’s comment is explicitly not to incorporate it into the single world in which they both exist, not to say – as Natacha desperately hoped she would – ‘“Mais oui, grosse bête, bien sûr qu’elle est plus belle que moi”’ (p. ) [‘“But of course, you big silly, of course she’s more beautiful than me”’ (p. )], but to react as if a tie between them had been broken and the world split in two. This she does by treating difference as a matter of treason, and then using this to define Natacha herself as different: ‘“Un enfant qui aime sa mère trouve que personne n’est plus beau qu’elle”’ [‘“A child who loves its mother thinks that no one is more beautiful than she”’]. The mother’s logic means that Natacha’s perception of difference is tantamount to a wholesale negation that amounts to betrayal. And this interpretation leads her to respond – like the father in Vous les entendez? – with an equally wholesale negation of Natacha as the agent of discriminations. Defined by the mother as a child who does not love its mother, Natacha sees her own difference as tantamount to a separation, an exclusion from the world she previously inhabited. Maman’s verdict makes of her. [un] enfant qui porte sur lui quelque chose qui le sépare, qui le met au ban des autres enfants . . . des enfants légers, insouciants que je vois rire, crier, se poursuivre, se balancer au jardin, dans le square . . . et moi je suis à l’écart. (p. ) [[a] child who bears the stigma of something that cuts it off, that outlaws it from other children . . . the light-hearted, carefree children I see laughing, shouting, chasing one another, swinging in the garden, in the square . . . and I am on my own. (p. )]

If Maman is not beautiful, then Natacha is not like other children, and is banished from their happy world. In a sense, Maman and Natacha have exchanged places, but in doing so each reveals what threatens the original position of the other: Maman wanted to be the only inhabitant of her world, a unique being in a universe of absolutes, a world of of what one might call positive terms without differences (outside, beyond); but by introducing difference



Difference and human relations

Natacha wrenches her out of this ‘beyond’, and places her amongst others and so lays her open to comparisons. As a result, Natacha is equally brutally cast out from the world of others (of children) into a total isolation where she is a monster whose being is so different from that of others that it ceases even to be intelligible: ‘moi je suis à l’écart. Seule avec ça, que personne ne connaît, personne, si on le lui révélait, ne pourrait le croire’ (p. ) [‘I am on my own. Alone with that something, which no one knows about and which no one, if told about it, would be able to believe’ (p. )]. Suddenly, it is Natacha who is beyond meaningful comparison, and Maman’s unique position in a world of absolutes is recast as a wholly negative one when it is experienced by Natacha as a traumatic expulsion from the world of others. And the comfort that Natacha derives from being a child like other children, is revealed by the mother’s experience to be the horror of potential comparison. The Sarrautean moral that may be drawn from this episode is that differences rebound on those who make them. Or, as one of her characters says in «disent les imbéciles», ‘C’est vous que ça juge’ (DLI, pp.  ff.) [‘You’re the one who’s judged by it’ (p. )]. The one who perceives difference becomes the one who is perceived as different: to make distinctions is to exclude, the response to which is counter-exclusion. In this episode of Enfance differences are the means whereby mother and child are torn apart by what each takes to be a rejection by the other. But from this point on, Natacha is also repeatedly described as being torn apart inside: the arrachement that separates two beings becomes the déchirement that tears apart a single being. So that the idea that Maman might be mean with the amount of meat she gives the servants ‘me déchire’ (p. ) [‘destroys me’, lit. ‘tears me apart’, (p. )]; the half-forgotten farewells with Gacha, the maid who looks after Natacha in St Petersburg, were ‘probablement déchirants’ (p. ) [‘probably heartrending’ (p. )]; the miserable Parc Montsouris makes Natacha fall prey to ‘une nostalgie par moments déchirante’, and, she adds, ‘le mot n’est pas trop fort’ (p. ) [‘a nostalgia that was sometimes heartrending [. . .] the word is not too strong’ (p. )]; Véra’s cruel words, ‘Ce n’est pas ta maison’ [‘It isn’t your home’], may charitably be interpreted in retrospect as a desire to spare Natacha ‘un nouveau déchirement’ (p. ) [‘a new heartache’ (p. )]; and when Maman returns to Russia early because of the outbreak of war, the narrator writes, ‘j’étais déchirée . . . et ce qui me déchirait encore davantage, c’était sa joie qu’elle ne cherchait même pas à dissimuler’ (p. ) [‘I was heart-broken . . . and what

Difference and dissension



broke my heart even more was her joy, which she didn’t even try to conceal’ (p. )]. These scenes are either scenes of separation (from Gacha, Maman), scenes of exclusion (Véra’s harsh words), or scenes of comparison (the Parc Montsouris is implicitly compared with happier places, Natacha notices the difference between the helpings given to the servants and the rest and is led to define her mother as ‘miserly’ and ‘mean’). Comparison and separation are treated as equivalent experiences insofar as they produce the same inward déchirement.       Since differences invariably turn out to be a form of différend or of inward déchirement, one can begin to see why Nathalie Sarraute might have so much at stake in denying difference. For, if her work is marked by apparent polarities, it is also striking in its repeated denials of difference, be they personal, social, racial, sexual or linguistic. The inner life may be opposed to the external world of social and physical existence, but it is one where differences of all kinds are thoroughly erased. The psychology of the tropism is one that presupposes that differences, even if they exist, do not count. Or, as Alain Guimier puts it: je ne parviens pas à croire à une différence fondamentale entre les gens . . . Je crois toujours – c’est peut-être idiot – que quelque part, plus loin, tout le monde est pareil, tout le monde se ressemble . . . Alors je n’ose pas juger . . . Je me sens aussitôt comme eux, dès que j’ôte ma carapace, le petit vernis . . . (P, p. ) [I can’t bring myself to believe in a fundamental difference between people . . . I always believe – perhaps it’s stupid – that somewhere, at a further remove, everyone is the same, everyone is alike . . . So I don’t dare judge . . . Right away I feel that I’m like them, as soon as I remove my carapace, the thin varnish . . . (p. )]

The truth of Sarraute’s psychology is one that transcends differences of age, gender, class, creed, race and nationality. In interviews one finds Nathalie Sarraute reporting with evident satisfaction that readers in Russia have claimed to recognise the inner world she depicts, a workingclass reader sees his shop-keeper aunt in the haute bourgeoise Tante Berthe, men acknowledge as a world they know one that happens to be portrayed by a woman.7 Nathalie Sarraute regularly evokes with euphoria worlds where racial and sexual differences apparently count for nothing. She recalls school as a place where ‘visiblement les idées de différence de race ou de religion



Difference and human relations

n’entraient dans l’esprit de personne’ (E, p. ) [‘it was obvious that any ideas about differences of race or religion never entered anyone’s head’ (p. )]. And it is school, the haven that abolishes difference, which determines Natacha’s decision to remain with her father in Paris when her mother suggests that she return to St Petersburg. Natacha chooses a world without differences (school), against one (her mother’s) which she evokes here exclusively in terms of violent separation and estrangement: ‘le choc produit par cette brusque réapparition de ce à quoi j’avais été arrachée [. . .] et sous ce brutal rapprochement la découverte d’un nouvel éloignement’ (p. –) [‘the shock caused by this abrupt reappearance of what I had been wrenched [lit. torn] away from [. . .] then under this brutal rapprochement, the discovery of a new distancing’ (p. )] (my emphases). In another vision of an ideal community observed during a stay in a kibbutz in , Sarraute not only extolls the equal welcome extended by the kibbutz to a Dutch couple, an old Czech woman and a beautiful English girl in wellington boots, but also claims that no distinction was made between Jew and non-Jew, or even – and this is an extraordinary assertion to make just two years after the Yom Kippur war – between Jew and Arab: Je n’ai, quant à moi, jamais remarqué de distinction entre Juifs et non-Juifs. J’ai rencontré à Merhavia un étudiant de Nanterre, heureux de travailler chaque été comme plongeur au kibboutz. Personne ne savait s’il était Juif ou non. Il s’est révélé par hasard qu’il ne l’était pas.[. . .] A Regavim, dans une classe de petits, où je suis entrée par hasard, j’ai vu les murs couverts de dessins sur le thème de l’amitié avec les enfants arabes. J’ai vu entrer dans mon atelier un jeune père avec ses deux petits garçons, accueillis en amis. J’ai appris plus tard qu’ils étaient arabes. D’autres Arabes sont venus dans la salle à manger discuter d’un match de football auquel ils devaient participer. [For myself, I never noticed any distinction between Jews and non-Jews. At Merhavia I met a student from Nanterre who was happy to work as a washerup in the kibbutz every summer. It was discovered by chance that he wasn’t Jewish. [. . .] At Regavim, in a classroom of small children which I happened to go into, I saw the walls covered with drawings on the subject of friendship with Arab children. I saw a young father with his two little boys come into my workshop where they were welcomed as friends. I learned later that they were Arabs. Other Arabs came to the dining hall to talk about a football match that they were supposed to be playing in.]

Difference and dissension



A Palestinian bomb attack that takes place during her visit and thus threatens to explode this image of harmony, is treated as a regrettable, but brief interruption, in a process of underlying unanimity between Jews and Arabs aimed at creating a single community in which all difference will ultimately be eliminated.8 In Sarraute’s ideal communities sexual difference is not an issue, and men and women are treated the same. In the kibbutz domestic labour is reduced to a minimum, and what little such work there is, is equally shared between the sexes. Similarly, when she describes the Russian émigré community of her childhood in Paris, she retrospectively discovers a world without sexual differences: ‘aussi bien au point de vue moral qu’au point de vue intellectuel, personne ne faisait entre les hommes et les femmes la moindre différence’ (E, p. ) [‘no one made the slightest distinction between men and women, either from the intellectual or the moral point of view’ (p. )]. However, this claim sits uneasily in a scene whose recall makes much of Véra’s highly gendered role in the gatherings that brought this supposedly ideal community together: seated behind the copper samovar ‘in the place that belongs to the mistress of the house’, pouring tea for her guests, silently attending to their needs and participating neither morally nor intellectually in the discussions taking place around her. One of the more curious areas where Sarraute’s denial of difference appears is in that of language. She spoke English and German as well as Russian and French, but the crucial languages were – for obvious biographical reasons – the latter two. When asked about her linguistic origins and the role of the two languages in her life, she would insist on her French-speaking origins as she had been quite unaffected by the Russian that she must nevertheless have heard spoken around her.9 In interviews she is also at pains to emphasise that her parents had equal command of both languages, and thus were never victims of linguistic difference, a position which would have excluded them from full participation in the French linguistic and social community. Like Babouchka in Enfance (who is also credited with impeccable French), they betray their Russian origins in French only in the rolled Russian r which they cannot unlearn (just as Natacha cannot learn it). The difference between the Russian and the French languages – and indeed between the Russian Orthodox and French Catholic religions – is regarded by Sarraute as a kind of game, where getting things wrong (like saying ‘serrer’ instead of ‘ranger’, or crossing yourself the wrong way in church) is merely charming idiosyncrasy, or at worst a minor gaffe: as when



Difference and human relations

Babouchka forgets that being in France she should speak in Russian and not in French if she doesn’t want the servants to understand. Or when, having contrasted the specific practices of the Orthodox church that Natacha visits with Babouchka with those of the Catholic church to which she sometimes accompanies the maid, Sarraute erroneously recalls the ‘chants grégoriens’ in the Orthodox church, an error which she corrects in subsequent editions as if it were a mere slip of the pen.10 And yet there are occasional but telling signs that the differences between the two languages do count, and count for a great deal. For instance, the effect of Véra’s words ‘Tiebia podbrossili’ is exclusively attributed to their Russian connotations: ‘en français elle aurait dû dire “on t’a abandonnée”, ce qui n’était qu’un mou, exsangue équivalent des mots russes’, whereas ‘ce mot russe évoque un rejet brutal en même temps que sournois’ (pp. –) [‘in French she would have had to say “on t’a abandonnée” [they’ve abandoned you], which would be a very feeble, anaemic equivalent of the Russian words [. . .], the Russian word conjures up a brutal and at the same time underhand rejection’ (pp. –)]. And when her mother comes to see her in Paris, Natacha finds it strange to ask for her at the hotel by the French version of her Russian name, Madame Boretzki, words which ‘have a strange, unreal sound’, as if the person they refer to doesn’t quite exist in French. And when mother and daughter finally meet in the hotel bedroom, Natacha is shocked by Maman’s bare shoulders until she remembers that ‘ce sont des choses qui là-bas, en Russie, ne choquent pas comme ici’ (p. ) [‘these are things which don’t shock people in Russia as they do here’ (p. )]. This reminder of cultural difference seems to leave the two with no common ground, and nothing to say to each other: ‘je ne sais pas quoi dire et je vois que maman ne sait pas très bien quoi dire non plus’ [‘I don’t know what to say and I can see that Mama doesn’t really know what to say either’]. These moments when linguistic and national differences surface in the narrative of Enfance would suggest that there are, after all, real differences that are being denied in Sarraute’s assertion that there is easy and effortless traffic between the two. Indeed, the child seems to know it better than the adult writer, for the scene of separation between mother and daughter which takes place in the train as it crosses Russia and heads for Berlin, includes the child’s physiological exploration of the contrasting French and Russian versions of the word for sun, and a desperate attempt on her part to make them interchangeable equivalents:

Difference and dissension



je m’amuse à scander sur le bruit des roues toujours les mêmes deux mots . . . venus sans doute des plaines ensoleillées que je voyais par la fenêtre . . . le mot français soleil et le même mot russe solntze où le l se prononce à peine, tantôt je dis sol-ntze, en ramassant et en avançant les lèvres, le bout de ma langue incurvée s’appuyant contre les dents de devant, tantôt so-leil en étirant les lèvres, la langue effleurant à peine les dents. Et de nouveau sol-ntze. Et de nouveau so-leil. Un jeu abrutissant que je ne peux pas arrêter. Il s’arrête tout seul et les larmes coulent. (pp. –) [I amuse myself by chanting [lit. scan] the same two words in time with the sound of the wheels . . . always the same two words which came, no doubt, from the sunlit plains I could see out of the window . . . the French word soleil and the same word in Russian, solntze, in which the ‘l’ is hardly pronounced, sometimes I say sol-ntze, gathering my lips and pushing them out, the tip of my curled-up tongue pressing against my front teeth, and sometimes so-leil, stretching my lips, my tongue barely touching my teeth. And then again, sol-ntze. And then again, so-leil. A mind-numbing game which I can’t stop. It stops of its own accord and the tears flow. (pp. –)]

Soleil and solntze are described as ‘the same word’, and the regular sound of the wheels of the train subjects them to the same scansion. But the shape of the tongue and the lips required by the pronunciation of the French and the Russian is very different in each case: lips pursed and pushed forward, tongue curved and pressed against the teeth for solntze; and a reverse movement for soleil, with lips stretched and the tongue barely touching the teeth. Language difference is once again described as a game, but one that the child knows is merely numbing the mind in order to palliate a difference which will take the form of a definitive separation between Russia and France, mother and daughter. It is no surprise, then, that the game gives way to tears. Later on in Enfance the child’s game is repeated in a different way by the mother as she sits lost in wonder at the equal beauty of the Russian and French words for wrath: elle se tourne vers moi et elle me dit: ‘C’est étrange, il y a des mots qui sont aussi beaux dans les deux langues . . . écoute comme il est beau en russe, le mot “gniev”, et comme en français “courroux” est beau . . . c’est difficile de dire lequel a plus de force, plus de noblesse . . . elle répète avec une sorte de bonheur “Gniev” . . . “Courroux” . . . elle écoute, elle hoche la tête . . . Dieu que c’est beau . . . et je réponds Oui.’ (p. ) [she turns to me and she says: ‘It’s strange, there are words which are equally beautiful in both languages . . . listen how beautiful the word ‘gniev’ is in Russian, and how beautiful the French word for wrath, ‘courroux’, is . . . it’s



Difference and human relations

difficult to say which one has more force, more nobility . . . she repeats with a sort of happiness: ‘Gniev’ . . . ‘Courroux’ . . . she listens, she nods . . . ‘God how beautiful’ . . . And I reply: ‘Yes.’ (p. )]

Maman’s aestheticising of the issue of language difference anticipates the solution to which Nathalie Sarraute herself will ultimately have recourse in order to deal with more general questions of difference: art. It is not so much that the words themselves, gniev and courroux, are equally beautiful, but rather that their beauty derives from their sameness. Or more precisely still, beauty consists of seeing things as the same, of not seeing the differences between them – and in this instance, perhaps also of overriding the threat contained in the signified (anger) of the two words. Already in the train episode, the regular rattle of the wheels provided an aesthetic form (‘scansion’) for making Russian and French words the same; and in its small way the child’s literary act prefigures the character of Sarraute’s adult practice as a writer. For writing in Sarraute is always implicitly presented as a sphere in which differences will melt away. The modern novel is a place where character need no longer be divided from character, since ‘[on] a vu tomber les cloisons étanches qui séparaient les personnages les uns des autres’ [‘[we] have seen the water-tight partitions that used to separate characters from each other, collapse’] in order to reveal ‘la trame commune que chacun contient tout entière’ (‘L’ère’, p. ) [‘the common woof that each of us contains in its entirety’ (p. )]. Moreover, the techniques of the modern novel are designed precisely to draw the reader into the world of the novel, and to abolish the distance that separates reader from author; or, as Sarraute puts it, ‘l’attirer coûte que coûte sur le terrain de l’auteur’ (p. ) [‘entice him at all costs onto the author’s territory’ (p. )]. Finally, writing itself is an activity which transports the writer into a world without sexual (or any other) difference: Je travaille à partir uniquement de ce que je ressens moi-même. Je ne me place pas à l’extérieur, je ne cherche pas à analyser du dehors. À l’intérieur, où je suis, le sexe n’existe pas. [. . .] Je suis, à un tel point, dans ce que je fais que je n’existe pas. Je ne pense pas que c’est une femme qui écrit. Cette chose-là, ce que je travaille, est en train de se passer quelque part où le sexe féminin ou masculin n’intervient pas.11 [I work exclusively on the basis of what I feel myself. I don’t position myself on the outside, I don’t try to analyse from without. Inside, where I am, sex doesn’t exist. [. . .] I am inside what I am doing to such a point that I don’t exist. I don’t think that this is a woman writing. The thing that I am working on is happening in a place where the female sex or the male sex don’t apply.]

Difference and dissension



Through writing, both for the writer who creates and in its psychological content, it becomes possible for Nathalie Sarraute to assert, along with Alain Guimier: ‘Je pense qu’à l’intérieur de chacun de nous, très profondément, nous sommes pareils’ (P, p. ) [‘I think that inside each of us, at a very deep level, we are the same’]. At the level of words, too, writing seems to offer Sarraute the possibility of sameness, the suppression of difference. Sarraute’s style exemplifies to an extraordinary degree the principle which Roman Jakobson famously defines as the poetic function of language, namely: ‘[the projection of] the princple of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.’12 Her writing is far less a combination of differences than it is a projection of equivalences. The metaphors and imagery which characterise her fiction in particular are the vehicle for a thorough-going elaboration of equivalence: first between the unnamed psychological experience being evoked and the various images offered as substitutes to elucidate it. And second, between the images themselves, which rarely appear in isolation, but almost always in pairs or clusters. So that the concrete metaphor becomes the equivalent of the psychological experience; and the metaphors themselves are treated as interchangeable substitutes or equivalents of each other. To take an example from Tropismes, the ‘pensée humble et crasseuse’ which the anonymous central character senses in the mistress of the house, is described as follows: Et il sentait filtrer de la cuisine la pensée humble et crasseuse, piétinante, piétinant toujours sur place, toujours sur place, tournant en rond, en rond, comme s’ils avaient le vertige mais ne pouvaient pas s’arrêter, comme s’ils avaient mal au coeur mais ne pouvaient pas s’arrêter, comme on se ronge les ongles, comme on arrache par morceaux sa peau quand on pèle, comme on se gratte quand on a de l’urticaire, comme on se retourne dans son lit pendant l’insomnie, pour se faire plaisir et pour se faire souffrir, à s’épuiser, à en avoir la respiration coupée . . . (T, pp. –) [And he sensed percolating from the kitchen, humble, squalid, time-marking thoughts, marking time on one spot, always on one spot, going round and round in circles, as if they were dizzy but couldn’t stop, as if they felt sick but couldn’t stop, the way we bite our nails, the way we tear off dead skin in strips when we’re peeling, the way we scratch ourselves when we have hives, the way we toss in our beds when we can’t sleep, to give ourselves pleasure and to make ourselves suffer, until we are exhausted, until it leaves us out of breath . . . (pp. –)]

The thought is evoked in terms of likenesses, and more particularly through a series of similes, each taken to be an equivalent of the others;



Difference and human relations

so that vertigo, nausea, nail-biting, peeling, scratching, tossing with sleeplessness are all proposed as versions of the same experience. Phonetically, semantically and syntactically, the words themselves also project equivalences. Adjectives rarely appear in isolation in Sarraute’s writing, and the presence of a second or third does not so much modify, as consolidate the meaning of the first; so that here ‘crasseuse’ [‘squalid’], by specifying ‘humble’ makes itself a quasi-synonym of it: ‘humble’ is to be understood as a version of ‘crasseuse’, and ‘crasseuse’ as a version of ‘humble’. The adjectival ‘piétinante’ [‘time-marking’] generates the verbal ‘piétinant sur place’ [‘marking time on one spot’], which, after a literal repetition (‘toujours sur place’ [‘always in one spot’]), in turn generates the synonymous expression ‘tournant en rond’ [‘going round and round’], with its repeated ‘en rond’. These words then call up by association the first of the similes (‘comme s’ils avaient le vertige’ [‘as if they felt dizzy’]), the second of which is in any case a redescribing of the symptoms of the first (vertigo gives you nausea), and also repeats the phrase ‘mais ne pouvaient pas s’arrêter’ [‘but couldn’t stop’]. ‘Comme’ [‘the way’] is used as an anaphora, providing a sort of scansion (like the wheels of the train) that reduces the different experiences of nail-biting, peeling, scratching, etc. to the same, lingering only on the last experience to explore how pleasure and suffering might be interchangeable, and to suggest that suffering, exhaustion and breathlessness are all instances of the same thing. Nathalie Sarraute’s sentences all tend toward this pattern of repetition – phonetic, semantic and syntactic – which has the effect of drawing the world and all its manifestations of difference into a vortex – or a haven – of equivalences.       Yet despite these evocations of social, psychic and literary utopias where all differences are erased, there is no way that Sarraute’s writing can exist as anything other than a radical assertion of difference. Nathalie Sarraute constitutes herself as a writing subject by setting herself up in opposition to various literary institutions and phenomena: as the Elephant’s Child who blows the whistle on the literary establishment through her questioning of the literary worth of Paul Valéry; as the protégée of Sartre who nevertheless challenges the fictional aesthetic championed by Les Temps modernes; as the defender of innovation against the tyranny of the critical rule of Realism; but also as the renegade from the formalist orthodoxy of the nouveau roman in the s.13 And if it is some-

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times useful to her to justify her own practices by citing the example of others, she is always quick to define her own difference when she does so. For example, Virginia Woolf is credited by Sarraute with having contributed to ‘la transformation de la matière romanesque dans le roman moderne, à ce déplacement du centre de gravité du roman qui est passé du personnage et de l’intrigue à la substance romanesque ellemême’ [‘the transformation of the subject matter of fiction in the modern novel, and to the shifting of the centre of gravity in the novel from character and plot to the very substance of the novel’], and thus with having initiated a form of writing which Sarraute has continued to develop and explore in her own work. But lest the two writers become too closely associated in the minds of readers, Sarraute makes it clear that they are not only different, but according to her, total opposites: On a parlé de nos ‘ressemblances’, de l’influence de Virginia Woolf sur ce que j’ai écrit. Je crois que nos sensibilités sont vraiment à l’opposé l’une de l’autre. Chez Virginia Woolf, l’univers entier, brassé par le temps, coule à travers la conscience des personnages, qui sont passifs, comme portés de côté et d’autre par le courant ininterrompu des instants. Chez moi, les personnages sont toujours dans un état d’hyperactivité.[. . .] D’où un rythme tout différent du style.14 [People have talked about our ‘similarities’, of the influence of Virginia Woolf on what I have written. I think our sensibilities are really totally unlike each other. In Virginia Woolf, the entire universe, swept along by time, flows through the consciousnesses of the characters, who are passive, and as if carried hither and thither by the ceaseless current of moments. In my work, the characters are always in a state of hyperactivity. [. . .] And that produces a completely different stylistic rhythm.]

Sarraute is drawing here upon all her critical acumen to establish a difference that will forestall any possible reduction of the two writers to the same. Similarly, for the emergent writer in Entre la vie et la mort, one of the first – and worst – experiences he has to confront is the way his newfound status as a writer is used as a basis for assimilating him into a group of other writers who welcome him as one of their own, dismissing any difference he may suppose he has: Vous voilà donc ici, parmi nous. Vous verrez, on n’y est pas si mal. On se sent soutenus. Appuyés les uns aux autres. On s’est cru, n’est-ce pas, si seul, tout différent . . . Et on est surpris, on est réconforté de découvrir entre nos états les plus subtils, jusqu’entre nos manies les plus étranges une telle ressemblance. (EVM, p. )



Difference and human relations

[So here you are, one of us. You’ll see, it’s not so bad here. You feel supported. Leaning on each other. You thought you were so alone, completely different, didn’t you . . . And you’re surprised, you’re cheered to discover such a likeness between our subtlest states of mind, even between our strangest quirks. (p. )]

But the writer finds no comfort in this discovery of sameness. Far from representing an ideal community like the kibbutz or the circle of Natacha’s father’s émigré friends, this group constitutes a real threat to the writer’s creativity which requires complete isolation, and demands to be nothing less than an assertion of pure difference: Pas de nous. Le nous est dégradant. Nous pour tout le reste, mais pas pour cela. Il n’y a pas de nous possible ici. Il est seul, comme au moment de sa naissance, comme au moment de sa mort, quand barricadé chez lui, tout son être ramassé sur lui-même, tendu vers cela, il se penche vers cette à peine perceptible craquelure . . . (p. ) [No ‘we’. ‘We’ is demeaning. ‘We’ for all the rest, but not for that. There is no ‘we’ possible here. He is alone, as at the moment of his birth, as at the moment of his death, when, shut away in his room, his entire being turned in on himself, straining toward it, he leans towards that barely perceptible fissure . . . (p. )]

The work of the writer insists upon existing in a world beyond, like the one that Maman laid claim to for herself in the episode with the poupée de coiffeur, ‘au-delà. Loin de toute comparaison possible’ [‘beyond. Far removed from all possible comparison’], a world in which, as for Maman, ‘Aucune critique, aucune louange ne sembl[e] pouvoir se poser sur elle’ (E, p. ) [‘It seemed as if no criticism, no praise could alight on her’ (p. )]. The difference asserted by writing would ideally be so extreme, so absolute as to preclude all possibility of comparison, let alone assimilation. This ideal form of writing would take the form of the epiphanic ‘moment of happiness’ experienced by Natacha in the Jardin du Luxembourg. She is with her father and the woman she will come to know as ‘Véra’, her step-mother, but whom for the time being, she knows only as the woman who dressed up in a man’s suit (thus negating sexual difference) and danced with her one Christmas in a flat in the rue Boissonade. A bound copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales lies closed on the lap of one of the adults, its sad stories of rejection, abandonment and exclusion temporally forgotten: the ugly ducklings, the little matchgirls shut out in the snow, the tin soldiers lost down drains, and the mermaids who cannot follow their lovers into the world of humans. And then the experience whose name might be ‘happiness’, but which is

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

qualified in a typically Sarrautean way by a list of near synonyms (‘félicité, exaltation, extase, joie’ [‘felicity, exaltation, ecstasy, joy’]) takes hold; and the child becomes one with the world around her, fills the walls, the flowers, the trees, the grass and the shimmering air with her being. This is self-assertion as euphoria: violent (‘a sensation of such violence’), but without any menace to threaten or contest the affirmation of pure being: ‘[la] vie à l’état pur, aucune menace sur elle, aucun mélange’ (p. –) [‘life in its pure state, no lurking menace, no mixture’ (pp. –)]. The world is now an expansion chamber for the child’s being which encounters nothing other than objects which it can absorb into itself, without having to acknowledge differences that would result in a ‘mix’. It is this state towards which Nathalie Sarraute’s writing aspires, a pure affirmation of self in which the surrounding world acquiesces and to which readers in their turn are called upon to assent. In his review of Entre la vie et la mort Jean Blot offers a very astute account of this mechanism. He sees clearly how the intersubjective dynamic which Sarraute creates (more of which in the next chapter) is also the origin of her writing: ‘le lieu où se situe le discours de Nathalie Sarraute est celui où l’être se veut unique, afin de revendiquer un amour sans partage. [. . .] Mais le lieu de cet appétit dévorant, à partir duquel se lève le murmure de Sarraute, lieu où l’existence est découverte comme vouée à la quête de l’amour passif, est aussi celui où la littérature prend racine ou celui à partir duquel elle prend son essor’ [‘the place where Nathalie Sarraute’s language is situated is the one where a person likes to think he is unique, in order to demand an undivided love. [. . .] But the place of this voracious appetite, from where Sarraute’s murmur emerges, a place where existence is found to be devoted to the search for a passive love, is also the place where literature takes root or from where it springs’].15 The loving response from a world which has no other allegiances (‘an undivided love’), is precisely the demand made by Maman and of which Natacha fell so catastrophically foul. And yet it is also the one implicitly made of its readers by the work of the adult writer. Indeed the demand is necessarily a highly problematic one. The selfassertion which embodies it rarely takes the straightforward euphoric form of the episode in the Jardin du Luxembourg. On the contrary, it is usually associated with an acute awareness of the possibility that selfaffirmation will encounter resistance or even outright negation. Blot is also alert to the ambivalence or hesitation which this awareness introduces into a movement which is nevertheless constructed as pure affirmation: ‘L’amour sans partage exige que deux conditions



Difference and human relations

contradictoires se trouvent miraculeusement réunies: la présence et l’indistinction. L’écrivain va aimer la parole qui le manifeste et redouter la phrase qui recèle une affirmation par laquelle il se distingue ou s’entend distinguer’ (p. ) [‘An unidivided love requires that two contradictory conditions be miraculously united: presence and indistinction. The writer will be drawn to words which reveal him, and will fear any expression which contains an assertion through which he stands out or in which he hears himself singled out’]. The desire that constitutes writing seeks both to occupy the world with its absolute and exclusive presence; but it also seeks to be accepted (loved) for what makes it different. In short, differences in Sarraute always imply and implicate an other whose existence largely accounts for the profoundly unstable character of their operation. Sarraute’s writing is caught in this repetitive cycle of denial and assertion of difference. Difference in her work is inextricably associated with two contradictory demands. If differences need to be denied it is because they are lived as exclusions and separations that are too painful to bear. But the denial of difference leads to an equally painful form of misrecognition which can be escaped only through an affirmation of absolute difference. This dilemma is the drama which is perpetually reenacted by Sarraute’s characters. Indeed, nothing escapes its logic; for it is not just the characters, but the writing itself which is constituted around the twin poles of this paradox.

    

Subjectivity and indistinction

       If the issue of difference in Sarraute’s universe takes the contradictory forms described in the previous chapter, this is because her work is concerned far less with the intelligibility of that universe than with the nature of the experience that is lived in it. And since experience presupposes a subject, the result is that, as we have already begun to see, issues of sameness and difference in Sarraute’s work are not based primarily on discrimination or judgement, but acquire a heavy existential charge. Difference is experienced subjectively either as a painful exclusion, or as an impulse towards a pure affirmation of self. Similarly, sameness is a condition which is either longed for by a subject at the mercy of what Sarraute calls ‘the terrible desire to establish contact’;1 or one that his whole being resists and revolts against. In seeking to understand how difference functions in Sarraute, one repeatedly discovers that it operates far more as an experiential issue for the subject than as a necessary condition for the intelligibility of the world which the subject inhabits. The world of Sarraute’s writing is decidedly not one that invites a deciphering that would reveal, as Balzac has it in his ‘Avant-propos’ to the Comédie humaine, ‘the reasons or reason’ for the phenomena the work presents. However intense the scrutiny that Sarraute’s characters bring to bear on each other and on the occasional objects that they encounter in their path, its aim is never the recovery of some underlying explanatory model, or a set of classifications and categories that would translate experiential phenomena into meaningful distinctions. The gaze projected onto Sarraute’s world by its inhabitants takes the form of a nervous vigilance rather than analytical insight. Theirs is a watchful eye that tracks the movements of its objects in order to establish where they are as the means of discovering who they are, that is to say, whether they exist as friend or as foe, as threat or as reassurance. For the Sarrautean 

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Difference and human relations

subject is never alone. The experience of the subject is always an experience – if often a phantasmatic one – of other subjects. In other words, subjectivity here necessarily entails intersubjectivity,2 and, as the conclusion of the last chapter suggested, the issue of sameness and difference is inextricably bound up with the subject’s relation to the other. In this chapter I shall be addressing the question of difference primarily from the perspective of the subject and his relations with others.3 But before going on to do so, it will be necessary to pause for a moment and consider the nature of the terms I shall be using. The word ‘subject’ as distinct from ‘character’ has the advantage of its associations of inwardness, anonymity and passivity which all seem apposite to the nature of experience as it is portrayed in Sarraute’s work. Moreover, her critique of conventional fictional ‘character’ in her essay ‘L’ère du soupçon’ is based on a conception of selfhood which would seem to require a term other than that of ‘character’. In modern literature, she says, ‘un être sans contours, indéfinissable, insaisissable et invisible, un “je” anonyme qui est tout et qui n’est rien et qui n’est le plus souvent qu’un reflet de l’auteur lui-même, a usurpé le rôle du héros principal et occupe la place d’honneur’ (‘L’ère’, p. ) [‘a being devoid of outline, indefinable, intangible and invisible, an anonymous “I” who is everything and who is nothing, and who as often as not is just a reflection of the author himself, has usurped the role of the main hero and occupies the place of honour’ (p. )]. I shall therefore refer to this formless being as the ‘subject’, and to the content of his selfhood as ‘subjectivity’. The basic premiss of Sarraute’s work is that this subjectivity is a universal, and that characters are no more than ‘une limitation arbitraire, un découpage conventionnel pratiqué sur la trame commune que chacun contient tout entière et qui capte dans ses mailles innombrables tout l’univers’ (pp. –) [‘an arbitrary limitation, a conventional figure cut from the common woof that each of us contains in its entirety, and which captures and holds the whole universe in its innumerable meshes’ (p. )]. Yet while the condition of subjectivity is universal, the nature of experience as it is actually lived condemns all subjects to encounter others as characters rather than as equals in subjectivity. Or, as Sarraute puts it in the prière d’insérer to «disent les imbéciles»: chacun de nous est à lui seul l’univers entier, [. . .] il se sent infini, sans contours. En même temps il voit tous les autres comme des personnages, [. . .] et il sait que lui-même en est un pour eux.

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

[each of us feels that they constitute an entire universe, [. . .] each of us feels infinite, without definitive outline. At the same time each of us sees all others as characters, [. . .] and knows that he is one for them.]

The novel, for Sarraute, is the means whereby the limitations of this terrible irony can be overcome, since it is able to present the experience of all its characters in terms of their own discrete apprehension of subjectivity, to treat them all as versions of the ‘I’ whom she instates in the place of the one-time hero of the novel. Not that there is anything complacent about the novel’s representation of this universal experience of subjectivity, for Sarraute’s work reenacts all the longing and the fear that real subjects often experience in relation to this issue. Subjects are presented as desperate for confirmation that their own subjectivity is shared by others; and yet at the same time they are shown to be deeply anxious about the consequences that any such confirmation might bring. It is this ambivalent desire that keeps the subject perpetually turned outward towards others. The question of whether the other is friend or foe is, as we have seen, tantamount to asking, ‘Is s/he the same or different?’ Although the underlying presupposition of all Sarraute’s writing is that at bottom everyone is the same – or as she said in an interview with Lucette Finas, ‘nous nous ressemblons tous comme deux gouttes d’eau’ [‘we are all as alike as two peas in a pod’]4 – this claim nevertheless remains no more than a hypothesis which is put to the test in every encounter. In her early novels Sarraute’s central characters are repeatedly confronted with the possibility that this belief about the underlying sameness of all individuals is just a mark of their own aberrant difference. The ‘specialist’ in Portrait d’un inconnu diagnoses the narrator as having ‘[un] goût de l’introversion, [et] de la rêverie dans le vide, qui n’est pas autre chose qu’une fuite devant l’effort’ (PI, p. ) [‘[a] tendency towards introspection and idle daydreaming, which is nothing other than a way of avoiding effort’ (p. )], and thus effectively singles him out as a particular kind of ‘case’. The same charge of neurosis and lack of any sense of reality is also made against the narrator in Martereau and Alain Guimier in Le Planétarium. But at a deeper level, even when the claim that ‘we are all the same’ does seem to have some foundation, it fails to settle matters for the subject by reassuring him that his experience as a subject is shared by others. Instead, it seems to introduce a constant and thorough-going uncertainty about where the boundaries between subjects lie. And as often as not, this becomes a question about whether boundaries exist at

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Difference and human relations

all. When contact with another is achieved, it is frequently experienced as a disturbing blurring of boundaries, where the disappearance of difference brings fear and havoc rather than peace and harmony. This ambiguity in the desire for contact is already evident in the passage from Katherine Mansfield’s Journal from which Sarraute took (and slightly adapted) the expression ‘the terrible desire to establish contact’. In the context of her discussion of the impulse that determines the psychology of Dostoevsky’s characters, it is easy to overlook the fact that Sarraute herself describes the tone of Katherine Mansfield’s remark as one of ‘une sorte de crainte et peut-être un léger dégoût’ (‘Dostoïevski’, p. ) [‘some fear and, perhaps, slight distaste’ (p. )]. And indeed the phrase is used by Katherine Mansfield to characterise the overly attentive and oppressively solicitous behaviour of her friend Ida Baker who nursed her during her illness: What I feel is: She is never for one fraction of a second unconscious. If I sigh, I know that her head lifts. I know that those grave, large eyes solemnly fix on me: Why did she sigh? If I turn she suggests a cushion or another rug. If I turn again, then it is my back. Might she try to rub it for me? There is no escape. All night: a faint rustle, the smallest cough, and her soft voice asks: ‘Did you speak? Can I do anything?’ If I do absolutely nothing, then she discovers my fatigue under my eyes. There is something profound and terrible in this eternal desire to establish contact.5

Desire for contact here is something to be resisted rather than embraced, perceived as unwelcome intrusion rather than solace. This sense that the other is more liable to encroach than to embrace is just one of the symptoms that marks the precariousness of the boundaries that separate Sarraute’s subjects from each other. It is this precariousness that I shall be exploring here through the notion of ‘indistinction’, a word already invoked by Jean Blot to characterise one dimension of Sarraute’s contradictory demand for love. Although Sarraute’s characters long for the indistinction of an undivided love, they also fear the loss of distinctiveness that it would entail. This anxiety about boundaries is particularly evident in Tropismes, Sarraute’s earliest work. The anonymous characters in these short texts are caught between two contradictory movements: on the one hand a terror of being absorbed and assimilated into worlds dominated by others and where they will cease to be distinct; and, on the other, a fear of the havoc that will be caused by a self-assertion which they can only conceive of as an unleashing of chaos and violence. The world of Tropismes (as of Portrait d’un inconnu and Martereau), is one of seeping secretions which threaten to

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engulf a being who, for all his claims about underlying sameness, lives in perpetual fear of the consequences of being found to be different. The collection opens with a depiction of one of these leaky threats: Ils semblaient sourdre de partout, éclos dans la tiédeur un peu moite de l’air, ils s’écoulaient doucement comme s’ils suintaient des murs, des arbres grillagés, des bancs, des trottoirs sales, des squares. (T, p. ) [They seemed to well up from everywhere, burgeoning in the slightly moist tepidity of the air, they formed a gentle flow as if they were seeping from the walls, from the trees encased in railings, the benches, the dirty pavements, the squares. (p. )]

In Tropismes , Sarraute spells out the nature of the threat posed to the subject by the insinuating existence of a world which is assumed to be incapable of accepting him either with an undivided love, or as other, let alone both. The world’s tentacular mode of existence simply denies the difference of the subject as other, and works to assimilate him into its own being: ‘comme une sorte de bave poisseuse leur pensée s’infiltrait en lui, se collait à lui, le tapissait intérieurement’ (p. ) [‘like some sort of sticky slaver, their thought filtered into him, stuck to him, formed a lining inside him’ (p. )]. The provisional, but of course unsustainable, response envisaged by the subject is a duplicitous placating of the other that conceals his own inner difference: Il fallait leur répondre et les encourager avec douceur, et surtout, surtout ne pas leur faire sentir, ne pas leur faire sentir un seul instant qu’on se croyait différent. Se plier, se plier, s’effacer: “Oui, oui, oui, oui, c’est vrai, bien sûr”, voilà ce qu’il fallait leur dire, et les regarder avec sympathie, avec tendresse, sans quoi un déchirement, un arrachement, quelque chose d’inattendu, de violent allait se produire, quelque chose qui jamais ne s’était produit et qui serait effrayant. (p. –) [You had to answer them and encourage them gently, and above all, not make them feel, not make them feel for a single second, that you think you’re different. Be submissive, be submissive, efface yourself: ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, that’s true, that’s certainly true,’ that’s what you should say to them, and look at them warmly, affectionately, otherwise a rending, a wrenching, something unexpected, something violent would happen, something that had never happened before and which would be terrifying. (p. )]

The assertion of difference can only be conceived of as a violent separation (‘un déchirement, un arrachement’ [‘a rending, a wrenching’] – those words again) with unimaginably destructive consequences. The potential violence outlined here is a dysphoric version of the violence of the epiphany in the Jardin du Luxembourg, because it immediately



Difference and human relations

encounters a resistant other, rather than a penumbra of acquiescence. This is confrontation, and confrontation in Sarraute is always a matter of total victory on one side and of total defeat on the other, with defeat conceived of as nothing less than wholesale obliteration: Il lui semblait qu’alors, dans un déferlement subit d’action, de puissance, avec une force immense, il les secouerait comme de vieux chiffons sales, les tordrait, les déchirerait, les détruirait complètement. Mais il savait aussi que c’était probablement une impression fausse. Avant qu’il ait le temps de se jeter sur eux – avec cet instinct sûr, cet instinct de défense, cette vitalité facile qui faisait leur force inquiétante, ils se retourneraient sur lui et, d’un coup, il ne savait comment, l’assommeraient. (p. ) [It seemed to him then that, in a sudden surge of action, of power, with immense strength, he would shake them like filthy old rags, would wring them, tear them, destroy them completely. But he also knew that this was probably a false impression. Before he would have time to leap on them – with that sure instinct, that instinct for defence, that easy vitality which constituted their disturbing force, they would turn on him, and with one blow, he didn’t know how, they would knock him senseless. (p. )]

This terrifying scenario haunts all the encounters that take place in Nathalie Sarraute’s work, as a latent possibility they contain. The sameness of subjects on which Sarraute’s psychology is predicated is depicted here in terms of an uncontrollable violence. If difference is perceived by all parties as a potential threat, to be dealt with by total obliteration, the very violence of the clash in and of itself reduces both parties to the same. This antagonistic sameness is everywhere in Sarraute and, in one form or another, it characterises the relations between subjects in her world. Hostility may not always be manifest as outright violence, but the subject tends to experience himself as a potential provocation or humiliation of the other. The main cause of this effect on the other lies in the inherent nature of subjectivity as matter that lacks shape and consistency and which therefore cannot easily be contained within limits: ‘cette matière informe et molle, si fade, celle dont nous sommes faits ici, celle dont je me nourris’ [‘the formless, soft, insipid substance, the one we are made of here, the one that I feed on’], as the narrator of Martereau describes it (p.  [p. ]). Subjectivity entails intersubjectivity not just because of ‘the terrible desire to establish contact’, nor because of the potential for violence in all human relations, but because the formlessness of subjectivity itself is a kind of contagion which, as it seeps across boundaries, contaminates and disgusts those who encounter it. ‘Moi l’impur’ [‘I the

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

impure’] says the narrator of Martereau, ‘moi la brebis galeuse, la bête puante’ (p. ) [‘I the black [lit. scabby] sheep, the noisome creature’, pp. –]. As stench, as liquid or as slobber (‘bave’), subjectivity infiltrates other subjects with its insidious and uncontainable presence. The narrator ‘discovers’ the subjectivity of Le Vieux and his daughter in Portrait d’un inconnu as a liquid substance that spurts uncontrollably out of them and spills over him: Et je sens alors sourdre d’eux et s’écouler en un jet sans fin une matière étrange, anonyme comme la lymphe, comme le sang, une matière fade et fluide qui coule entre mes mains, qui se répand . . . (p. ) [And then I feel a strange substance welling up out of them in an endless stream, a substance as anonymous as lymph, or blood, an insipid, liquid substance that pours through my hands and spreads . . . (p. )]

The forms which had previously given these two characters their distinctive identities are reduced to a heap of shapeless and colourless wrappings: Et il ne reste plus, de leur chair si ferme, colorée, veloutée de gens vivants, qu’une enveloppe exsangue, informe et grise. [And all that remains of the firm, pink, smooth flesh of these living persons, is a shapeless, grey casing from which all blood has drained away.

As sticky threads, suckers and tentacles (these, along with liquids, are the metaphors which dominate the early works) subjectivity is set to embroil the other. Its characteristic mode of being in these guises is insinuation, adherence, infiltration, absorption – all of which the other seems instinctively inclined to resist: il m’a aperçu de loin, quand je ne le voyais pas, il a senti, flottant, porté vers lui par le courant, quelque chose de mou, de prenant, de flasques tentacules, prêts à se tendre tout à coup vers lui, toutes leurs ventouses s’ouvrant avidement pour adhérer à lui, aspirer . . . il s’est recroquevillé, durci . . . (M, pp. –) [he noticed me from a distance, when I couldn’t see him, he felt something limp, prehensile, floating, borne towards him on the current, flabby tentacles, ready to reach out suddenly towards him, all their cups opening avidly to adhere to him, to suck . . . he shrivelled up, grew hard . . . (p. )]

And where the avidities and intrusions of subjectivity do not elicit recoil in the other who encounters it, they are embraced as self-abasement: j’ai accepté l’avilissante promiscuité, l’ignominieuse fraternité . . . [. . .] notre sort est lié maintenant, tous les trois, elles et moi, logés à la même enseigne, rampant dans l’abjection . . . (p. )



Difference and human relations

[I have accepted their degrading promiscuity, their ignominious comradeship . . . [. . .]: our fates are joined now, the three of us alike, them and me, we’re all in the same boat, grovelling in abjection . . . (p. )]

Promiscuity and abjection are as effective in producing indistinction as are the violence described in the episode in Tropismes and the more insidious forms of infiltration that we have examined so far. To exist as a subject in Sarraute is to exist at the mercy of other subjects, be it by obliteration, absorption, contagion or abjection. In a sense the whole aim of Sarraute’s work could be seen to be to chart all the possible ways in which the amorphousness of subjectivity can lead the subject to fall prey to other subjects, and to record the full variety of pressures that erode the boundaries separating self from other. There is, for example, widespread uncertainty about which of the partners involved in an encounter is the source of whatever is felt to be happening. The narrator of Martereau is particularly sensitive to this ambiguity: je reproduis comme toujours en moi tous ses mouvements, les remous en lui, les déroulements, ou bien est-ce que ce sont mes propres mouvements qui se répercutent en lui? – je ne sais pas, je ne l’ai jamais su: jeu de miroirs où je me perds – mon image que je projette en lui ou celle qu’il plaque aussitôt, férocement sur moi. (p. ) [as always I reproduce inside myself all his reactions, all the currents inside him, the uncoilings, or is it rather my own reactions that are echoed in him? – I don’t know, I never have known: a game of mirrors in which I lose my way – my image which I project onto him, or the one he slaps immediately, savagely onto me? (p. )]

Or again: ‘Je ne sais jamais si c’est quelque chose en eux qui les gêne ou si c’est moi qui leur fais honte sans le vouloir’ (p. ) [‘I never know whether it’s something in them that makes them uncomfortable or whether, without intending to, it is I who cause them to feel ashamed of themselves’ (p. )]. The only answer to this uncertainty is to accept it and to acknowledge that ‘nous fonctionnons comme des vases communicants’ (p. ) [‘we function like communicating vessels’ (p. )]. In other scenarios the other is felt to have the upper hand and to determine entirely what the subject perceives himself to be: malléable qu’il est, dépendant, tremblant, changeant . . . à chaque instant semblable au reflet de lui-même qu’il voit dans les yeux des gens . . . (p. ) [he’s so malleable, so dependent, tremulous, changeable . . . at each moment, he’s like the reflection of himself that he sees in people’s eyes (p. )]

Subjectivity and indistinction



The formless, impressible nature of subjectivity allows the subject to be moulded by the view of himself that he meets in the eyes of others. In a further variant of this plasticity, the subject becomes a kind of chameleon which takes on the character and hue of the people he finds himself associated with. One of the multiple selves in Tu ne t’aimes pas is described as ‘Lui qui en présence de n’importe quel groupe de gens se met à leur ressembler. Ils déteignent sur lui . . .’ (TNTP, p. ). [The one who in the presence of any group of people, begins to resemble them. They rub off on him. lit. their colour rubs onto him p. ).] Where the colour was completely drained from Le Vieux and his daughter through their contact with the narrator in Portrait d’un inconnu, here it runs and rubs off onto the chameleonic subject. Another more extreme image for the susceptibility of the subject to the other – and which incidentally concretises vividly the issue of boundaries – is that of the subject as a territory invaded by others. The narrator of Martereau describes himself as a public park overrun by trippers: Ils entrent sans vergogne, s’installent partout, se vautrent, jettent leurs détritus, déballent leur provisions; il n’y a rien à respecter, pas de pelouses interdites, on peut aller et venir partout, amener ses enfants, ses chiens, l’entrée est libre, je suis un jardin public livré à la foule le dimanche, le bois un jour férié. Pas de pancartes. Aucun gardien. Rien avec quoi on doive compter. (pp. –) [They walk in brazenly, sit down all over the place, sprawl about, drop their litter, unpack their food baskets; there’s nothing they need to watch out for, no grass which you have to keep off, people can come and go as they please, bring their children and their dogs, entrance is free, I am a public park thrown open to the Sunday crowds, the woods on a bank holiday. No signs. No wardens. Nothing anyone is obliged to reckon with. (p. )]

The subject here is incapable of guarding the entrance to his territory (‘entrance is free’), cannot impose prohibition on areas he might want to keep out of bounds (‘there is no grass which you have to keep off’), and there is no authority he could appeal to in order to contain or restrain potential trespassers (‘No signs. No wardens. Nothing anyone is obliged to reckon with.’) Elsewhere the territorial image of the self takes the form of conquering armies or imperialist invasions.6 In these scenarios the subject is, if anything, even more powerless than in the public park to defend himself against encroachment, since this time the invading other has all the forces of law and order behind him to back him up:



Difference and human relations

[l]es fortes personnalités nous envahissent entièrement . . . Une puissance occupante qui nous soumet à sa loi . . . nous ne pouvons qu’obéir à ses ordres . . . (TNTP, p. ) [such strong personalities completely invade us . . . An occupying force that subjects us to its law . . . we can only obey its orders . . . (p. )]

If the multiple subject of Tu ne t’aimes pas can live this experience with more equanimity than the anxious narrators of Portrait d’un inconnu and Martereau, it is not because it has acquired better defences against encroachment, but because it has reconciled itself to the condition of subjectivity as territory without boundary. This plural nous is able to accept the fact that ‘Nous ne sommes qu’un espace vide où il peut se déployer . . .’ (p. ), and to tolerate ‘cette absence chez nous de frontières’: ‘chez nous,’ they acknowledge, ‘entre qui veut’ (p. ). This is partly because the amorphousness of subjectivity which allows it to be conceived as unbounded territory in the first place, also allows it to be thought of in terms of plurality and multiplicity. The plural subject becomes a space peopled by a whole range of possibilities and virtualities which are activated in turn by the various circumstances they encounter in the outside world. The impurity of the moi whose labile presence muddies the waters of Martereau evolves in Sarraute’s writing towards a plural nous who can in some measure accommodate and survive the vagaries of dependency, trespass or what one might call the ‘chameleonism’ that encounters with others seem inevitably to entail.7 But the nature of the relationship remains fundamentally the same. There is one further manifestation of the boundariless nature of the subject’s existence which is perhaps even more disturbing than any of the forms we have explored so far. The problem in the cases discussed previously has largely been about where one subject ends and the other begins. But, as the violent episode in Tropismes has already hinted, there is a way in which the indistinction entailed by subjectivity can create doubts about whether either of the parties involved in an encounter is responsible for what passes between them. In many instances it is as if the subject had completely renounced – or been stripped of – his own agency, and had relinquished control to some other force which far exceeds him. Sarraute’s subjects frequently show awareness of this possibility in the habitual use of expressions like ‘Qu’est-ce qui t’a pris?’ (DLI, p. ) [‘What’s got into you?, (p. )], or ‘Je ne sais pas ce qui m’a pris’ (p. ) [‘I don’t know what got into me’ (p. )], as if the strange behaviour of the other – or even of the self – were to be explained in

Subjectivity and indistinction



terms of some greater, if ultimately always mysterious power which had taken him (or oneself) over. Tropisms are at best only a semi-conscious phenomenon, and it takes very little for the subject’s awareness of them to shade off into a mere sense of the presence of an unknowable and alien force inhabiting the space of his subjectivity. Many of Sarraute’s characters find themselves acting without volition, ‘malgré moi’ [‘inspite of myself ’]. Or, as the narrator of Martereau puts it, ‘À tout moment, des mouvements incontrôlables m’agitent . . .’ (M, p. ) [‘at every moment I am prey to uncontrollable reactions’ (p. )]. Moreover, the effects of these uncontrollable movements are not limited to the subject who is galvanised by them, but through him, they also work on those whom he encounters. Whatever the nature or the origin of this agitation, it is as palpable for others as it is involuntary in its subject. The narrator of Portrait d’un inconnu compares the inadvertent influence of his friend l’Alter with that equally inadvertently exercised by himself: il agit sur eux comme le moule de plâtre sur les os trop mous ou déformés, il les maintient droits, les redresse; au contraire de moi qui exerce toujours sur eux une influence mystérieuse comme celle de la lune sur les marées: je provoque en eux toujours des courants, des lames de fond, des remous; avec moi ils se soulèvent, s’agitent, débordent, je les lâche; lui au contraire, sans le vouloir probablement – ces choses-là, c’est toujours inconscient – il les tient. (PI, pp. –) [he acts on them like a plaster cast on bones that are too soft or deformed, he holds them in place, sets them upright; just the opposite of myself who always have the same kind of mysterious influence on them that the moon has on the tides: I always stir up currents and ground swells and eddies in them; with me they expand, get excited and spill over, I let them drop; he, on the other hand, probably without intending to – these things are always unconscious – holds them in his grasp. (pp. –)]

Where the mysterious effect of L’Alter’s existence is to hold and support his others, the narrator invariably elicits the agitated responses that he experiences himself. Yet neither of them wills the very divergent reactions they provoke in others. It is no suprise, then, to find Sarraute’s characters describing themselves as ‘des corps conducteurs’ [‘conducting rods’],8 since so often they appear as no more than a passive vehicle for forces which operate through them and on others. Sarraute’s subjects are agitated and passive in equal measure because the absence of boundaries deprives subjectivity of the focus that would make real agency possible. In Sarraute’s world relations are governed by



Difference and human relations

a principle that produces scenarios which constitute subjects not as agents amongst other agents, but as mass on the one hand, and vacancy on the other. Subjects are either accepted as a mass which is allowed to occupy a vacant space; or they are obliterated by a mass which aggressively treats them as unoccupied territory; or else they are excluded by another subject (or subjects, since the subject as other tends to proliferate into a plural ‘they’); or, again, they are absorbed and assimilated by the seeping mass of another subject. Being mass rather than agent, the Sarrautean subject does not so much act, as let himself be propelled or animated by forces which make him a vehicle or a victim of something that lies beyond his control. In the extract from Tropismes  discussed earlier, the subject is able to envisage himself only as a channel for forces lying outside him, as acted upon, rather than as the instigator of an event which could only take place ‘dans un déferlement subit d’action, de puissance, avec une force immense’ [‘in a sudden surge of action, of power, with immense strength’]. For good and for ill, the subject is subject to impulses which exceed him, impelled into action by something that is repeatedly described as ‘plus fort que lui’ [lit. stronger than him]. And insofar as he sees himself as the object of actions of others, it is not as an agent encountering other agents, but as the helpless recipient of a ‘disturbing force’, which in addition to working on the other through him, can also provide that other with an inexplicable and unopposable capacity for action. As we saw in the same example from Tropismes: ‘ils se retourneraient sur lui et, d’un coup, il ne savait comment, l’assommeraient’ [‘they would turn on him, and with one blow, he didn’t know how, they would knock him senseless’] (my emphasis). There seems to be a link here between passivity and violence as related manifestations of the indistinction that the subject encounters in his dealings with others. By putting the subject at the mercy of powers which far exceed him, violence places his distinctiveness in serious jeopardy. Moreover, since violence is also inevitably reciprocal, that reciprocity itself has the effect of erasing the differences that might otherwise separate or distinguish one subject from another. If we are to believe the anthropologists, this conjunction of sameness and violence has a larger significance, which carries important implications for the understanding of difference. According to René Girard, not only does violence eradicate difference by virtue of its reciprocity, but it is also the result of an eradication of difference itself. ‘Là où la différence fait défaut,’ he writes, ‘c’est la violence qui menace’ [‘Wherever differences are lacking, violence threatens’]. Or again, ‘Ce n’est pas la

Subjectivity and indistinction



différence, mais bien sa perte qui cause la confusion violente’ [‘it is not differences, but the loss of them that gives birth to violence and chaos’].9 Social and cultural order, he claims, relies on the existence of a set of differential systems which assign a place and an identity to every individual. When the differential order collapses (as we repeatedly find it doing in Sarraute), people are reduced to the same, and this sameness produces a rivalry that condemns them to a violence which, for Girard is always a violence of ‘undifferentiation’ (p.  [p. ]). In other words, survival would seem to depend on the possibility of maintaining differences. There is a similar presupposition in Mary Douglas’s presentation of the other major source of indistinction that I have been discussing in Sarraute: pollution.10 (This word seems a particularly apposite way of summarising the Sarrautean subject’s experience of the leaking boundaries as he encounters them both in others and in himself.) For what is at stake in pollution is a challenge to the particular differential order which constitutes the culture of a given society. If (as Mary Douglas has it) dirt is nothing but ‘matter out of place’, then its presence raises questions about what the proper place of any given matter is, how it is assigned, and what the particular nature of the symbolic thinking is that creates these classes and categories for things. Where Girard is more interested in violence as a phenomenon entailed by the collapse of differential systems, Mary Douglas is exploring pollution as a challenge to these systems. But despite this difference of emphasis, both thinkers clearly regard all social and cultural activity as being grounded in, and dependent on, differential thinking. And it is precisely this differential thinking that is under threat in Nathalie Sarraute. This brief detour into anthropology is intended as much to provide some measure of what is at stake in Sarraute’s undertaking, as to suggest an explanatory model for the scenes of mayhem and defilement which regularly occur in her work. For Sarraute not only focuses on episodes of violence and pollution, or on scenarios that produce the ferocious rivalry described by Girard, but her whole project is designed to throw the differential order into crisis. As we have seen, it does this through her basic premiss that we are all the same, and through the various ways in which the boundaries between subjects are persistently eroded. The result is that they are drawn into a continuum of likeness that the anthropologists tell us represents a threat not just to intelligibility, but to the very survival of the individual, and to the very possibility of social organisation.



Difference and human relations           

As we have seen, Sarraute’s work repeatedly displays a radical scepticism about the functioning of differential systems. For the anthropologist (as for the post-Saussurean literary critic), it would seem axiomatic that all cultural systems, like language itself, cannot but be differentially constructed. So that, to the extent that, as a writer, Sarraute works both with language and with literary form, her very enterprise would seem unable – at least, within this frame – to avoid working against the indistinction that constitutes the experience of her subjects. Indeed René Girard speaks of ‘une certaine répugnance et une certaine impuissance du langage différencié à exprimer l’effacement de toute différence’ (La Violence, p. ) [‘Being made up of differences, language finds it almost impossible to express undifferentiation directly’ (p. )]. And he goes so far as to claim that the loss of difference brought about by the violence of rivalrous sameness will actually be negated by language because of its differential basis. Similarly, although Mary Douglas has little to say about language and art as such, she regards cultural institutions as the means whereby the challenges of impurity and ambiguity may be accommodated, and this would seem to imply a notion that art offers new ways of making sense of experience through its ordering in form. For her, as for Girard, the symbolic thinking through which all experience is organised, always presupposes thinking in terms of differences, categories, classification. For Sarraute, by contrast, there seems to be nothing inevitable about linguistic difference. Systems of classification are regularly mocked in her writing and differences never hold. The ‘specialist’ in Portrait d’un inconnu is presented as someone whose activities are devoted to diagnosis and categorisation in a manner which is at once futile in its attempt to establish difference, and severely lacking in the ability to acknowledge the true difference of the narrator’s experience. His labels prove just to be a means of disposing of the narrator as part of a job lot of similar cases: Ils ont vite fait de ranger tout cela, de le classer à leur manière. Elle est étiquetée, jetée en vrac avec les autres, dans la même catégorie, la petite idée, la petite vision qu’on a couvée, plein de honte et d’orgueil, dans la solitude. Elles se ressemblent toutes, d’ailleurs, paraît-il, quand on les étudie bien. (PI, pp. –) [‘They tidy it all away in no time, and classify it in their own way. That little idea, that little vision of yours that you had been brooding over with shame and pride in solitude, is labelled and tossed in among the others, in the same category. In any case, they’re all alike when one studies them closely. (p. )]

Subjectivity and indistinction



Differential categories here simply inflict another – and worse – kind of indistinction on the subject. Indeed, any language that seeks to categorise is shown in Sarraute to be totally incapable of acknowledging the real distinctiveness of its object. Much of the activity of Vous les entendez? turns on the characters’ experience of a variety of classifications and categories. The father undergoes an absurd experience when he sets out to find the right name for the effect that the presence of his wife has on his relation to works of art. He visits a kind of reference library in search of this word, and begs the librarians to check through their card indexes under the heading ‘malheurs. [. . .] Des vrais. Reconnus. Catalogués. Classés. Inscrits sur fiches’ (VLE, p. ) [‘misfortunes. [. . .] Real ones. Acknowledged. Listed. Classified. Recorded on index cards’ (p. )]. At his own request he is eventually redirected to the ‘Dictons’ [‘Sayings’] section where he gratefully accepts the most appropriate saying available: ‘“Des goûts et des couleurs”’ (p. ) [‘“There’s no accounting for taste”’ (p. )]. But like all those in Sarraute who seek to use classifications seriously, he finds in the course of the novel that they simply don’t work. There seems, for example, to be no way of determining whether the children’s laughter that sounds throughout the novel is innocent or subversive: Des deux côtés des gens parfaitement normaux, des citoyens respectueux des convenances, obéissants aux coutumes, aux lois. Les uns affirment que c’étaient des rires innocents. Et un autre réplique conformément au code en vigueur, faisant usage de ses droits, que c’étaient des rires sournois. (p. ) [On both sides, perfectly normal people, citizens who respect the proprieties, observe the customs, the laws. Some assert that it was innocent laughter. And another replies in accordance with the code currently in force, exercising his rights, that it was sly laughter. (p. )]

And the children themselves taunt the two old men as they ponder this question by dangling labels with the alternative verdicts, like paper fish on All Fool’s Day, into the room where the father and his friend are sitting, and using them to tickle the tops of the men’s worried heads. Yet the capacity for noting difference is at times treated with some nostalgia by Sarraute, as if she cannot quite relinquish the longing for intelligibility and certainty that differential systems seem to promise. If Martereau is depicted as someone who will examine pebbles ‘pour distinguer le silex du schiste’ [‘to see whether it was silex or shale’], this capacity for seeing distinctions and making classifications is one of the qualities that mark him out for the narrator as being from an impossibly distant world which he still longs for, an inhabitant of ‘la patrie lointaine



Difference and human relations

dont pour des raisons mystérieuses, j’avais été banni, [. . .] la terre où je ne pourrais jamais aborder, ballotté que j’étais sur une mer agitée’ (M, pp. –) [‘the distant homeland from which, for mysterious reasons, I had been banished, [. . .] the land on which I could never step ashore, tossed about as I was on a rough sea’ (p. )]. Similarly, when Natacha goes to visit her father in his chemical factory and he asks her for her opinion about the relative qualities of two shades of chrome yellow, she is clearly tantalised by the way the difference eludes her: Il observe longuement l’un des petits tas . . . ‘Regarde bien, tu ne trouves pas qu’il a moins d’éclat que l’autre? Il est un petit peu plus grisâtre . . . Je m’efforce de voir une différence . . . –Non, je ne vois pas . . . ou peut-être si, un petit peu . . . –Un peu trop, c’est évident, il est plus terne . . . Ça ne fait rien, je crois que je sais d’où ça vient, on va refaire ça . . .’ (E, pp. –) [He observes one of the little piles for a long time . . . ‘Look carefully, don’t you think that this one is less bright than the other? It is a little bit more of a greyish colour . . .’ I try hard to see a difference . . . ‘No, I don’t see . . . or perhaps I do, just a little . . .’ ‘A little bit too much, it’s obvious, it’s duller . . . It doesn’t matter, I think I know what’s caused it, we’ll have another go . . .’ (p. )]

Natacha seems mystified both by her father’s confident capacity for discrimination and awed by his ability to master it. The factory exists in another dimension which is also that of M. and Mme Florimond, precursors of Martereau and his wife. It is a world devoted to the manufacturing of dyes with a process which, thanks to a discovery made by Nathalie Sarraute’s chemist father, prevents colours from fading and running.11 In the end, the world of the Martereaus (and perhaps, by implication, of the idealised Florimonds) crumbles under the pressure of the narrator’s explorations. And in the everyday experience of human relations, the chemistry of Monsieur Tcherniak in his factory at Vanves, proves powerless to counter the effects of the tropism as colour repeatedly fades (as it does from the casings of Le Vieux and his daughter in Portrait d’un inconnu), or runs from one subject to another (as it does with the chameleonic figure in Tu ne t’aimes pas). However much they might be longed for at given moments, meaningful differences cannot be sustained in Sarraute’s world, and far from structuring the experience which is lived within it, any would-be categories survive only in vestigial forms as the last-ditch devices that characters call on in moments of desperation in an attempt to limit or contain the leaky threats they encounter. When the image of the grandmother implied by the words ‘Elle est mignonne, elle est à croquer’ [‘She’s sweet, couldn’t you just eat her up?’] in «disent les imbéciles» begins

Subjectivity and indistinction



to wobble, this is represented as an alarming haemorrhage requiring classifications to stem the flow: ça déferle, une masse bouillonnante, elle coule sans fin, m’entraîne . . . Arrêtez ça . . . Au secours . . . Amenez des cloisonnements, séparez, enfermez ce qui coule d’elle, s’épand . . . arrêtez-le . . . Vous avez tout ce qu’il faut pour le canaliser, l’emprisonner, le réduire, toutes vos catégories, toute votre psychologie . . . vite, endiguons, enserrons, dirigeons, amenons les mots fabriqués tout exprès, destinés à cet usage . . . les voici, prenons-les: révolte, besoins réfrénés, désirs vivaces, aussi vivaces qu’autrefois, renoncements, rancunes, fureurs, mutilations, petites lâchetés, hypocrisie, intrépidité, méchanceté, bonté, naïveté, lucidité, sensualité . . . Voilà, petit à petit les flots s’apaisent, je m’apaise . . . La crise est passée. (DLI, p. ) [it pours forth, a boiling mass, it keeps on flowing, dragging me along with it . . . Stop that . . . Help . . . Put up partitions, separate, shut in what’s pouring out of her, spreading . . . stop it . . . You have everything you need to channel it, capture it, overpower it, all your categories, all your psychology . . . quick, let’s damn it up, enclose, direct, bring on the specially created words, designed for this purpose . . . here they are, let’s have them: revolt, repressed needs, inveterate desires, as inveterate as they were in the past, renunciations, resentments, rages, mutilations, petty cowardice, hypocrisy, intrepidity, malice, kindness, naïvety, clear-sightedness, sensuality . . . There, little by little the flood is calming down, I am calming down . . . The crisis has passed. (p. )]

As often with Sarraute’s classificatory lists on these occasions, categories are treated with increasing disdain, and opposites are heaped up pellmell and regardless of their contradictions (hypocrisie/intrépidité, méchanceté/bonté, naïveté/lucidité [hypocrisy/intrepidity, malice/kindness, naïvety/clear-sightedness]). The characteristically Sarrautean indifference to linguistic difference on this occasion merely underscores the fact that the ultimate (if ultimately futile) aim of such distinctions is to support a desperate attempt on the part of a subject under threat to deal with the uncontainable subjectivity of the other. It seems impossible for Sarraute’s characters to treat linguistic differences as anything other than a means of limiting, containing, repressing or imprisoning the threat that the other represents. The very phrase ‘disent les imbéciles’ [‘fools say’], rather than categorising a certain kind of behaviour (what fools say as distinct from what wise men might say), has as its most urgent purpose the containing of what is most alarming in the other: Il a dû tracer ces mots dans un moment de dégoût, de fureur, quand il s’est approché de cela, quand il a senti s’en dégager cette louche odeur . . . Il a voulu



Difference and human relations

empêcher que d’autres touchent à cela, subissent la contagion . . . [. . .] Il a voulu l’entourer de barbelés électrifiés, menacer, saisir, brutaliser, mettre au pilori, désigner à l’opprobre, exposer aux railleries ceux qui s’en emparent et le propagent . . . (pp. –) [He must have written those words in a moment of disgust, of rage, when he had got close to it, when he smelled that dubious odour coming from it . . . He wanted to keep others from touching it, from being infected by it . . . [. . .] He wanted to surround it with electrified barbed wire, threaten, seize, bully, pillory, designate for opprobrium, expose to jeers all those who appropriate it and propagate it . . . (p. )]

The spilling liquid matter, the foul smells and the contagions which are the forms in which subjectivity merges into intersubjectivity, are not something which Sarraute’s characters can ever hope to define or to categorise. Their recourse to language in the face of it is no more than a panic-stricken raid on an indistinct mass of words which they pile up like sandbags against a rising flood of equally indistinct subjectivity. Nevertheless, Sarraute’s subjects do not always experience the indistinction of their encounters with others as threat, and there are occasions when the blurring of boundaries between characters is presented as uncomplicatedly euphoric. In these scenes, the characters positively revel in the fluid connections which link them to each other. But even here language is shown to pose a problem. Indeed, whereas the threat in the previous examples came from the uncontainable nature of the other’s presence, in these instances it is language itself which is the source of anxiety. For under these happy circumstances characters experience any categorisation as cruel separation or incarceration. The section entitled ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’ [‘Your father. Your sister’] in L’Usage de la parole explores just such a moment where the intimate embrace of family relations is destroyed by the mother’s insistence on defining the different roles of the family members: ‘ton père, ta sœur.’ The moist indistinction of the family bond is destroyed by a brutal naming of parts: Ils étaient là tous quatre pelotonnés, serrés les uns contre les autres, leurs contours mous, moelleux se fondant se confondant ils ne sentent pas où l’un finit où l’autre commence . . . ils sont une boule vivante humectée de chaudes moiteurs, imprégnée d’intimes, de fades, de douces odeurs . . . quand tout à coup elle s’est dégagée, elle s’est soulevée . . . là-bas au-dehors on appelait, on cognait contre la porte . . . Elle les a secoués, elles les a obligés à se réveiller, à se détacher les uns des autres [. . .] . . . Vous voyez, nous voici, je peux vous aider à faire le recensement. Voici devant vous: le père. Voici la fille. Ici c’est le fils. Et moi je suis la mère. (UP, pp. –)

Subjectivity and indistinction



[There they were, all four of them, so close, pressing against each other, their soft, yielding contours melting and merging into one another so that they no longer know where one ends and the other begins . . . they are a living ball, damp with warm moisture, imbued with intimate, stale, sweet odours . . . when all of a sudden, she detached herself, she got up . . . someone from outside was knocking at the door . . . She shook them, she forced them to wake up, to detach themselves from one another [. . .] . . . You see, here we are, I can help you do your census. Here, in front of you: the father. Here is the daughter. This is the son. And I am the mother. (p. )]

The mother’s invocation of familial categories separates each member of the family from the others, introducing distance as well as difference between them: La distance qui les sépare les uns des autres est la bonne distance, nécessaire et suffisante. Certaine, comme celles indiquées près du nom de chaque localité sur les pancartes et les bornes disposées le long des routes. Immuable. À jamais fixée. (pp. ‒) [The distance that separates the ones from the others is the right, the necessary and sufficient distance. Unequivocal, like those shown beside the name of every locality on the signposts and milestones along the roadside. Immutable. Fixed for all time. (p. )]

In introducing this distance between them, not only does the mother put an end to the murky indistinctions of intersubjectivity (‘Pas de fluctuations possibles, d’écarts brusques, d’arrachements, de rapprochements imprévus, de soudaines fusions’ [‘No potential fluctuations, abrupt sidesteps, separations, unexpected rapprochements, sudden fusions’]); but she also places an insuperable distance between herself and the rest of the family, moving completely outside their world, into an inaccessible beyond: Mais alors, comment se fait-il qu’elle, la mère . . . elle n’était pas là où elle devait se trouver, où on la trouve d’ordinaire, entre son mari, sa fille et son fils. Elle était aussi loin d’eux qu’une étrangère quand, s’adressant à l’enfant, elle a désigné les autres par ces mots: ‘Ton père’ ‘Ta soeur’ . . . (pp. –) [But then, how is it that she, the mother . . . wasn’t where she should have been, where we usually find her, between her husband, her daughter and her son. She was as far away from them as a stranger, when, addressing the child, she referred to the others with these words: ‘Your father.’ ‘Your sister.’ (p. )]

Where this other world had seemed to the narrator of Martereau like an Eden from which he felt painfully banished, paradise now appears as the blurred and uncircumscribed world in which the mother figures only as a stranger and from which she has abruptly removed herself.



Difference and human relations

In a moment of insight towards the end of Vous les entendez? the father seems to realise that this banishment (whichever direction it operates in, that of the excluded narrator in Martereau or the self-imposed exile of the mother in ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’) is the consequence of invoking distinctions. In response to his children’s challenge, he therefore abandons his quest to define their laughter: Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire, qu’est-ce que ça peut bien signifier pour nous: Sournois? Moqueur? Innocent? . . . Innocent, tu le sais bien, ne valait pas mieux. Comment as-tu pu penser que ces mots grossiers à l’usage des autres, des étrangers . . . ces mots tirés de leurs lexiques, de leurs dictionnaires . . . (pp. ‒) [What does it mean, what can possibly be the sense for us of: Sly? Mocking? Innocent? . . . Innocent, you know very well, was no better. How could you think that those ordinary words, designed to be used by other people, by strangers . . . those words taken from their lexicons, their dictionaries . . . (p. )]

Even the label ‘innocent’ would settle nothing since categories of whatever kind are a currency used only by strangers. The father endorses his children’s rejection of definitions and embraces the fluid indistinctions of the world of his family: C’est vrai, ils ont raison, comment ces vieux mots sclérosés pourraient-ils retenir, enserrer ce qui sans cesse entre nous circule, si fluide, fluctuant, ce qui à chaque instant se transforme, s’épand dans tous les sens, ne se laisse arrêter par aucune borne . . . ce qui est à nous, à nous seuls . . . Quel mot venu du dehors peut-il mettre de l’ordre entre nous, nous séparer ou nous rapprocher? . . . (p. ) [It’s true, they are right, how could those old sclerotic words retain, enclose the fluid, fluctuating thing that circulates amongst us, constantly being transformed, spreading in every direction, that no boundary can stop . . . that is ours, ours alone . . . What word from without can set things right between us, separate us or bring us together? . . . (p. )]

In those scenes where words do momentarily seem capable of more than mere containment, and where their capacity to differentiate and discriminate is in some degree desired, that differentiation is nevetheless presented as something divisive and impoverishing. This is because the differential nature of language is profoundly at odds with the sameness of intersubjective exchange and with the indistinction of subjective experience. The reason for this is that the differential function relates language to its subject matter on an axis of negation or repudiation. As bulwark or as bound words are merely

Subjectivity and indistinction



massed up in defence against encroaching matter. As discrimination, they divide person from person, and place speaker and object in worlds that are irrevocably exiled from each other. If language for Sarraute can never operate effectively as a signifying system, this is as much as anything because, rather than analyse or explain from without, it becomes an integral part of the experience which the work is seeking to convey. Words seem unable to gain any analytical purchase on an experience which is presented as one of blurred boundaries, violent confusions, creeping encroachments or – very occasionally – as harmonious fusions; and instead they become embroiled in the very processes they evoke. The intersubjective dynamic which governs existence for Sarraute’s subjects and condemns them in their dealings with each other to an alternation between indistinction and rebuff, contact and exclusion, also contaminates the language that they use to articulate their experience. Differences of whatever kind, it would seem, are always caught up in human relations.

    

Abjection into art

      One of the most striking features of Sarraute’s work is the degree of commitment exhibited in it to the indistinction it portrays. It is not just the familial embrace of Vous les entendez? or ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’ which the characters yearn for, since even where embrace is lived as threat or contamination it is nevertheless ardently sought. The narrator’s discovery of the liquid subjectivity of Le Vieux and his daughter in Portrait d’un inconnu is, for all its contamination, the gratifying outcome of the obsessive pressure he exerts on the surface of these figures in the hopes, precisely, that they will yield the sticky substance of their inner being: Moi, je ne sais [. . .] que tourner autour d’eux, cherchant avec un acharnement maniaque la fente, la petite fissure, ce point fragile comme la fontanelle des petits enfants, où il me semble que quelque chose, comme une pulsation à peine perceptible, affleure et bat doucement. Là je m’accroche, j’appuie. (PI, pp. –) [[. . .] all I am able to do is hover about them and try with fanatical eagerness to find the crack, the tiny crevice, the vulnerable spot, as delicate as a baby’s fontanelle, where I seem to see something that resembles a barely perceptible pulsation, swell and begin to throb gently. I cling onto it and press. (pp. –)]

The reward for this maniacal attention is the stream of strange liquid which bursts out of them and engulfs him. The anthropologists cannot help here because their evidence demonstrates that no human society willingly sustains this degree of unclarity. Instead, we are dealing in Sarraute with something much more like the phenomenon that Julia Kristeva has described as abjection.1 Sarraute’s characters willingly portray themselves as ‘grovelling in abjection’ (see Chapter , pp. ‒), and one can recognise much of Sarraute’s world in Kristeva’s account of this condition. For example, Kristeva writes: ‘Il y a, dans l’abjection, une de ces violentes et obscures révoltes de l’être contre ce qui le menace et qui lui paraît venir d’un dedans ou d’un 

Abjection into art



dehors exorbitant’ (p. ) [‘There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside’ (p. )]; and the violence, the obscurity, the revolt, the exorbitance and the threat which comes as much from the forces within as well as from an overwhelming without, all have their counterparts in the world of Sarraute’s writing. And like so many of Sarraute’s subjects, the subject of Kristeva’s abjection finds himself in a world of uncertain boundaries, which never succeed in ensuring protection against whatever threatens him: ‘Frontière sans doute, l’abjection est surtout ambiguïté. Parce que, tout en démarquant, elle ne détache pas radicalement le sujet de ce qui le menace – au contraire, elle l’avoue en perpétuel danger’ (p. ) [‘We may call it a border, but abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while it demarcates, it does not radically separate the subject from what threatens it – on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger’ (p. )]. More particularly, these boundaries fail to defend him against an other who is already a part of him: ‘Je n’éprouve de l’abjection que si un Autre s’est planté en lieu et place de ce qui sera “moi”’ (p. ) [‘I experience abjection only if an Other has set himself up in the place and the stead of what will be “me”’ (p. )]. The subject’s attempts at demarcation always become violent expulsions or exclusions of an other from whom he nevertheless never succeeds in definitively separating himself. And his habitat is precisely the ‘territoires encore instables’ (p. ) [‘yet unstable territories’ (p. )] where he, just like the Sarrautean subject, wanders in a perpetual state of disorientation and exile. So there would seem to be a strong family resemblance between Kristeva’s subject of abjection and the bearers of Sarraute’s tropisms. But beyond providing us with the critical satisfaction of noting this likeness, the concept of abjection may help us go some way towards understanding why Sarraute’s characters remain so determinedly within their disturbing and indistinct condition. As we have seen, this has partly to do with the impossibility of constructing a stable and effective differential system of meaning within it. The condition of abjection is one where demarcation never manages to create clear and reliable distinctions, and where oppositions, though violent, remain permeable and unstable. When the subject in abjection encounters structures of meaning, he does so only as a series of commands and injunctions which he experiences as affect rather than sign. This is exactly how the Sarrautean subject experiences language, treating every definition as a gesture of provocation, exclusion or rejection. Finally – and perhaps most promisingly of



Difference and human relations

all – Kristeva may also help us in coming to grips with Sarraute’s enterprise through her claim that literature has a unique and privileged role in relation to abjection. For she argues that in the modern era, where religion and the sacred have lost their power to deal with contamination, literature offers a kind of solution. This it does through its capacity at once to articulate abjection and to transcend it: ‘l’expérience artistique [est] enracinée dans l’abject qu’elle dit et par là même purifie’ (p. ) [‘artistic experience [. . .] is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token purifies’ (p. )]. In other words, Kristeva is suggesting that, far from working against the indistinctions of violence and pollution by virtue of its inherently structured quality and the differential nature of the language it uses, modern literature actually works with the kind of subject matter that she is exploring in the condition of abjection.2 Supported by this hypothesis, the way now seems open to explore in more detail how Sarraute’s writing is able to sustain such a degree of commitment to indistinction, and in particular, how her embroiling of language in indistinction might come about.     Nathalie Sarraute’s work is deeply – and increasingly – preoccupied with words and with what words do. From Les Fruits d’or onwards the focal point of many of the dramas staged in her writing turns on words and the effect that they create on those around them. Whole plays are devoted to worrying at a single phrase (‘C’est beau’, ‘C’est bien, ça’), or to agonising about a possible lie, a persistent silence, an idiosyncratic pronunciation.3 The novels Vous les entendez?, «disent les imbéciles» and Tu ne t’aimes pas revolve around the utterances that provide their titles. Enfance is a record of remembered remarks; and the texts which make up L’Usage de la parole (whose title alone speaks volumes on this topic), each explore the fate of a phrase (‘Ich sterbe’, ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’), or chart the vagaries of verbal exchange between two speakers. When Nathalie Sarraute remarks that ‘Mes véritables personnages, mes seuls personnages, ce sont les mots’ [‘My real characters, my only characters, are words’], she is conveying some sense of the degree and intensity of the preoccupation with words in her work, governing as they do so many of the encounters between her characters.4 She is also anticipating her latest work, Ouvrez, where words are quite literally the central characters: ‘Des mots, des êtres vivants parfaitement autonomes, sont les protagonistes de chacun de ces drames’ [‘Words, perfectly autonomous

Abjection into art



living beings are the protagonists of each of these dramas’], she writes in the blurb (which here is printed as part of the text). In each of the fifteen short texts that make up the book, a variation on the basic scenario described in the blurb is acted out: Dès que viennent des mots du dehors, une paroi est dressée. Seuls les mots capables de recevoir convenablement les visiteurs restent de ce côté. Tous les autres s’en vont et sont pour plus de sûreté enfermés derrière la paroi. [As soon as words from outside appear, a partition goes up. Only the words which are capable of giving a proper reception to visitors remain on this side of it. All the others disappear and for greater safety are locked up behind the partition.]

This exclusion of unsuitable words, and their longing for acceptance in the lexicon of the well-behaved recall many similar scenes in Sarraute’s other work. Only here, as she says, the protagonists are words – words like ‘Pourtant’ [However’], or ‘Au revoir’ [‘Goodbye’] who erupts a little prematurely in the course of a telephone conversation, or ‘ ’ [‘ ’] who consorts with an equally prestigious ‘’ [‘ ’]. Narrated entirely in dialogue form, the book presents its multiple protagonists very much as the verbal equivalents of the multiple subject of Tu ne t’aimes pas. Verbal relations would seem, then, to be virtually indistinguishable from human relations. If words have this central status in Sarraute it is largely because their capacity to produce effects on their recipients far exceeds their capacity to signify. Language here is performative rather than constative (to borrow the terms of L.J. Austin’s How to do Things with Words).5 And this is so because in her world discourse is always powerfully directed at an other, its recipient. As Monique Wittig has said, Sarraute’s work is concerned with locution insofar as it is above all interlocution, that is to say, ‘all that occurs between people when they speak’.6 In these circumstances words are far more likely to cross boundaries than they are to create them. Language in Sarraute powerfully privileges what Roman Jakobson calls the phatic and the conative dimensions of language over the referential one, the ‘set towards contact’ and the ‘set towards the addressee’ often overriding or even precluding any ‘set towards the context’.7 Many of the texts in L’Usage de la parole illustrate this emphasis very graphically, narrating the circumstances and the tenor of the various exchanges they stage, rather than their content. In ‘Et pourquoi pas?’ [‘And why not?’] two interlocutors are introduced, but the topic of their



Difference and human relations

conversation is instantly dismissed as irrelevant: ‘ils discutent d’événements, ils émettent des opinions . . . rien de plus banal’ (UP, p. ) [‘they’re talking about current events, they’re expressing opinions . . . nothing could be more banal’ (p. )]. Attention then shifts to the tone of the discussion (‘Oui, le ton, c’est bien vrai, a une grande importance. “C’est le ton qui fait la musique”, disait un vieux dicton . . .’ [‘Yes, it’s true, the tone is very important. As the old saying has it: “It’s not what you say, it’s the way you say it”’]), and from there to the rules of conversational engagement, still resolutely avoiding all issues of subject matter: ‘la proie pour nous ne se trouve pas dans la validité de telle ou telle idée . . .’ (p. ) [‘our prey isn’t to be found in the validity of this or that idea’ (p. )]. Taking ideas and the content of words seriously is no more than a charade required by the rules of the game as a means of ensuring the real business of the encounter: contact with the other. So that when one of the speakers refuses to play his part by appearing not to respond to the meaning of the words, this is felt by the first speaker to be a destructive resistance, rather than a failure to take on board the content of his utterance: Sur cet être les paroles chargées de sens, lourdes d’idées n’ont plus prise . . . elles ne ‘prennent’ plus. Nul lieu où se poser, plus de terrain d’atterrissage . . . comme dans l’apesanteur elles flottent, volettent . . . son regard de fauve, de maniaque les observe, il les attrape, les presse, les écrase, leur sens gicle, s’éparpille, et il écoute ravie le bruit que font en tombant, renvoyées par lui là-bas, leurs enveloppes flasques . . . (p. ) [These words, laden with significance, weighed down with ideas no longer have any purchase on this being . . . they no longer ‘take’. There’s nowhere for them to touch down, no landing strip . . . they float and flutter as if in weightlessness . . . his wild animal’s gaze, his maniac’s eye observes them, he catches them, squeezes them, crushes them, their meaning spurts out, disperses, and he listens with delight to the sound they make as their floppy casings, flung back by him, fall to the ground . . . (pp. –)]

The meaning of the words is reduced to just another one of Sarraute’s indistinct but very material liquid substances, spurting, spattering and besmirching the subjects who are drawn into engagement through their medium. Aside from tone and the protocols of exchange, Sarraute’s characters are unusually sensitive to the physical quality of words. They are frequently shown to respond reactively and purely physiologically to their effects, like a living organism to an allergen or a wasp-sting. For example, the ‘accent gouape’ [‘mock tough accent’] which is occasionally heard

Abjection into art



in her novels invariably produces an instinctive revulsion in the person who hears it. Regardless of the actual words spoken (vacances, valise [holiday, suitcase]), the accent itself is experienced in terms that recall the amorphous, intrusive and contaminating nature of subjectivity itself: Les molles voyelles graisseuses impitoyablement sur lui s’étirent, s’étalent, se vautrent . . . Ces vaaacances . . . la courte consonne finale apporte un bref répit, et puis on va recommencer . . . le soooleil . . . laaa meeer . . . le liquide aux relents fades qu’elles dégorgent l’asperge . . . (EVM, p. ) [Pitilessly, the lazy, unctuous vowels stretch, wallow and sprawl all over him . . . The holidaaays . . . the short final consonant brings a brief respite, and then it’ll start up again . . . the suhhn . . . the seeea . . . the stale-smelling liquid that they disgorge splashes over him . . . (p. )]

The mere sound of these words takes the form of yet another liquid assault on the subject’s defences. In short, words in Sarraute have a way of getting inside those who hear them. They are experienced more than they are understood.8 This is partly because they so often provide the combatants in her world with the arsenal they require to defend themselves against each other, since words are, as Sarraute writes in L’Ère du soupçon, ‘l’arme quotidienne, insidieuse et très efficace d’innombrables petits crimes’ (‘Conversation’, p. ) [‘the insidious and often very effective, daily weapon used in countless minor crimes’ (p. )]. Whether as weapon, as allergen, or as liquid, words have an insidious capacity, like subjectivity itself, to cross boundaries and get under the skin of their recipients. Lucette Finas was one of the first critics to appreciate the extent of the role that Sarraute accords to words, noting that their importance in her work is indistinguishable from their effect. As she says, ‘le mot, dès qu’il n’est plus perçu avec indifférence, mais ressenti par le moi tout entier, se fait chair et monte sur la scène. Le malaise qu’éprouve, à la réception du mot, son destinataire, fait de ce mot un poids vivant’ [‘as soon as it ceases to be perceived with indifference, but is felt by the self in its entirety, the word becomes flesh and steps onto the stage. The uneasiness which its addressee feels on receiving the word turns it into an active force’].9 And she goes on to summarise very astutely the kinds of activity ascribed to words by Sarraute which make them capable of producing these effects: Le mot sourd et suinte; il filtre, s’infiltre, colle, tapisse. Au mieux, il est fil de la vierge, mais, assez souvent, odeur fade et chaude, vapeur lourde, plante sousmarine tapissée de ventouses, longs anneaux visqueux, sangsue, limace collée partout et répandant son suc.[. . .] Le mot, en effet, est investi de tous pouvoirs.



Difference and human relations

Il flaire, aguiche, s’allume, tend le cou, bave, absorbe, farfouille, roule, pétrit. (pp. , , italics in original) [The word seeps and oozes; it leaks out, it infiltrates, sticks, plasters over. At best, it is a gossamer thread, but, frequently, a stale warm smell, a heavy vapour, an under-water plant coated with suckers, long viscous rings, a slug sticking to everything and spreading its juice. [. . .] In fact, the word is invested with every kind of power. It sniffs, tantalises, flares up, cranes its neck, slobbers, soaks up, rummages, rolls things over, kneads.]

The malaise which Lucette Finas identifies as the characteristic response to words in Sarraute’s work derives entirely from the nature of these actions. Not only do words do (rather than signify), but their doing adopts the same forms as the behaviour we have observed taking place between subjects: infiltrating, insinuating, adhering, leaking, tracking, crushing, and so on. Charged with affect rather than with meaning, words enter the subject’s body and become lodged inside him.10 But they are just as frequently projected outwards as attack, or as the vomit in which the subject of abjection tries to expel the alien other that is also himself. The following example from Martereau illustrates nicely the two-way traffic that words engage in: Les mots qui nous ont humiliés, si nous n’avons pas la force, la rapidité de réflexes, l’adresse et le courage parfois assez grands qu’il faut pour riposter, sont comme les projectiles qu’on n’a pas pu ou qu’on a négligé d’extraire aussitôt de la chair: ils restent enfoncés en nous, s’enkystent, risquent de former des tumeurs, des abcès où la haine peu à peu s’amasse. [. . .] Un beau jour, au moment pour lui, et pour elle aussi probablement, le plus imprévu, la haine amassée en elle viendra affleurer à la surface, lui gicler dans les yeux. (M, p. ) [Words that have humiliated us, if we don’t have the force, the speed of reflex, the cunning and the courage that you need to retort, are like projectiles which we have not been able to, or have neglected to extract straight away from our flesh: they remain embedded in us, become encysted and risk forming tumours, or abcesses in which hatred gradually amasses. [. . .] One fine day, at the most unexpected moment for him, and for her too, probably, the hatred that has amassed in her will come to the surface, and spurt right out into his eyes. (p. )]

There is violence and pollution here in equal measure (signalled in all the extracts in this section through the presence of the words gicler [spurt] and asperger [splash], both of which imply a combination of aggression and contamination); and it is through both effects that words become embedded within the subject. In short, then, rather than offer control or mastery of abjection from without, words as they are used in Sarraute’s work, would seem to partake of its very substance and dynamic.

Abjection into art



       It is not just ordinary words which function in this way in Sarraute. For her work contains several depictions of mini-narratives or prototypes of her own literary project which are drawn into a very similar kind of dynamic. From time to time, the texts present us with characters desperate to narrate versions of her own insights about psychic existence, and their attempts are almost always treated by the recipients of these narrations as forms of aggression or contamination. The opening pages of Portrait d’un inconnu plunge us into just such a scene, as the narrator tries to persuade an anonymous and decidedly resistant group of listeners to accept both his intuition and the language he wants to use to convey it. As with so many of the actions that erupt in the intersubjective encounters in Sarraute’s work, the narrator’s desire to narrate stems from an impulse that is ‘plus fort que lui’ [‘something he couldn’t help’, lit. stronger than him]. The result is that the contamination he is seeking to describe in his dealings with the anonymous ‘elle’ seems to be exactly reenacted in the narrator’s address to his listeners. He asks: ‘n’avaientils pas senti, parfois, quelque chose qui sortait d’elle, quelque chose de mou, de gluant, qui adhérait et aspirait sans qu’on sache comment et qu’il fallait soulever et arracher de sa peau comme une compresse humide à l’odeur fade, douceâtre . . .’ (PI, p. ) [‘hadn’t they sometimes sensed something that she exuded, something soft and gluey, that stuck to them, absorbent, without their knowing how, something they had to take hold of and tear off their skins, like a damp compress with a stale, sweetish smell . . .’ (p. )]. And their response implies that for them the narrator’s question is itself just as insinuating and repellent as the phenomenon he is evoking: ‘C’était dangereux, trop fort, et ils avaient horreur de cela’ [‘This was dangerous, it was going too far, and they hated that’]. The narrator’s insistence appears to his listeners as ‘quelque chose en moi de louche’ [‘something ambiguous in me’] against which they feel the need to defend themselves, or as if it were itself a glutinous and nauseating compress that they wanted to rip away from their skin. This they do through a recourse to one of the peremptory classifications that we have already seen Sarraute’s characters resort to under threat of encroachment: ‘C’est un vieil égoïste. [. . .] Et elle, c’est une maniaque’ (p. ) [‘He’s a selfish old man. [. . .] And as for her, she’s just a crank’]. These verdicts are perceived by the narrator as being designed to keep him and the insidious intuitions that he shares with his creator, at arm’s length. Alain Guimier comes up against a similar sort of resistance in his



Difference and human relations

mother-in-law when, in telling the story about his aunt and the oval door, he asserts that he and his aunt are the same: ‘bien sûr que je lui ressemble. Nous nous ressemblons comme deux gouttes d’eau’ [‘of course I’m like her. We are as alike as two peas in a pod’]. He then goes on to round off his tale by provocatively telling his audience that ‘Ça ne vous intéresserait pas tant, vous non plus, si vous-même et nous tous ici, nous n’avions pas un petit quelque chose quelque part, bien caché, dans un recoin bien fermé . . .’ (P, p. ) [‘You wouldn’t be so interested by it either, if you yourself and all of us here, didn’t have a little something somewhere, hidden away, in some sealed recess . . .’ (p. )] It is this claim – repeatedly made by Nathalie Sarraute herself – which Alain’s motherin-law finds intolerable and which incites in her a violent desire for retaliation: Ce qui donne soif de vengeance, ce qui donne envie de courir, de le saisir par les épaules et de lui crier ses vérités, la vérité pas bonne à dire, très mauvaise à dire pour lui si on osait, si on n’avait pas honte de l’humilier, c’est d’avoir eu l’audace de la mettre dans le même bain, d’insinuer qu’elle aussi, comme cette famille de fous . . . (pp. –) [What makes you thirst for vengeance, what makes you feel like running and taking him by the shoulders and telling him some home truths, the kind of truths that are not pleasant to hear, very unpleasant for him to hear if you dared, if you weren’t ashamed to humiliate him, it was his having the nerve to put her in the same basket, to insinuate that she too, like that family of lunatics . . . (pp. –)]

Alain’s story is perceived as an unwarranted insinuation, a transgression of the bounds of decency, a humiliation which prompts in her an impulse towards counter-humiliation – in short, as an abjection. Even the most compliant of listeners is liable to respond in this way to accounts of the tropism. The narrator’s friend, L’Alter, in Portrait d’un inconnu is described by him as ‘well-trained ‘ and largely complicit with the sort of view that these mini-narratives usually contain. But here, the ‘warm bath’ of intimacy which they are able to establish as the context for their narrations is nevertheless threatened by the possibility of L’Alter’s resistance. The narrator’s evocation of a world of suckers (ventouses) and larvae meets with a lack of positive response in his friend: ‘Je sens qu’il n’aime pas cela. [. . .] Il paraît mal à l’aise, gêné’ (PI, p. ) [‘I sense that he doesn’t like it [. . .]. He seems ill at ease, embarrassed’ (pp. –)]. And the narrator is left feeling that he has pushed things too far, and that in giving way to the urgency of his desire to share his discovery, he has merely debased and prostituted himself:

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

c’est plus fort que moi: je ne peux pas résister à ce besoin, dès que je sens poindre au loin le moindre semblant de succès, de retarder l’effort final, de me détendre tout de suite, de jouer, de savourer sans fin l’attente, à ce besoin, surtout, toujours, de me galvauder. (pp. –) [it’s too much for me: I can’t resist a certain need I have, as soon as I notice the slightest semblance of success on the horizon, to postpone the ultimate effort, to relax straight away, to play around, endlessly relishing the anticipation; above all, I can never resist the need to debase myself. (p. )]

The narrator’s attempt to evoke a world of abjection becomes itself the means of his own abjection. The atmosphere of danger which surrounds attempts to recount this kind of subject matter extends by implicaton to the relation between Sarraute herself and her readers. In one of the texts in L’Usage de la parole, ‘Eh bien quoi, c’est un dingue . . .’ [‘So what, he’s crazy . . .’] this implication becomes explicit. The text stages (albeit in a mock ironic and heavily self-conscious manner) one of these mini-narrations involving two likeminded partners, more in the mould of the scene with L’Alter than of the one between Alain Guimier and his mother-in-law. The narrator of the mini-narrative is certain that he can count on the fact that his friend’s responses are the same as his own: ‘par-delà quelques apparences, quelques détails de peu d’importance l’autre lui ressemble . . .’ (UP, p. ) [‘beyond a few appearances and a few minor details, the other resembles him’ (p. )]. And he launches into a description of an episode which has echoes both of Le Vieux’s anxious night-time wanderings and his discovery of the leak in the bathroom, and of Tante Berthe’s experience with her door – perceptible echoes, that is, of Sarraute’s own work. At one point in his narration, the narrator appeals very strongly to his listener for a shared perception of the scene he is describing: Est-il possible que vous ne perceviez pas comme moi? . . . et on se met à raconter, on insiste avec avidité, avec espoir . . . tout comme celui qui maintenant montre à l’autre, le tire, veut le forcer . . . Ici, regardez . . . (p. ) [Is it possible that you haven’t noticed, as I have? . . . and one starts telling, one insists eagerly, confidently . . . just like the man who is now showing the other, tugging at him, trying to force him . . . Here, look . . . (pp. –)]

As avid as he is coercive, the narrator is relentlessly seeking to draw his friend into a continuum of shared experience and response. And it is this that the listener refuses with his ‘Eh bien quoi, c’est-un-dingue . . .’ [‘So what, he’s crazy . . .’]. The definition that this retort brings has the effect

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Difference and human relations

of turning him into a stranger in the eyes of the story-teller (‘à la place où était son ami, vient de surgir . . . cet inconnu,’ p.  [‘in his friend’s place there has suddenly appeared . . . this stranger’ (p. )]). There are striking similarities with the mother in ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’ whose invocation of categories made her an outsider to her own family. The remainder of the text charts the various ways in which the listener’s reaction destroys the intersubjective intimacy between the two friends, drying out the ‘substances spongieuses, suintantes’ (pp. –) [‘those spongy, oozing subtances’ (p. )] of the narrator’s subject matter, placing ‘toutes les agitations et convulsions’ [‘all the agitations and convulsions’] of subjectivity firmly behind bars, and creating a strongroom with ‘[d]es parois garanties à toute épreuve, d’une parfaite étanchéité’ (p. –) [‘walls guaranteed proof against all risks and totally impenetrable’ (p. –)] as a defence against them. The text concludes with the ‘real’ narrator’s recognition that nothing prevents the real reader from responding with the same kind of verdict. In all these scenes of narration Nathalie Sarraute is more or less explicitly presenting us with mises-en-abyme of her own project in such a way as to underscore that project’s own implication in the intersubjective dynamic that it portrays. The erosion of the boundaries across which subjectivity leaks and infiltrates its other is not confined to the substance of Sarraute’s texts, but has thoroughly contaminated both the discourse and the circumstances of its articulation. To speak of this kind of subjectivity seems to entail participating in all its forms, and encountering all the responses it habitually elicits on the part of those who come up against it.  And yet there is more to Sarraute’s work than the depiction and reenactment of a certain kind of experience. If she accepts the generic classification ‘roman’ which appears on the front cover of most of her prose writing (Tropismes, L’Usage de la parole, Enfance, Ici and Ouvrez are the exceptions), ‘récit’ is a term she invokes far less readily than that of ‘poème’. This word appears in the prières d’insérer or blurbs of both Les Fruits d’or and «disent les imbéciles» to characterise the book in question. The intention seems to be less to contest the label ‘roman’ on the cover, than to draw attention to the aesthetic dimension of the work. This insistence on the poetic character of her writing appears on a number of occasions in interviews that Sarraute has given over the years. For example, in

Abjection into art



conversation with Serge Fauchereau and Jean Ristat, she says: ‘Pour moi, le roman se rapproche, essaye de se rapprocher de la poésie; il tend, comme la poésie, à saisir au plus près de leur source, des sensations, quelque chose de ressenti. Les romans devraient devenir de grands poèmes. Et de même certaines œuvres poétiques sont créées dans des formes qui jusqu’ici étaient considérées comme appartenant à la prose’ [‘For me, the novel is moving closer, or trying to move closer to poetry; like poetry, it seeks to grasp sensations, something felt, as close as possible to its source. Novels should become large poems. And in the same way, a number of poetic works are being created in forms which until now were considered to belong to prose’].11 It is precisely by becoming poetry that Sarraute’s writing is able to transcend as well as to mime the forms of abjection which it describes. Being of, as well as beyond, the world she portrays, the aesthetic in Sarraute neither counters nor contradicts its abject qualities, although she does represent many misguided attempts carried out in the name of art to do just this. The poems of Paul Valéry (especially the later ones), Flaubert’s Salammbô,12 the novel by Germaine Lemaire in Le Planétarium, ‘Les Fruits d’or’ for some of its readers in Les Fruits d’or, and Natacha’s childhood attempts at writing in Enfance all bear the marks of this false aesthetic. It is signalled by mention of characteristics implied by words such as ‘lisse’, ‘dur’, ‘achevé’, ‘glacé’ [smooth, hard, finished, frozen], – the very antithesis of the forms of subjectivity as Sarraute portrays it in her fiction. It is associated with calculation for effect (Valéry), conscious control (ditto), excessive polish (Flaubert’s style), in short, with an absence of any sign of living contact with readers. One of the defenders of this false aesthetic in Les Fruits d’or praises the novel of the same name for just these qualities: Pure œuvre d’art – cet objet refermé sur lui-même, plein, lisse et rond. Pas une fissure, pas une éraflure par où un corps étranger pût s’infiltrer. Rien ne rompt l’unité des surfaces parfaitement polies dont toutes les parcelles scintillent, éclairées par les faisceaux lumineux de la Beauté. (FO, p. ) [A pure work of art – this self-enclosed, solid object, so smooth and round. Not a crack, not a scratch through which a foreign body could infiltrate. Nothing to break the smoothness of the perfectly polished surfaces, every particle of which sparkles, shining in the lightbeams of Beauty. (p. )]

Another reader spells out the (false) aesthetic credo that lies behind such preferences by contrasting them to the murky and abject forms of subjectivity that are the stuff of Sarraute’s own fiction:

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Difference and human relations

Pas de grouillements de larves, de pataugeages dans je ne sais quels fonds bourbeux qui dégagent des miasmes asphyxiants, dans je ne sais quelles vases putrides où l’on s’enlise. [. . .] Tout l’art, je crois, pour un romancier, consiste en cela, de s’élever au-dessus de ces grouillements nauséabonds, au-dessus de ces décompositions, de ces ‘processus obscurs’, comme on les nomme . . . (p. ) [No swarming larvae, no floundering about in God knows what miry swamps that give off asphyxiating miasma, or in putrid ooze into which you sink. [. . .] The whole art of the novelist, in my opinion, consists in that, in rising above these noxious swarmings, above these decompositions, these ‘obscure processes’ as they are called. (pp. –)]

A novel, he concludes, should be like St Petersburg or Venice, a solid and glorious construct wrested from the swamps, in short, an antithesis to abjection and to the murky indistinctions that characterise experience for the subjects of Sarraute’s fiction. This view is very different from the response of the reader who defends ‘Les Fruits d’or’ in terms which are quite the reverse of this classical purity and aesthetic distance. The test for him is experience rather than awe or admiration: ‘il me faut éprouver . . . je ne sais pas ce que c’est . . . c’est quelque chose comme ce qu’on sent devant la première herbe qui pousse sa tige timidement . . .’ [‘I need to sense . . . I don’t quite know what it is . . . it’s something like what you feel in the presence of the first blade of grass that timidly sends up a shoot . . .’] It is something that seizes hold of him in a particularly intimate form of contact: ‘C’est quelque chose qui me prend doucement et me tient sans me lâcher . . .[. . .], la main d’un enfant qui se blottirait au creux de ma main’ [‘It’s something that takes me gently and holds me without letting me go . . . [. . .] a child’s hand nestling in the palm of my own’]. And it infiltrates his entire being: ‘chaque parcelle de moi en est imprégnée’ (p. ) [‘every particle of me is imbued with it’ (p. )]. Contact, intimacy, infiltration: these are the very terms of the subject’s existence in Sarraute; and we find them repeated in all the representations of positive aesthetic experience in her work. But with the important difference that contact is freed of fear, threat or disgust, and seems equally exempt from the possibility of betrayal. Like everything else in Sarraute, the aesthetic can be validated only by the experience of the subject. However, although it is inscribed in the familiar forms of the subject’s experience of others, it constitutes a redemptive version of that experience by virtue of the absence of the negative, dangerous qualities normally involved in engagements with the other in her world. The insistence on the porous quality of contact is to be found in all

Abjection into art



the authentic encounters with works of art in Sarraute’s writing – and indeed is precisely the index of their authenticity. The ‘Portrait of the Unknown Man’ in Portrait d’un inconnu announces its presence to the narrator like a puff of warm and acrid air above the entrance to a metro station, an image that recalls the ‘asphyxiating miasma’ decried by the defenders of the false aesthetic in Les Fruits d’or. Once the narrator finds himself face-to-face with the painting, he is seized by the gaze of the unknown man: ‘son regard s’empara de moi’ [‘his glance seized hold of me’], rather as ‘Les Fruits d’or’ takes hold of its authentic reader. And the powerful appeal that the narrator senses coming from the figure in the portrait produces an effect that completely dissolves the boundary between them: ‘je restais là devant lui, perdu, fondu en lui’ (p. ) [‘I stood there before him, lost, dissolved in him’ (pp. –)]. This proves to be a mutual exchange of response which the narrator describes in terms very characteristic of the permeable forms of intersubjective exchange in Sarraute’s world: ‘cette réponse timide qu’il avait fait sourdre de moi, pénétrait en lui’ [‘this timid response he had awaked in me, penetrated him’]. The narrator’s reactions are elicited as seepage by the other of the portrait; and in turn they penetrate the surface of that other in a twoway traffic that perfectly exemplifies the porousness of their boundaries. Like the portrait in Portrait d’un inconnu, the sculpture in Vous les entendez? is of uncertain outline and is lacking in clear form and definition: possibly a puma, possibly a mythical beast, possibly a religious object, ‘elle ne ressemble à rien’ (VLE, p. ) [‘it’s not like anything’ (p. )]. Its importance lies in its effects rather than in any intrinsic quality it may possess; and, as in the case of the portrait, these effects are repeatedly described in terms of infiltration, penetration, leaking boundaries: ‘Ce qui sort de là, ce qui émane, irradie, coule, les pénètre, s’infiltre en eux partout, ce qui les emplit, les gonfle, les soulève . . .’ (p. ) [‘What comes from it, what emanates, radiates, flows, penetrates them, percolates right inside them, what fills them dilates them, uplifts them . . .’ (p. )]. The stone beast bears all the signs of contamination, but it is of a strangely purified contamination. In addition to the absence of danger and betrayal which marks the aesthetic experience, there is in this case also an absence of language. The exclusion of language from the aesthetic experience seems to contribute significantly to the non-degraded quality of the blurring of boundaries between the art object and its viewers: ‘ils n’ont pas besoin de mots, ils n’en veulent pas, ils savent qu’il faut surtout ne laisser aucun mot s’en approcher, y toucher’ [‘they have no need of words, they don’t want any, they know that above all no word should be



Difference and human relations

allowed to come close to it, to touch it’]. As with the faithful reader of ‘Les Fruits d’or’ whose experience ends the novel, words are eschewed because they get in the way of contact between the two. Paradoxically, words are regarded here both as a genuinely degrading form of pollution and as an excessively policing form of boundary. As pollution, words are described as ‘mesquins, précis, coquets, beaux, laids, enjôleurs, trompeurs, tyranniques, salissants, réducteurs, amplificateurs, papoteurs’, and finally, as ‘dégradants’ [‘petty, precise, coy, beautiful, ugly, cajoling, treacherous, tyrannical, sullying, reductive, inflating, gossipy, degrading’]. And yet they are also presented as a particularly rebarbative form of barrier: ‘Ces mots dont elle [la bête] est entourée sont comme des fils de fer barbelés’ (p. –) [‘The words with which it [the animal] is surrounded are like barbed wire’ (pp. –)]. Words, then, both divide and degrade; whereas the work of art succeeds in contaminating without profaning. However, language does not necessarily constitute an obstacle to the intimacy and fusion which are the hallmarks of the aesthetic as well as of the intersubjective experience. Everything depends on how it operates. Too much definition, and language profanes or disrupts the exchange between art and its recipients. But when language constitutes the actual stuff of this exchange, then it need not impede the aesthetic process. As the fluid substance that flows back and forth without recourse to differentiation, it participates in the non-degrading intersubjective contamination between the living being that the art object seems to become in these moments, and its human counterpart. For instance, the words in a poem which a character in «disent les imbéciles» is moved to recite at one point, succeed in creating such a degree of continuum with their speaker that the very concepts of fusion and separation are themselves eroded: Soudain des mots, une strophe, une seule, elle flotte, se déploie, elle m’enveloppe, me pénètre . . . une chaude buée . . . [. . .] Par toutes leurs voyelles, leurs consonnes ils se tendent, s’ouvrent, aspirent, s’imbibent, s’emplissent, se gonflent, s’épandent à la mesure d’espaces infinis, à la mesure de bonheurs sans bornes . . . [. . .] Il n’y plus de moi, plus de lui, plus de séparations, plus de fusions, il n’y que leur balancement, leur vibration, leur respiration, leur battement . . . qui font vibrer et respirer une même substance, battre au rythme d’un même pouls une même vie . . . (DLI, p. ) [Suddenly words, a stanza, just one, it floats, unfolds, envelopes me, penetrates me . . . a warm vapour . . . [. . .] With all their vowels, their consonants, they stretch, open up, breathe in, become saturated, fill up, swell, spread out over

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

infinite space, over boundless happinesses . . . [. . .] There’s no more me, no more him; no more separations, no more fusions, there is only their swaying, their vibration, their breathing, their heartbeat . . . causing us to vibrate and breathe a single substance, to beat in time to a single pulse, a single life . . . (pp. –)]

Nothing resists the infiltration of the words of the poem whose physical elements (vowels and consonants) operate, independently of any meaning, to transform everything into a single substance that vibrates according to a single pulse. If Sarraute tends to use ‘poetry’ more generally as a synonym for ‘art’, the material, auditory qualities mentioned here as well as the allusion to a rhythm, suggest the means whereby poetry might indeed be an effective means for turning difference into sameness and thus transcending the differential basis of language.13 Most of the explorations of the redemptive capacity of art in Nathalie Sarraute focus on its reception: the work of art is redemptive for the person who responds to it, such as the narrator to the painting in Portrait d’un inconnu, the authentic reader to ‘Les Fruits d’or’ in Les Fruits d’or, the father to the sculpture in Vous les entendez?, and so on. But the scenes of creation staged in Entre la vie et la mort also present the emergence of words in writing itself as bearing all the marks of the fluid intimacy that we have been examining here. The writer in this novel is depicted towards the end of the book coaxing words out of his subject matter in a manner that recalls very closely the intimate probing by which the narrator of Portrait d’un inconnu elicits the liquid grey matter of subjectivity from Le Vieux and his daughter: ‘palper encore et encore tout autour, appuyer . . . jusqu’à ce qu’enfin de là des mots commencent à sourdre . . .’ [‘palpate again and again all around it, press . . . until finally words begin to well up out of it . . . ‘] Words seep out of the image the writer is working on like tropisms out of a person: ‘Voilà . . . Des mots suintent en une fine traînée de gouttelettes tremblantes, se déposent sur le papier . . .’ (EVM, p. ) [‘There . . . Words are seeping in a fine stream of trembling drops, and land on the paper . . .’] And the novel closes as the writer searches for signs of living, warm breath from his creation: ‘est-ce que cela se dégage, se dépose . . . comme sur les miroirs qu’on approche de la bouche des mourants . . . une fine buée?’ (p. ) [‘is it exuding, settling . . . as on the mirrors people hold in front of the mouths of the dying . . . a fine vapour?’ (p. )] The noxious exhalations of intimacy are redeemed in the form of the ‘fine vapour’ exuded by authentically living literary language, just as they were in the ‘warm vapour’ of the poem in «disent les imbéciles».



Difference and human relations

The wager for the writer is to prevent words from reverting to the differential capacity which kills writing through the fixity that definition and distinction introduce into it. The work of art – even the one which, like Sarraute’s is made of language – achieves its aesthetic status by avoiding closure and promoting maximum contact. The sign of this contact is the work’s capacity to transform all elements into a single substance, to set up vibrations (a key word in these moments) to which everything will respond. The aesthetic has a unique ability to transmute difference into sameness, and to draw artist, subject matter, linguistic (or other) medium, and recipient into a continuum in which differences cease to exist. It is in this way that the ‘poem’ succeeds in transcending the limits of intersubjective relations while still subscribing to their dynamic.

 

The body and sexual difference

   

Minds, bodies and the new unanimism

When it comes to discussing the nature of the novel and fictional form, Nathalie Sarraute seems to have two major tenets: the first is that psychology constitutes the essential subject matter of fiction; and the second, related, point is that character can no longer be the vehicle for portraying this psychology. These two assumptions constitute the cornerstone of the essays in L’Ère du soupçon; and they are endlessly repeated within the novels themselves, as their protagonists come up against the reality of the tropism, and yet also find themselves involved in the business of characterisation through their dealings with others. Character in the conventional sense of the word is no longer treated as the means whereby human truths may be revealed to readers, but instead becomes part of the armoury deployed in intersubjective relations. The concept of ‘character’ is used as both weapon and defensive strategy in the dramas that take place between the protagonists in Sarraute’s fiction. For her largely anonymous subjects (or characters with a small ‘c’) regularly engage in mutual attack and retaliation in terms that are borrowed from an anachronistic characterological repertoire of personality traits. Thus father and daughter in Portrait d’un inconnu deploy the masks of the miser and the crank in their struggles with each other; and Alain summarily despatches his mother-in-law by describing her as an authoritarian personality. The inauthenticity of this notion of ‘character’ for Sarraute is demonstrated by this downgrading of its former revelatory function in fiction to that of a mere counter in the hostile varieties of human relations. In repudiating character as the vehicle for exploring psychological truth, Sarraute is not just condemning an outworn fictional convention. She is shifting the centre of gravity of the novel’s concerns: rejecting physical manifestations of human existence in favour of the disembodied inwardness of psychology, and renouncing individual differences for the universal sameness of the tropism. Disembodied 



The body and sexual difference

states of consciousness rather than flesh and blood ‘characters’ are the main concern of her fiction; and since her aim is exclusively to track the elusive movements of the tropism as it darts along the frontiers of consciousness, individual identities with their concomitant physical differences become totally irrelevant to her enterprise. At the level of the tropism it does not matter whether a character has a lump on the end of his nose (like Père Grandet’s veiny wen ), is fair or dark, tall or short, thin or fat – even male or female (although this question perhaps deserves separate consideration which will come later) – because the focus of attention is so inward. The psychological reality so tenaciously pursued throughout all Sarraute’s writing is taken to be present in all people: ‘un nouvel unanimisme’, ‘un fond commun, [. . .] qui, telles les gouttelettes de mercure, tendent sans cesse, à travers les enveloppes qui les séparent, à se rejoindre et à se mêler dans la masse commune’ (‘Dostoïevski’, pp. –, my emphasis) [‘a new unanimism’, ‘a common source, [. . .] which like little drops of mercury, continually tend to conglomerate and mingle in a common mass through the casings that separate them’ (pp. –)]. Any acknowledgement of the physical characteristics that distinguish one body from another would serve to re-erect the partitions that divide character from character, and limit and undermine the enquiry into this common mass of psychic existence. In banishing the body from her fictional world, then, Sarraute is banishing its potential for marking difference in order to concentrate on what is the same in the human psyche. For bodies with their inevitable, outward particularities stand in the way of inward and universal psychological truths. Yet in placing psychology at the centre of the novelistic tradition (exemplified and inaugurated in French literature by La Princesse de Clèves),1 Sarraute is assuming an inheritance (the ‘roman psychologique’) in which a reading of the mind has proved inseparable from a reading of the body. Madame de Clèves’s passion becomes legible – both to herself and to others – only when she recognises, and they perceive the body’s trouble, its blushes, its anxious glances, its speechlessness, its helpless paralysis. The body repeatedly calls for interpretation,2 and it is only beyond and behind its physical surfaces that the interpreter’s quarry – ‘psychology’ – is to be found. When the mention of Nemours’s name to Madame de Clèves causes an extreme physical ‘embarras’, this response unambiguously reveals to M. de Clèves that it is Nemours (and not either of the other two possible suspects) who is the lover whose identity she did not wish to reveal.3 Even in the age of classical pudeur, there-

Minds, bodies and the new unanimism



fore, the body is central to the pyschological narrative, offering interpretative access to the truths that lie within. The centrality of the body to any hermeneutic enterprise can, however, take two apparently contrasting forms. Succinctly put, it can function either as the veil behind which lies the truth (as in the case of Mme de Clèves), or as the truth that lies behind the veil. These two alternative positions may be represented respectively by Roger Kempf (in his book Le Corps romanesque) for whom the fictional body is always a text to be deciphered (and his own readings demonstrate superbly with what rich potential);4 and by Peter Brooks who argues that the body is always the ultimate focal object of the philosopher’s search after truth. Developing Sartre’s notion of an ‘Acteon complex’ in conjunction with a reading of Freud, Brooks suggests that the seeker after truth is always implicitly gendered as male, that his desire for knowledge has an inescapably erotic investment, and that truth is positioned like a woman’s body as the terminus ad quem of his epistemophilic strivings.5 In the first scenario (Kempf) the body is all sign, and in the second, it serves as transcendental signified.6 Any discussion of the body will probably have to take account of whether it is treating the body as sign or signified. In doing so it might also wish to consider how far such a treatment draws the body into a logic of vehicle and tenor (vehicle when the body is a sign, tenor when it is the transcendental signified). What would follow from such a consideration is the possibility that the body might never be more than merely metaphorical, and so would undermine the relatedness to the real that it has come to promise in contemporary thought. The materialism of Brooks’s assimilation of the body to truth slides only too easily into figure as it becomes impossible to say whether, in his account, the body stands as figure for truth, or truth as a figure for the body. This question of whether the status of the body is that of ultimate reality, or that of metaphor or analogon, is one that is probably raised by all discussions of the topic; but at any rate it is an inescapable part of Sarraute’s use of the body and I shall be returning to it below.  The starting point for Sarraute’s ‘psychology’7 appears, however, to dispense entirely with the duality of the interpretive schema that I have



The body and sexual difference

described above. In her essay ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’ she describes the choice for the writer in the early s as one between the behaviourist novel exemplified by Hemingway, and the ‘roman psychologique’ exemplified by Dostoevsky,8 and, significantly, she presents it in terms of a choice between body and mind. In the behaviourist novel modern man is a ‘body without a soul’, totally reducible to his surface appearance with no inner beyond, and entirely at the mercy of the triple determinism of hunger, sexuality and social class as described by Pavlov, Freud and Marx. Whereas in the modern psychololgical novel which she is seeking to rehabilitate in L’Ère du soupçon, bodies are vaporised in order to reveal complex and elusive incorporeal psychological states. In charting the evolution of fictional character from Balzac to the present day, she notes that he has lost not only the entire social, but also the material, basis for his identity, including notably ‘ses vêtements, son corps, son visage’ (‘L’ère’, p. ) [‘his clothes, his body, his face’ (p. )]. This is because ‘les personnages de roman modernes seront de plus en plus, non point tant des “types” humains en chair et en os [. . .], que de simples supports, des porteurs d’états parfois encore inexplorés’ (‘Dostoïevski’, pp. –) [‘fictional characters were increasingly to become, not so much flesh and blood human “types” [. . .], as simple props, bearers of states of consciousness that have sometimes still not been explored’ (pp. –)] (my emphasis). The main reason why the modern novelist will decline to provide characters with any physical existence (‘aspect physique, gestes, actions, sensations’, p. ) [‘physical aspect, gestures, actions, sensations’ (p. )], is that these markers of individual difference lend themselves too easily to interpretation in terms of an over-familiar and consequently false vraisemblable. In other words, by opting for the psychological novel, Sarraute is making disembodiment the condition of the universal psychological truth of her fiction. This psychological truth is expressed in terms of tropisms, the undefinable movements on the borders of consciousness. But these movements never operate in a vacuum; as I have already argued (in Chapter ), they always take place in a relation to an other. Their dramatic quality – which Sarraute always insists upon – is an effect of the fact that there is always more than one person involved: the indefinable movements which she calls ‘ces drames intérieurs [. . .] ont tous ceci en commun, qu’ils ne peuvent se passer de partenaire’ (‘Conversation’, pp. –) [‘these inner dramas [. . .] all have one thing in common: they cannot do without a partner’ (p. )]. Sarraute’s psychology is a psychology not of an individual – nor even of

Minds, bodies and the new unanimism



a universal – inner subject, but of an intersubjectivity where the individual is always caught up in something more than himself, and where universality has to be thought of as all the permutations that intersubjective relations are shown to be capable of taking.9 It is here, in the dimension of intersubjectivity, that the body of which her characters had initially been stripped, makes its return in Sarraute. In fact, it never quite departs, for in the vestigial survival of so-called Balzacian characterisation in Portrait d’un inconnu the father and his daughter around whom all the dramas are concentrated, preserve fragments of the body through which their Balzacian personality might once have been read. The novel educates both its narrator and its readers into dispensing with terms like ‘selfish’, ‘tight-fisted’ and ‘crank’, and tentatively works its way towards the ‘psychisme’ of the tropism. In the process the body acquires an entirely different function. Its surviving fragments, no longer required as an index of individual difference or ‘character’, are metamorphosed into highly sensitive transmitters and receptors of intersubjective awareness: Ce n’est qu’à la sortie que j’apercevais tout à coup, au moment où elle disparaissait à un tournant de l’escalier, la ligne furtive de leur dos ou, dans une glace, parmi la foule qui s’écoulait devant moi, leur nuque. Certains détails, en apparence insignifiants, de leur aspect, de leur accoutrement m’accrochent tout de suite, m’agrippent – un coup de harpon qui enfonce et tire. (PI, p. ) [It was only on the way out that suddenly, just as she disappeared round a turn on the stairs, I would catch sight of the furtive outline of their backs or, reflected in a mirror, among the crowd streaming in front of me, the nape of their necks. Certain seemingly insignificant details of their appearance, of their general getup, catch me immediately and seize hold of me – like a harpoon that strikes deep and pulls. (p. )]

Father and daughter share indistinguishable physical characteristics (their backs, the nape of their necks) which not only signal the existence of inner dramas to the chance observer, but also, through their harpooning effect, draw the narrator into a further drama as ‘partner’ in his own right. The body is never reconstituted to form a totality (the body of a miser, the body of a crank), and it exists as fragment because it is only through the morselised parts of the body that subjects become aware of the presence of the other: Elle aussi a ce même flair surnaturel des choses. Elle sent cela: elle me sent dans son dos, et dans son dos aussi, sûrement, mon regard dans la glace, quand je suis à la sortie d’un spectacle dans la foule. (p. , my emphasis)



The body and sexual difference

[She also has this same supernatural sense of things. She can feel it: she senses me in her back, and it’s certain that it’s in her back that she senses my glance in the mirror as I leave the theatre in the crowd. (p. )]

The fragmented body (here the back) is directly registering the existence of intersubjective relations – not as a surface in which they might be deciphered, but as a direct physical response.10 The morselisation of the body is carried so far that the dramas between subject and subject tend to become dramas between quasiautonomous anatomical entities. Bulging eyes, raised fingers, bare necks, pendulous cheeks, bulbous lips, pot-bellies, (parts of the body many of which very graphically reach out towards the other as protrusion of some form or another) are instinctively interpreted by Sarraute’s subjects as attributes of the other that signify an intersubjective relation, be it as threat or as debilitating vulnerability. The subject himself experiences his own body as an arbitrary collection of disparate physical attributes that are constantly falling captive to forces outside his own person and hence of his own control. As one of the characters in «disent les imbéciles» discovers, every movement of every part of his body proves to be subject to influences which he is powerless to resist: Ce qui vient d’arriver, ce mouvement malheureux de mes yeux qui se sont abaissés, de mes doigts qui se sont joints et ont donné un petit coup sur ma manche, bien sûr, c’étaient mes yeux, c’étaient mes doigts, mais c’est ce qui s’appelle un geste machinal. (DLI, p. ) [What just happened, that unfortunate movement of the eyes which glanced down, of the fingers which closed and lightly tapped my sleeve, of course they were my eyes and my fingers, but it was what’s called a mechanical gesture. (p. )]

And he concludes ruefully, in a way that summarises much of the bodily experience of Sarraute’s characters: ‘le corps réagit ainsi parfois avec une déplorable indépendance . . .’ (p. ) [‘the body reacts like that sometimes with deplorable independence’ (p. )]. In a more exteme version of this, the viscous, leaky quality of subjectivity makes the body (particularly in the early novels) permanently prey to encounters with the other in ways that the subject is similarly unable to master.11 The body oozes of its own accord, betraying its intersubjective awareness against the will and the wishes of its subject. It is voided under attack, direct or insidious, from without: ‘elle draine toutes ses forces, elle le vide . . . il lui semble, tandis qu’il est couché là, immo-

Minds, bodies and the new unanimism



bile, que son sang s’écoule de lui petit à petit, aspiré par elle’ (P., p. ) [‘she drains off all his strength, emptying him of all substance . . . as he lies there motionless, he feels as if his blood is gradually flowing out of him, being sucked in by her’ (pp. –)]. Equally, it is the body of the other which secretes the substances that contaminate the subject with unwanted contact: quelque chose d’insaisissable sort d’eux, un mince fil ténu, collant, de petites ventouses, délicates comme celles qui se tendent, frémissantes, au bout des poils qui tapissent certaines plantes carnivores, ou bien un suc poisseux comme la soie que sécrète la chenille; quelque chose d’indéfinissable, de mystérieux, qui s’accroche au visage de l’autre et le tire ou qui se répand sur lui comme un enduit gluant sous lequel il se pétrifie. (p. ) [something intangible emanates from them, a fine, tenuous, sticky thread, delicate little suckers like the ones that stretch out, quivering, on the tips of the hairs that line carnivorous plants; or else a sticky juice like the silk secreted by caterpillars: something indefinable and mysterious that adheres to the other person’s face and pulls it, or which spreads over it like a gluey coating, beneath which it turns to stone. (pp. –)]

It is through his body, or more precisely, through his bodily attributes, that the subject is engaged by the other in dramatic encounter; and he is helpless to do anything but stand by and let it happen. This remains so even when Sarraute abandons the mode of Sartrean disgust as a means of representing the phenomenon. The power of the other to determine how the subject perceives himself is one that makes the body the focus of his control, as Germaine Lemaire discovers in an unexpected encounter with Alain’s father in Le Planétarium: Elle s’était sentie soudain exposée, rosissant, frissonnant sous ce regard d’où coulait sur elle et la recouvrait [. . .] un dégoût d’amateur délicat pour une femme . . . mais elle n’avait pas l’air d’une femme, elle était quelque chose d’informe, d’innommable, un monstre affreux, toute décoiffée. (P, pp. –) [She had suddenly felt herself exposed, blushing, trembling before this gaze from which there poured over her, covering her, [. . .] the distaste for a woman of a fastidious connoisseur . . . but she didn’t look like a woman, she was something shapeless, unnameable, a frightful monster, her hair all dishevelled. (p. )]

The man’s gaze not only provokes uncontrolled shivers and blushing, but it also imposes a shapeless monster on a subject who, in so far as she assumed anything about herself, assumed she had the physical appearance of a woman. This happens over and over again in Sarraute’s



The body and sexual difference

writing as characters are constantly obliged to negotiate with an image of themselves that lies in the hands of the other; and it is an image that is always seen as having its basis in the body. In confronting this image the subject is also confronting his own mortality, because the other can not only make a monster out of a woman: he can also in the same process turn a live body into a dead one. As long as the body operates in parts, and is comprised of autonomous eyes, lips or ooze, there is life, despite the disgust and the pain that arise in the consequent engagement with the other. But the most awesome power that subjects have over one another is far worse than their ability to puncture the surface of the body and manipulate its separate parts: it lies in their ability to construct a body that is a whole. For it is when the body becomes whole, that it becomes intelligible in terms of the vraisemblable; and it is this vraisemblance that deals the most mortal of blows as living beings are turned into lifeless cardboard characters. This happens for instance when Alain Guimier presents his young wife Gisèle with a thumbnail character sketch of his mother-in-law as ‘an authoritarian personality’. He is skilled in the traditional art of characterisation (‘Il était si drôle quand il saisissait les gens, les tenait dans le creux de sa main, les lui montrait, quand il les dessinait d’un trait si juste, si vif, il savait les rendre si ressemblants, il les imitait si bien’ (P, p. ) [‘He was so funny when he took hold of people, held them in the palm of his hand, showed them to her, when he sketched them with such accurate, vivid strokes, he knew how to get such a good likeness, he imitated them so well’ (p. )]), and this completely changes Gisèle’s sense of what her mother is: elle avait vu sa mère, jusque-là comme elle-même incernable, infinie, projetée brusquement à distance, se pétrifier tout à coup en une forme inconnue aux contours très précis. (p. ) [she had seen her mother, who, until then, like herself had been uncircumscribable, infinite, abruptly projected at a distance, suddenly petrified in an unfamiliar form with very precise contours. (p. )]

Distance and coherent outline always have this petrifying effect in Sarraute. And it is this that spells death to the person who falls victim to the supposedly ‘lifelike’ characterisations that produce whole and intelligible beings: they become indistinguishable from the lifeless waxwork effigies that Germaine Lemaire constructs in the novels that she writes.12 In its various phases and manifestations, then, the intersubjective psychology of Sarraute’s fiction always makes the body central. A certain use of the body where it is sign of some individual ‘sentiment’ in the

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

traditional moulds of the psychological and Balzacian novel has gone, or at least survives only as the deadly strategy of characterisation in the inner dramas that form the action. But it is nevertheless through the body that the action is worked out. Why this should be after Sarraute’s determined expunging of the body from the modern psychological novel remains to be explained. It could be argued that intersubjective relations – and especially the sort which involve the particular forms of power and dependency that Sarraute explores – find in the body a vital arena for the working out of their dramas.13 The phrase ‘corps à corps’ [‘hand to hand’, lit. body to body] which Sarraute uses on more than one occasion to describe the encounters that are depicted in her texts now seems peculiarly apposite. So too does the notion of a ‘corps conducteur’ [‘conducting rod’, lit. conducting body] which is how the narrator in Portrait d’un inconnu refers to his own sensitivity to the tropistic encounters that take place between people.14 Every aspect of human relations in Sarraute is lived as event, and the body is conjured back into being in order to underscore the fact that human relations are experienced only and always as dramatic engagement, as interaction, as encounter.       Arising out of all this is the question of where the body stands in relation to truth and the mode of its realities in the text. As the above examples will have suggested, the body’s presence in the Sarrautean text is partly (or sometimes) ‘real’, and partly (or sometimes) metaphorical. To return to the first example from Portrait d’un inconnu: the backs and the necks of the old man and his daughter exist as realities in the physical world of the novel, whereas the harpooning of the narrator is metaphorical. It will therefore be necessary to consider both how far the body is ‘really’ present in Sarraute, and then, when it is not ‘really present’, why the metaphorical dimension of the text should invest so heavily in it. As far as the body’s ‘real presence’ in the text is concerned, it seems to function chiefly as a cue to alert the subject to the otherwise invisible existence of inward psychological dramas. Its role here reinforces the tendency of the Sarrautean body always to be seen in action, since its bodily parts provide the support for a narrative of interaction; bodies never feature as the reposeful objects of contemplation or description.15 Words and gestures may provide a protective screen, but at the same time they also point to the existence of something that lies



The body and sexual difference

behind or beyond: ‘Derrière l’écran protecteur des gestes, des mots . . .’ (FO, p. , my emphasis) [‘Behind the protective screen of gestures, of words . . .’ (p. )]. So when a character ‘avance des lèvres gourmandes’ [‘thrusts out his greedy lips’], when ‘ses mains impies se tendent’ [‘holds out his impious hands’], when ‘Il se renverse en arrière, croise les mains sur son ventre [l]’oeil fixé devant lui’ (pp. –) [‘He leans back, folds his hands over his belly, [h]is eyes staring ahead of him’ (p. )], all these gestures alert his ‘partner’ to the fact that the words the man goes on to utter, however innocuous at face value, constitute a crushing display of authority. The focus on the body’s disparate parts and their associated gestures goad the observer into interpretation, shifting his attention onto the tropistic movements in which the body’s actions originate. At the same time, the interpretive movement that goes from gesture to ‘psychisme’ is always to some extent speculative, and this involves the body in another role. For the narrators of Portrait d’un inconnu and Martereau this speculation concerns the very existence of the tropism: are they just imagining what they think they sense, or do these elusive ‘movements’ really exist? Although there is much less doubt in the later novels about the underlying nature of intersubjective relations, there still remains, as I have already suggested (see above, Chapter ), endless uncertainty for the characters about where the other is, and what the nature of the relation is at any given point. It is this anguished curiosity that provides the motor force of the drama, and it is one that frequently drafts in support from the body in the hopes of resolving the uncertainty. Moreover, the body is shown to have its own capacity for cognition, and to have access to truths that the restless conjectures of the mind on their own are denied. The body registers the tropism more directly than anything else and so provides more incontrovertibly than anything else a guarantee of the existence of Sarraute’s elusive quarry. This is Gisèle’s experience in Le Planétarium: C’est de là qu’elle vient, cette sensation de faiblesse dans les jambes, cette peur qu’elle éprouve de nouveau maintenant – le corps ne se trompe jamais: avant la conscience il enregistre, il amplifie, il rassemble et révèle au-dehors avec une implacable brutalité des multitudes d’impressions infimes, insaississables, éparses. (P, pp. –, my emphasis) [That’s where it comes from, this sensation of weakness in the legs, this fear which she feels again now – the body is never wrong: before the conscious mind, it registers, amplifies, assembles, and with relentless brutality reveals to the outside world a multitude of tiny, elusive, scattered impressions. (p. )]

Minds, bodies and the new unanimism



In this scenario the body is not merely the vehicle for a truth that lies beyond it; it is entirely coextensive with that truth. There is a third version of the body’s presence in the text in which it is both metaphor and truth, and this is to be found in the interpretive commentary (the so-called ‘sous-conversation’) that elucidates the intersubjective action. Time and again in her critical writings Sarraute asserts that her writing is an exploration of an unknown field, ‘[des] états parfois inexplorés’ [‘states of consciousness that have sometimes remained unexplored’]. She presents her ‘psychisme’ as something entirely new, and thus as something that by definition will be totally unfamiliar to her readers at the level of conscious knowledge. The aim of the true realist writer according to her interpretation of the term, is to go beyond the familiar in search of the unknown: il s’acharne à débarrasser ce qu’il observe de toute la gangue d’idées préconçues et d’images toutes faites qui l’enveloppent, de toute cette réalité de surface que tout le monde perçoit sans effort et dont chacun se sert, faute de mieux, et il arrive parfois à atteindre quelque chose d’encore inconnu et qu’il lui semble être le premier à voir. (‘Ce que voient’, p. ). [he works tirelessly to rid the things he observes of the matrix of preconceived ideas and ready-made images that encase them, as also of all the surface reality that everyone can easily see and which, for want of anything better, everyone uses; and occasionally he succeeds in reaching something that is thus far unknown and which it seems to him that he is the first to see. (p. )]

The problem in writing is thus how to make the unfamiliar intelligible to the reader without falsifying it and reducing it to the forms of the already known, the vraisemblable. Here simile, analogy and metaphor proliferate, as the unknown in the sphere of the psychological is compared to the known in a variety of familiar but very different spheres: the everyday (salt being used to soak up spilt wine, EVM, pp. – [p. ]), popular culture (finding bodies strung up in a tree by Red Indian marauders, P, p. [p. ]), common experience (nightmares where you find yourself unable to make a sound, FO, p.  [p. ]). In this sustained invocation of shared experience one of the most powerful and most frequently adopted forms that it takes is an appeal to the shared experience of the body. For example, the child’s word-game in Entre la vie et la mort is compared to a whole range of compulsive physical behaviour, some of which everybody may be presumed to have experienced at some time: il ne peut plus les arrêter . . . c’est comme se ronger les ongles, extraire les crapauds de son nez, sucer son pouce . . . comme les démangeaisons que provoquent les éruptions, l’agitation monotone que donne la fièvre. (EVM, p. )



The body and sexual difference

[he can no longer stop them . . . it’s like biting your nails, picking your nose, sucking your thumb . . . like the itching caused by eruptions, the monotonous restlessness that fever gives. (p. )]

Here the reader is very clearly being invited to make sense of the psychological unknown by means of a comparison with the physical known. Some of the most compelling images in Sarraute, however, come not from an appeal to the common experiences of the body, but from depictions of the body in extremis where the experience is not one that most people have shared: being rounded up and handcuffed, shot at pointblank range, having a stomach pump inserted, – the list (picked here at random from Les Fruits d’or) could go on. The extremity of what the body is subjected to in these cases (and they almost always involve some kind of violence) provokes in the reader an identification with the situations that are being evoked in the text, even if those situations are ultimately psychological and non-physical. The gut response of the reader is being pressed into service to vouch for the truth of what is taking place in the minds of the characters in the novel. It was Sartre who first drew attention to the centrality of the lieu commun [commonplace] in Sarraute, by which he meant ‘les pensées les plus rebattues’ [‘the most hackneyed thoughts’] that provide the meeting place for human exchange.16 But of all the lieux communs in Sarraute’s fiction perhaps that of the body is even more vital than that of language: for while the characters may meet and act through an exchange of ‘hackneyed thoughts’, readers are incited to engage with the text and receive what it has to communicate at the level of the common-place of the body. The purpose of writing for Sarraute is to ‘faire revivre au lecteur, à mesure qu’elles se déroulent, [l]es actions souterraines’ (‘Conversation’, p. ) [‘make the reader relive these subterranean actions as they unfold’ (p. )]; and the effect is achieved through the deployment of metaphors of the body that are designed to work very directly on the body through an appeal to common experience. This makes the reader’s encounter with the text primarily a physical one: a rhetoric of the body addressed to a body with the aim of persuading the reader of a certain truth about the mind. Once again Sarraute’s materialism emerges out of an emphasis on event, not just in her psychology of interaction, but in her manner of representing that psychology to the reader. The sense that something very real is happening in the interactions that take place between the characters seems to call up the human body as an index of that reality. The intensity in Sarraute of what Elaine Scarry has noted more gener-

Minds, bodies and the new unanimism



ally as a renewed desire to reconnect language to the material world means that this desire is bound to have recourse not just to ‘this or that piece of material ground but to the most extreme locus of materialisation, the live body’.17 Physical experience is treated as a universal through which the reader is incited to acknowledge her own implication in the world being evoked, thus minimising the possibility of her dismissing it as unique and aberrant with a formula such as: ‘Eh bien quoi, c’est un dingue . . .’ [‘So what, he’s crazy . . .’] The body’s re-entry into Sarraute’s world as the ground of a shared experience becomes the means whereby her texts can be saved from the readerly judgements that dismiss them as different. And the universality claimed for her psychic truths is underpinned by her insistence on the sameness of physical incarnation.      With this mention of rhetoric in connection with the body, a third area of Sarraute’s fiction emerges as an aspect of the role of the body in her texts, namely writing itself. As we have seen, the body is central both to the intersubjective relations of which her psychology (or ‘psychisme’) consists, and to the representation of that psychology as true. But the body is equally vital to the writing through which that representation is mediated; and perhaps its most fundamental role is, tellingly, to disarm any tendency to characterise the writing in terms of the rhetoric that I have just invoked. Intersubjective relations in Sarraute involve language in much more than merely providing what Sartre called the ‘lieu de rencontre de la communauté’ [‘meeting place for the community’]. For words serve less as a neutral terrain on which psychological interaction takes place, than as autonomous entities within that interaction. The drama of Sarraute’s writing turns to a large extent on the use of words, and in particular, on the way in which words are so often depicted as constituting the most lethal form of ammunition. As I have already suggested (see above, Chapter ), what gives them this dangerous power is above all their ability to work directly upon the body of their addressee: un mot quelconque, tout à fait banal, a transporté cela, un mot a pénétré en lui, s’est ouvert et a répandu cela partout, il en est imbibé, cela circule dans ses veines, charrié par son sang, des caillots se forment, des engorgements, des poches, des tumeurs qui enflent, pèsent, tirent . . . Et avec l’obstination des maniaques il cherche à découvrir d’où viennent les élancements, il palpe les endroits douloureux pour trouver leur place exacte, délimiter leurs contours . . .



The body and sexual difference

cela enfle toujours plus, cela appuie, il a besoin d’être soulagé, il lui faudrait des soins immédiats, une incision, une ponction, une saignée. (EVM, p. ) [it was transported by a perfectly commonplace, ordinary word, a word got inside him, opened up and spilled it all over everywhere, he is soaked in it, it is circulating in his veins, carried along by his blood, clots form, obstructions, haematomas, tumours which swell, press and pull . . . And with the obstinacy of a fanatic, he tries to find out where the pains are coming from, he palpates the sore spots to see exactly where they are, to define their outline . . . the swelling continues, it presses, he must obtain relief, he should have immediate care, it should be lanced, tapped, bled . . . (p. )]

Words have a capacity to enter the body of those to whom they are addressed where they create pain, ‘pourriture’ and various other usually more or less pathological forms of physical response. Indeed, the experience of language in Sarraute is almost always represented as a physical experience, and this is true not just at the level of the psychological and the intersubjective, but more importantly perhaps, at the level of the aesthetic. Art of any kind (not just writing) is always tested in Sarraute by its ability to elicit physical response within its viewer or reader.18 She ‘knows’ that Valéry’s work is over-rated when on opening the poems she catches an unmistakeable whiff of ‘cette vieille odeur aigrelette de chiffon humide et de craie, cette vieille odeur rassurante et familière d’encre et de poussière qui flotte autour des souvenirs d’exercices et d’efforts scolaires’ (‘PV’, p. ) [‘that old, sour smell of damp cloths and chalk, that old, comforting, familiar smell of ink and dust which hovers around memories of schoolroom exercises and exertions’]. Conversely, the lone figure left at the end of Les Fruits d’or still believing that the book is good bases his conviction on the very different but equally physical response he has to its prose: ‘Cela afflue vers moi, se répand . . . Quelque chose me parcourt . . . c’est comme une vibration, une modulation, un rythme’ (FO, p. ) [‘It flows towards me, spreads . . . Something runs through me . . . It’s like a vibration, a modulation, a rhythm’ (p. )]. The body is as accurate an indicator of authentic art as it was of the existence of the tropism; and Gisèle’s claim that the body is never wrong applies as much to the realm of the aesthetic as to that of the interior dramas of the tropism. The appeal to the body here is being deployed as a means of excluding the possibility of even considering its use as a rhetorical strategy. Or more precisely, it is being used to establish a distinction between a rhetoric that is merely aesthetic (Valéry) and a writing that is more than aesthetic, that is to say, authentic (‘Les Fruits d’Or’).

Minds, bodies and the new unanimism



All the emphasis in the discussion so far has been on the role of the body in the reception of words and writing. But it also has a vital (if less extensively represented) role in the origins of writing. Writing for Sarraute is always the writing of sensation: ‘Le langage n’est essentiel que s’il exprime une sensation’ [‘Essential language only exists if it expresses a sensation’].19 The relationship of language to sensation is explored in Entre la vie et la mort through contrasting metaphors in which the object of the writing – the sensation – is conceived of as a body. Either it secretes words out of its own being under the gentle pressure of the writer’s hand, or it is fatally constricted and effaced as the writer primps and decks it out in language of a grand couturier style imposed from without: il a essayé de la dresser, de lui apprendre les bonnes façons, il l’a obligée à surveiller sa ligne, à se faire toute mince pour bien porter ces modèles de grand couturier, ces phrases qu’avec tant de soins, d’efforts il a dessinées, sobrement élégantes ou savamment désordonnées, ou brochées et chamarrées de mots somptueux . . . il lui a appris, lui aussi, comme tant d’autres, à s’effacer pour mieux les présenter, les mettre en valeur, et [. . .] elle doit avoir fini par acquérir la grâce anonyme et grêle, la désinvolture appliquée des mannequins . . . (pp. –). [he had tried to train her, to teach her good manners, he had made her watch her figure, become very slender so as to look good in the models of the big dress designers, in these sentences which he constructed with such care, such effort, soberly elegant or skilfully disordered, or brocaded and embroidered with sumptuous words . . . he also taught her, like so many others, to be self-effacing the better to present them, to set them off, and [. . .] she must have ended up by acquiring the anonymous frail grace, the studiedly carefree style of fashion models . . . (p. )]

At any event it is the living body which becomes the index of the viability of the writing, since only authentic language can avoid destroying its object and allow it to survive and make contact with the reader.20 The body, in short, forms the basis of the writing which is simultaneously making it the focus of the intersubjective relations that it depicts, and appealing to it as guarantor of the truth of that representation. But if the body is so pervasively present in Sarraute, if its manifestations are so numerous, does it betray any marks of sexual difference? Is gender as extraneous as hair-colouring or height to the modes of existence of the body in her writing? I shall be discussing the question of gender in more detail in the next chapter, but in the meantime it has crucial implications for the way Sarraute understands the role of the



The body and sexual difference

body in writing. For unlike many younger women writers in France, and against the grain of much of the feminist theory and commentary that goes with them, Sarraute is deeply opposed not only to the assertion of sexual difference, but to grounding that assertion in physical difference. Nothing could be more inimical to Sarraute than the project of a writer like Hélène Cixous who is explicitly searching for a ‘writing that inscribes femininity’, and who sees the way towards it going via the female body. This forms the rallying cry of her essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’: ‘Write yourself. Your body must be heard. [. . .] Women must write through their bodies.’21 And while Luce Irigaray may have a more judicious and complex argument, the female body is still the key point of reference in her attempt to challenge masculine forms of representation and thinking – including masculinist forms of differential thinking.22 By contrast, while Sarraute also makes the body a central point of reference in her work, it is a strikingly ungendered body. Very few of the many physical features in Sarraute’s novels carry marks of gender; this is in part because the context of the interactions between the characters is neither physical nor sexual, and the world of the sous-conversation is violent rather than erotic. The potential for recognising gender is also lessened by the fact that, as Gaëtan Brulotte points out, bodies in Sarraute are ‘overinvested in their upper half ’ (face, hands, shoulders, etc.).23 She also claims to base her choice of ‘il’ and ‘elle’ on considerations of variety and euphony alone, and in addition, given her view that in contrast to ‘elle’, ‘il’ is unmarked,24 the choice of the masculine pronoun could in itself be seen as a further denial of gender. And finally, scenes of violence tend culturally to imply male participants, so that masculinity would be simply a by-product of the image repertoire she has chosen as a means of exploring the underside of human relations. The apparent exclusion of gender from the agenda of the novels, however, perhaps has as its ultimate cause the relationship of the body to writing. It may seem hugely paradoxical to say so, but Sarraute’s writing may after all be best described as a writing of the body, even though the logic of that writing makes gender irrelevant to a phrase that has become a leitmotif in feminist theory. While not ruling out the possibility that Sarraute’s writing of the body could ultimately be recuperated for feminist theory, in Sarraute’s own terms the body that writes has no gender: ‘À l’intérieur, où je suis, le sexe n’existe pas’ [‘Inside, where I am, sex does not exist’].25 It is possible for her to make this claim because for her, gender is essentially a secondary physical characteristic, and more precisely a characteristic that is visible only in

Minds, bodies and the new unanimism



the body as social construct – which is to say as a whole construct. She sees gender differences primarily in terms of social roles that are either imposed on the subject by the other, or, as is more frequently the case in her work, adopted by subjects who are anxious to come over as a ‘character’ in their intersubjective encounters. There is, for example, the narrator’s aunt in the opening scene in Martereau who parades herself before him as the spoiled but irresistible young wife in a style that is also heavily dependent on stereotypical feminine mannerisms (‘cet air minaudeur et faussement innocent que prennent certaines fillettes précoces qui font l’enfant’ (M, p. ) [‘that simpering, falsely innocent manner that certain precocious little girls assume when they want to play the baby’ (p. )]). Or there is the young widow standing at her husband’s graveside whose pregnant belly is a little more prominent that it needs to be, in order that she may appear precisely as the bereaved young mother-to-be (DLI, pp. – [pp. –]). For gender to become a part of writing it would require the writer to see herself inauthentically as one of these stereotyped images, as a traditional character with the full panoply of physical and social characteristics – that is to say, in the very terms which the writing negates. The writing subject has to dispense with these images for her work to acquire authenticity: ‘je n’existe pas, au sens propre du mot, au moment où je travaille [. . .]. Je ne pense pas que c’est une femme qui écrit’ [‘I do not exist in the strict sense of the word, in the moment when I am working [. . .]. I don’t think this is a woman writing’] (Qui êtes-vous?, p. ). As Sarraute sees it, if she were to write as a women it would mean picturing herself writing as a woman and posturing in a female role just like the narrator’s aunt or the young widow at the graveside. To gender her writing would be to lose everything that the body’s presence in the text is designed to guarantee: the truth of what she is representing, and the authenticity with which she is saying it.

   

Sexual indifference

‘Quand j’écris, je ne suis ni homme ni femme ni chien ni chat . . .’ [‘When I write I am neither man nor woman nor dog nor cat’] Nathalie Sarraute1

,              If Sarraute’s conception of the body succeeds in eliminating gender from the physiology of writing, it would seem that sexual difference nevertheless returns in the intersubjective relations that are portrayed in her work. However insistently she may assert that sexual differences do not count – either at the level of the tropism or at the level of writing – they repeatedly intrude both in the assumptions that characters make about each other, and in the assumptions that readers make about Sarraute. In short, it is the presence of the other which reintroduces gender onto the agenda of the novel. Sexual difference in Sarraute would seem, then, to be the result of social existence, and above all, of the fact that the subject is seen by her other (I say ‘she’ here, since gender is far more strongly marked in relation to women than to men). Social existence is mediated by the visual as much as it is by convention and stereotype. And when these two factors – the visual and the stereotypical – operate in tandem, the effects can turn out to be deadly for the Sarrautean subject. In exploring this intrusion of gender as a function of social relations and their visual currency, I shall begin with the example of photography. In  Nathalie Sarraute was described by an interviewer as not the sort of writer one would think of ‘photographing in her bath’,2 a comment which makes a brief allusion to her sex only to dismiss the topic from the more unworldly concerns of her writing. This was the era of the nouveau roman, and the most publicised photograph taken of Nathalie Sarraute in  was one which depicted her standing outside the Éditions de Minuit, flanked by Claude Ollier and Samuel Beckett, 

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and in the company of her fellow New Novelists, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Claude Mauriac, Robert Pinget, and their publisher Jérôme Lindon. To be a woman in this group of men may have been to be an exception to the rule of men, but it was one that went largely unremarked in those terms. It did, however, afford her some indulgence. One version of the photograph shows her standing with her ankles crossed, and another with her feet apart. According to Alain Robbe-Grillet Sarraute asked to have the original version of the photograph (where she is standing with her ankles crossed) altered to portray her with her feet apart. In his account of the event, Sarraute was on medication which had made her cheeks swell. Standing next to the gaunt figure of Samuel Beckett she had inadvertently crossed her legs in attempt to give herself a leaner look. In other words, her desire not to stand out from the crowd because of her appearance had prompted her to perform what is regarded as a typically female gesture (crossing her ankles) and she demanded the female privilege of having the photograph altered. It is tempting to assume that only Sarraute’s position as a woman could have allowed her this touch of vanity, even though the message sent by the (altered) photograph itself occludes any gendering of Sarraute’s status in the group.3 It was only in the late s and s when the nouveau roman was on the wane as a collective phenomenon, and écriture féminine was on the ascendant, that the issue of Nathalie Sarraute as a ‘woman writer’ emerged into the critical arena. And when it did, it was little less than anathema to Sarraute who, as we have seen, always resolutely ignores questions of sexual difference in writing: ‘C’est une grave erreur, surtout pour les femmes, que de parler d’écriture féminine ou masculine,’ she warns. ‘Il n’y a que des écritures tout court’ [‘It is a serious mistake, especially for women, to talk about women’s writing [écriture féminine] or men’s writing. There are just writings, period’].4 In attempting to understand the implications of this remark and the attitudes that lie behind it, we should perhaps begin by recognising the nature of Sarraute’s attitude towards feminism. First, although she regularly describes herself as a feminist, she has always asserted that these are political views which as such have no place in her literary writing.5 And second, the demand for equal recognition written into her rejection of écriture féminine could be seen as characteristic of a feminist politics which were bred in the s when the issue was not – as it has come to be since the s – the assertion of female difference, but equal suffrage, a cause which Sarraute herself actively campaigned in support of. (French women were not



The body and sexual difference

granted the vote until .) The daughter of a man who believed that women ‘avaient dans le cerveau quelque chose qui réduisait leur intelligence’ [‘had something in their brains which reduced their intelligence’],6 and acutely aware of the differences in the educational ambitions and opportunities for the boys as compared to the girls of her generation,7 Nathalie Sarraute would seem to have good reason to share the broad assumptions and egalitarian aspirations of Simone de Beauvoir, just eight years her junior. For women of this generation, feminism did not mean the demand for positive recognition of their difference, but, on the contrary, a crusade for acknowledgement of the sameness of the two sexes. Sarraute shares Beauvoir’s belief that ‘On ne naît pas femme: on le devient’ [‘One is not born a woman: one becomes a woman’],8 and, as we saw in the previous chapter, she regards femininity primarily as a social construct. Like Beauvoir too, she views work and its concomitant economic independence as the path to freedom for women. But most of all, Sarraute and Beauvoir concur in the conviction that the invention of womanhood alienates women from their status as human beings. In Beauvoir’s words: ‘Le fait d’être une femme pose aujourd’hui à un être humain des problèmes singuliers’ [‘The fact of being a woman currently poses peculiar problems for a human being’]. For men, by contrast, masculinity and humanity are virtually synonymous: Le privilège que l’homme détient et qui se fait sentir dès son enfance, c’est que sa vocation d’être humain, ne contrarie pas sa destinée de mâle. (p. ) [The advantage that man enjoys, which makes itself felt from his childhood, is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter to his destiny. (p. )]

Beauvoir is chiefly preoccupied with the resulting impossibility for women of reconciling work and erotic fulfilment. And although Sarraute eschews both the social and the sexual as topics of literary concern, her discussion of the perception of gender, particularly in the theatre, makes some very similar points to Beauvoir’s. For Sarraute, it is impossible to represent the human being as anything other than male. Women, she says, are incapable of appearing gender-‘neutral’, of coming across simply as a ‘human-being’. This, according to Sarraute, is because Elles sont toujours représentées, se représentent socialement, se veulent ellesmêmes – et cela joue un rôle énorme – différentes de l’homme. Elles ont cer-

Sexual indifference



taines habitudes, certaines manières d’être, une certaine voix, certaines intonations dont les trois-quarts, à mon avis, sont fabriquées, sont le fait de l’éducation. Il serait insupportable de faire jouer cette pièce [her own Pour un oui ou un non] par des femmes parce qu’on ne verrait plus l’être humain, on n’y verrait que des femmes qui se disputent. Il existe une certaine image de la femme, jusqu’à présent indéracinable, qui sera plaquée, projetée immédiatement sur ces deux êtres humains.9 [They are always represented as, represent themselves socially as, wish themselves to be – and that’s a large part of it – different from men. They have certain habits, certain ways, a certain voice, certain intonations, most of which, in my view, are invented and are the result of upbringing. It would be unbearable to have this play [her own Pour un oui ou pour un non] acted by women, because one wouldn’t be seeing human beings any more, one would just see women quarreling. There exists a certain image of woman, which up until now it’s been impossible to eradicate, which will immediately be imposed or projected onto these two human beings.]

It is no accident that Sarraute should make these comments in the context of the stage, for both she and Beauvoir share the Existentialist perception of the theatrical as a form of inauthenticity. In this view, the stage constitutes an arena for purely specular modes of being, so that a person on a stage can only appear as inauthentically acting up to temptations and demands that are mediated by the gaze of the spectators. This perspective powerfully affects the way both writers conceive of gender differenes which, as far as women are concerned, are the effect of the gaze of the other. For Sarraute and for Beauvoir, then, women are trapped in an inauthentically produced gender identity by virtue of the fact that they are the object of a gaze: that of men, each other’s, and their own as fantasised in the eyes of others. According to Beauvoir, women’s failure (as she sees it) in the world of work is due to the narcissism which is an inevitable by-product of their condition: unable to forget their own image in the eyes of others, women are incapable of losing themselves in absorption in their work, and are consequently doomed to mediocrity. Moreover – and more importantly for the woman writer – this debilitating self-awareness also undermines the work of women who choose to be artists and writers: C’est ainsi que, sur la légion de femmes qui s’essaient à taquiner les lettres et les arts, il en est bien peu qui persévèrent; celles mêmes qui franchissent ce premier obstacle demeurent bien souvent partagées entre leur narcissisme et un complexe d’infériorité. Ne pas savoir s’oublier est un défaut qui pèsera sur elles plus lourdement que dans aucune autre carrière. (II, p. )



The body and sexual difference

[Thus, of the legion of women who toy with arts and letters, very few persevere; and even those who pass this first obstacle will very often continue to be torn between their narcissism and an inferiority complex. Inability to forget themselves is a defect that will weigh more heavily upon them than upon women in any other career. (p. )]

This debilitating narcissism is the result of the fact that women internalise a spurious gender difference produced by the specular gaze. Sarraute’s very similar sense of women’s entrapment in a male gaze stems – in her opinion – both from the way that that gaze imposes a certain image upon them (as in the case of actresses on the stage), and also from the tendency that she ascribes to some of her female characters to play up to the image that men have of them as women: instances where ‘la femme joue un rôle de femme’ [‘a woman acts the role of a woman’] (Qui êtes-vous?, p. ). (I shall come back to this later.) However, Sarraute differs crucially from Beauvoir on two scores. First, where Beauvoir devotes herself to exploring these problems as they figure in the lives of women, Nathalie Sarraute refuses to acknowledge a separate sphere for women’s experience. And second, she maintains an unshakeable conviction that the absorption and forgetting of self which in Beauvoir’s view are denied to the woman writer, are, on the contrary, given in the very activity of writing.10 For Sarraute, to write one has simply to close one’s eyes to the possibility of being seen. ‘Je ne me vois pas’ [‘I do not see myself ’] she says repeatedly to Simone Benmussa in the course of their published conversations. Thanks to her supposed inability to conceive of herself as someone seen, Sarraute claims that she is able – even on the quasi-theatrical lecturer’s podium – to find the freedom that Beauvoir believes still to be unavailable to women: moi, j’ai l’impression, que là où je suis, il y a comme une place vide. Je ne peux jamais imaginer que, quand je quitte des gens, ils parlent de moi. Cela me donne beaucoup de liberté. Quand je fais une conférence devant des étudiants, je suis toujours très libre parce que je n’existe pas. Des mots sortent de moi, vont vers eux, ils seront accueillis puisque ce sont des mots porteurs de quelque chose qui semble sincère et juste. Mais comment les étudiants me voient? Cela ne m’effleure pas. (Qui êtes-vous?, p. ) [I have the impression that where I am there is like an empty seat. I can never imagine that when I leave people, they talk about me. This gives me a great deal of freedom. When I’m lecturing in front of students, I am always very free because I don’t exist. Words come out of me and go towards them, and those words will get through because they are bearers of something which seems

Sexual indifference



sincere and true. But as to how the students see me? The idea never crosses my mind.]

Writing constitutes an extreme version of this scenario of invisibility and absorption: je suis à un tel point, dans ce que je fais que je n’existe pas. Je ne pense pas que c’est une femme qui écrit. Cette chose-là, ce que je travaille, est en train de se passer quelque part où le sexe féminin ou masculin n’intervient pas. (pp. –) [I am so involved in what I am doing that I don’t exist. I don’t think that it’s a woman who is writing. The thing which I’m working on is happening somewhere where the female or the male sex aren’t relevant.]

Sarraute seems implicitly to be contradicting Beauvoir’s pessimism about women’s writing by claiming that the activity of writing can and does, of itself, confer upon women the condition of invisibility and its consequent gender-neutrality so often denied to her characters. The woman writer finds exemption from the ‘ineradicable image of woman’ which in the real world is inevitably projected onto real women, because – it would seem – writing automatically equips the writer with the ‘cap which makes one invisible’ from fairytales which one of the characters in «disent les imbéciles» briefly finds himself wearing (DLI, p.  [p. ]).11 Unlike the women who step into the visible arena of the stage or into the frame of the photographic lens), and have to acquiesce to the image of woman projected onto them (by men and women alike), the woman who sits down at her desk to write can simply vanish from sight. And as she disappears from view she begins to acquire the status of ‘human being’ that is the birthright of men, be they actors, writers or anything else. In a word, then, writing appears as the place where the false differences produced by the effects of social interaction can be erased.         However, in the world of Sarraute’s novels, everything is a matter of negotiating gazes, with characters constantly subjecting each other to the acutest scrutiny. This raises questions about what, ultimately, could guarantee invisibility and its consequent immunity from the image projected by the gaze of the other. «disent les imbéciles» explores more thoroughly than any other of Sarraute’s novels the experience of this gaze, as subjects who feel themselves to be ‘à lui seul l’univers entier’, ‘infini, sans contours’ [‘a universe of their own’, ‘infinite, and without boundaries’], are nevertheless viewed by others precisely as ‘characters’: ‘un



The body and sexual difference

personnage qu’on lui impose ou qu’il impose’ [‘a character which is imposed upon him or which he imposes himself ’].12 It is important to understand the logic of this dilemma before trying to establish how – or indeed whether – the writer might really succeed in escaping it. The gaze in Sarraute’s fiction is almost always a vehicle for the construction of stereotypes; and gender differences are common currency in the repertoire of these stereotypes. As the multiple subjects in Tu ne t’aimes pas put it: – [. . .] Les mieux doués, les plus précoces se voient déjà eux-mêmes tels que tout le monde les voit: en bébés . . . puis en petits garçons, en fillettes, en garçons manqués . . . – Une fois qu’ils ont pris ce pli de se sentir tels qu’on les voit, ils le gardent toujours . . . à chaque étape de leur vie, ils se sentent être des femmes, des hommes ... – Et rien que cela. De ‘vraies’ femmes, de ‘vrais’ hommes . . . le plus conformes possible aux modèles . . . – Oui ‘vrais’ jusque dans leurs moindres gestes, dans leur voix, leurs intonations ... – Et dans leurs passions, leurs affections . . . (TNTP, pp. –) [‘The most gifted among them, the most precocious ones, already see themselves as everyone else sees them: as babies . . . then as little boys, as little girls, tomboys . . .’ ‘Once they’ve got the habit of feeling themselves to be the way they are seen, they keep it for ever . . . at every stage in their lives they feel they are women, men . . .’ ‘And nothing more. “Real” women, “real” men . . . as similar as possible to the models . . .’ ‘Yes, “real”, even down to their slightest gestures, voices, their intonation . . .’ ‘And to their passions, their attachments . . .’ (p. )]

The gender-producing gaze of the other determines every aspect of the susceptible individual, from identity, to mannerisms and emotional disposition in a way that makes of these individuals either men or women – or even proto-feminists (‘des garçons manqués’). «disent les imbéciles» opens with the highly gendered image of a fairytale grandmother who is constituted primarily as a visual object: ‘Une chose. [. . .] Un objet, posé là devant nous, étalé, offert’ (DLI, p. ) [‘A thing. [. . .] An object, set there before us, on display, on offer . . .’ (p. )], a magnet for the fascinated gaze of her grandchildren: ‘nous ne pouvions pas détacher nos yeux de son doux visage fané’ (p. ) [‘we couldn’t take our eyes off her

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sweet faded face’ (p. )]. Furthermore, gathered around this visual focus, the children are conscious of composing a visual scene themselves, ‘un tableau de famille charmant’ (p. ) [‘a charming family picture’ (p. )]. It is not just social images (fairytale grandmothers, happy families) that are produced by and for visual appreciation. Social consensus is clinched by gazes: that is to say, both by an appeal to visual evidence, and by an exchange of glances that seals complicity, as the following passage suggests: – Mais pas du tout, nous ne sommes pas empoisonnés, c’est vous qui l’êtes, mon pauvre, vous avez été influencé, vous vous êtes laissé imprégner . . . cela saute aux yeux. Ils se consultent du regard, ils opinent de la tête . . . Je suis du même avis . . . Oui, moi aussi . . . (p. , my emphasis) [– That’s not so, we aren’t poisoned, you’re the one, my poor fellow, it’s you who have allowed yourself to be permeated by it . . . it’s plain to see. They glance at each other, they nod in assent . . . – I agree with you . . . Yes, so do I. (p. )]

The gaze of the complicitous crowd creates its own evidence which the individual who is its object is powerless to resist. A child is told he has a ‘menton en galoche’ [a prominent chin] and feels his chin actually growing under the pressure of the gaze of the group who has made the assertion: Sur cette tête dont il est affublé maintenant, sur ce visage qu’il a et qui s’étale, comme leurs visages, sous tous les yeux, ça s’avance, ça s’allonge, un menton auquel le mot ‘galoche’ est venu se coller. (p. ) [On that head that he’s now rigged up in, on that face of his, which is exposed to view, like their faces, as everybody looks on, it’s advancing, lengthening, a chin to which the word ‘galosh’ has attached itself. (p. )]

This particular character undergoes the experience of characterisation as helpless victim of the views (in all senses of the word) of others, unable to make himself invisible to the eyes of the world. There are, however, characters who revel in the look of the other, and the results are often strongly marked by gender. A character who is variously described by others as ‘un poseur’, a would-be genius, lives his (implicitly male) role to the hilt: imbu de lui-même [. . .]. Imbu. Empli jusqu’aux bords de lui-même. Ne pouvant se quitter. Fasciné par l’image de lui-même qu’il projette. Occupé par elle avant tout. Apportant à elle d’abord ses soins. (p. )



The body and sexual difference

[full of his own importance. [. . .] Full. Brimming over with himself. Unable to leave himself. Fascinated by the image of himself that he projects. Preoccupied with that more than anything else. Caring first for that. (p. )]

Women are even more prone than men to this form of fascination with their image, and are frequently depicted as being both more susceptible to the gaze of the other and more in need of the consecration that it brings: Elle a besoin de se montrer, de se répandre . . . et il le comprend, il faut qu’elle sorte, qu’elle s’aère, qu’elle se retrempe, qu’elle se fasse admirer, consacrer . . . (p. )13 [She needs to be seen, to spread herself around . . . and he understands this, she must go out, take the air, acquire new strength, be admired, sanctioned . . . (p. )]

Both male and female (in their varying degrees) in Sarraute’s universe are created primarily by the specular gaze of the subject before his mirror or by that of the admiring crowd. The gaze of the other is, nevertheless, always treacherous, even for those who appear to thrive on it. For most, it is experienced as cruel imposition (like the boy with the ‘menton en galoche’), or as a spotlight that brutally exposes the subject to view. More particularly, the character who feels he is protected by a cloak – or cap – of invisibility is apt to find himself caught in the beam of the gaze of others in ways that he is powerless to control: il a le plus souvent la rassurante impression de circuler parmi eux comme ce personnage de conte de fées coiffé du bonnet qui rend invisible. Et tout à coup, ces réveils brutaux . . . Que s’est-il passé? Son bonnet protecteur a été arraché . . . Le voici exposé . . . Il écarquille les yeux . . . (p. ) [more often than not he has the reassuring impression of moving among them like the fairy-tale figure who wears a cap that makes him invisible. And all at once these brutal awakenings . . . What’s happened? His protective cap has been snatched away . . . There he is, exposed . . . His eyes widen with alarm . . . (p. )]

He is forced to concede a likeness in the photograph of himself that the group confronts him with, until they eventually turn away and he is restored to his previous condition of invisibility, ‘comme si à la place de son corps, de son visage, il y avait un vide que leurs regards traversent’ (p. ) [‘as though in place of his body, of his face, there were an empty space which their glances pass through’ (p. )]. The blank which the character in question regards as his natural state

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has an obvious resemblance to the cloak of invisibility which Sarraute lays claim to in her own case and which supposedly protects her writing from the gender-producing gaze of the other. This similarity points to the possibility that the barrier which, according to Sarraute, separates a woman’s writing from her fate in the social exchanges of the real world, may not after all be absolute. And indeed, she is perhaps nowhere more harsh in her treatment of ‘the woman who acts the role of a woman’ than in her depiction of the woman writer, Germaine Lemaire in Le Planétarium.        There are two women writers who figure in Sarraute’s œuvre, Germaine Lemaire in Le Planétarium and her own mother in Enfance, and both are represented in relation to the visual. Sarraute has also spoken of her writer-mother in interviews, where she reports that her mother wrote under a male pseudonym, N. Vikhrovski, a cover which was apparently never broken.14 But Sarraute’s depiction of her mother in Enfance reveals a woman who, far from living under a cloak of invisibility, is the centre of a huge amount of visual attention. Like the grandmother in «disent les imbéciles» she is ‘delicious to look at’. Apparently carelessly indifferent to mirrors, she nevertheless successfully magnetises the gaze of others: Je la trouvais souvent délicieuse à regarder et il me semblait qu’elle l’était aussi pour beaucoup d’autres, je le voyais parfois dans les yeux des passants, des marchands, des amis, et, bien sûr, de Kolia. (E, p. ) [I thought she was often delicious to look at, and it seemed to me that that was how she was for many others as well, I could see it in the eyes of passers-by, of tradesmen, of friends, and, of course, of Kolya. (p. )]15

The mother’s writing is also a visual and very public affair: when writing she did not closet herself away in private, but could be seen sitting and covering page after page with words which are described in terms of their visual rather than their communicative impact: ce qui me revient, c’est cette impression que plus qu’à moi c’est à quelqu’un d’autre qu’elle raconte . . . sans doute un de ces contes pour enfants qu’elle écrit à la maison sur de grandes pages couvertes de sa grosse écriture où les lettres ne sont pas reliées entre elles . . . (p. ) [what comes back to me is the impression that, rather than to me, it’s to someone else that she’s recounting . . . no doubt one of the children’s stories that she writes at home on big pages, covered in her large handwriting with its disconnected letters . . . (p. )]

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The body and sexual difference

This is the reverse of the model of communication that Sarraute uses to describe what happens when she lectures to students: an empty space where she is, and words which are powerfully directed at their addressees in the audience. Sarraute’s mother exercises a compelling charm (‘au sens propre du mot elle me charmait’, p.  [‘in the literal sense of the word, she charmed me’] (p. )]), whereas Sarraute seeks to ‘establish contact’. Moreover, there is a certain gendering of the literary genres that Sarraute’s mother espouses: ‘des romans-fleuves, des contes pour enfants et des nouvelles’ [‘romans-fleuves, children’s stories and novellas’].16 Sarraute’s own attempt to write like her mother (in the story of the Georgian Princess that she writes as a child) is portrayed in Enfance as a dangerous brush with the inauthentic, and provides a glimpse of the kind of literature that Sarraute ascribes to her mother. It is one that bears a striking similarity to the style of writing that Beauvoir claims to be peculiarly characteristic of women. According to Beauvoir, women’s desire to please and to be accepted in the world of men, condemns them to a fatal caution in literary matters: La femme est encore étonnée et flattée d’être admise dans le monde de la pensée, de l’art, qui est un monde masculin: elle s’y tient bien sage; elle n’ose pas déranger, explorer, exploser; il lui semble qu’elle doit se faire pardonner ses prétentions littéraires par sa modestie, son bon goût; elle mise sur des valeurs sûres du conformisme; elle introduit dans sa littérature tout juste cette note personnelle qu’on attend d’elle: elle rappelle qu’elle est femme par quelques grâces, minauderies et préciosités; ainsi excellera-t-elle à rédiger des ‘best-sellers’; mais il ne faut pas compter sur elle pour s’aventurer sur des chemins inédits. (Deuxième sexe, , p. ) [A woman is still astonished and flattered at being admitted to the world of thought, of art – a masculine world. She is on her best behaviour in it; she is afraid to disrupt things, investigate, cause explosions; she feels she should seek pardon for her literary pretensions through her modesty and good taste. She relies on the sure values of conformity; she gives literature precisely that personal tone which is expected of her, reminding us that she is a woman by a few well-chosen affectations and preciosities. All this helps her to excel in the production of best-sellers; but we must not look to her for adventuring along unexplored paths. (p. )]

With her masculine pseudonym Sarraute’s mother may have been in a position to avoid the obligatory gestures of ingratiation typical – according to Beauvoir – of most women writers. But – at least, as portrayed by her daughter – she nonetheless seeks to guarantee her place in a man’s

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world through her literary conformism, her preference for best-selling genres and her refusal to take risks with experimental forms of writing. In short, despite its male signature, the writing of N. Vikhrovski bears the mark of female gender in its generic orthodoxy, and in its author’s heavy investment in a visual existence. Much of this also applies to Germaine Lemaire in Le Planétarium. Germaine Lemaire’s desire to be accepted in the masculine world of ‘art and thought’ takes the form of a particularly narcissistic demand for recognition. This recognition is invariably solicited from men who are invited to grant her rights of entry into their world in exchange for her self-presentation as a woman. Sarraute’s portrayal of Germaine Lemaire is highly critical and shows the fictional woman writer to be shameless in the way that she uses her feminine identity as the essential bargaining counter in her negotiations for membership of a world that belongs to men. Unlike Natacha’s mother, Germaine Lemaire has no male pseudonym to alleviate her femininity, and although she is described as having rather coarse features (‘des traits taillés à la serpe’, P, p.  [p. ]), the issue on Alain Guimier’s mind when he visits her for the first time is her beauty rather than her literary talent: ‘Elle est belle, “Germaine Lemaire est belle”, ils ont raison, c’est évident’ (p. ) [‘She’s beautiful. “Germaine Lemaire is beautiful,” they’re right, it’s obvious’ (p. )]. Natacha’s mother may have had a better claim to this epithet than Germaine Lemaire, but the issue is as central for her in Enfance as it seems to be for Germaine Lemaire in Le Planétarium, and as we saw in Chapter , she expresses it in the form of an explicit demand: ‘“Un enfant qui aime sa mère trouve que personne n’est plus beau qu’elle”’ (E, p. ) [‘A child who loves its mother thinks that no one is more beautiful than she’ (p. )]. Germaine Lemaire’s demand is not articulated in so many words but it is just as powerful – as the testimony of those who encounter her reveals. Alain comes away from his first visit with the sense that Germaine Lemaire’s reputation – beauty and all – is the effect of the response she exacts from those around her: ça ne se fait pas tout seul, la gloire, la réputation . . . il y a comme une faim inassouvie, un besoin d’adulation . . . on ne lui donne jamais assez . . . elle surveille, elle mesure, elle doit remettre les gens à leur place au moindre manquement . . . (P, p. ) [it doesn’t just come all by itself, fame, a reputation . . . there’s a sort of unsated hunger, a need for adulation . . . you can never give her enough . . . she keeps a check, she takes people’s measure, she has to put them in their place at the slightest lapse . . . (p. )]



The body and sexual difference

And a fellow member of the coterie tells Alain: ‘elle sait combien vous l’admirez . . . Et c’est ça qui compte pour elle par-dessus tout. [. . .] Pour Maine, voyez-vous, les gens c’est des miroirs. C’est des repoussoirs. Elle s’en moque, au fond, des gens . . .’ (p. –) [‘she knows how much you admire her . . . And that’s what matters to her above all else. [. . .] You see, for Maine, people are mirrors. They’re foils. In reality she doesn’t care a rap about people . . .’ (p. )]

This use of people as mirrors and sources of adulation would seem to be a cruder version of the response that Maman elicited from shopkeepers, passers-by and her devoted husband in whose eyes Natacha regularly saw the image of her mother produced by their admiration. But Germaine Lemaire discovers that she cannot exercise complete control over the production of her image in the eyes of others. And, as we saw in the discussion of the body in the last chapter, her encounter with Alain’s father – a man who is deeply sceptical about his son’s literary pretensions – leaves her feeling stripped by the older man’s gaze, not only of the adulation which she craves, but of the highly gendered ‘feminine charm’ which the adoring look of her admirers normally guarantees. She is even inhibited from performing the one gesture that Natacha’s mother allowed herself a mirror for, namely to push back a stray lock of hair that had escaped from her chignon: quelques mèches tristes, elle le savait, pendaient dans son cou, elle n’avait pas osé lever la main pour les rentrer sous son chapeau. (p. ) [a few forlorn locks, she was aware of them, hung down the back of her neck, she hadn’t dared lift her hand to push them up under her hat. (pp. –)]17

The most damning element of Sarraute’s critique of Germaine Lemaire’s dependency on the gaze of others is in the disastrous effects it has on her writing. The thought is first tentatively voiced by Alain to his friend in the Lemaire coterie: ‘Mais si elle est comme ça, comme vous dites, si centrée sur elle-même . . . estce que pour un écrivain? . . . [. . .] Franchement, est-ce que ce n’est pas un défaut qui peut être assez grave . . . Un manque . . .’ (p. ) [‘But if she’s like that, as you say, so self-centred . . . for a writer isn’t it . . .? [. . .] To put it frankly, isn’t it a failing which could be rather serious . . . A real shortcoming . . .’ (p. )]

The friend refuses to hear these doubts, but confirmation of Alain’s suspicions is brought in the chapter that follows immediately after this conversation. In it Germaine Lemaire finds herself burdened with the

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ambivalent accolade of ‘our Madame Tussaud’, and finally confronts the fact that the products of her creative efforts are dead: ‘Pas un souffle de vie en elles. C’est en elles que tout est mort. Mort, mort, mort . . .’ (p. ) [‘Not a breath of life in it. It’s there that everything is dead. Dead, dead, dead . . .’ (p. )]. The feminine demand for admiration and consecration proves to be incompatible with authentic, living writing. Sarraute’s depiction of women writers in her work would seem, then, to suggest, that nothing automatically exempts them as writers from the dynamic that operates between the other characters in her world, nothing that guarantees immunity from sexual difference. And moreover, participating in this dynamic proves to have ruinous effects on the creativity of these writers. Everything turns on the degree of investment in the visual; for it is the presence of a gaze which generates the paranoia and the narcissism that go with social relations – and so brings gender into being. The only way to close the breach in which social and gender differences emerge is to close the gap between people. For in Sarraute, as we have repeatedly seen, it is distance that separates person from person, producing the alienating effects that turn characters into differentiated ‘characters’ and destroying the creative efforts of the writer.          It is not enough, then, for Sarraute to assume that in writing she can escape social and gendered existence simply by believing – like the character in «disent les imbéciles» – in her own invisibility, since nothing automatically guarantees writing this immunity. The solution would seem to lie in breaking down the distance in which visual relations flourish, and in creating a relation based on contact rather than sight. There are a great many ways in which Sarraute seeks to create intimacy of contact, but there is one in particular that I should like to explore here in more detail: identification. It is axiomatic in Sarraute that the inner world of the tropism is a universal phenomenon, and it is on this basis that identification becomes possible. Alain Guimier articulates the principle with reference to his aunt, Tante Berthe, when she is dismissively characterised by another character as ‘une maniaque, voilà tout’ (P, p. ) [‘A crank, and that’s all there is to it’ (p. )]. Alain responds by claiming an identification where his interlocutor sees only difference: ‘je ne parviens pas à croire à une différence fondamentale entre les gens . . . [. . .] Je me sens aussitôt comme eux, dès que j’ôte ma carapace, le petit vernis . . .’ (p. )



The body and sexual difference

[‘I can’t make myself believe that there is a fundamental difference between people . . . [. . .] Right away I feel that I’m like them, as soon as I remove my carapace, this thin varnish . . .’ (p. )]

‘Feeling like’ others is the motive force that drives Nathalie Sarraute’s entire literary enterprise: at the level of the tropism we all supposedly feel the same; the reader is persuaded of this truth by being made to feel like the characters; and finally, Sarraute herself claims her prerogative as author on the basis of her ability, similarly, to feel like her characters. In one sense, gender is made irrelevant by this pervasive identification: Alain Guimier identifies with his old aunt, and readers identify with characters regardless of their sex. As Sarraute proudly records in an interview with Isabelle Huppert: Quand Le Planétarium est sorti, j’ai été interviewée par un jeune homme qui m’a dit: ‘Ah! Mais la Tante Berthe c’est moi, je viens de me marier, je me relève la nuit pour regarder les poignées de porte . . .’ Ça m’a fait un plaisir!18 [When The Planetarium came out, I was interviewed by a young man who said to me: ‘Oh! Tante Berthe is me. I’ve just got married and I get up in the night to look at the door-handles . . .’ I was so pleased!]

But in her conversations with Simone Benmussa, Sarraute comments on the process of identification in a way that suggests that gender is not totally irrelevant to it. Her remarks about women on the stage are based on her view that gender (at least in women) constitutes an obstacle to identification. And she also suggests that if, in her work, she represents men as relatively gender-neutral, this is in part the result of the demasculinising effect of her own identification with them: C’est très curieux mais, quand je construis mes personnages, je ne vois pas de conduite spécifiquement masculine . . . Si, je sais pourquoi . . . c’est que, probablement, j’établis comme un contre-poids qui agit en sorte que cette conduite ne me paraît jamais typiquement virile puisqu’elle est aussi ma propre conduite. Elle devient neutre par le fait que j’y participe moi-même et, d’un coup, je la neutralise. (Qui êtes-vous?, p. ) [It’s very strange, but when I construct my characters, I don’t visualise any specifically masculine behaviour . . . Actually, I know why it is . . . it’s probably because I set up a sort of counterweight whose effects mean that this behaviour never seems to me to be characteristically virile because it’s also my own behaviour. It becomes neuter by virtue of the fact that I participate in it, and at a stroke, I neutralise it.]

It is certainly true that the central figures in the first three novels (the narrators of Portrait d’un inconnu and Martereau, and Alain Guimier in Le

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Planétarium) whose function is to provide testimony to the existence of the tropism, are all lacking in conventional masculine qualities. The middleaged male narrator of Portrait d’un inconnu pales in terms of virility alongside the bluff masculinity exhibited by Le Vieux or the solidly masculine virtues of the daughter’s future husband, Dumontet. Similarly, in Martereau, the narrator’s uncle presents himself to the world as a man toughened by the world’s knocks, and has little patience for what he regards as the airy-fairy sensibilities of his nephew. And Alain Guimier is clearly viewed by his mother-in-law as failing to conform to the masculine role she requires for her daughter’s husband: insufficiently serious, lacking in foresight, apparently uninterested in a proper career, ‘il est bizarre pour certaines choses, il n’est pas comme les autres garçons de son âge’ (P, p. ) [‘he’s queer about certain things, he’s not like other young men of his age’ (p. )]. The tropisms which are Sarraute’s quarry are most palpably present in men whose masculinity is least in evidence. Yet both tropisms and the creative enterprise that depicts them are invariably sanctioned by men, not women. If it is a man in the form of the ‘specialist’ who comes closest to putting an end to the narrator’s attempt to confirm the inner reality he senses in Le Vieux and his daughter in Portrait d’un inconnu, it is nevertheless another man, in the form of the ‘Portrait of a Man Unknown’ in the gallery in Holland, who provides the narrator with the conviction that the inner life exists and so frees him from the specialist’s embargo. This is brought about through an experience of identification that breaks down the distance between the narrator and the painted subject; what counts is not what the Unknown Man in the portrait looks like, but what he makes the narrator feel like: Et petit à petit, je sentais comme en moi une note timide, un son d’autrefois, presque oublié, s’élevait, hésitant d’abord. Et il me semblait, tandis que je restais là devant lui, perdu, fondu en lui, que cette note hésitante et grêle, cette réponse timide qu’il avait fait sourdre en moi, pénétrait en lui, résonnait en lui, il la recueillait, il la renvoyait, fortifiée, grossie par lui comme par un amplificateur, elle montait de moi, de lui, s’élevait de plus en plus fort, un chant gonflé d’espoir qui me soulevait, m’emportait . . . (PI, p. )19 [And little by little, I became aware that a timid note, an almost forgotten strain from long ago, had sounded within me, at first hesitantly. And it seemed to me, as I stood there before him, dissolved in him, that this faltering, frail note, this timid response he had awakened in me, penetrated him and reverberated inside him, that he seized it and gave it back to me increased and magnified as though by an amplifier; it began to rise from me and from him, louder and louder, a song filled with hope that lifted me up and bore me along . . . p. )]

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The body and sexual difference

Moreover, this is a somewhat bizarre form of identification since it reverses the usual direction of identification in art where the reader or spectator identifies with the represented character.20 The reciprocity of the intersubjective relation between the painting and the narrator which we noted in Chapter , is pushed to a point where, curiously, it is the painted subject who seems to end up feeling like the narrator: it is he who returns the narrator’s intuitions to him in magnified and amplified confirmation of them, rather than vice versa. This scene takes place within Sarraute’s fiction, but there are important ways in which Sarraute stages her own literary enterprise within a context that is validated by men. On a personal level, she claims that it was her husband who encouraged her to write. When she began Tropismes in , ‘il a immédiatement compris ce que je voulais faire’ [‘he understood immediately what I was trying to do’]. Moreover, his responses as a reader of her work are invoked by her as a guarantee of its validity. Sarraute read everything she wrote to her husband Raymond Sarraute, and when she did so ‘je sentais sur le champ ce qui allait ou n’allait pas’, because, ‘Au moment où je le lui lisais, nous avions les mêmes réactions’ [‘I would know at once what worked and what didn’t,’ ‘As I read to him, we would have the same responses’]. When Raymond Sarraute died in , Sarraute found herself for the first time without someone she could read her work to ‘and who would react like me’ (Qui êtes-vous?, pp. –, my emphasis). Raymond Sarraute is presented here as someone who spontaneously identifies with the content and the aims of his wife’s literary project. From a less personal and more literary-historical perspective, Sarraute also seeks to validate her work through a series of male identifications. In the preface to L’Ère du soupçon she speaks of a need she feels to understand her place in the evolution of the novel by examining the works of other writers, ‘pour découvrir à travers elles un mouvement irrésistible de la littérature et voir si mes tentatives s’inscrivaient dans ce mouvement’ (ES, p. ) [‘in an effort to discover an irreversible direction in literature that would permit me to see if my own quest was in line with this direction’ (p. )]. In one sense it is hardly surprising if almost all the examples she chooses are the works of men, since the canonical texts of both French and Russian literature (her main points of reference) contain few examples of women writers. But Sarraute is doing more than map a field or write a history, and her own writing is presented as having a particular form of relation to precursor texts that is almost always grounded in a form of projective identification which turns her

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own texts into continuations of the work of male precursors who anticipate her insights. The prime example of this is Dostoevsky, whose Brothers Karamazov is not so much analysed as rewritten by Sarraute in her essay ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’. In Sarraute’s rendering, his characters become rather like the Unknown Man in the portrait, agents of ‘a timid appeal’, and incarnations of ‘une manière de se montrer tout proche, accessible, désarmé, ouvert, offert, tout livré, tout abandonné à la compréhension, la générosité d’autrui’ (p. ) [‘a way of showing that they are quite near, accessible, disarmed, open, acquiescent, in complete surrender, completely abandoned to the understanding, the generosity of the other’ (p. )]. She concludes her discussion of Dostoevsky by claiming that behind the apparent variations of characters and temperaments in his work, it is possible to discern ‘a sort of new unanimism’ – an assertion which inscribes her ‘tropisms’ within the work of her precursor, and presents her own as a continuation of it. There is a similar – if in some senses more daring – move in relation to Tolstoy in Portrait d’un inconnu. Tolstoy offers less propitious material than Dostoevsky for the sort of vision that Sarraute is seeking to present as part of a continuous evolution. Indeed, in an article in Les Lettres françaises, she contrasts the two Russian writers, to the detriment of Tolstoy whom she dismissively characterises as the novelist of socially consecrated appearances.21 But here, in her first novel, she wrests a tender concession to her own perception of things out of the curmudgeonly Prince Bolkonsky, as she interprets his whispered ‘drouzhok’ or ‘douchenka’ to his daughter on his deathbed as an implicit acknowledgement of the existence of [m]ille fils excessivement ténus, difficiles à déceler – encore ces tremblants et collants fils de la Vierge – [qui] devaient à chaque instant partir de la princesse Marie et se coller à lui, l’envelopper. (PI, p. )22 [a thousand extremely fine and barely discernible threads – again those trembling, sticky gossamer threads – [which] must have emanated continually from Princess Marie to cling to him, and eventually envelope him. (p. )]

These are precisely the ties that the narrator imagines bind the daughter to Le Vieux in Portrait d’un inconnu and are the stuff of the psychology of Sarraute’s tropisms. And it is perhaps no more fanciful than Sarraute’s own supposition about Prince Bolkonsky, to imagine that Tolstoy – just as curmudgeonly as his gruff Prince – is being made to concede that the writing of his honorary daughter is bringing to light the



The body and sexual difference

hidden psychological truths that lie behind the ‘hard, closed mask’ of his characters.23 Portrait d’un inconnu is also a rewriting of another novel by a man, Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, in so far as it is – at least at a superficial level – the story of a miser and his daughter. Furthermore, it was first published with a preface by Sartre which gave it yet another sort of male blessing, which all subsequent editions – including the Œuvres complètes in the Pléiade – have been careful to include.24 Sartre makes no explicit reference to Sarraute’s sex, and says nothing to suggest that there is anything characteristically feminine about the novel he is presenting to the public. Instead, he sets Sarraute’s work in a constellation of male references: Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, Gide, Roger Caillois, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Meredith, Rembrandt, Miro, Heidegger and so on. And he concludes by describing the book as ‘difficult and excellent’, terms which do not have ready feminine connotations. (Beauvoir in Le deuxième sexe published the following year, was, as we have seen, to suggest that women’s writing was more likely to be conventional and mediocre than difficult and excellent.) In these various ways, then, Sarraute can be seen to stage her entry as a novelist into the literary world under the sponsorship of men. References to women writers in her work are few and far between. The allusion to Katherine Mansfield is only fleeting; Mme de Lafayette is mentioned on a few occasions, but always in association with the male Benjamin Constant, and even then merely as an example of an outmoded tradition of psychological analysis. If Ivy Compton-Burnett is briefly alluded to as the author of novels based on dialogue, Sarraute distinguishes emphatically between her own use of the form and that of Compton-Burnett.25 Virginia Woolf is the only woman writer whom Sarraute quotes at any length (in her critical essay ‘Conversation et sousconversation’). And we have already seen (in Chapter ) that any suggestion that Sarraute and Woolf might resemble each other is met with assertions of radical differences between the two on Sarraute’s part.26 Sarraute’s response on this matter uses every means at her disposal to prevent readers and critics from assimilating the two women writers with each other, thus limiting the possibility of constructing Sarraute’s work as an example of women’s writing. Every mention by Sarraute of her mother’s writing similarly emphasises the difference between the two (‘elle écrivait à l’inverse de moi, avec une grande facilité et beaucoup de joie’ [‘in direct contrast to me, she wrote with great facility and much joy’]);27 and any allusion to Simone

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de Beauvoir always elicits the most oppositional response from Sarraute. She holds Beauvoir (and not Sartre) reponsible for the cuts imposed on her first critical essay, ‘Paul Valéry et l’Enfant d’Éléphant’ which appeared in Les Temps modernes in , and also for the same journal’s rejection of her essay ‘Conversation et sous-conversation’ in .28 And despite a brief friendship between the two women in the late s, there appears to have been little love lost between them: Beauvoir wrote a hostile account of Sarraute’s fiction in La Force des choses,29 and Sarraute’s views about Beauvoir have appeared in print under the title, ‘Nathalie Sarraute ne veut rien avoir de commun avec Simone de Beauvoir’ [‘Nathalie Sarraute does not want to have anything in common with Simone de Beauvoir’].30 For all the common cause one may discern between the two on the issue of gender, Sarraute is interested only in keeping a distance between herself and this other well-known, post-war woman writer of her generation. If Sarraute is to succeed in writing as a human being she can do so only in the company of men and not of women, creating identifications with male precursors, and receiving from men the baton in the relay race of literary evolution.31 But her aim is not to wear trousers à la George Sand, or to become one of the chaps (despite the appearances of the Éditions de Minuit group photograph). Sarraute does not so much want to be like a man, as to present herself as validated by men who are willing to admit that they are like her. Theatricality is perhaps ultimately an inescapable component of Sarraute’s enterprise, as she has recourse to this series of ‘stagings’ of an identification which nevertheless presupposes a non-specular form of relation. But by means of this dual manoeuvre – a staged invocation of a non-specular identification – Sarraute is seeking to solve the dilemma posed for the woman writer as she confronts the gender-producing gaze of the world. Like the narrator in Portrait d’un inconnu in front of the portrait of the Unknown Man, she projects her own voice into the work of her male precursors and, with the blessing of their identification, has them send her out into the world, delivered from the chain which binds her to her feminine condition, and exempted from the consequences of sexual difference.

    

Genre and difference

  

Criticism and ‘the terrible desire to establish contact’

       Unlike a number of her contemporaries, Nathalie Sarraute always seems happy to accept inherited generic distinctions. Rather than seek to challenge or blur generic categories in favour of some general, generically undifferentiated écriture (in the manner of Blanchot, Barthes or Sollers, for example),1 she concentrates her energies instead on redefining the concepts and assumptions contained within those divisions. Most particularly – by means both of her own fictional practice and of her critical essays – she makes herself the champion of a modernised conception of the novel. Where others (beginning with Sartre in his Preface to Portrait d’un inconnu) had recourse to the notion of the ‘antinovel’, Sarraute always insists that definitions of fiction may need to be rethought, but that they should certainly not be abolished. ‘[Portrait d’un inconnu] n’est pas un “anti-roman”, les autres non plus,’ she says in an interview in response to a question about Sartre’s use of the term ‘antiroman’. ‘[Sartre] avait une idée préconçue de ce que devait être une forme romanesque, alors qu’il s’agit seulement de faire bouger cette forme. J’écris des romans modernes, c’est tout’ [‘[Portrait d’un inconnu] is not an “anti-novel”, nor are the others. [. . .] [Sartre] had a preconceived idea about what fictional form should consist of, whereas the point is simply to move this form on. I write modern novels, that’s all’].2 Central to Sarraute’s thinking on this subject is the idea that the novel is an inherently evolutionary genre, and that signs of change in its form are symptoms of its overall health rather than portents of its imminent demise. She opens her essay ‘L’ère du soupçon’ with a sideswipe at critics who in the name of eternal values insist on imprisoning the novel within an anachronistic and immutable conception of the genre: ‘Les critiques ont beau préférer, en bons pédagogues, faire semblant de ne rien remarquer, et par contre ne jamais manquer une occasion de proclamer sur le ton qui sied aux vérités premières, que le 

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Genre and difference

roman, que je sache, est et restera toujours, avant tout, “une histoire où l’on voit agir et vivre des personnages”’ (‘L’ère’, p. ) [‘It’s all very well for critics to prefer, like good pedagogues, to appear not to notice anything, and on the contrary, never to miss an opportunity to proclaim, as though they were announcing fundamental truths, that the novel, unless they are very much mistaken, is and will always remain, first and foremost “a story where you see characters living and doing things”’ (p. )]. They can whistle, says Sarraute: ‘it is of no avail’. These good pedagogical assertions are powerless in the face of evolutionary forces; character (the point at issue here) is no longer, and can no longer be, what it was in the time of Balzac. Things move on, and fictional forms change. Nevertheless, Sarraute’s confidence that the boundaries surrounding fiction remain fixed while their content evolves, is in its own way grounded in as essentialist a view of the novel as the one she denounces here. If the novel is an inherently evolutionary genre, she implies that at the same time it is constantly evolving towards an ever purer version of itself. It was Gide who first spoke of ‘le roman pur’ in Les Faux-monnayeurs and Sarraute seems to share his view that all its developments take it ever closer to its own essence: Si l’on envisage ce mouvement dans son ensemble, si l’on considère ses formes récentes, il semble qu’il consiste, dans le roman, comme dans tous les autres arts, à dégager la sensation pure, à conserver un contact direct avec la réalité d’où elle jaillit, en éliminant les formes lourdes, sclérosées qui l’écrasent. Ainsi l’élément sensible se dégage, toujours plus réduit à lui-même. (‘Forme et contenu du roman’, p. ) [If one envisages this development as a whole, if one considers its recent forms, it would seem that it consists, in the novel, as in all the other arts, in isolating pure sensations, in maintaining a direct contact with the reality from which they spring, by eliminating the leaden, ossified forms which crush them. In this way the palpable element emerges, always further reduced down to itself.]

And in connection with this view Sarraute also frequently describes the novel as being in need of some sort of promotion that will rescue it from its Cinderella status in relation to the other arts, or of some encouragement that will enable this ‘art plus retardataire que les autres’ to catch up with parallel developments in the plastic arts for example.3 For Sarraute it would seem that the arts develop in broad parallel, each progressing towards an ever purer version of its own par-

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ticular essence, so that the development she describes in the novel in ‘Forme et contenu du roman’ has its counterparts in other arts and other literary genres: Ainsi la musique s’est débarrassé du sentiment et de la mélodie pour dégager le son pur. Ainsi la peinture dite ‘abstraite’ s’attache à fixer l’attention du spectateur sur le seul élément pictural. Ainsi la poésie se débarrasse de la rhétorique et de la rime. (p. ) [Thus music has got rid of feeling and melody in order to allow pure sound to emerge. Thus so-called ‘abstract’ painting endeavours to fix the viewer’s attention on the painterly element alone. Thus poetry is getting rid of rhetoric and rhyme.]

All this underscores the point that in Sarraute’s view, generic boundaries are not there to be challenged, but constantly reaffirmed in relation to contemporary critera. On the question of genre, then, she subscribes neither to the abolitionists, nor, at the other end of the scale, does she display any signs of the panic concerning difference that discussions of genre can so often produce.4 Sarraute is known primarily as a novelist, and her ventures into criticism and the theatre tend to be regarded as just that: temporary diversions from a central preoccupation with fiction, which far from undermining its distinctiveness, reinforce it by virtue of the difference of their own generic status. Her move into theatre, for example, is presented by her as something much more thorough-going and radical than a mere dramatised adaptation of her fictional practices. Rather than simply transpose her fictional dialogues into a theatrical medium, she finds a way of turning the whole notion of dialogue upsidedown to meet the specific generic demands of the theatre: Ce qui dans mes romans aurait constitué l’action dramatique de la sous-conversation, du pré-dialogue, où les sensations, les impressions, le ‘ressenti’ sont communiqués au lecteur à l’aide d’images et de rythmes, ici se déployait dans le dialogue lui-même. La sous-conversation devenait la conversation. Ainsi le dedans devenait le dehors et un critique, plus tard, a pu à juste titre, pour qualifier ce passage du roman à la pièce, parler de ‘gant retourné.’5 [What in my novels would have been the substance of the dramatic action of the sous-conversation, of the pre-dialogue, where sensations, impressions and felt response are communicated to the reader by means of images and rhythm, are manifest here in the dialogue itself. The sous-conversation became the

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Genre and difference

conversation. In this way the inside became the outside, and in order to characterise this movement from the novel to the play, a critic subsequently, and quite rightly, spoke of a ‘glove turned inside out’.]

Her plays may be a continuation of her novels (as she says in an interview of the same title),6 but they achieve this by distinctly different generic means. The same is broadly true of her critical essays which, Sarraute is at pains to point out, are a quite distinct kind of enterprise from her fiction. In her Preface to L’Ère du soupçon she begins by asserting that her novels are in no way the demonstration of certain a priori theoretical premises, that fifteen years separate the beginnings of her fictional writing () from the date of her first published essay (); she goes on to emphasise that her novels are the spontaneous expression of felt experience, whereas her critical essays are a considered, retrospective attempt to understand her own choices and practices; and she adds that this attempt, far from being spontaneous and natural (like her creative writing), was imposed on her from without by the public’s apparent inability to make sense of that writing. In all these ways, then, Sarraute quite explicitly stakes out a clearly demarcated terrain for her critical essays which sets them apart by a series of oppositions and differences from the fiction on which they comment. This is further underscored by the fact that all the published versions of L’Ère du soupçon carry clear markers of their generic status. They all bear the sub-title ‘Essais sur le roman’. The  Gallimard edition also advertised the name of the series in which the essays were included: ‘Les Essais  ’. The  edition was published under the equally distinctive ‘Idées’ label at Gallimard; and the two subsequent paperback editions ( and ) appeared in the ‘Les Essais’ and the ‘Folio/Essais’ collections respectively. The Pléiade Œuvres complètes presents all the critical essays in a separate category headed simply ‘C R I T I QU E ’. In short, there are no signs of any uncertainty about the generic category to which the critical essays belong. Although the essay as a form does generally constitute a peculiarly problematic entity when it comes to establishing clear generic categories,7 Sarraute seems surprisingly content to accept the critical essay’s conventional metalinguistic status and to exploit without compunction the enunciative authority that is the privilege of the essay writer. The effects of the publication of L’Ère du soupçon amply confirm this. Its appearance in  was decisive in drawing the attention of the literary public to the phenomenon that was soon to be designated the nouveau

Criticism and ‘the terrible desire’



roman;8 and Celia Britton has recently (and convincingly) gone so far as to claim that the group owed its identity far more to the theoretical writings of its practitioners than to their fictional efforts.9 Certainly Sarraute’s own reception and reputation have to a large extent depended on her willingness to engage in critical and theoretical discussion both about her own work and about the novel in general, whether it be in the form of essays, interviews or the many lectures that she has given (largely to university audiences) throughout the world.10 The study of Nathalie Sarraute’s work both in universities and in the critical literature on it also tends to reflect the distinctive status of her critical writings (and, perhaps because of its availability, L’Ère du soupçon in particular) by giving them pride of place as exemplary commentaries on, or explanations of her fictional practice. In other words, the status of the critical writing has largely been that of ‘a treatise on the novel’ (as Jean-Yves Tadié has called L’Ère du soupçon),11 and the ideas contained in this ‘treatise’ have become familiar and crucial points of reference in the critical landscape that surrounds Sarraute’s fiction: the attack on Balzacian characterisation; the defence of a new, so-called ‘tropistic’ view of psychology based on anonymity; the discussion of dialogue in the novel with its attendant specifically Sarrautean terminology of ‘conversation’ and ‘sous-conversation’; the redefinition of realism as a preoccupation with form; the general conception of the novel as essentially innovatory and experimental; and, finally, the defence of a pre-verbal reality against those who claim that literature is a self-generating verbal construct. However, given Sarraute’s reluctance to accept received categories, and particularly her horror of those which are used to erect or impose differences, it is strange to find her so content with traditional distinctions between generic categories: fiction, theatre, criticism. One response to this might be to question Sarraute’s apparent complicity with these differences and to explore her work for moments when generic boundaries become blurred or confused, and I shall be doing this later on in this chapter and in the chapter that follows. But another response might be to examine the effects that Sarraute is able to exploit by taking on board received distinctions between fiction and criticism. In this light the question becomes one not of what Nathalie Sarraute’s critical writing says, but rather one of what it does. Not, What kind of argument do they contain? but, What kind of function do the essays fulfill? What kind of strategic possibilities do the essays offer by virtue of their generic difference from the fiction they discuss? In a sense, these

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Genre and difference

questions already imply a very Sarrautean approach to the issue since, as we have seen (in Chapter ), words for her are above all a form of action, things that do rather than say, whether it be as the agents of ‘countless minor crimes’, or more neutrally as the medium for the ‘game of actions and reactions’ by means of which language becomes for the novelist ‘the most precious of instruments’ (p.  [p. ]).12 In attempting to explore this view of Sarraute’s criticism as something that ‘does’ as well as something that ‘says’, I propose first to look at how criticism is represented and defined as an activity within Sarraute’s work as a whole (fictional and critical) in order to show how she presents her own version of critical practice as different from the institutionalised versions of it. I shall then go on to examine the particular features of fictional technique foregrounded in her critical discussions, all of which seemed designed to eradicate differences between readers and text. Broadly speaking, we shall find her playing a kind of double-game whereby she exploits the generic difference between critical discussion and fictional practice in order to educate her reader to respond to the cues in her fiction that will mitigate his otherness (his difference) and incite him to participate in the world of the novels by establishing a direct contact between himself and the text. I shall be basing my comments not just on L’Ère du soupçon but on all Sarraute’s published essays as well as three of her unpublished lectures which together form the corpus for the criticism section of the Œuvres complètes. The point behind this is not only to establish a more complete picture of a body of Sarrautean theory, but, more importantly, to make the issue of their doing present from the start. For by approaching her critical writings as a sequence of essays, it becomes possible to appreciate their status as interventions where Sarraute repeatedly uses her critical essays to present her literary activities as a series of différends with the critical status quo.     ,       Until now, I have used the terms ‘criticism’ and ‘theory’ more or less interchangeably when talking about Sarraute’s non-fictional writing. But though the essays are not strictly critical in the sense that they are not primarily concerned with the works of other writers, they are equally not purely theoretical to the extent, precisely, that they set themselves up against the ex nihilo, programmatic or magisterial manner of theory. While I would not wish to undersell the theoretical import of Sarraute’s

Criticism and ‘the terrible desire’



work in this domain, it makes better sense when looking at what this kind of writing does, to regard them as critical essays rather than theoretical pronouncements. For time and again, Sarraute’s essays define themselves as a ripost to instances of what in Les Fruits d’or she terms ‘des arguments d’autorité’ (FO, p. ) [‘authoritative arguments’ (p. )], and whose mere existence provides her with a justification for her recurrent postures of dissent. From the very beginning – indeed, on the very first page of her very first essay devoted to Paul Valéry – Nathalie Sarraute’s critical voice emerges as that of the ‘Enfant d’Éléphant [. . .] qui posait toujours des questions et qui se faisait partout rabrouer’ (‘PV’, p. ) [‘the Elephant’s Child [. . .] who was always asking questions and was rebuffed wherever he went’], daring to question the ‘fundamental truths’ of the literary establishment by asking sacrilegious questions. Like many of the subsequent essays, ‘Paul Valéry et l’Enfant d’Éléphant’ is presented as a challenge to the status quo of a literary dogma whose authority rests solely on the unreflecting consensus of its adherents. In the aftermath of his death, Sarraute is taking on the defenders of the view that Valéry was ‘a great poet’; and in the process she is also calling into question the view of literature propounded by Valéry as being a matter of intellect rather than feeling, contemplation rather than contact. The issues raised by this redefinition are important ones and I shall be returning to them later; but for the meantime, there remains more to be said about the way that Sarraute’s critical voice repeatedly appears as a heretical intervention in a literary orthodoxy. Sarraute’s critical essays are almost always presented as a form of provocative dissent from critical orthodoxies of one kind or another, marking a difference in approach from an established norm, and introducing a series of différends into the literary-critical arena. This is certainly how her comments on psychology in the novel are staged in her next essay, ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’. First published in Les Temps modernes, it offers itself once again as a form of ‘sacrilegious utterance’, daring to contest a conception of the novel that was closely identified with Les Temps modernes itself, the so-called ‘novel of the absurd’ (i.e. Camus’s L’Étranger and the kind of American fiction exemplified by Hemingway and Caldwell), which Sarraute characterises as both misguided in its refusal of psychological interiority and profoundly conformist in its principles of composition. The third essay, ‘L’ère du soupçon’ opens with the attack on the conventional critical dogma that a novel is a ‘story in which you see characters living and doing things’; and ‘Ce que voient les oiseaux’ continues in a similar vein by reversing

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Genre and difference

the traditional opposition between formalism and realism. In short, these first essays are each targeted against a series of critical orthodoxies, and repeatedly present Sarraute as a critical heretic bravely asserting her difference against the accepted norm. This stance is maintained throughout the s as she contests a certain line of thinking in the nouveau roman (and for which Jean Ricardou was the spokesman), summed up by her as ‘The idea that the “reality” of a work depends solely on an exploration of language,’ and which she dismisses quite simply and peremptorily as ‘manifestly untenable’ (‘La littérature, aujourd’hui’, p. ). This characteristic critical contrariness culminates in her talk at the Cerisy colloquium on the nouveau roman in , where she begins by describing herself once again as a lone voice at odds with the beliefs and assumptions of the group she finds herself in. In admitting to her initial reluctance to participate in the colloquium, she says: Si j’ai tant hésité, c’est que je savais que je me trouverais ici de nouveau, comme je l’ai été si souvent au cours de ma vie, dans une situation assez singulière. Dans un certain isolement dont d’ailleurs je ne me plains pas – il m’a probablement été nécéssaire – mais enfin il n’est pas assez agréable pour que j’aille délibérement le chercher. (‘Ce que je cherche’, p. ) [If I hesitated for so long, it was because I knew that, as has happened to me so often in the course of my life, I would find myself once again in a somewhat singular situation here. In a certain isolation which in fact I am not complaining about – it has probably been necessary to me – but still it is not sufficiently pleasant for me to go deliberately searching it out.]

This remark acknowledges as both recurrent and necessary to her, the role of renegade amongst a group of believers. The underlying nature of this group as a ‘bande de croyants’ remains the same, whether they be defenders of the reputation of Paul Valéry, the proponents of a behaviourist representation of human experience, the guardians of a traditional view of fiction, or the theorists and practitioners of ludism and the freeplay of the signifier. For this reason, it is no accident that the vocabulary of orthodoxy and sacrilege, dogma and heresy pervades Les Fruits d’or (the novel which deals most directly with the nature of critical activity), or that so much of the book consists of imaginary scenes which act out scenarios based on the terms of these oppositions. For example: Qu’est-ce que c’est? Qui trouble l’ordre? Qu’est-ce que c’est que cette folle, cette illuminée qui parcourt la terre, pieds nus et en haillons, crie sur les places publiques, se frappe la poitrine, appelle à la pénitence, prêche la parole du

Criticism and ‘the terrible desire’



Christ, pointe son doigt crochu sur les grands de cette terre, nargue l’ordre établi, annonce le Jugement dernier . . . On l’entoure. Leurs regards la lapident. Elle est repoussée, expulsée. Le cercle des fidèles se referme. (p. ) [What is it? Who’s disturbing the peace? Who is this mad, exalted creature who goes about the world in her bare feet and dressed in rags, shouts out in public squares, beats her breast, urges penitence, preaches the word of Christ, points her crooked finger at the great of the earth, flouts the established order, announces the Last Judgement . . . They surround her. Their looks lapidate her. She is repulsed, expelled. The circle of the faithful closes again. (p. )]

As a critic Sarraute always implicitly casts herself as a version of this mad woman preaching heresies in public places and flouting the established order, a renegade whose difference is apt to lead to the exclusion that so often accompanies the phenomenon in Sarraute: rejection and expulsion. However, Les Fruits d’or makes it very clear that the established order is also a critical order, so that criticism in Sarraute’s world must be seen as taking two very different forms: dogma as well as heresy. I should therefore like to turn now to the way in which she depicts what one might call criticism-as-dogma which her own interventions so provocatively thumb their nose at. Criticism of the type practised by ‘circle of the faithful’ is invariably represented as a form of ‘argument d’autorité’, and is consequently treated by Sarraute with the deepest suspicion. It appears as a self-justifying orthodoxy that simultaneously saps the lifeblood of the literary text and destroys the reader’s relation with it. This implication is clearly visible in one of her earliest fictional characters, the anonymous professor of Tropismes  who lectures on literature at the Collège de France: Il se plaisait à farfouiller, avec la dignité des gestes professionnels, d’une main implacable et experte, dans les dessous de Proust ou de Rimbaud, et étalant aux yeux de son public très attentif leurs prétendus miracles, leurs mystères, il expliquait ‘leur cas.’ (T, p. ) [He enjoyed prying with the dignity of professional gestures, with relentless, expert hands, into the secret places of Proust or Rimbaud, and then, displaying their so-called miracles, their mysteries before the gaze of his highly attentive audience, he would explain their ‘case.’ (p. )]

His destructive achievement is ironically summed up in his concluding claim that: ‘je les ai vidés pour vous de leur puissance et de leur mystère, j’ai traqué, harcelé ce qu’il y avait en eux de miraculeux.’ (p. )

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Genre and difference

[‘I have emptied them of their power and their mystery for you, I have tracked down and harried what was miraculous about them.’ (p. )]

The chief fault of the master-critic here is both that he fails to respect the difference that the miraculous otherness of the texts of Proust or Rimbaud represent, and also that he refuses to enter into a relation of contact with the text, subsuming it instead into his own self-promoting discourse. The practice of criticism-as-dogma is always presented as this kind of power-game where its objects are expertly and implacably emptied of their ‘puissance’ for the sole benefit of that of the critic. The language of this type of criticism is extensively parodied in Les Fruits d’or so as to appear as an oppressive and mystificatory nonsense which never brings critical illumination to the text, and which merely bolsters the authority of the critic: ‘“Oui. Evidemment. Il y a là un envol qui abolit l’invisible en le fondant dans l’équivoque du signifié . . .”’, is the comment of one of the parodied critics [‘Yes. Quite so. There is a move there which erases the invisible by dissolving it in the ambiguity of the signified’]. Readers ‘qui avaient eu pendant un bref instant l’espoir de se fixer dans les pays riants qu’ils avaient entrevus’ [‘who for a brief moment had been hoping to settle in the pleasant lands which they had glimpsed’] find themselves having instead to bow to a régime of forced labour imposed by the vacuous but nonetheless repressive critical authorities: [ils] reprennent leur marche, morne troupe captive traînant ses chaînes, chassée vers quelles immensités marécageuses, quelles étendues sans fin de toundras glacées. (p. ) [[they] resume their trek, a dreary band of captives, dragging their chains, banished to heaven knows what marshy wastes, what endless stretches of icy tundra. (pp. –)]

The dogmatic critic is someone who seeks to promote his own status at the expense of both the text and its readers. His discursive currency is the ‘argument d’autorité’, a self-generating critical discourse with no relation to the text it supposedly describes, and which interposes itself to deadly effect between the reader and that text: ‘Les arguments d’autorité. Rien d’autre. Jamais aucun contact vrai, aucun sentiment spontané’ (FO, p. ) [‘Authoritative arguments. Nothing else. Never any real contact, no spontaneous feeling’ (p. )]. For Sarraute, the contact which we have seen to be the underlying impulse in human relations, is equally essential to criticism if it is to have any value. In fact, contact appears often as the very opposite of criticism,

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

with criticism almost invariably constituting a barrier that stands in the way of contact. We should perhaps recall that for Sarraute contact is always presented as the means whereby subjects are brought into a relation with each other and boundaries between them erased. This goes for the relation between texts and readers too. In recounting her attempt to make up her own mind about Valéry’s poetry, Sarraute describes herself as first needing to shut out the world (‘Je n’avais qu’à m’enfermer dans ma chambre; fermer ma porte à tous les bruits du dehors’, ‘PV’, p.  [‘I could just shut myself away in my room; close the door on all the noises of the outside world’]); and then having to prise the text free of its surrounding commentary in order for an authentic encounter to be possible: Quelle couche chaque jour plus épaisse de vernis protecteur ne fallait-il pas gratter, quelle gangue solide et dure, chaque jour plus solide et plus dure, de paroles louangeuses et de commentaires enthousiastes ne fallait-il pas briser autour de chaque ligne, de chaque strophe, de chaque vers, pour les faire apparaître à la lumière! (‘PV’, p. ) [What a layer of protective varnish you had to scratch off, and it got thicker by the day, what a solid, hard gangue of words of praise and enthusiastic commentary you had to break open, and it got thicker and harder by the day, surrounding each line, each verse, in order to bring them to the light of day!]

This solitary meeting between reader and text is for Sarraute the only valid relation between the two. The immediacy and spontaneity of readerly contact are evoked in very similar terms by Sarraute nearly twenty-five years after the Valéry article, in her talk at Cerisy, where she describes the way she reads the critical essays of others. Her habit, she says, is to reverse the normal sequence of reading this kind of writing, and to defer the commentary until she has made independent contact with the quoted extracts from the literary text being discussed. The effect is to render even the best instances of critical comment marginal, or even ultimately superfluous: Quand je lis un article critique, c’est aux citations que je vais d’abord, puis, ayant pris contact avec le texte – un contact si direct et si spontané qu’aucun commentaire venu du dehors ne pourra le modifier – je lis avec intérêt ce qu’en dit le critique, je relis les citations à cette lumière, je cherche à retrouver ce qu’il y a vu – ce qui parfois enrichit ma relecture, sans jamais me faire perdre ma première impression. (‘Ce que je cherche’, pp. –) [When I read a critical article, I always go to the quotations first, then, having made direct contact with the text – a contact which is so direct and so spontaneous that no commentary from outside can alter it – I read what the critic says

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Genre and difference

about it with interest, I re-read the quotations in the light of what he says, I try to find the thing that he sees in it – which sometimes enriches my re-reading, but without ever making me lose my first impression.]

These two accounts of reading (Valéry’s poetry and critical essays) demonstrate that for Sarraute criticism is anathema to contact, and that there is an important distinction to be made between reading and criticism. To the extent that reading can be defined as a form of contact (and in Sarraute the two terms are virtually synonymous), her own socalled critical writing is not so much a form of criticism as a defence of reading, which frequently takes the form of what Jonathan Culler (admittedly in a rather different context) has called ‘stories of reading’.13 There is a sense in which for Sarraute all criticism tends ultimately to become dogma, and her essay on Valéry is not intended as a better critical account than those proposed by existing commentaries, but is offered quite explicitly as a story about the experience of reading his work. It begins with a description of the various responses elicited by her question about whether Valéry was really ‘a great poet’ (which, incidentally, recalls the very similar scene which opens Portrait d’un inconnu),14 continues with her decision to see for herself as she shuts herself away in her room, and above all it presents the text as an event in its own right: [l’œuvre de Paul Valéry] serait pour moi ce que toute œuvre d’art, comme le dit si bien Thierry Maulnier, ‘peut être à chaque moment et pour tout lecteur qui se place en face d’elle, un événement neuf et un commencement absolu.’ (‘PV’, p. ) [[Paul Valéry’s work] would be for me, as Thierry Maulnier puts it so well, what any work of art ‘can be at each moment and for every reader who stands before it, a new event and an absolute beginning.’]

Contact is made possible by the status of the work of art as event, a status which means that the only valid sort of commentary about it will be a narrative of the reader’s experience. This, at any rate, is the formula which Sarraute adopts when writing about the works of other authors such as Dostoevsky, Kafka and Flaubert: Je vous ai prévenus que je regarderais cette œuvre [here, Flaubert’s Salammbô] comme un événement neuf et sans idée préconçue. Ici soyons sincères, et disons ce que font surgir en nous ces belles descriptions ciselées et cadencées. (‘Flaubert’, p. ) [I warned you that I would regard each work as a new event without any preconceived ideas. Let’s be frank here and say what feelings these beautiful, chiselled, rhythmical descriptions produce in us.]

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What she is proposing here is not an interpretation, nor an analysis, nor a judgement, but an account of the response that the work provokes in its reader. For this reason ‘criticism’ does indeed turn out to be as much of a misnomer as ‘theory’ when talking about Sarraute’s essays. Although Barthes is just the kind of critic who gives criticism a bad name for Sarraute (and whose particular kind of critical language is heavily parodied in Les Fruits d’or), his discussion of the difference between criticism and reading in Critique et vérité seems to echo very closely her own feeling on the question, and may help to explain where the problem about criticism might lie: le critique ne peut en rien se substituer au lecteur. C’est en vain qu’il se prévaudra – ou qu’on lui demandera – de prêter une voix, si respectueuse soit-elle, à la lecture des autres, de n’être lui-même qu’un lecteur auquel d’autres lecteurs ont délégué l’expression de leurs propres sentiments, en raison de son savoir ou de son jugement, bref de figurer les droits d’une collectivité sur l’œuvre. [The critic can in no wise substitute himself for the reader. In vain will he presume – or will he be asked by others – to lend a voice, however, respectful, to the readings of others, to be himself just a reader to whom other readers have delegated the expression of their own feelings as a consequence of his knowledge or his judgement, in other words, to exercise by proxy the rights of the community in relation to the work.]15

The critic, says Barthes, can never be a spokesman for the reader, because, as he goes on to explain, reading implies a relation with the text, criticism inevitably and only a relation with critical language: Passer de la lecture à la critique, c’est changer de désir, c’est désirer non plus l’œuvre, mais son propre langage. (p. ) [To move from reading to criticism is to change desires, it is no longer to desire the work, but one’s own language. (p. )]

This is exactly the view which we have seen amply and repeatedly reflected in Sarraute’s own representation of criticism. Reading for, in, and, ideally, of Sarraute is very much a matter of desire – and, more especially, of desire as identification – which takes the form described here by Barthes: Seule la lecture aime l’œuvre, entretient avec elle un rapport de désir. Lire, c’est désirer l’œuvre, c’est vouloir être l’œuvre, c’est refuser de doubler l’œuvre en dehors de toute autre parole que la parole même de l’œuvre. (pp. –) [Only reading loves the work, entertains with it a relationship of desire. To read is to desire the work, to want to be the work, to refuse to echo the work by using any language other than the language of the work. (p. )]

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Genre and difference

It is precisely because criticism is so unavoidably deflected from its object by its investment in its own language that Sarrautean heresy never aspires to the status of criticism as such. Sarraute’s essays aim, instead, to be an expression of the desire embodied in reading: they speak in the name of that desire, or, as in the case of the stories of reading, offer narratives of Sarraute’s encounters with works that have to a greater or lesser degree responded to its identificatory thrust. In other words, the ‘terrible desire to establish contact’ applies as much to the relations between the reader and the text as it does to the psychology of the tropism. The desire that drives Dostoevsky’s characters towards ‘an impossible and calming embrace’ also drives the reader on in the same search for a similar ideal relation – in this case with the text (‘Dostoïevski’, p.  [p. ]). This, at least, is the presupposition behind the essays; it is also the reponse that the novels would like to elicit from their real readers; and it is an experience that is occasionally represented within the novels themselves. For instance, the lone reader at the end of Les Fruits d’or is depicted in just such a relation: unable to express the textual ‘embrace’ by means of critical comment and ‘le vocabulaire perfectionné [des] savants docteurs’ (FO, p. ) [‘the well-honed vocabulary of those learned Doctors’ (p. )], he articulates his contact and expresses his readerly desire by speaking directly to the work itself: Ce silence où vous baignez, dépouillé de tous les vêtements et ornements dont vous aviez été affublé, nu, tout lavé, flottant à la dérive, avec moi cramponné à vous, rend très étroit notre contact. Nous sommes si proches maintenant, vous êtes tellement une partie de moi, qu’il me semble que si vous cessiez d’exister, ce serait comme une part de moi-même qui deviendrait du tissu mort. (p. ) [The silence in which you are immersed, divested of all the garments and the ornaments in which you’d been rigged out, naked, washed clean, floating adrift, with me clinging on to you, makes our contact a very close one. We are so near to each other now, you are so much a part of me, that it seems to me that if you ceased to exist, it would be as though a part of myself had become dead tissue. (p. )]

The text is regarded here by its reader not as a linguistic construct that might lend itself to contemplation or analysis, but as a kind of being that has an existence beyond language, and this is precisely what makes contact possible: ‘silence [. . .] makes our contact a very close one.’ What, then, does all this imply about Sarraute’s own so-called criticism? It is certainly something very different from my own commentary which in a Sarrautean schema is bound to appear uncomfortably like the lectures of the professor at the Collège de France as I try to explain the

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‘case’ in hand. But at the risk of seeming to have been deaf to the values I have been elucidating, the discussion so far has established first, that her essays take the form of a heretical intervention into systems of critical orthodoxy (they assert a difference); and second, that they speak in the name of readerly contact with the text rather than with the aim of providing critical interpretation (they claim a critical identification). In other words, they seek to do what Barthes has argued that the contradictory logics of readerly versus critical desire make impossible when he says that because he uses a language other than that of the text, the critic can never act as spokesman for a collectivity of readers. Nevertheless, and logic notwithstanding, Sarraute writes precisely in the hope that la réponse que je me ferais à moi-même ne vaudrait pas pour moi seule. Elle serait peut-être aussi la réponse timide de quelques-uns de ces lecteurs inconnus qui, isolés les uns des autres, enfermés dans leurs chambres solitaires, en face de [l’]œuvre s’interrogent avec inquiétude et s’étonnent. (‘PV’, pp. –) [the answer that I would give myself would be valid not just for me. It might perhaps also be the timid reply that a few of those unknown readers who, in isolation from each other, and shut away in their solitary rooms, sitting before [the] work anxiously wonder and are astonished.]

There remains more to be said about the paradoxical nature of the essays as criticism that speaks in the name of reading, and I shall be coming back to this question later. In the meantime, I want to consider the use that the essays make of the critical capacity which they have inspite of themselves – as it were – for the benefit of the reader of Sarraute’s own fiction. For the essays are addressed not to other critics but to a reader, a lone individual and not a member of a critical sect, in short, to the unknown readers shut away in their rooms invoked in the Valéry essay. More particularly, the reader of the essays is treated as an actual or potential reader of Sarraute’s own fictional œuvre, and thus as someone who may be trusted not to take critical language at face value.             It is a striking feature of the essays that their literary and technical concerns are almost exclusively with those aspects of writing which bring reader and fictional text into closer contact. The reader’s own potential for difference is conceived of as a distance separating him from the text which it is the writer’s task to reduce. The appeal to shared experience made by Sarraute’s writing requires the removal of all the obstacles

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Genre and difference

which might stand between text and reader since they introduce a fatal difference-as-distance between the two. One of the biggest obstacles of this kind, in Sarraute’s view, is traditional character, and this is the first topic that she confronts in L’Ère du soupçon. The exterior representation of character promoted by the ‘novel of the absurd’ is, according to her, already a barrier to contact, since it presents character only in terms of ‘sa dureté [. . .] et son opacité’ (‘Dostoïevski’, p. ) [‘its hardness and opacity’ (p. )]. Anachronistic forms of Balzacian characterisation are equally rebarbative: for whereas in Balzac’s time the portrayal of a figure like Père Grandet represented ‘[un] terrain d’entente’ [‘[a] meeting ground’] between author and reader, the persistence of such representations in the modern era has opened up a breach between author and reader. Character of this type has become ‘[un] terrain dévasté ou ils [author and reader] s’affrontent’ (‘L’ère’, p. ) [‘a devastated terrain on which they confront each other’ (p. )], promoting not just distance, but outright hostility. In order to restore ‘entente’ between author and reader, character has to adapt to the reader’s new-found knowledge of human psychology which, says Sarraute, is the combined legacy of the work of Joyce, Proust and Freud. Moreover, the manner in which that psychology is depicted in writing is just as urgent a critical question as is its content for Sarraute: no longer a matter of ‘the old analysis of feelings’ (ES, p. ) psychology becomes ‘the living substance of all my books’ (p. ). The essays explain that this is achieved by representing that psychology as a phenomenon that unfolds simultaneously with the writing of the text. In an interview in , she sums up the point as follows: ‘Chez moi, il s’agit de montrer des actions intérieures en train de se faire, des actes en train de se produire qui ne sont pas analysés mais seulement donnés’ [‘In my work, the point is to show internal actions as they are produced, acts in the process of taking place which are not analysed but just given’].16 The distance implied by retrospect is abolished through the creation of this impression of a simultaneity between the writing – and consequently the reading – and the action itself. However, this would still leave open the gap implied by the depiction of pscyhology in the form of a spectacle which the reader merely observes, if Sarraute’s conception of writing were not designed to shift the action from an imaginary stage in the novel to an inner space located within the reader himself – as she explains in the preface to L’Ère du soupçon:

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il n’était possible de communiquer [les tropismes] au lecteur que par des images qui en donnent des équivalents et lui fassent éprouver des sensations analogues. (ES, p. ) [it was not possible to communicate them to the reader other than by images that create equivalents and make readers experience analogous sensations (p. )]

Sarraute’s reflections on the novel in these essays are largely about the technical means of bringing about this shift of scene. This suggests that critical self-consciousness is not necessarily alienating or incompatible with the ultimate goal of immediacy of impact: Il est donc permis de rêver [. . .] d’une technique qui parviendrait à plonger le lecteur dans le flot de ces drames souterrains que Proust n’a eu le temps que de survoler, [. . .] qui donnerait au lecteur l’illusion de refaire lui-même ces actions. (‘Conversation’, pp. –) [It is therefore permissable to dream [. . .] of a technique which would succeed in plunging the reader into the stream of these subterranean dramas of which Proust only had time to glimpse a rapid aerial view, and [. . .] which would give the reader the illusion of repeating the actions himself. (p. )]

If this dream could be technically realised, the reader would be moved up so close to the action of the novels that the boundary which separates him from the text would be dissolved, and the symbiosis imagined by the figure at the end of Les Fruits d’or might become a guaranteed literary reality. It is as if Sarraute were prepared to take a detour through a potentially alienating critical awareness, and to rummage around in her own literary ‘insides’ explaining her own technical ‘case’, in order to formulate fantasies about this ideal ‘embrace’ between reader and text where the difference between the two would be erased. The discussions of first-person narration and of dialogue represent two further aspects of this project. The first person is conceived of as a device to draw the reader onto a version of the ‘meeting ground’ provided by character in the traditional realist novel: Tout est là, en effet: reprendre au lecteur son bien et l’attirer coûte que coûte sur le terrain de l’auteur. Pour y parvenir, le procédé qui consiste à désigner par un ‘je’ le héros principal constitue un moyen à la fois efficace et facile. (‘L’ère’, p. ) [Indeed, it all turns on this issue: dispossessing the reader and enticing him, at all costs, onto the author’s territory. To achieve this, the device that consists in referring to the central character as ‘I’ constitutes a means that is both simple and effective. (p. )]

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Genre and difference

The use of dialogue is similarly designed to lure the reader into the universe of the text. The underlying concern behind Sarraute’s preoccupation with the modus (‘he said’, ‘she replied’) is the issue of contact between author and reader.17 According to Sarraute, these little phrases undermine the novelist’s aim because they reintroduce the distance which traditionally separates author from character and character from reader in a novel: Elles marquent la place à laquelle le romancier a toujours situé ses personnages: en un point aussi éloigné de lui-même que des lecteurs; à la place où se trouvent les joueurs d’un match de tennis, le romancier étant à celle de l’arbitre juché sur son siège, surveillant le jeu et annonçant les points aux spectateurs (en l’occurrence les lecteurs) installés sur les gradins. (‘Conversation’, p. ) [They mark the site on which the novelist has always positioned his characters: a point as remote from himself as from his readers; in the place of players in a tennis match, while the novelist occupies the position of the umpire, perched on his seat, supervising the game and announcing the score to the spectators (in this case the readers) sitting on the terraces. (p. )]

Dispensing with the modus is a means of closing this gap and bringing author, reader and character into mutual contact. The use of dialogue in the form of the combined effect of conversation and sous-conversation is viewed by Sarraute as a further device for involving the reader in the action of the novel and creating a contact which elicits his active response: Le lecteur, sans cesse tendu, aux aguets, comme s’il était à la place de celui à qui les paroles s’adressent, mobilise tous ses instincts de défense, tous ses dons d’intuition, sa mémoire, ses facultés de jugement et de raisonnement. (‘Conversation’, p. ) [The reader, constantly tensed, on the alert, as if he were in the shoes of the person to whom the words are addressed, mobilises all his instincts of defence, all his powers of intuition, his memory, his faculties of judgement and reasoning. (p. )]

The dialogic nature of the novels obliges the reader to call on all his human resources as if he were himself directly implicated as their addressee. The essays that deal with realism (‘Ce que voient les oiseaux’, and the two lectures ‘Roman et réalité’ and ‘Forme et contenu du roman’) go further than the previous ones by claiming that awareness of formal and technical issues is actually essential to the reader’s grasp of the reality the author is trying to represent. Realism for Sarraute is not a matter of

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accurate resemblance, but of a joint involvement between author and reader in a quest for the real. The reality which the novelist seeks is by definition new and uncharted: ‘c’est toujours du réel qui n’a pas été pris dans des formes convenues’ [‘it is always a part of reality which has not been fixed in accepted forms’]. Forms have constantly to be renewed and revised: Il est nécessaire que les formes se déplacent continuellement. On ne peut plus reprendre les formes anciennes sans retrouver une substance romanesque ancienne, elle aussi connue. [Forms need to be moved on constantly. One cannot re-use old forms without finding old fictional material, which is also familiar.]18

This means that critical awareness becomes a necessary condition of the novel’s realism. If the reader is to share in the pursuit of an elusive reality, he must go through the same critical education as the novelist, unlearning old habits, and participating in the discovery of new ones. First of all, he needs to undertake a thorough rethinking of characterisation, a project which is so vital that critical guidance must sometimes be included in the novels themselves. Indeed, Portrait d’un inconnu could be seen as one long lesson on the subject, and the novel contains some quite overtly critical moments, such as the discussion of the character of Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace. This discussion is virtually indistinguishable from the essays, and the reading of Tolstoy is more or less identical to the account of Dostoevsky in ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’. At these points the critical enterprise becomes inseparable from the creative one, and the reader’s participation in the text requires a degree of critical awareness that it is the essays’ special task to promote, but which is evidently not their exclusive preserve. (I shall be returning later to this blurring of generic differences in Sarraute.) If the reader’s contact with the text is so urgently sought by Sarraute that critical lessons must sometimes be included in the fiction, this implies the possibility of a reluctance or failure on the reader’s part to make the contact he is assumed so terribly to desire. And, at times, the essays do seem to anticipate possible resistance from the reader. Far from being shut off from the world in solitude and perplexity, awaiting endorsement of his own uncertain responses in the form of Sarraute’s spokesmanship (as in the scenario in the Valéry essay), he is also depicted as someone in need of some quite firm handling: having to be stripped of his possessions and drawn ‘at all costs’ onto the author’s ground. But these signs of his occasional reluctance merely highlight the mutual

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Genre and difference

nature of the desire for contact: if – in principle, at least – the reader desires contact with the text, the text is equally desiring of its readers. Signs of a recourse to technical force and pedagogical self-commentary are proof of the fact that the text can no more stand the resistance and opacity of its readers, than can the characters it portrays. It is as desperate as they are to essayer par n’importe quel moyen de se frayer un chemin jusqu’à autrui, de pénétrer en lui le plus loin possible, de lui faire perdre son inquiétante, son insupportable opacité. (‘Dostoïevski’, p. ) [try, by any means available, to clear a path to the other, to get inside him as deeply as possible, to make him to lose his disturbing, unbearable opacity. (p. )]

And like these same characters, the text’s desire for contact with the other ‘le[. . .] pousse à s’ouvrir à lui à [son] tour, à lui révéler [ses] plus secrets replis’ [‘impels him to confide in him in turn, and to reveal to him [his] own innermost recesses’]. In so far as the essays are part of this urge to break down the terrifying opacity of the other and draw him into the orbit of the novels, the function of their critical awareness is to remove any obstacles (outmoded assumptions, readerly resistance) that might stand between reader and text, and not to add to them in the manner of the sort of critical commentary that surrounds the work of Paul Valéry. In short, the essays both contain an inventory of the devices used by the novels to draw the reader into their embrace, and themselves constitute just such a device: offering explanations that help to dispel the ‘disturbing, unbearable opacity’ of the work, inviting the reader behind the scenes, and into its most intimate recesses, to share the author’s creative preoccupations and concerns.        ⁄        Nevertheless, nothing guarantees this transparency, and Sarraute appears very conscious of the risk that her own commentaries might become an impediment to contact (‘gangue’ rather than ‘embrace’); and in interviews she frequently attempts to divert the attention of potential readers away from the essays and back to the fictional texts: je suis entièrement d’accord avec Roland Barthes quand il nie la possibilité pour un écrivain de communiquer aux lecteurs par des discours ou des écrits autres que son œuvre elle-même les sens différents, le plus souvent ignorés de lui, qu’elle contient, de renforcer par des articles ou des déclarations l’impression

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que seule l’œuvre elle-même, dans la forme particulière qu’il a choisie, peut donner. [I agree entirely with Roland Barthes when he says that it is impossible for a writer to communicate to readers the different meanings contained within his work, which he is most often unaware of himself, by means of words or writings other than the work itself, or to underscore by means of articles or declarations the impression that only the work itself in the particular form that he has chosen for it, can give.]19

The reason she gives for the impossibility of critical communication with the reader is that critical self-commentary requires of the writer ‘un langage [. . .] très différent de celui qu’il emploie dans son œuvre écrite’ [‘a very different kind of language from the one he uses in his written work’]. Critical language, she says, is not only different, but positively dangerous, since it brings with it a degree of ‘lucidity’ which undermines the creative impulse: Une grande lucidité, une conscience trop claire au cours du travail seraient, me semble-t-il, assez dangereuses; je crois que l’impulsion créatrice trouve au départ sa source dans l’inconscient. (p. ) [A great deal of lucidity or too clear an awarenss while one is working seem to me to be rather dangerous; I think that the creative impulse originates from the outset in the unconscious.]

One solution to the threat posed by the excessive lucidity and the linguistic difference of critical commentary is to efface or eclipse it before the literary text by directing the reader to set it aside and return to the text, as Sarraute does here. But another means of achieving this would be to create maximum homology between the two forms of discourse, and actively work against the difference between the two. I have already discussed how critical language forms an integral part of the fiction; so I should now like to look at the homology from the reverse perspective, and consider the ways in which the critical essays repeat the fictional strategies used in the novels as a means of eroding the generic differences between the two forms of writing. One of the most frequently used ways of replicating the fiction in the essays is the miming in the criticism of scenarios that appear in the novels. I have already suggested that the essays themselves are staged in the terms of a particular scenario which is a recurrent feature in the novels: the lone figure (‘le voyou qui trouble l’ordre’ [‘the hooligan who disturbs the peace’] of «disent les imbéciles» (p.  [p. ]), as well as the ‘exalted creature’ of Les Fruits d’or) who deliberately or inadvertently

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Genre and difference

comes up against the concerted opposition of established opinion, social and cultural, as well as specifically literary. In miming these gestures of opposition, then, the essays are strongly identifying themselves with the fiction from the outset. Similarly – if somewhat paradoxically – the prise de conscience and the lucidity associated with criticism and whose pernicious effects Sarraute condemns in the remarks quoted above, are nonetheless an integral element of the fiction. In describing her essays as a retrospective attempt to understand her own writing, Sarraute is repeating another gesture that is fundamental to the experience of the characters in her novels as well as to the work of the novelist: J’ai été amenée ainsi à réfléchir – ne serait-ce que pour me justifier ou me rassurer ou m’encourager – aux raisons qui m’ont poussée à certains refus, qui m’ont imposé certaines techniques. (ES, p. ) [As a result, if for no other reason than to seek justification, reassurance or encouragement for myself, I began to reflect upon the motives that impelled me to reject certain things, and to adopt certain techniques. (p. )]

Not only does this account of the genesis of the essays establish an order of events which preserves the spontaneity of the creative impulse in the unconscious, but it also follows the course that events tend to take in the fictional and dramatic work. Action itself very frequently appears in Sarraute as a spontaneous or unconscious phenomenon which can only be grasped by a retrospective unpacking of an event. It emerges as a response to the question ‘what happened?’ which is asked both by the characters and by the novelist/ narrator: Vous me dites quelque chose, je sens un malaise ou je rougis, il est impossible que je l’empêche, et c’est là que commence mon travail: que s’est-il passé? Quel mouvement avez-vous accompli pour produire en moi cet autre mouvement? [You say something to me, I feel a moment of unease or I blush, it’s impossible for me to stop it, and that’s where my work begins: what happened? What movement did you perform to produce in me this other movement?]20

In other words, as well as being stories of reading, the essays also become stories of writing which, by turning back to the novels and treating them as a similar sort of spontaneous or unconscious event, re-enact the plotforms of the fictions whose writing they narrate. This mimicry goes very deep and it is reinforced by a number of more localised rhetorical and stylistic effects.21 In particular, the essays make extensive use of the irony, metaphor and dialogue which characterise so much of Sarraute’s fictional work. For example,

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‘Conversation et sous-conversation’ opens with a heavily ironic dismissal of Virginia Woolf: Qui songerait aujourd’hui à prendre encore au sérieux ou seulement à lire les articles que Virginia Woolf, quelques années après l’autre guerre, écrivait sur l’art du roman? Leur confiance naïve, leur innocence d’un autre âge feraient sourire . . .(p. ) [Who today would dream of still taking seriously, or even just reading, the articles that Virginia Woolf wrote a few years after the First World War on the art of the novel? Their naïve confidence and their innocence from another age would only elicit a smile . . . (p. )]

It was a risky piece of rhetoric and even some of the most well-disposed critics missed the ironic intent,22 but it does illustrate the degree to which the language of the novelist comes naturally to the critic. This is even more evident in the essays’ use of imagery, some of which also appears in near-identical form in the novels. For example, in the Valéry article Sarraute uses a highly metaphorical passage to describe the effect that reading ‘La Jeune Parque’ has on her: Je venais de reconnaître cette vieille odeur aigrelette de chiffon humide et de craie, cette vieille odeur rassurante et familière d’encre et de poussière qui flotte autour des souvenirs d’exercices et d’efforts scolaires. (p. ) [I had just recognised that old sour smell of damp cloths and chalk, that reassuring, familiar old smell of ink and dust which hovers around memories of schoolroom exercises and exertions.]

The same image returns in Vous les entendez? some twenty-five years later where the father reluctantly submits to the verdict passed on his children as ‘des cancres’ [‘dunces’]: Se levant, prenant congé, prenant la fuite, fuyant à travers les tristes cours couvertes de gravier, de ciment, le long des hideux couloirs à l’odeur de poussière humide, de désinfectants, le long des mornes salles vitrées où des médiocres ingurgitent docilement des bouillies insipides . . . (VLE, p. ) [Getting up, taking leave, taking flight, fleeing across the miserable playgrounds covered in gravel, cement, down the hideous corridors which smell of damp dust, of disinfectant, past the dreary classrooms behind glass partitions, where mediocrities docilely ingurgitate inspid pap . . . (p. )]

In both essay and novel, the dreary atmosphere of the classroom is evoked to convey a sense of enforced mediocrity and obligatory conformism. The fact that the image appears in the essay so long before the novel is yet another sign of the extent to which the language of the

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Genre and difference

essays repeats and mimes – even to the extent of anticipating – that of the novels. Jean-Yves Tadié has drawn attention to the widespread use of spoken language and dialogue in the essays,23 but there is also a way in which, above and beyond this use, the essays themselves are fundamentally conceived as components of a dialogue. In their heretical guise, they appear as a retort or a challenge to existing views, a posture which of itself implicitly presupposes a dialogue of sorts. A somewhat more conciliatory version of this confrontation is sketched by Sarraute in one of her lectures where she accepts the possibility of critical difference as dialogue, and she asks: ‘l’essentiel n’est-il pas, dans une rencontre comme celle-ci, de discuter, de confronter des points de vue?’ [‘the main thing, isn’t it, in an encounter like this one, is to discuss and compare points of view?’] (‘Roman et realité’, p. ). More frequently and more consistently, however, the essays adopt a distinctly complicitous tone of address, as if they were one half of a dialogue with a silent and largely assenting reader. For instance, the reading of Camus in ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’ is presented as a shared undertaking: ‘Enfin! Nous y voilà donc. Ce dont nous nous étions timidement doutés se trouve d’un seul coup confirmé’ (p. ) [‘Now we have it! At last! What we had timidly surmised is suddenly confirmed’ (p. )]. And the ironic comment on Virginia Woolf cited above clearly presupposes an addressee who knows how to interpret it correctly. The implicitly dialogical character of the essays becomes overt in the lectures, and after L’Ère du soupçon (with the single exception of the essay on Flaubert) all Sarraute’s critical work started life in lecture form.24 Although the lectures were written out in full and delivered from a script, Sarraute always had beside her a set of what she has called ‘notes de plaidoirie’ [‘barrister’s notes’ lit. notes for the speech for the defence], consisting of a list of headings corresponding to the different points she intended to cover, and designed above all to lend the lectures as much of a spoken air as possible.25 The lectures testify to a powerful awareness of their audience whom Sarraute frequently addresses in the second person: ‘Je vous ai proposé de vous parler aujourd’hui du langage dans l’art du roman. Et à ce propos je vous ferai part de quelques opinions . . .’, etc. [‘I have suggested to you that I would talk to you today about language in the art of the novel. And it’s in this connection that I shall tell you about various opinions . . .] (‘Le langage dans l’art du roman’, p. , my emphasis). Elsewhere she describes the occasion as a ‘causerie’ [‘chat, conversation’] (‘Forme’), and in fact from the s onwards she aban-

Criticism and ‘the terrible desire’



doned the lecture format entirely in favour of the ‘rencontre’ or ‘causerie’ which took the form of question and answer sessions, so making explicit the underlying dialogue contained in the more traditional lectures. Moreover, one might see in the open acknowledgement of dialogue in the lectures and the ‘causeries’ which replaced them an anticipation or rehearsal of the explicitly dialogic narrative frame of L’Usage de la parole where the narrator directly addresses the reader with remarks like ‘Vous allez voir, prenez patience’, or ‘Tchekhov, vous le savez, était médecin’ (UP, pp. , ) [‘You’ll see; just be patient,’ ‘Chekhov, as you know, was a doctor’ (pp. , )] (my emphasis). All this would seem to confirm that through dialogue, irony and metaphor, the writing of the essays mimes the fiction to a very considerable degree. But another point also emerges from the orientation of the essays as dialogue, for the effect of this slant is to figure the reader in a way which has important implications for his role in relation to the fictional texts. In an interview (and, incidentally, the interview format is, of course, yet another version of the dialogue as a vehicle for critical ideas) Sarraute has talked about her conception of the audience of her lectures as a collective instance of the silent but assenting reader postulated in the essays: Quand je suis devant un auditoire, je ne vois que des gens grosso modo sympathisants et qui sont comme moi. Il n’est pas question d’hostilité ni de résistance: ils sont comme moi. [When I am in front of an audience, I only see people who are generally welldisposed and who are like me. There’s no question of any hostility or resistance: they are like me.]26

The lectures, like the early essay on Valéry, conjure up addressees ‘who are like me’, beings whose sensibilities ultimately make them ideal readers of the novels. The very overt and direct forms of address used in the lectures and heavily implied in the critical writings, work towards creating this ideal reader for the fiction. And indeed, Sarraute goes on to describe the critical self-commentary in L’Usage de la parole as a means of creating the reader of her desires: ‘Je montre au lecteur à quoi on va jouer, je lui donne les règles du jeu’ [‘I show the reader what we are going to play, I show him the rules of the game’]. This device works, according to her, because the reader is a figure whom she conceives of as ‘like her’: ‘Dans ma naïveté, je crois toujours que le lecteur est exactement comme moi, que celui qui me lit a les mêmes sensations que moi’ [‘In my naivety, I always believe that the reader is exactly like me, that the



Genre and difference

person reading me has the same sensations as me’] (p. ). This is the counterpart to the process of identification through which the reader’s desire for the text manifests itself: just as the reader desires the text by wishing to become the text, so the author desires the reader as a self-projection with whom she too can in turn identify. One of the purposes of the critical writing is to create such a figure from whom real readers of the novels may take their cue. This is perhaps not so much a matter of miming as of projecting, but the reader called up by means of this projection in the criticism constitutes a crucial link between the essays and the fiction. He is a figure who fits in multiple ways into the ‘terrible desire to establish contact’, being the object of the author’s desire for contact through the text, and imagined as the subject of a reciprocal desire. The reader’s contact with the text is made possible, first by a critical self-commentary which spells out the rules of the game so that nothing may stand in the way of maximum participation; and second, by turning that commentary into a rehearsal of the scenarios and the rhetoric of the novels themselves. The essays are thus both precept and example, both a saying and a doing, and as such, they put the reader through a dual apprenticeship for the fictional corpus. There seems, in other words, to be no limit to the ‘terrible desire to establish contact’ in Sarraute’s work, and the essays constitute a particularly intense – if risky – instance of it: adopting the potentially alienating language of critical lucidity in the hopes of making the reader experience the text as a living part of his own self, and capable ultimately of addressing it in the words of the figure depicted at the end of Les Fruits d’or: Nous sommes si proches maintenant, vous êtes tellement une partie de moi, que si vous cessiez d’exister, ce serait comme une part de moi-même qui deviendrait du tissu mort. [We are so near to each other now, you are so much a part of me, that it seems to me that if you ceased to exist, it would be as though a part of myself had become dead tissue.]

In short, Sarraute both emphasises and undermines the generic differences between her critical essays and her fiction in order to create readers who will relinquish the habits of mind that might place them at a distance from her texts, and who will consent instead to a blurring of their own boundaries which would otherwise separate them from the text. The strategic function of Sarraute’s generically distinctive critical discourse is ultimately to produce a universal fusion where boundaries, distance and differences will no longer exist.

   

Same difference: reprise and variation

The voyage of variations leads into that other infinitude, into the infinite diversity of the interior world lying in all things. Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

            Unlike the critical works which we considered in the last chapter, the publication of Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (in ) raised some teasing questions about its generic status. On the one hand it was treated simply as the latest addition to Sarraute’s fictional output, its lack of any explicit generic marker making it no different from its similarly unmarked precursor, L’Usage de la parole. And yet on the other hand, the text’s own embarrassed acknowledgement of its affiliation to the category of ‘childood memories’ invites a reading of it as an autobiographical record of its author’s childhood – in other words, as a venture into a new and different genre. Gallimard, Sarraute’s publisher, has – presumably with her blessing if not on her initiative – supported both strategies: on the one hand Enfance is included in the chronological sequence of her prose writings in the Pléiade Œuvres complètes (which, however, provides no generic heading for the prose texts, as distinct from the ‘Théâtre’ and the ‘Critique’); and on the other hand, the Folio edition of the text appears with an enchanting photograph of a six-year-old Natacha on the front cover and a blurb on the back which refers to a childhood spent between Russia and Paris, and which describes the book as offering a chance to ‘voir se dessiner le futur grand écrivain’ [‘see the emergence of the future great writer’], all of which implicitly present the text as ‘autobiography’ as opposed to ‘fiction’. Similarly, critics are divided between treating 



Genre and difference

Enfance as interchangeable with the other prose texts in her corpus, and responding to it as an example of a particularly innovatory manifestation of autobiographical writing, on a par with those of Leiris, Sartre, Barthes and so on.1 In other words, the question raised by Enfance is: is it the same as the fiction, or is it different? And moreover, same or different in what way? The arguments for it being the same are made in the opening pages of the text as a counter to the anxiety expressed by the narrator’s double that she (the narrator) may be succumbing to the easy temptations offered by the project of recording her childhood memories.2 Where the double worries that the project might be a symptom of incipient senility, or at least a sign that Sarraute is abandoning her ‘élément’ (E, p.  [p. ]), the narrator herself counters with the reassurance that the (unreassuring) characteristics of her ‘element’ are still intact: c’est encore tout vacillant, aucun mot écrit, aucune parole ne l’ont encore touché, il me semble que ça palpite faiblement . . . hors des mots . . . comme toujours . . . des petits bouts de quelque chose d’encore vivant . . . (p. ) [it’s still vacillating, no written word, no word of any sort has touched it, I think it is still faintly quivering . . . outside words . . . as always . . . little bits of something still alive . . . (p. )]

This claim places the new enterprise firmly within the context of Sarraute’s previous writings whose subject matter, the tropism, is precisely the wavering, wordless, palpitating thing evoked here. But there are a number of other, more specific ways in which Enfance appears as a continuation of Sarraute’s fiction – that is to say, as the same as the fiction. The first of these is the dialogue between the narrator and her double, which in the context of conventional autobiographical practice looks like a new and radical departure; but this strategy is much less of a new departure when it is placed in the context of the overall development of Sarraute’s fiction. L’Usage de la parole had already reintroduced a first-person narrator into Sarraute’s fiction after his disappearance following Martereau (there being no first-person narrator in her work from Le Planétarium onwards). Not only did this narrator acknowledge his role as a writer, but he did so in a dialogue (albeit a one-sided one) with a reader who, like the double in Enfance, is assumed to be already familiar with Sarraute’s writing.3 For example, in commenting on the phrase ‘Si tu continues, Armand. . . .’ [‘If you carry on like that, Armand . . .’] in ‘Ton père. Ta sœur.’, the narrator acknowledges that it had already appeared in a previous work, and then, after expressing surprise that the

Same difference: reprise and variation



silent reader had remembered the words, he goes on to apologise for the need he feels to revisit them: ‘il faut tout de même, pardonnez-moi, que j’y revienne . . .’ (UP, p. ) [‘Even so, I hope you’ll forgive me, I must come back to them again’ (p. )]. Although in L’Usage de la parole the dialogue is carried out with a reader rather than an active co-creator, and although that reader remains silent (in contrast to the double whose question opens Enfance), his presence is as palpable in the text as Clamence’s equally silent interlocutor in Camus’s La Chute or the ‘gentlemen’ to whom the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Letters from the Underworld so provocatively addresses. The silent addressee of L’Usage de la parole contributes significantly toward the strongly other-directed commentary of the narrator in a manner which closely prefigures the mix of scepticism and cooperation which characterises the relations between the narrator and her double in Enfance.4 The narrator’s double also harks back to figures such as L’Alter in Portrait d’un inconnu, and more importantly to the double who splits off from the writer in Entre la vie et la mort in order to judge the authenticity of his writing and whom the writer calls variously ‘a witness’, ‘a judge’, and later on, ‘my double’ (EVM, pp. ,  [pp. , ]). But just as importantly, the narrator and her double would seem jointly to anticipate the multiple subject of the text which followed Enfance, Tu ne t’aimes pas, where two have become an innumerable plurality who, just like the duo whose commentary underpins Enfance, express themselves solely in dialogue. This plural subject consisting of multiple virtualities, which could never be reduced to a single coherent entity, also seems to be designed to undermine in retrospect any authorial identity which the autobiographical effects of Enfance may have produced. The retrospective strategy implied in this development clearly places Enfance within a continuous fictional evolution, rather than assigning it a different, extra-fictional status to one side of the main prose corpus. Structurally too, the textual organisation of Enfance as a series of fragments relates it to many of Sarraute’s other texts, beginning most notably with Tropismes and revived in equally striking form in L’Usage de la parole where the central focus of each of the component texts is provided by an utterance whose multiple ramifications and resonances the writing is devoted to exploring. Indeed, Chekhov’s dying words, ‘Ich sterbe’, in the first text of L’Usage de la parole anticipate both in colour and in language (German), the prohibition of the governess which forms the kernel of the first remembered scene of Enfance, ‘Nein, das tust du nicht’.

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Genre and difference

And the fragment was, of course, also the basis of Sarraute’s last works, Ici and Ouvrez. Finally, the presumption of retrospect associated with autobiography is ignored in Enfance in favour of a predominantly present tense, which also provides the centre of gravity in the fiction and indeed constitutes an essential part of its purpose. That purpose is most clearly articulated in ‘Conversation et sous-conversation’ where Sarraute argues that it is important to move beyond a retrospective vision which fixes experience in the form of memory, and to try instead to convey the movements of the inner life as if the reader were living them himself: ‘les revivre, et [. . .] les faire revivre au lecteur dans le présent, tandis qu’ils se forment et à mesure qu’ils se développent’ (‘Conversation’, p. ) [‘relive them, and [. . .] make the reader relive them in the present, while they are forming and as they develop’ (p. )]. If Enfance is devoted to recalling the past, that past is resurrected and relived as present, and the combined work of inward exploration and of the writing process itself serves to shift moments of a past merely recollected (‘J’étais assise, encore au Luxembourg [. . .]’ [‘I was sitting, again, in the Luxemburg Gardens [. . .]’]) into a moment of present immediacy and intensity: et à ce moment-là, c’est venu . . . quelque chose d’unique . . . qui ne reviendra plus jamais de cette façon, une sensation d’une telle violence qu’encore maintenant, après tant de temps écoulé, quand, amoindrie, en partie effacée elle me revient, j’éprouve . . . mais quoi? quel mot peut s’en saisir? (E, pp. –) [and at that moment, it happened . . . something unique . . . something that will never happen again in that way, a sensation of such violence that, even now, after so much time has elapsed, when it comes back to me, faded and partially obliterated, I feel . . . but what? what word can capture it? (p. )]

In all these ways, then, Enfance is inscribed within the continuous evolution of a self-consistent literary genre in a manner which makes it very much ‘the same’ as both its precursors and its successors within that corpus.5 Problems only arise when we consider how we might characterise this literary genre. For if it is to include Enfance with its overtly autobiographical gestures, then the category of ‘fiction’ becomes an awkward one. But rather than get involved in the intractable debates about truth and fiction which recent autobiographies have provoked, it might be worth simply sticking with the issues of sameness and difference. And if we shift the perspective slightly on this issue, it emerges that the sameness of Enfance in relation to the writings which can unproblematically be classed

Same difference: reprise and variation



as fictional, can also – if paradoxically – become the basis for its difference. That is to say that the appeal to lived experience which the autobiographical character of Enfance makes by virtue of its status as autobiography, works to ground the experience of the fiction in a truth which would otherwise remain purely speculative or hypothetical. Although the fictional texts seek to persuade their readers of the experiential truth of what they narrate, they cannot do so except by using the strategies of rhetorical persuasion which are fiction’s sole recourse. It is only in the extra-fictional space of commentary that Sarraute can effectively make the truth-claims for her work on which it nonetheless depends. Thus, it is in the  preface to the critical essays L’Ère du soupçon (in other words, in the frame of what is in effect a sort of commentary – the preface – on commentaries – the essays) that we learn that the tropisms of which she writes in her novels are an intimate part of her own experience which goes back to the childhood which Enfance was to portray twenty years later: ‘ces impressions étaient produites par certains mouvements, certaines actions intérieures sur lesquelles mon attention s’était fixée depuis longtemps. En fait, me semble-t-il, depuis mon enfance’ [‘these impressions were produced by certain movements, certain inner actions which had held my attention for a long time. Indeed, since my childhood, I think’] (ES, p. , my emphasis). Similarly, it is in the extraliterary format of the interview that Sarraute spells out the nature of the autobiographical basis of her work: Les éléments autobiographiques, comme chez tous les écrivains, existent partout: dans ce sens que je n’écris pas de choses que je n’ai jamais éprouvées ou que je n’ai jamais vu quelqu’un éprouver. Mais ça ne veut pas dire que ce sont des choses tirées de ma propre vie. Je ne connais pas d’homme plus généreux qu’était mon père et j’ai décrit un père avare. Je ne me suis pas servie d’éléments autobiographiques, mais simplement de sensations, d’impressions, éparpillées partout. [As in all writers, there are autobiographical elements everywhere: in the sense that I never write about things that I have not experienced or that I have not seen someone else experience. But that doesn’t mean that these are things taken from my own life. I don’t know anyone more generous than my father was and I portrayed a father who is a miser. I didn’t use autobiographical elements, but just sensations and impressions that are scattered all over the place.]6

It is these sensations and impressions which Enfance is seeking to ground in the lived experience of the child. If the familiar claim made by novels, ‘“All is true”’ (as Balzac has it in Le Père Goriot), is really to carry weight, then it must be made outside the genre on behalf of which it speaks. In



Genre and difference

this sense, the validity of the truth-claims of the fiction depends on their having a source in a writing which is (generically) different from the fiction: critical essay, interview, or autobiographical text. In Sarraute’s case these truth-claims are psychological or experiential rather than anecdotal, and she makes this point very concretely in an interview with Arnaud Rykner, where she distinguishes between the quality of an experience as actually lived and the fictional scenarios in which it is represented: Quelquefois je pars d’un tropisme vécu, mais que je déplace: je le prends dans d’autres circonstances, je crée autour de lui un milieu ambiant dans lequel il pourra s’épanouir et qui n’est pas celui où je l’ai personnellement vécu. [. . .] Prenez le texte sur l’angoisse dans Portrait d’un inconnu. Le fait que sa fille lui vole du savon réveille le personnage en pleine nuit. Dans la réalité, je n’ai jamais expérimenté cela, de près ou de loin. Ce que j’ai expérimenté, c’est cette sorte d’angoisse qui tout à coup se fixe sur une chose quelconque. Cherchant à rendre cette sensation, je me suis décidée pour la barre de savon qui en elle-même ne répond à aucune expérience personnelle – comme rien d’ailleurs dans Portrait d’un inconnu. [Sometimes I start from a lived tropism, but I place it somewhere else: I take it from other cirumstances, I create an environment around it in which it can develop and which is not the one that I personally experienced. [. . .] Take the passage about anguish in Portrait d’un inconnu. The character is woken in the middle of the night by the fact that his daughter is stealing soap from him. I have never experienced that in real life, at close quarters or at a remove. What I have experienced is that sort of anguish which all of a sudden fixes on some object or other. In trying to convey that sensation I decided on a bar of soap which in itself does not correspond to any personal experience – as indeed nothing in Portrait d’un inconnu does.]7

As far as Enfance is concerned, the psychological kernel of an experience – as distinct from the accident of its circumstances – is repeatedly emphasised at key points in the text so as to make this its fundamental autobiographical component. In this, fundamental sense, then, Enfance no different from (no more and no less autobiographical than) the fiction. Thus, the opening dialogue between the narrator and her double establishes that the anecdotal material of the childhood memories will be validated as a literary enterprise chiefly by virtue of the fact that they all contain ‘little bits of something still alive’ – in other words, the lived tropisms which constitute the material of the imagined episodes of the fiction (such as the one involving the stolen soap in Portrait d’un inconnu). And beyond this global directive to the reader to focus his attention on this level of the reality of the book’s contents, a number of the epi-

Same difference: reprise and variation



sodes in Enfance seem, in one way or another, to possess an exemplary status whose general significance eclipses the particular material happenstance of the past. For instance, the first recollection where the young Natacha defies her governess’s prohibition and plunges a pair of scissors into the silk upholstery of a sofa in a Swiss hotel, has been widely interpreted by critics as being emblematic of Sarraute’s whole literary enterprise: with its challenge to authority and convention, its submission to impulse, its implicit attack on the mother who is repeatedly described in association with her silky skin, the split in the smooth surface of the upholstery evoking the various splits and fissures in Sarraute’s writing through which the tropism seeps, and finally the formless grey matter revealed beneath the surface by the child’s assault, recalling the ‘matière anonyme comme le sang, [le] magma sans nom’ [‘the substance as anonymous as blood, [the] magma without name’] of the tropism itself.8 In a less metaphorical and more explicit mode, the episode where a well-meaning housekeeper says to Natacha ‘Quel malheur quand même de ne pas avoir de mère’ (E, pp. –) [‘What a tragedy, though, to have no mother’ (pp. –)] presents the effect of the words on the child as a first encounter with an experience (that of being ‘trapped’ inside a word) which has subsequently been repeated on numerous occasions in her life. The double asks, ‘C’était la première fois que tu avais été prise ainsi, dans un mot?’ [‘Was that the first time that you had been trapped like that, inside a word?’]; and the narrator replies, ‘Je ne me souviens pas que cela me soit arrivé avant. Mais combien de fois depuis ne me suis-je pas évadée terrifiée hors des mots qui s’abattent sur vous et vous enferment’ [‘I don’t remember it happening to me before. But how many times since have I not escaped, terrified, out of words which pounce on you and hold you captive’]. This firmly underscores the paradigmatic character of the event, and invites readers to see similar episodes in the fiction as grounded in real experience. Nevertheless, over and above this paradigmatic dimension of certain episodes and the book’s stated emphasis on the tropismic element in all the scenes it portrays, there are certain moments which, in so far as they present scenarios depicted elsewhere in Sarraute’s writing, lend themselves to being read as the ‘true’ autobiographical or definitive account of partial or distorted fictional versions which have appeared elsewhere. As autobiography Enfance is susceptible to this kind of inevitable, if naïve, referential reading which presupposes a generic difference in the way that the same material is treated. Moreover, this generic distinction between Enfance and the other prose texts is underscored through its



Genre and difference

conformity with the basic generic requirement of autobiography identified by Philippe Lejeune: namely that author, narrator and protagonist should all refer to the same person.9 In this instance, the complication of the narrator having a double can be accommodated within the schema by virtue of the fact that despite – or rather, because of – the shifting character of the gender used to refer to him/her, s/he does represent an aspect of the writing part of Sarraute herself. A propos of the masculine adjectives ‘outrecuidant’ [‘presumptuous’] and ‘grandiloquent’ which the narrator ascribes to her double at one point (pp. – [p. ]), Sarraute has said in an interview: ‘Mon double est forcément asexué. Si je mettais un féminin, cela voudrait dire que je me sens être une femme. Ce que je ne me sens pas’ [‘My double is necessarily asexual. If I used the feminine, it would mean that I feel that I am a woman. Which I don’t’].10 In other words, the extra narratorial component in the form of the asexual double, far from introducing an element of fictional ambiguity into the autobiographical pact between the text and its reader, stands on the contrary as additional proof of Sarraute’s total involvement in her autobiographical enterprise by representing the asexuality of Sarraute’s actual writing self. Finally, and less subtly no doubt, in addition to this generic requirement that author, narrator(s) and protagonist refer to the same person, the simple fact of the match between Enfance’s account of Natacha’s childhood and the evidence of independent biographical data concerning Nathalie Sarraute, serves to reinforce the text’s validity as ‘true’ in its own right, regardless of any claims it may also be making implicitly on behalf of the fictional texts. Read as a true account, certain scenes then stand out as the authentic or original versions of scenes that readers have encountered elsewhere in Sarraute’s work. Perhaps the key episode here concerns the train journey where Maman accompanies Natacha to Berlin, which clearly recalls a similar scene in Entre la vie et la mort where there is also a train journey, a mother, a child, an implicitly Russian landscape and a game with words. The temptation with this scene is to assume that the Enfance version is making explicit an emotional experience of being separated from the mother which has somehow been repressed or excised from the fictional version, thus prompting a reading of the fictional text against the autobiographical one. Similarly, the allusion to a homework assignment entitled ‘Mon premier chagrin’ [‘My first sorrow’] in Entre la vie et la mort (p.  [p. ]), may retrospectively acquire an extra charge of emotional and aesthetic significance when placed

Same difference: reprise and variation



alongside the much fuller account of such an assignment in Enfance. In each case it is possible to read the autobiographical episode as the full and original truth behind its partial fictional equivalent. Other moments in the text lend support to this kind of approach, naïve as it may seem. For example, the occasion when Maman’s literary friend puts an end to Natacha’s early attempts at writing with the comment that ‘Avant de se mettre à écrire un roman, il faut apprendre l’orthographe’ (E, p. ) [‘Before anyone sets out to write a novel, they first need to learn to spell’ (p. )]makes an implied allusion to Sarraute’s reference to the same episode in an interview with Pierre Demeron in . Demeron narrates the experience as an instance of ‘[un] traumatisme d’enfance dont elle [a] longtemps conservé les traces’ [‘[a] childhood trauma which left its mark on her for a long time’];11 but in Enfance Sarraute dismisses this interpretation as a facile evasion (for which she holds herself responsible), and presents the autobiographical account as the only one based on a proper consideration of and insight into the incident. So that although the two versions of the episode at issue here are both non-fictional, the autobiographical text makes a stronger truth claim than the journalistic account on the grounds of its greater reflectiveness: C’était si commode, on pouvait difficilement trouver quelque chose de plus probant: un de ces magnifiques ‘traumatismes de l’enfance’ . . . [. . .] j’y croyais . . . par conformisme. Par paresse. (E, p. ) [It was so convenient, it would have been difficult to find anything more convincing: one of those magnificent ‘childhood traumas’ . . . [. . .] I believed it, out of conformism. Out of laziness. (p. )]

And the narrator goes on to say that it is only recently that she had been inclined to recall the elements of her childhood and as a result has been surprised to discover on closer scrutiny that as far as this one goes she feels (felt) no anger or resentment towards the discouraging ‘uncle’, but rather, immense relief at having been delivered from the spell exerted by a certain kind of writing (the kind she associates with her mother). In its small way this episode serves to contribute to the implication that Enfance is the only true and reliable account of events that have been presented elsewhere in adulterated or misleading form. Indeed, Sarraute seems more than willing to flaunt the accuracy of even the purely material and circumstantial recall of events, supplying her editors and commentators with testimonies from those who were witnesses or participants in the same events, as if to underline the truthfulness of their depiction in



Genre and difference

Enfance.12 In all these ways, then, the autobiographical text’s difference from broadly similar scenes in other fictional (but also non-ficitonal) accounts is a crucial factor in its claim to be true. The problems start, however, when this principle is extended to other moments where the link between the autobiographical text and a fictional counterpart remains perceptible but is more tenuous. For example, it may be justifiable in the light of what Enfance relates about the significance of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper or Lazhechnikov’s Maison de glace to give particular weight to allusions to these texts which appear elsewhere in Sarraute’s work. It may also be plausible to see a model for M. and Mme Martereau in the Florimond couple. But Sarraute herself seeks to put a brake on this tendency by confronting it head on over the question of Babouchka’s role as a model for the idealised grandmother in «disent les imbéciles». The question is raised, acknowledged and then severely circumscribed and limited to incidentals: – [Elle n’a p]as grand-chose de commun avec celle [la grand-mère] que tu as montrée plus tard dans l’un de [tes livres] . . . – Rien que la jupe moelleuse, les tavelures qui parsèment le dos de ses mains et, sur son annulaire, au niveau de l’articulation ce petit creux . . . Mais ses cheveux sont d’un jaune terne, ses yeux ne sont pas pareils à de l’émail bleu, ils sont d’un vert jaunâtre un peu déteint, elle a un grand visage blafard, d’assez gros traits . . . il est impossible de la modeler en une mignonne statuette bleue et rose de grand-mère de conte de fées . . . (pp. –) [– Not a great deal in common with the one you later described in one of your books . . . – Nothing but the soft skirt, the scattering of liver spots on the back of her hands, and, on her ring finger, that little hollow at the joint . . . But her hair is a dull yellow, her eyes are not like blue enamel, they are a slightly faded, yellowish green, she has a large, pale face, with rather heavy features . . . it’s impossible to mould her into the dainty little blue and pink statuette of a fairy-tale grandmother (pp. –)]

However, in other instances, not only is the link not mentioned, but it is at best inconclusive, since the emotional character of the autobiographical version of the event is quite different from its fictional counterpart.13 When Natacha goes with her father to the Jardin du Luxembourg she persuades him to buy her a balloon as proof that he loves her; but Portrait d’un inconnu records memories of a similar episode where the father obstinately refuses his young daughter the same indulgence. And whereas Gisèle in Le Planétarium recalls a nightmare event in the same Jardin du

Same difference: reprise and variation



Luxembourg when a happy moment is interrupted by a scream from her mother and the sight of a sinister and foul-smelling vehicle lumbering towards her (P, p.  [p. ]), the same setting with trees in flower, damp grass sparkling in the sunshine, the vibrating air, and even the component of happiness, is used in Enfance for Natacha’s experience of the ‘bonheur’ which expressly excludes precisely the sort of horror that is conveyed by Gisèle’s experience in the same situation (E, pp. – [pp. –]). It is impossible to know what to make of these echoes where the combination of similarity and difference between the autobiographical and the fictional texts entails a difference in emotional cast which may or may not carry signficance for the parallel scene: does Natacha’s moment of ‘happiness’ constitute a comment on Gisèle’s memory of horror? or is Gisèle’s nightmare lurking in the margins of Natacha’s ecstasy? The implications of these parallels remain thoroughly inconclusive. More inconclusively still, what are Sarraute’s readers who, as we have seen, are treated as having memories of her earlier texts, to make of the appearance in Ici, published some twelve years after Enfance, of a fragment which seems to echo (right down to the insistence on the word ‘always’) the scene where Natacha’s father teaches her the days of the week? In Enfance the fragment is part of a section which evokes idealised memories of Natacha’s birthplace in Ivanovo and a series of very positive, and perhaps equally idealised images of her father as an affectionate and attentive parent (E, p.  [p. ]). In Ici the equivalent fragment is part of the concluding meditation on Pascal’s phrase ‘Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie’ [‘The eternal silence of those infinite spaces fills me with terror’] with all its solemnity and awe (I, p.  [p.]). The thematic context in each case seems ‘strong’ enough to be capable of providing a frame or implied interpretive comment on the other, but nothing dictates which could or should determine the reading of the other. Most importantly, since Ici postdates Enfance, the possibility of reading the autobiographical as the true or corrective version of the fictional one is ruled out here. There is sameness and difference in equal measure in these scenes, but in a form which precludes using one as the ground or yardstick for the other. Issues of ‘truth’ no longer seem pertinent and we are left simply with two versions of the same material: two equipollent variations on a single theme, rather than an autobiographical truth against which we might measure a fictional distortion.



Genre and difference :   

Looked at in this way, the link between Ici and Enfance seems not to be specific to the relation between lived experience and fictional representations, but recalls instead other kinds of link between different texts by Sarraute. Indeed, Sarraute’s work is increasingly marked by a network of echoes and repeated motifs that run from one text to another, and sometimes from one genre to another. For example, many of the plays appear to take their inspiration from a phrase in one of the novels, or to contain moments which rework a similar moment in the fiction. So that, for example, Les Fruits d’or would seem to contain the sources for Le Mensonge, Le Silence and C’est beau.14 Or again, the phrase ‘C’est bien, ça’ [‘It’s very good, that’] first appears in Entre la vie et la mort, and is revived for its full, deadly effect to become the kernel of the play Pour un oui ou pour un non.15 In the case of the phrase ‘mon petit’ [‘my dear’], the shift of direction is reversed and it is L’Usage de la parole () which picks up and develops the words which had already figured in C’est beau (first broadcast as a radio play in ).16 In all these cases we are dealing with something more than instances of mere repetition. As Arnaud Rykner argues, the different circumstances provided by theatre as opposed to prose fiction allow certain possibilities contained within the original fictional phrase to be explored and developed in ways that only the conditions of theatrical dialogue make possible – or more precisely, the phrase and its associated sous-conversation allow theatrical dialogue itself to be pushed to new and previously unexplored limits.17 This kind of textual reworking from one genre to another is not confined to Sarraute’s theatre. Les Fruits d’or () takes its plot structure from a discussion in the critical essay ‘Ce que voient les oiseaux’ () where Sarraute comments on the tendency of critical enthusiasms to rise and fall: Il arrive de temps en temps qu’une sorte de vertige, explicable chez des gens occupés à tant lire, prenne les plus écoutés des critiques: ils se mettent tout à coup à crier au chef-d’œuvre, à porter aux nues un ouvrage dénué de toute valeur littéraire, comme le prouvera, quelque temps après, l’indifférence, puis l’oubli où sa faiblesse ne manquera pas de le faire glisser. [Every now and then we see our most influential critics in the grip of a kind of vertigo, which is understandable in people who spend so much time reading: but then they suddenly start talking about masterpieces, and to praise to the skies a work which is devoid of all literary value, as will be proven some time later, by the indifference and then the oblivion into which its weakness will inevitably see it slide.]18

Same difference: reprise and variation



And she goes on in the essay to mention the fate of those who resist the mass hysteria of critical orthodoxy and whose uncomfortable situation is explored in considerable detail by the novel. But beyond these intergeneric transpositions, many of the texts are linked by one text providing the germ for a subsequent one. So, for example, the emergence of a solid, conventional character, Dumontet, at the end of Portrait d’un inconnu gives Sarraute a starting point for her next novel, Martereau, where an equivalent figure is gradually dismantled, as if Martereau himself had been reworked from the same substance as Dumontet, and the refurbishment of the weekend house planned in Portrait d’un inconnu had been handed over to M. and Mme Martereau for its final execution in the novel which succeeded it. Or again, in an interview Sarraute suggests that both Les Fruits d’or and Entre la vie et la mort constitute two separate developments of a single kernel contained in Le Planétarium. In response to a suggestion from Germaine Brée that her work had seen a change of emphasis and direction after Le Planétarium towards an explicit concern with the ‘author, his relationships with others, with himself, with his work’, Sarraute replies as follows: Certainly. The idea came to me when I was writing Le Planétarium; I had just completed a passage about Germaine Lemaire, the writer, and I thought that it would be very interesting to do something about the literary text itself. I thought of Les Fruits d’or. It would be interesting to take a book, which would become the true hero of the novel, and follow its destiny as it rises and falls and especially to examine the tropisms which its publication generates around it. And then afterwards I thought that it would be interesting to concentrate on the writer as such, not on a writer.19

What is significant about this comment is that Sarraute sees the change of direction in the work that follows Le Planétarium as having its source in Le Planétarium, and to be the effect of a return to one of its key moments: the episode where the writer confronts her own writing, a moment which, incidentally, itself portrays a kind of return as Germaine Lemaire rereads her work. This notion of writing as return or reprise is implied on a number of occasions in Sarraute. The writer in Entre la vie et la mort is depicted at the end of the novel returning to words he had written earlier, and the life or death quality of his writing depends not on the worth of his first draft but on the way in which he revises it as he revisits the original: too much polish and the writing will be dead, too much complacency on his part, and the result could be the same. Extending this idea, one could also see each of Sarraute’s texts as emerging from a series of returns to its



Genre and difference

opening scene, since she claims that the genesis of each of her works is provided by its inaugural moment: Je commence toujours par travailler ce qui constituera le début du livre. Une fois que j’ai trouvé les premières phrases, je m’en sers comme tremplin pour la suite, et j’ai besoin de ce tremplin. [I always begin by working on what will form the beginning of the book. Once I have found the first sentences, I use them as a springboard for the rest, and I need this springboard.]20

It is as if each section of a text were a variation on its introductory theme, and each phase of the work both a return to and a development of its original motif. In other words, the movement of return is integral to both the writing and the construction of the Sarrautean text, and the repeated motif not just a link between separate works – or even separate genres – within the overall corpus, but a powerful structuring device within a single work.21 Much of what Sarraute herself has said on this subject implies that the original kernel has an inexhaustible plenitude and that this explains and justifies its generative role. For instance, her comments on Vous les entendez?, a novel which very obviously derives from its opening scene, whose ramifications and potential the whole book is devoted to exploring, imply that the scene is marked by just such an abundance: Le père dit: ‘Vous les entendez?’ et à partir de cette phrase se développe tout le livre. Ces mots servent de catalyseurs. Ils sont comme un germe qui arrive là et, tout autour, commence à grossir quelque chose qui devient énorme et se développe presque malgré moi. (Qui êtes-vous?, p. ) [The father says: ‘Do you hear them?’ and the whole book develops out of that sentence. The words are catalysts. They are like a seed which appears, and then all around, something begins to grow which becomes enormous and develops almost in spite of me.]

This view is endorsed by many critics of Sarraute’s work, and André Allemand, for example, describes this opening scene as ‘ce moment aux mille et une résonances, [. . .] ce moment total, parfait, que je qualifierai de poétique, parce qu’il se compose de toutes les extensions, qu’il est fait à la fois de tout ce qui est vécu et de la part d’imaginaire et de rêve qu’implique ce vécu’ [‘the moment with a thousand and one resonances, [. . .] this total, perfect moment, which I would call poetic, because it is composed of all its implications, and because it is made up both of every aspect of the lived experience and of all the imagination and dreams that this lived experience implies’].22 Sarraute’s writing is presented in

Same difference: reprise and variation



both these comments (her own and Allemand’s) as having as its purpose the revelation of the fullness of the originary moment. Each reprise would then be like another dip into a brantub, bringing further confirmation of the abundance contained in the text’s starting point. Another gloss on this aspect of her writing comes in an interview where Sarraute suggests that this technique is literature’s equivalent of the multiple perspectives of Cubism: Dans l’écriture, on ne peut le faire que d’une manière successive. Alors je suis obligée, quand un mot, une expression provoque chez nous une impression globale, je suis obligée de prendre ce mot et montrer une nouvelle sensation que ça provoque, et une nouvelle, et encore une autre, alors que, en réalité, nous le ressentons tout à fait globalement. C’est à la fois que nous percevons tout ça. [In writing, one can only do it in succession. So when a word or an expression produces an overall impression in us, I have to take that word and show a new sensation that it produces, and then another new one, and then another, whereas in real life, we sense it completely as a whole. We perceive it all at the same time.]23

The originary moment is ‘an overall impression’ whose implications can be fully appreciated only by repeatedly returning to it so as to draw them all out. This structure can also be seen on a small scale in a number of episodes where a single phrase provides a kernel around which the writing weaves a series of arabesques, each one bringing out another aspect of it. The phenomenon of variation as repetition with a difference here becomes constitutive of whole episodes. For example, in Entre la vie et la mort, in the scene where the writer comes to tell his father that his book has been accepted for publication, the father’s sceptical response, ‘Combien t’a-t-on pris pour publier ça?’ [‘How much did they take off you to publish that?’], is repeated six times over, each repetition being accompanied by a different sous-conversation and a different set of images which present yet another dimension of the situation: the boy in short trousers who, having been the despair of his teachers and psychologists comes home from school one day with a string of good marks to show; the prodigal son kneeling at his father’s feet and asking for his forgiveness and his blessing; the deserter returning to his ranks who finds that, instead of being met with the open arms he had hoped for, his way is barred by his former companions who have their rifles trained on him; and so on. There is indeed a presumption here of an abundance in the scene’s central motif which this sequence of variants serves to reveal, like the different facets of a Picasso portrait.



Genre and difference

But these returns can also signal a serious anxiety. Françoise Asso has argued eloquently that Sarraute’s repetitions revisit an original trauma which is never identified, but which constantly resurfaces as menace in the ceaseless return of the tropism itself.24 And there is a further source of anxiety implied by the reprises of Sarraute’s writing in the sense that repetition can become an indication of insufficiency rather than abundance in relation to the original moment. Plenitude may be undermined rather than enhanced by the differences in each of the perspectives which supposedly elucidate it, each one replacing rather than expanding the one that precedes it. Difference between turns out to be a much more disquieting difference within. Indeed a good many of Sarraute’s reprises focus on an impression that is itself more divided than it is global. I shall be looking in more detail at some of these divided impressions later on, but one relatively straightforward instance of variation as inner division can be seen in those scenes where a single episode is narrated from the point of view of more than one of the characters participating in it. Le Planétarium contains a number of instances of these scenes since it combines a multiple narrative perspective (unlike the first two novels) with a cast of clearly distinguished characters who inhabit a self-consistent and identifiable world (unlike the texts which succeed it). The most striking of these multiply narrated episodes is the one where Pierre goes to visit his sister Berthe to talk about Alain’s wish to take over her flat. The two versions of the scene – Berthe’s and Pierre’s – follow straight on from each other as if to highlight the difference in their two experiences of the encounter (P, pp. – [pp. –] and pp. – [pp. –] respectively). Each one contains much the same spoken dialogue and each includes Pierre’s gesture of turning down the corner of the rug by his feet. But the ‘sous-conversations’ of each of the two versions differ enormously from each other, and this turns Pierre’s visit into a completely different event for each of them. These differences are chiefly local, since the scene is not presented as having a single overall significance for either character, and neither character has his or her ‘character’ underwritten or confirmed by the episode. The divide which separates the two characters is apparent from the outset since for Berthe much happens before the conversation ever starts, whereas for Pierre this moment is so insignificant that nothing is said of his experience of it. When Pierre enters the narrative, he is focusing on the upturned corner of the rug and as he straightens it out, the gesture is described as bringing him great relief (‘quel soulagement, quel apaise-

Same difference: reprise and variation



ment’, p.  [‘what a relief, how soothing’ (p. )]). For Berthe observing the gesture it appears as the sign of an evasion or a wilful distraction from the matter in hand (p.  [p. ]). And although the two characters are acutely sensitive to each other throughout the scene, their interpretations of each others’ thoughts and responses are widely divergent. Where Berthe imagines Pierre (with some exasperation at his defeatism) as an old man in a worn raincoat admiring his handsome son, resplendent on horseback as he passes by without seeing his father (pp. – [p. ]), Pierre’s own image of his paternal role at the same point in their exchange is expressed in another imaginary scenario which is quite different in flavour from Berthe’s. Instead of seeing his son as a resplendent horseman, he pictures Alain in the dock as a pale and shifty delinquent and himself as the loyal father defending his son against the juridical opprobrium being heaped upon him (p.  [p. ])). The significance of both inner and outer realities (Pierre’s role as a father, his gesture of turning down the corner of carpet) is quite different for each of the characters concerned. Moreover, although each of them is acutely aware of being the object of the other’s interpretation, the picture that each has of the other’s view of him- or herself is very different from the one that the other actually has. So, for example, Pierre imagines Berthe remembering the way he once lit a cigarette after taking leave of his grandmother (p.  [p. ]), but the memory does not feature at all in Berthe’s mind. Equally, when Berthe senses that her brother is nurturing a momentary grudge, she assumes quite erroneously that she is its object (p.  [pp. –]). The two accounts of this episode end on the same words as Berthe asks Pierre to tell Alain to come and see her, to which Pierre replies that it is for Berthe and Alain to work things out between themselves. Here again, the significance of this exchange is very different for each of the two characters: for Berthe it is a sign that she has come up against something hard (‘elle a buté sur quelque chose de dur’, p.  [‘she has stumbled against something hard’ (p. )]) which then explodes; whereas for Pierre it carries his new-found sense of freedom and well-being, ‘une exquise sensation de légèreté, un goût d’autrefois qu’il avait oublié, de liberté, d’insouciance . . .’ (p. ) [‘an exquisite sensation of lightness, an old hankering, which he had forgotten, for freedom, for insouciance’ (p. )]. Mutual self-awareness, a common dialogue, a common perception of gesture turn out to have little that is really mutual or common between the two characters concerned. They inhabit very different mental universes, and the presence of these common motifs, far from



Genre and difference

implying a wealth of significance which it takes both perspectives to bring out (as in a Picasso portrait), are instead divided and undercut by the hugely divergent roles and interpretations that they acquire in each of the two perspectives in which they figure. The kernel of sameness which the motif might potentially constitute is transformed into an index of incommensurable difference when it appears as reprise in the second version.25 The plenitude of the ‘truth’ which the reprises seek to reveal, is undermined by the gesture of repetition itself. The different perspectives of Berthe and Pierre do not so much complete or complement each other, as underscore a difference that lies at the very heart of experience. The tropism which for Sarraute constitutes the common substance of human experience is in practice powerfully associated with divergence, and perhaps nowhere more so than in those contexts where it figures as reprise. One of the most striking instances of this paradox is to be found in the four versions of the scene between M. and Mme Martereau in Martereau. Collectively these four versions testify to the universality of the tropism by revealing its presence in a figure who had challenged that universality by appearing to be immune to this kind of response. But at the same time this collective ‘proof ’ goes hand in hand with radical differences of interpretation as to the form that the responses take in each of the four accounts. The first version presents a Martereau in broadly confident mood as the result of an unexpectedly pleasant evening with the narrator’s uncle; the second, a Martereau nervously aware of certain hostile undercurrents between himself and his new business acquaintance; the third, a Martereau whose every gesture has been dictated by his more powerful interlocutor and who then ‘discovers’ that he has been set up as a straw man; and the fourth has its centre of gravity in the impoverished relationship between the Martereau couple which each of the preceding scenes had already presented in different lights. This is a fundamentally unstable world where nothing can be known with certainty, and where nothing ever remains identical to itself – be it, as here, the sound of a door closing, a man walking up and down and whistling, a woman clearing a table, and a few spoken words. As Martereau himself observes, ‘c’est une chose qui arrive assez souvent, qu’on perçoive d’un même objet, à la fois plusieurs images très différentes’ (p. ) [‘this is something that happens quite often, we perceive several very different images of the same object’ (p. )]. Sarraute’s textual reprises have the effect of turning these differences into a disturbing internal divergence; the differences between her variants point ultimately to a difference within the single object they depict.

Same difference: reprise and variation



      In the last part of this exploration of Sarraute’s variants, I should like to consider the implications of two sets of reprises in her work where divergence takes the form both of textual variants and of variant interpretations, these being provided by the characters who speak and hear the words which constitute the central motif in each case. In each instance there proves to be an internal difference within words themselves whose capacity for proliferation of meaning, far from spelling abundance, leads to frustrated communication and a consequent rift between the characters involved. Linguistic difference in these episodes is something very different from the differential operations which determine the signifying systems, such as Saussurean linguistics or structural anthropology, which I examined in Chapters  and . The first of these examples is that of the phrase ‘Si tu continues, Armand, ton père va préférer ta sœur’ [‘If you carry on like that, Armand, your father will prefer your sister’]. It appears in Entre la vie et la mort and is taken up again and developed at length in ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’ in L’Usage de la parole. I have already discussed the way in which the words themselves are presented as opening up a breach between the characters who are referred to by them (in Chapter  above). But over and above this division, in both versions of the scene, the narrator who brings the utterance to the attention of his interlocutors has his intentions frustrated by their refusal to interpret the phrase in the way he sees it; and on both occasions this lack of a shared interpretation leads the narrator too to experience a breach, namely one between himself and the recipients of his comments. In Entre la vie et la mort, the phrase ‘Si tu continues, Armand, . . .’ is offered by the writer as an example of the kind of perfectly ordinary words which nevertheless get inside one and produce insidious and noxious effects: ‘ils ont quelque chose, ces mots, de très particulier . . . Ils restent là, en vous, toujours en activité, ils entrent de temps en temps en éruption, ils dégagent des vapeurs, des fumées . . .’ (EVM, pp. –) [‘these words have something very peculiar about them . . . They remain inside you, still active, from time to time they begin to erupt, they emit fumes, smoke . . .’ (p. )]. His interlocutors, however, fail to see the words this way, and the writer’s attempt to share his experience and to establish a common understanding of the phrase in question, collapses. Not only are his listeners unable to perceive the utterance in the light in which the writer presents it, but a further breach opens up as they turn his emphasis on the banality of the phrase into a sign that he spies on



Genre and difference

their ordinary, everyday conversations and takes notes on their verbal misdemeanours: – Mais on ne peut donc plus parler, on ne peut pas prononcer en votre présence les mots les plus ordinaires . . . Vous êtes terrible. Vous êtes là à nous épier . . . à tout enregistrer, à tout critiquer . . . (p. ) [It’s impossible for anyone to speak any more, one can’t use the most ordinary words in your presence . . . You’re awful. You’re there spying on us . . . noting everything down, criticising everything . . . (p. )]

The writer’s appeal for a shared reponse meets with refusal, suspicion and accusation. The reprise in L’Usage de la parole is presented explicitly as a second attempt to get the writer-narrator’s experience across: Écoutez-les, ces paroles . . . elles en valent la peine, je vous assure . . . Je vous les avais déjà signalées, j’avais déjà attiré sur elles votre attention. Mais vous n’aviez pas voulu m’entendre . . . [. . .] Mais il faut tout de même, pardonnez-moi, que j’y revienne, je dois absolument les reprendre encore une fois. (UP, p. ) [Listen to these words, they’re worth it, I assure you . . . I had already pointed them out to you, I’d already drawn your attention to them. But you didn’t want to listen to me . . . [. . .] All the same, and I hope you’ll forgive me, I really must come back to them, I absolutely have to take them up once again. (p. )]

He goes on to justify his return to the phrase by invoking its plenitude, and he denies that he is merely repeating himself. The problem for the writer, according to him, is not the insufficiency of his subject matter (the phrase), but of the means available to him for doing justice to it: je peux être à court, c’est vrai, devant une si grande abondance, devant un tel embarras du choix. Oui, à court de moyens, et c’est un manque qui peut devenir parfois exaspérant, insupportable. (p. ) [‘I may well be scraping the bottom of the barrel, it’s true, in the face of such abundance, such an enormous choice. Yes, scraping the bottom of the barrel, short of resources, and it’s a deficiency which can sometimes become exasperating, unbearable.’ (p. )]

Having given his account of what this ‘key phrase’ contains for him, the writer feels momentarily that he has succeeded in getting it across to his listeners: ‘Ah cette fois, il me semble que nous y sommes. Vous êtes avec moi cette fois, vous avez perçu comme moi . . . Je vois vos sourires complices . . .’ (p. ) [‘Ah, this time I do believe we’ve got there. You’re my accomplices this time, you’ve noticed, like me . . . I see it by your smiles . . .’ (p. )]. However, he then discovers that his audience have read the

Same difference: reprise and variation



phrase quite differently from him, focusing on the emotional blackmail it contains rather than on the way it allocates family roles. So that once again the phrase, supposedly so pregnant with positive potential, diverges in unforeseen and unwelcome ways; and instead of constituting an object of common understanding it sets speaker and listeners at cross purposes with each other. Words here prove to have an unmasterable division at their heart, which far from serving the writer’s purpose, places him at odds with those whom he seeks to make his accomplices. The repetition in L’Usage de la parole, which was intended to heal the rift that had opened up in Entre la vie et la mort, simply ends up by producing a further one. The other – almost obsessive – reprise which is also based on a failure of shared understanding, turns on the phrase ‘Debout les morts!’ [‘Let the dead arise!’] Like ‘Si tu continues, Armand . . .’ it makes its first appearance in Entre la vie et la mort, and Sarraute returns to it three times more, twice in «disent les imbéciles» and one further time in Ici. However, each of the scenarios in which it features reverses the situation associated with ‘Si tu continues, Armand . . .’ in the sense that they focus on a single figure who is presented as the source of an apparently wilful misunderstanding of the topic of the conversation going on around him. In each version this character interrupts a discussion by suddenly calling out ‘Debout les morts!’, much to the consternation of the people he is with: Mais qu’est qui lui prend? Qu’est-ce que c’est? Pourquoi, tout à coup? Certains, moins craintifs, se rapprochent, tendant le cou, levant la tête vers lui . . . ‘Maître, nous parlions des Maures. Des événements en Mauritanie.’ [But what’s got into him? What is it? Why, all of a sudden? Some of them, the less fearful ones, come closer, craning their necks, looking up towards him . . . ‘Maître, we were talking about the Moors [Les Maures]. Things happening in Mauritania.’]

In each case the solitary figure refuses to be corrected, and he obstinately pursues his own idiosyncratic reading of the word: Il n’a pas l’air de les entendre, il garde son visage figé. Son œil lourd, buté, fixe implacablement quelque chose devant soi. Il lève son bras. Il fait claquer son fouet: Debout les morts! Debout les morts! (EVM, p. ) [He appears not to hear them, he keeps the same fixed expression on his face. His heavy, obstinate eye stares implacably at something in front of him. He raises his arm. He cracks his whip: Let the dead [les morts] arise! Let the dead arise! (p. )]



Genre and difference

The scenes in «disent les imbéciles» (pp.  ff. and ) and Ici (pp. –) turn on exactly the same misunderstanding (‘Maures’ [Moors] heard as ‘morts’ [dead]), and Sarraute’s insistent return to it makes one wonder what is at stake for her in this rather forced homophony, and in the obstinate figure who simultaneously introduces difference into words and denies it. That is to say, he understands ‘les morts’ where the others mean ‘les Maures’, but he is adamant in hearing only his own version of the homophone: ‘Debout les morts!’ parce que c’est mon bon droit. Mon bon plaisir. Debout les morts! [. . .] C’est à prendre ou à laisser. Et qui oserait laisser? Qui ici aurait le courage de courir le risque? Personne. Ils sont matés. Dressés. (pp. ‒) [‘Let the dead arise!’ Because it’s my will and my right. My will and my pleasure Let the dead arise! [. . .] Take it or leave it. And who here would dare leave it? Who here would have the courage to take the risk? Nobody. They’ve been brought to heel. Trained. (pp. –)]

The Master imposes his own variant as the sole version of the word. In each text the scene has a slightly different colour and emphasis, but it retains certain constants beyond the core motif of misconstrual: in Entre la vie et la mort the interruption is a sign of the writer’s autocratic belief in his unique destiny and importance; in «disent les imbéciles» the ‘Maître’ figure is trapped in an image of this kind which is imposed on him by others, his every protest being turned by them into confirmation of his role; and in Ici the oppression lies in the phrase itself, rather than in its speaker, as it hijacks the conversation and kidnaps the Moors who were its original subject. But aside from these differences of emphasis, all three texts present the episode as one of difference violently denied in its very assertion. The Moors are each time ousted by the dead who claim exclusive rights of possession over the word: il n’y rien à faire, ‘Maures’ est maintenu prisonnier . . . ‘Debout les morts! Debout les morts!’ . . . il a été vidé de son sens et enchaîné à ‘Debout’ qui injecte en lui un sens inconnu, déconcertant, impénétrable . . . qui le rend tout à fait méconnaissable . . . son large ‘au’ est serré, comprimé en un ‘o’ étroit . . . mais on a beau essayer de désserrer l’étau . . . ‘Ce n’est pas “morts”, “morts” n’a rien à voir, c’est des “Maures” qu’on parlait’ . . . il n’y a pas moyen de le délivrer. Il faut s’y résigner, il est irrécupérable . . . (I, p. ) [there’s nothing to be done, ‘Maures’ [Moors] has been taken prisoner . . . ‘Let the dead arise! Let the dead arise!’ . . . it has been emptied of its meaning and shackled to ‘Arise’ which injects it with an unknown, disconcerting, impenetrable meaning . . . which makes it completely unrecognisable . . . its open ‘au’ is

Same difference: reprise and variation



squashed and compressed into a narrow ‘o’ . . . but it’s hopeless to try and loosen the noose . . . ‘It wasn’t “morts” [the dead], “morts” have nothing to do with it, it was the “Maures” [Moors] that we were talking about. There’s no way to deliver it. We’ll have to resign ourselves, it’s irretrievable . . . (p. )]

Like the phrase ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’, the scene where the Moors are evacuated by the dead demonstrates that words contain unforeseen and unmasterable internal differences, and that they are the cause of isolation and oppression as each side argues that only his version counts. There is a curious contradiction in Sarraute’s reprises between a view of difference as a mark of the inexhaustible wealth of potential contained within certain scenes and utterances, and the stories that these scenarios tell. For here difference appears as the source of either betrayal and abandonment (the case with ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’), or of oppression and tyranny (as with ‘Debout les morts!’). The experience of the characters in these scenes suggests that rather than constituting a sign of plenitude and completion, the differences contained within a single entity serve to isolate and divide. Yet, this breach in the heart of both words and things is evoked again and again in Sarraute’s writing as its necessary origin. The writer in Entre la vie et la mort offers the overheard words about fathers and sisters to his audience as an example, precisely, of something containing that vital if troubling fissure: On dirait qu’une paroi tout d’un coup s’est ouverte. Par la fente quelque chose s’est engouffré, venu d’ailleurs . . . Un ailleurs était là, qu’on ne soupçonnait pas, ou plutôt qu’on s’efforçait d’ignorer, on faisait semblant, pour la commodité, vous comprenez . . . Et c’est là, ça presse de toutes parts, cela s’infiltre . . . (EVM, p. ) [It’s as if a wall had suddenly opened up. Through the crack something that has come from somewhere else has surged through . . . There was somewhere else which we never suspected, or rather which we tried to ignore, we pretended, you understand, for the sake of convenience. And it’s there, it’s pressing in on all sides, it’s seeping through . . . (pp. –)]

The emergence of an elsewhere (of a somewhere different) through a breach (la fente) in the uniformity of the same is repeatedly associated with the quality that makes the difference between life and death in writing. It is through this split in the smooth surface of things that the tropism seeps, and it is the recurrent origin of Sarraute’s own writing, as she makes clear when she describes the effect that rereading Tropismes (the only text, she claims, that she ever returns to as a reader) has on her:



Genre and difference

Il me semble alors que je revois les premières fines craquelures dans le mur épais, tout lisse, qui autrefois m’entourait et d’où un jour quelques gouttes d’une substance inconnue pour moi avaient filtré. Depuis, je n’ai fait que m’efforcer d’élargir ces craquelures. [I feel as if I were once again seeing the first fine cracks in the thick, smooth wall which used to surround me and from which a few drops of a substance unknown to me seeped through one day. Since then all I have done is try to enlarge those cracks.]26

Writing is both a capturing of what seeps through these cracks and, as the opening scene of Enfance demonstrates, it is also, if need be, a sacrilegious tear in the too-smooth surface of existence. Questions of sameness and difference have led us from the question of generic affiliation, which concerns differences between, to the issue of the difference within, which is an issue about writing itself, regardless of generic categories. Writing for Sarraute depends crucially on this internal divergence in things; but it is poised in an uneasy equilibrium between the necessity of this kind of difference and the equal necessity of an absolute endorsement from its readers who are urged to feel the same about the difference within. Readers – like those depicted in the scenes we have been examining – who cannot or will not see that difference, but only the smooth uniformity of the surface of life, introduce a different kind of difference which can only end in the difference of betrayal and isolation. The divergence opened up by the unwanted difference in words denies the difference of the internal breach in existence, and in doing so leads ultimately to silence and the end of writing. This is what the closing words of ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’ suggest: ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’ . . . je le répète avec vous . . . vraiment, ne dirait-on pas que quelque chose . . . là . . . ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’? Non? rien ne bouge? la paroi est toute lisse, immobile. ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’? . . . Vous devez avoir raison . . . il n’y a rien . . . rien qui puisse bouger, s’ouvrir, pas de paroi. (UP, p. ) [‘Your father. Your sister . . . I repeat it with you . . . really, wouldn’t you say that something . . . there . . . ‘Your father. Your sister’? No? is there nothing moving? the wall is quite smooth, immobile. ‘Your father. Your sister’? . . . You must be right . . . there’s nothing . . . nothing that might move, open up, no wall. (p. )]

Without the reader’s replication of the writer’s vision of the difference at the heart of things, that difference vanishes. Even the things vanish, and writing itself falls silent.

   

Conclusion

Death and the impossible difference

At the end of the last chapter we saw that when a difference is opened up in the heart of things it becomes possible for writing to capture the ‘scrap of living substance’ which is its goal. But even this internal difference is liable to differ from itself; for it is just as often associated with death in Sarraute’s writing as it is with life. The breach that introduces internal difference is itself split between being a sign of life and a portent of death. In these concluding pages I shall be exploring the particularly volatile forms of difference that cluster around the issue of death in Sarraute’s work, and hope in the process to demonstrate both how intractable that cluster is, and also how imbroiled it is with the writing project itself. In short, by the intensity of its focus on issues of sameness and difference, rupture and continuity, loss and identification, death proves to be the ultimate testing ground for Sarraute’s writing. Though it does not figure as a large-scale theme in her work death is nonetheless a topic which repeatedly surfaces in it, and moreover very often in association with the appearance of a breach in things. From Tropismes to Ici, the tiniest fissure can provide a conduit for the intolerable menace which death represents for Sarraute: par la fente minuscule, une menace indéfinissable, quelque chose d’implacable, d’intolérable, qui est là, derrière, toujours prêt à s’insinuer, s’infiltre sournoisement . . . (PI, p. ) [through the tiny fissure, an undefinable threat, something implacable, intolerable, that exists on the other side, always ready to insinuate itself, keeps stealthily seeping through (p. )]

Fifty years later, the gap opened up by a sudden blank in the narrator’s memory produces the same panic-stricken effect as this breach does on Le Vieux. And his response, like that of so many of Sarraute’s characters before him, is to seek to plug the crack and seal off the menace which in the end always turns out to be the menace of death: 



Conclusion

refermer ce qui peut n’importe où, à n’importe quel moment s’ouvrir, laisser passer, se répandre ici ces exhalaisons . . . le souffle, l’haleine de l’absence irréparable, de la disparition . . . (I, p. ) [closing off what, no matter where, at no matter what moment, may open up and let those vapours in and spread themselves here . . . the exhalation, the breath of irreparable absence, of extinction . . . (p. )]

Sarraute’s characters live constantly with the barely repressed anxiety that the world around them will split apart and expose them to the possibility of the irreparable absence and the obliteration which is death. The frantic activity of these characters is, according to Sarraute, no more than a perpetually renewed attempt to avoid confronting this fear. This is how she puts it in an interview with Carmen Licari in : La peur de la mort est tellement forte qu’on ne peut pas l’aborder de front. En face de cette angoisse atroce que donne à chaque être humain la mort, on biaise. Comme fait par exemple dans Portrait d’un inconnu ‘le vieux’, quand il fixe son esprit sur la barre de savon coupé ou sur le trou dans le mur. La mort, c’est la rupture, le scandale, la destruction, la perte totale. On s’occupe de la perte d’un object, d’un trou derrière la baignoire, mais ce ne sont que des approches, c’est une façon de vivre à moindres frais la chose atroce et invivable. [The fear of death is so strong that one cannot confront it head on. Faced with the excruciating anguish that death causes in all human beings, one prevaricates. As ‘Le Vieux’ in Portrait d’un inconnu does when he fixes his mind on the bar of soap which has been cut or on the hole in the wall. Death is rupture, scandal, destruction, total loss. You busy yourself with the loss of an object, or a hole behind the bath, but these are only approximations, they are a way of living the excruciating and unlivable thing in a more bearable form.]1

And talking to Simone Bemussa on the same subject she says: Je crois toujours que quand nous cherchons un objet qui a disparu, nous éprouvons le même sentiment que devant le néant ou la mort qui nous hantent à ce moment-là et, comme nous ne pouvons pas l’affronter, nous nous accrochons à la disparition de l’objet. Quand l’objet reparaît, si nous l’avons retrouvé, c’est comme si la mort, la disparition de tout s’écartait pour un instant. (Qui êtes-vous?, p. ) [I always think that when we are looking for an object which has disappeared, we experience the same feeling as when we are confronted with the nothingness or the death which we are haunted by in those moments, and as we can’t face up to it, we cling to the disappearance of the object. When the object turns up again, if we’ve found it, it’s as if death and the disappearance of everything had been cast aside for a moment.]

Death and the impossible difference



The ‘angoisse’ which death elicits in us is so intolerable that human activity becomes a necessity that enables us to create bearable forms of anxiety as a displacement or a substitute for this fundamental and unbearable one. Le Vieux in Portrait d’un inconnu fixes on the damage caused by a leaking pipe; the narrator of Ici desperately searches for a series of forgotten names (Philippine, Tamaris, Arcimboldo);2 and the rest of us, says Sarraute, frantically turn out drawers or empty bins looking for a mislaid letter or a book whose loss could be more easily borne than the annihilation that is death, but which in any case – unlike death – may be cancelled by the recovery of the missing object. The words for this threat are, however, far from taboo and they proliferate in Sarraute’s writing as faille, fissure, craquelure, fente, écaillure, gouffre, creux (just to take page  of Portrait d’un inconnu [defect, fissure, crack, abrasion, abyss, hole (p. )]), or trou, ouverture, rupture, vide, vacance, béance, interstice (to take the first texts of Ici) [hole, opening, breach, void, space, gap, chink], as if to remind us of the omnipresence of a threat which is always ready to burst through every conceivable form of breach. What this reversal of the significance of the Sarrautean split (now as much a sign of death as of life) suggests is that the heroism of the writer’s sacrilegious gesture as s/he rips apart the intolerably smooth surface of things has as its counterpart the need to contain the equally intolerable menace that leaks through the resulting breach. The workings of difference in this domain are, however, more complicated still. For although the internal breach is both the source of writing’s living substance and the conduit for the reminder of death, death itself proves to be an equally divided entity: in one guise it figures as the fissure in the smooth surface of things; but it is also equated with that smooth surface itself. So once again, we find that in this universe, the essentials of existence – even when they take the absolute-sounding forms of ‘irreparable absence’ and ‘total loss’ – seem to be unnervingly incapable of remaining self-identical, and death can turn out to be both a breach and a uniform continuum. Death is already present in this second guise on the very first page of the first of Sarraute’s Tropismes, as the ‘ils’ who are its subject mysteriously seep into being from between the flat surfaces of the buildings along the street, ‘les façades mortes des maisons’ (T, p. ) [‘the dead façades of the houses’ (p. )]. Smooth façades are dead façades, and Sarraute’s first novel, Portrait d’un inconnu, is brought to a close when a deadly smoothness begins to seal up the world’s surfaces so that they no longer offer any purchase for the narrator’s tropistic sensibilities:



Conclusion

Tout s’apaisera peu à peu. Le monde prendra un aspect lisse et net, purifié. Tout juste cet air de sereine pureté que prennent toujours, dit-on, les visages des gens après leur mort. [Little by little everything will calm down. The world will take on a smooth, clean, purified appearance. At most that air of serene purity which people are always said to have after death.]

However, perhaps the deadliest manifestation of death in this guise lies in the way that it smooths over even the terror of death itself, reducing the event that Sarraute describes as ‘rupture’ and ‘scandal’ to a moment that is like any other. Après la mort? . . . Mais non, ce n’est rien, cela non plus . . . Même cet air un peu étrange, comme pétrifié, cet air un peu inanimé disparaîtra à son tour . . . Tout s’arrangera . . . Ce ne sera rien . . . Juste encore un pas de plus à franchir. (PI, p. ) [After death? . . . But that, too, is nothing either . . . Even that slightly strange, petrified look, that slightly lifeless look will disappear in its turn . . . It will be nothing . . . Just one more step to be taken. (p. –)]

In one sense, then, there seems to be nothing more appalling about death than the blandness with which some people seem capable of approaching it. The grandfather in Tropismes  tyrannises his grandson with his oppressive insistence on his own future disappearance; Le Vieux in Portrait d’un inconnu torments a sulky teenage acquaintance with a parade of equanimity at the prospect of his own demise (PI, pp. – [pp. –]); Martereau’s stories of his father’s calm encounter with death leave the narrator surer than ever that Martereau inhabits a different universe: ‘Il est mort de sa belle mort, il s’ést éteint de vieillesse à quatre-vingt-neuf ans entouré de ses petits-enfants et arrière-petits-enfants.’ [. . .] Tout est pour le mieux. La mort apprivoisée vient comme une bête familière se faire donner de bonnes tapes amicales, manger dans notre main. (M, p. ) [‘He died a beautiful death, he passed on as the result of old age at eighty-nine years old, surrounded by his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren.’ [. . .] Everything is for the best. Death is tamed and comes like a familiar animal to receive our friendly pats, to eat out of our hand. (pp. –)]

And at the end of ‘Ton père. Ta sœur’, the narrative of the various breaches opened up by the mother’s words comes to a close as the gaps are sealed up (‘rien ne bouge? la paroi est toute lisse, immobile’ [‘nothing’s moving? the wall is quite smooth, immovable’]), and to such a degree that, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, even the smooth surface in which they first appeared vanishes:

Death and the impossible difference



‘Ton père. Ta sœur’? . . . vous devez avoir raison . . . il n’y a rien . . . rien qui puisse bouger, s’ouvrir, pas de paroi. (UP, p. ) [‘Your father? Your sister’? . . . you must be right . . . there’s nothing . . . nothing that could move, open up, there’s no wall. (p. )]

The smoothness of the surface has become the blandness of its nonexistence; and as it disappears, what vanishes with it is the very possibility of opening up any difference within. If writing encounters a defeat in Sarraute – which, as we have seen from these examples, it regularly does – it is in the face of this deadliest form of death: its acceptance as banality, rather than terror at its awful prospect. Death, then, needs to differ from itself in order that terror may at least counter its effects as banality. And indeed, the narrator’s resistance to Le Vieux’s charade of acceptance in the face of death is described by him as a kind of triumph, which takes the form, precisely, of a reassertion of the old man’s terror. The old man flaunts his equanimity, but, says the narrator, ‘Cela n’avait pas pris avec moi’. By not being taken in by the smooth surface of the charade and its accompanying platitudes (platitudes being language that is, literally, all smooth surface), the narrator is able to reach beyond it, to penetrate the protective armoury of banality sported by Le Vieux and to reach something living within: J’avais réussi à saisir, dépassant de l’armure solide qu’il s’était fabriquée et où il se croyait bien en sûreté, quelque chose de vivant – sa main qui se tendait vers moi furtivement. J’avais saisi sa main au vol. Je le tenais. [I had succeeded in piercing the heavy armour which he had created for himself and behind which he felt safe, and I had caught hold of something alive – his hand which he was holding out to me furtively. I had seized his hand in mid-air. I held him tight.]

Paradoxically, the ‘living thing’ comes from the narrator’s ability to make contact with the old man’s panic as he lies awake in the grip of what he (Le Vieux) calls ‘mes réveils de condamné à mort’ (PI, p. ) [‘the awakenings of a condemned man’ (pp. –)]. This is not, however, a predatory appropriation of another’s experience, since it is presented precisely as a form of contact: the narrator has taken the old man’s outstretched hand, and what follows (the imagined night-time scene) is offered as the narrator’s response to the implicit appeal in the old man’s gesture. Through imaginative identification the narrator is able to share Le Vieux’s confrontation with what is the reverse of sharing, since for Sarraute death is primarily rupture and loss: ‘La mort, c’est la rupture [. . .], la perte totale’ [‘Death is rupture [. . .], total loss’]. This question of separation and loss is central to the way death



Conclusion

appears in Sarraute’s work. The absence of the elusive name in the first text of Ici opens up a gulf which threatens to separate the nameless figure from the narrator, as if the figure himself were already dead and irretrievably lost. Separation and death are synonymous, and this is why the breach has so urgently to be filled by recovering the name: ce qu’il a laissé derrière lui, cette ouverture, cette rupture disjoint, disloque, fait chanceler . . . il faut absolument la colmater, il faut à tout prix qu’il revienne, qu’il s’encastre ici à nouveau, qu’il occupe toute sa place . . . (I, pp. –) [what it has left behind here, this opening, this breach separates, dislocates, makes everything wobble . . . it must be filled in, it must at all costs come back, embed itself here once again, take its full place . . . (pp. –)]

When the name does finally come back to mind and the hole is filled, a lost contact is restored between the narrator and ‘Philippine’, just as the phrase ‘Bonjour Philippine’ itself evokes a restored union, as Barbara Wright’s note in the English translation explains: In the days when families of all nations used to play parlour games, one of the most charming was ‘Bonjour Philippine’. When the nuts and the fruit were brought in after a meal, if someone took an almond with twin kernels, he (or she) kept one half and gave the other to a fellow player. In the French version played in the first decades of this century, the recipient had to be a family member of the opposite sex. When the two players next met, the first to hold out his kernel and say ‘Bonjour Philippine’ became the winner of the game and was entitled to a ‘modest present’ from the loser. (p. )

The threat of separation associated with death is ultimately staved off here because the name succeeds in effecting a double union: between the narrator and his old friend, and metaphorically, between the twin kernels of the almond. The two guises in which death appears in Sarraute’s work – the smooth surface and the terrifying breach – both imply or impose separation. Or rather, the terror implies it and, as we saw in the ending of Portrait d’un inconnu, the smooth surface imposes it. But in using one form of death as an antidote to the threat of the other, there is a risk that one form of separation will merely replace the other. In this instance the union effected by the name ‘Philippine’ comes very close to restoring an excessive smoothness in things: Philippine . . . Philippine . . . encore et encore Phi-lip-pine . . . ses effluves délicieux répandent la certitude, l’apaisement . . . tout autour est stable, bien clos, bien lisse, parfaitement uni . . . pas le moindre interstice par où puisse s’infiltrer ici, souffler, faire osciller, trembler . . . (I, p. )

Death and the impossible difference



[Philippine . . . Philippine . . . again and again Phi-lip-pine . . . its delightful exhalations spread certainty, reassurance . . . everything around is stable, nicely enclosed, nice and smooth, perfectly sealed [uni], not the slightest interstice through which anything could seep in here, infiltrate and cause wavering, trembling . . . (p. )]

The ambiguity of the French word uni (meaning both ‘joined’ and ‘smooth’) sums up this risk perfectly. Sarraute’s response to this dilemma is, at one level, simply to accept it, allowing her writing to follow its dynamic by alternately opening up the breach through which terror seeps, and sealing it up again. And indeed, the chapters in this book have sought to chart the various ways in which the breach of difference in general is alternately opened and closed by Sarraute’s writing strategies. But in addition to this alternation, the dilemma as it is experienced in relation to death also takes a particularly paroxystic form to which Sarraute returns again and again in her writing, and in which that writing seems peculiarly implicated: the moment of death. This moment is repeatedly evoked in Sarraute’s work, both in extenso and as more fleeting allusion. The most extensive explorations of this moment are the death of Prince Bolkonski in Portrait d’un inconnu and that of Chekhov in ‘Ich sterbe’ in L’Usage de la parole, both of which focus on the last moments of a dying man. But other, briefer moments leave their mark: one of the characters in Entre la vie et la mort refers to the death of the poet Félix Arvers who used the last remnants of the life and strength within him to correct the pronunciation of the nun nursing him.3 In Enfance the narrator recalls Natacha’s predilection for the death scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and mentions that the copy she owned as a child contained an illustration of ‘l’oncle Tom mourant et en face, sur l’autre page, la description de sa mort’ [‘Uncle Tom dying, and on the other page, opposite, the description of his death’]. And as if to underscore the emotional significance of this scene for the child, she notes of these two pages of the book that ‘Elles étaient toutes deux légèrement gondolées, des lettres étaient effacées . . . elles avaient été tant de fois trempées de mes larmes’ (E, p. ) [‘They were both slightly crinkled, some of the letters were obliterated . . . they had so often been soaked by my tears’ (p. )]. The essay ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’ contains a discussion of Meursault’s responses at his mother’s funeral, and mentions by contrast the reaction of one of the characters in Virginia Woolf ’s The Years as she awaits the announcement of the death of her mother. And the same essay ends with an account of the death of Kafka’s K. at the hands of the two ‘gentlemen’ in The Trial. (It also



Conclusion

appears in Martereau.) The ‘Unknown Man’ in the painting in Portrait d’un inconnu seems to the narrator to be frozen in the moment of violent death: On aurait dit qu’ici l’effort, le doute, le tourment avaient été surpris par une catastrophe soudaine et qu’ils étaient demeurés là, fixés en plein mouvement, comme ces cadavres qui restent pétrifiés dans l’attitude où la mort les a frappés. (PI, p. ) [It was as though all effort, all doubt, all torment had been overtaken by a sudden catastrophe and had remained as they were, frozen in action, like corpses which are petrified in the position they were in when death struck. (p. )]

What follows in this important scene is therefore contained within this cataclysmic instant. In Entre la vie et la mort the experience of writing is described as an encounter with a hitherto unknown extremity, but which might be ‘ce que doivent dans les tout derniers instants se dire les mourants’ (EVM, p. ) [‘what the dying must say to themselves in their very last moments’ (p. )]. And at the end of the same book this ultimate moment is evoked again – and again in connection with writing – when the test of the authenticity of the writer’s work is compared to a mirror held over the mouth of a dying person: ‘est-ce que cela se dégage, se dépose . . . comme sur les miroirs qu’on approche de la bouche des mourants . . . une fine buée?’ (p. ) [‘is it exuding, settling . . . as on the mirrors people hold in front of the mouths of the dying . . . a fine vapour?’ (p. )] The frequency and the intensity of these scenes in Sarraute’s work – brief though many of them are – suggest a proccupation with death as paroxysm, thus foregrounding the divided, knife-edge quality of the moment. In each case, the dying person is portrayed in extremis, between life and death, between death as imminent and death as completed event, between menace and fixity. A second characteristic of many of these scenes is to be found in the way in which they make possible a moment of powerful contact between the dying person and another. This aspect is particularly prominent in the deaths of Prince Bolkonski and Chekhov. In the case of Prince Bolkonski, the moment of his death allows the fixity of the mask he wore in life briefly to dissolve before it acquires the fixity of ‘cet air de sereine pureté que prennent toujours, dit-on, les visages des gens après leur mort’ [‘that air of serene purity which people are always said to have after death’] described on the novel’s last page. And in that instant of dissolution, he gives his daugh-

Death and the impossible difference



ter the only sign of the love he has for her, allowing his feelings to break through the surface within which he had always contained them. And he does so by a last, desperate attempt at speech: Ce n’est qu’une fois, une seule, juste au dernier moment, quand il allait mourir, qu’elle a vu, tandis qu’elle se penchait sur lui pour essayer de saisir les paroles qu’il balbutiait en remuant péniblement sa langue paralysée – c’était peut-être ‘douchenka’, ma petite âme, ou peut-être ‘droujok’, mon amie, elle n’avait pu saisir, c’était si extraordinaire, si inattendu – ce n’est qu’à ce moment qu’elle a vu pour la première fois le masque se détendre, se défaire. (PI, p. ) [There was only one time, one single time, at the very last moment, when he was about to die, that, as she leaned over him to try to catch the words he was stammering, moving his paralysed tongue with difficulty – perhaps it was douchenka, my little soul, or droujok, my little friend, she had not been able to catch it, it was so extraordinary, so unexpected – it was only in that instant that for the first time she saw the mask relax, collapse. (pp. –)]

The extremity of death breaks down the barrier between father and daughter, and in revealing the father to be as prone to the impulses of the tropism as anyone else, it also breaks down the barrier that divides him from the rest of humanity. For it is the moment of death that makes it possible to reconstruct the true nature of the relations between father and daughter, and to see that the Prince’s mask had been his defence against the complex and disabling threads in which his daughter’s attachment to him seemed to trap him. In other words, this ultimate moment reveals the universality of the tropism which it is the goal of Sarraute’s writing to uncover and convey. But contact is implied in these moments in yet another way, for a good many of them contain an acknowledgement of the necessity on the part of the narrator or writer to follow the dying person to the limits of his experience through the exercise of his creative imagination. Just as the narrator of Portrait d’un inconnu presents the account of the terrors of Le Vieux as the product of his own imaginative recreation, so too he underscores the imaginative status of his evocation of Prince Bolkonski’s death: ‘ce ne sont là, je le sais, que de vagues et assez grossières suppositions, des rêveries’ (p. ) [‘all this is the vaguest and crudest of speculations, so much day-dreaming’ (p. )]. The truth about the tropism is always arrived at by imaginative identification, whether it be the living substance of the Le Vieux’s panic, the inner life behind Martereau’s façade, or the identificatory response that Sarraute constantly seeks to elicit from her readers. In this way the contact bridging the catastophic rift that is imminent in death is experienced both by the characters



Conclusion

portrayed in the text (the Prince and his daughter) and by the writer in his imaginative identification with the last moments of the dying person – an identification which the reader is in turn invited to emulate. The purpose of writing is to reach behind the smooth surface of the mask in the hope of discovering a longing for contact behind it. And in so doing, a circuit of communication is created that transcends the breach in the instant when it is about to become irrevocable rupture. The moment of death is a challenge to the creative imagination and a test of its worth. The account of the death of Chekhov in ‘Ich sterbe’ is also presented as a creative identification that goes beyond the surface appearance of the event as recorded at the beginning of the text: au dernier moment, ayant auprès de son lit sa femme d’un côté et de l’autre un médecin allemand, il s’est dressé, il s’est assis, et il a dit, pas en russe, pas dans sa propre langue, mais dans la langue de l’autre, la langue allemande, il a dit à voix haute et en articulant bien ‘Ich sterbe’. Et il est retombé, mort. (UP, p. ) [at the last moment, with his wife on one side of his bed and a German doctor on the other, he raised himself, he sat up, and he said, not in Russian, not in his own language, but in the other man’s language, the German language, he said aloud, articulating clearly: ‘Ich sterbe.’ And he fell back dead. (p. )]

The narrator’s efforts in this short text are devoted to reconstructing what lies behind these bare facts. In the first instance, the words – a form of medical self-diagnosis addressed to a German colleague – are portrayed as the dying man’s antidote to his inward disintegration, the imminent inner void. And the commentary is ascribed directly to Chekhov himself in the first person, as if to suggest that the narrator has already succeeded in establishing an identificatory bond with his subject whose inner discourse he is able to hear: Ce qui en moi flotte . . . flageole . . . vacille . . . tremble . . . palpite . . . frémit . . . se délite . . . se défait . . . se désintègre . . . Non, pas cela . . . rien de tout cela. Qu’est- ce que c’est? Ah voilà, c’est ici, ça vient se blottir ici, dans ces mots nets, étanches. Prend leur forme. Des contours bien tracés. S’immobilise. Se fige. S’assagit. S’apaise. Ich sterbe. (pp. –) [That part of me which is floating . . . sagging . . . wavering . . . trembling . . . palpitating . . . quivering . . . splitting . . . crumbling . . . disintegrating . . . No, not that . . . none of any of that. What is it? Ah, this is it, it’s here, it’s coming to nestle here, in these clear impenetrable words. Takes their shape. Welldefined contours. Becomes immobilised. Solidifies. Abates. Subsides. Ich sterbe. (p. )]

The utterance asserts (medical) order over inward chaos. But at the same time it is also a message sent from a point of utter extremity:

Death and the impossible difference



Ich sterbe. Un signal. Pas un appel au secours. Là où je me trouve il n’y a pas de secours possible. Plus aucun recours. Vous savez comme moi de quoi il retourne. Personne mieux que vous ne sait de quoi je parle. Voilà pourquoi c’est à vous que je le dis: Ich sterbe (p. ) [‘Ich sterbe. A signal. Not a call for help. Where I am now there is no possible succour. No further recourse. No one knows better than you what I am talking about. You know as well as I do what is happening. That is why it is to you that I am saying: Ich sterbe. (p. )]

Chekhov’s appeal to the doctor is as powerful a plea for the contact of a shared understanding as that of the Unknown Man to the narrator in Portrait d’un inconnu. And both pleas are made in similar situations of isolation and cataclysm. For Chekhov, ‘Ich sterbe’ are the only words capable of reaching across the gulf that is opening up between himself and his companions. He knows that the language that he shares with his wife can no longer cross that divide: ‘pas nos mots à nous, trop légers, trop mous, ils ne pourront jamais franchir ce qui maintenant entre nous s’ouvre, s’élargit . . . une béance immense . . .’ (p. ) [‘not our sort of words, they are too light, too soft, they would never be able to cross what is now opening up, yawning, between us . . . an immense chasm . . .’ (p. )]. But in reaching across the chasm and transmitting the signal, Chekhov seems to have come dangerously close to the appalling equanimity which Sarraute presents elsewhere as the alternative to terror in the face of death. The articulation of these self-referring dying words is not only an appeal to his companions, but it also constitutes an almost superhuman attempt on Chekhov’s part to be adequate to the experience of his own death. The words amount to a metaphorical selfentombment, as he seals himself up beneath his own gravestone: Je rassemble toutes mes forces, je me soulève, je me dresse, je tire à moi, j’abaisse sur moi la dalle, la lourde pierre tombale . . . et pour qu’elle se place bien exactement, sous elle je m’allonge . . . [I muster all my strength, I raise myself, I sit up, I pull towards me, I lower the flagstone onto myself, the heavy tombstone . . . and to make sure that it falls in exactly the right place, I lie down underneath it . . .]

For the narrator, however, everything depends on hearing in these words something other than a stoical acceptance of the seamless closure of entombment: Mais peut-être . . . quand il soulevait la dalle, quand il la tenait au-dessus de lui à bout de bras et allait l’abaisser sur lui-même . . . juste avant que sous elle il ne retombe . . . peut-être y a-t-il eu comme une faible palpitation, un à peine perceptible frémissement, une trace infime d’attente vivante . . . (p. )



Conclusion

[But perhaps . . . as he was raising the slab, when he was holding it above him with outstretched arms and was about to lower it onto himself . . . just before he fell back under it . . . was there maybe something like a faint palpitation, a barely perceptible quivering, a minute trace of living hope . . . (pp. –)]

The narrator’s speculation makes the words a form of communication between Chekhov and the narrator as the latter opens himself up to the possibility of hearing these faint, palpitating resonances within the utterance. Just as the self-sufficient medical verdict was punctured for the narrator by hearing in it an address powerfully directed at the one person who might be able to pick up the message (the German doctor), so the self-entombment is breached by the tiny crack that remains before the slab settles into place, and through which a channel of contact with other beings might flow. The narrator’s attention to the words and his imaginative identification with their speaker eventually succeed in endowing Chekhov’s utterance with a communicative thrust strong enough to affect anyone who might hear them. And by the end of the text the words are presented as having acquired a force which is associated much more with their transmission and their communicative effects than with the content which first came under the narrator’s scrutiny. These effects are described as ‘des cercles qui vont s’élargissant quand lancés de si loin et avec une telle force [ils] tombent en nous et nous ébranlent de fond en comble’ (p. ) [‘circles which continue to expand when, propelled from such a distance and with such force, these words fall on us and shake us to the very depths of our being’ (p. )]. The fraught, paroxystic, impossible moment of Chekhov’s death summons the writer to perform his own impossible task: to open up the banalities of its surface appearance, breaching it with his imaginative energies to hear more than the bare constation it contains. But also to throw a line across the ensuing rift by means of words that restore a contact between all the parties involved: the dying Chekhov, the German doctor, Chekhov’s wife, the narrator and ultimately the reader. At every stage writing is required both to breach and to connect, with all the risk that is entailed by each. These contradictory imperatives are a final reminder that differences in Sarraute are impossible ever to settle. They can be neither fixed nor erased; and they are as unbearable as they are necessary. Death is both the ultimate horizon for this tourniquet of impossibilities and its most acute embodiment.

Notes

 . Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Gallimard, Collection Idées, ), p. . First published in . Translated in Snapshots and Towards a New Novel by Barbara Wright (London: Calder & Boyars, ), p. . . Page numbers in square brackets refer to published translation where available (occasionally modified). Translations otherwise mine. . André Gide, Les Faux-monnayeurs (Paris: Gallimard, Livre de poche, ), Part III, Chapter . First published in , some twelve years after the publication of Du Côté de chez Swann. Translated as The Counterfeiters with Journal of the Counterfeiters by Dorothy Bussy and Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, ) . Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots, (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ). First published in . Translated as Words by Irene Clephane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ). . Marcel Proust, À la Recherche du temps perdu, edited by Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, ), vol. IV, p. . Translated as Remembrance of Things Past by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor (London: Chatto & Windus, ), vol. III, p. . . André Gide, Journal des Faux-monnayeurs (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . . Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature?: Situations, II (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . Translated as What is Literature? by Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen, ), p. . . Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), p. . Translated as Difference and Repetition by Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, ), p. ix. . Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, edited by Tullio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, ), p. . Translated as Course in General Linguistics by Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, ), p. . My emphasis. . Honoré de Balzac, ‘Avant-propos’ to the Comédie humaine, edited by Marcel Bouteron (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, ), vol. , pp. , . . Roland Barthes, ‘L’activité structuraliste’, Essais critiques, nd edition (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ), pp. –), p. . The essay was first published in 



. . .

. . . .

Notes to pages ‒ . Translated as Critical Essays, by Richard Howard (Evanston, Northwestern University Press: ), pp. –. Jacques Derrida, ‘La différance’, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, ), pp. –, p.. Translated as ‘Différance’ in Margins of Philosophy by Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, ), pp. – (p. ). See Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, ), passim. Translated as Of Grammatology by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Andrew McKenna has, however, made a powerful case for mapping Derrida onto Girard’s theory of the social articulation of difference. He argues that ‘What Girard does is thematise the moral impulse of deconstruction in its ever more subtle detections of unconscious violence. This is an impulse all too often ignored by both advocates and adversaries of deconstruction, which uncovers violence in texts only to concern itself thereafter with textuality and not with violence.’ See Andrew J. McKenna, Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida and Deconstruction (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, ), p. . It is worth noting, however, that one of the justifications that Derrida adduces for the word ‘différance’ is precisely the need to render the sense of difference as ‘différend’: ‘le mot différence (avec un e) n’a jamais pu renvoyer au différer comme temporisation ni au différend comme polemos.’ See ‘La différance’ in Marges de la philosophie, p. .[‘the word différence (with an e) can never refer either to différer as temporisation or to différends as polemos)’ (p. )]. Similarly, Barabara Johnson suggests that criticism and difference are hard to distinguish from one another since so often ‘it is impossible to know whether something constitutes description or disagreement, information or censure’. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), p. x. The fact remains, however, that although all this points the way towards a social dimension in deconstructive thinking, it is still little more than a possibility contained within the thought, and never becomes its chief focus. V.N. Volosˇinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (New York and London: Seminar Press, ), pp. –. J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words, edited by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, nd edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, ), p. . Translated as The Differend: Phrases in Dispute by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester University Press: ), p. . Or more precisely, Girard argues, with its absence. I shall be discussing these ideas in more detail in Chapter . See René Girard, La Violence et le Sacré (Paris: Bernard Grasset, ). Translated as Violence and the Sacred by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, Md. and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, ).

Notes to pages ‒



. Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe () (Paris: Gallimard, Collection Idées, ), vol. , p. . Translated as The Second Sex by J.M. Parshley (London: Jonathan Cape, ), p. . . Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing, History and the West (London: Routledge, ), p. . The first person to articulate this sort of approach was Edward Said in his Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ). See also ‘Race’, Writing and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, ). In his Introduction, Gates argues that ‘Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application’ (p. ). . For example, as she says in her preface to L’Ère du soupçon: ‘Mon premier livre contenait en germe tout ce que, dans mes ouvrages suivants, je n’ai cessé de développer’ (L’Ère du soupçon, p. ). [‘My first book contained the seeds of all the things that in my subsequent work I have never stopped developing.’]     . L’Ère du soupçon, p. . The preface to the English translation of these essays appeared the year before the publication of the  preface to the second French edition of L’Ère du soupçon and is not entirely identical with it. Where there is no equivalent in the English translation I have supplied my own (as here). . In his review of L’Ère du soupçon, Mauriac describes Martereau as ‘ce livre étonnant, [. . .] l’un des romans les plus nouveaux que nous ayons lus depuis longtemps’ [‘this astonishing book, [. . .] one of the most original novels that I have read for a long time’], and he praises in particular its ‘richesse psychologique sans précédent dans l’infinitésimal’ [‘its unprecedented psychological richness in the minutest details’]. And yet he reads the essays as an attack on psychology by Sarraute: ‘À en croire Mme Nathalie Sarraute dans L’Ère du soupçon (Gallimard), le mot psychologie serait de ceux qu’aucun auteur aujourd’hui ne pourrait entendre prononcer à son sujet sans baisser les yeux ni rougir’ [‘If we are to believe Mme Nathalie Sarraute in The Age of Suspicion, the word psychology is one of those that no author today can hear used about him without looking away and blushing’]. But, he is driven to argue, ‘c’est [avec] l’assurance d’un écrivain se désolidarisant à haute voix de ce dont il se sait complice, sinon même coupable’ [‘it is with the assurance of a writer claiming in public to dissociate himself from the thing that he knows he is complicitous with, if not actually guilty of ’]. (Claude Mauriac, ‘Nathalie Sarraute et le nouveau réalisme’, Preuves, :, () pp. – (p. )). This essay was later published in book form in L’Alittérature contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel, ), in a revised version which removes the misreading – a revision which would seem to confirm the fact that a misreading is precisely what we are dealing with. . Mary McCarthy, ‘Hanging by a Thread’ in The Writing on the Wall (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ), pp. – (p. ). The review first



. . .

.

. .

.

Notes to pages ‒

appeared in The New York Review of Books ( July ). For a report on the proceedings leading up to the award of the Prix International de Littérature, see the article by Bernard Pivot, Le Figaro littéraire, – May , p. . See Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing (London: Elek, ), pp. –, and Nathalie Sarraute, ‘Ce que je cherche à faire’, OC, p. . Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, p. . See Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend. Lyotard introduces the problem of ‘le différend’ in terms of the absence of any frame that could encompass two conflicting positions: ‘À la différence d’un litige, un différend serait un cas de conflit entre deux parties (au moins) qui ne pourrait pas être tranché équitablement faute d’une règle de jugement applicable aux deux argumentations’ (p. ) [‘As distinct from a litigation, a differend [différend] would be a case of conflict between (at least) two parties, that cannot equitably be resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments’ (p. xi)]. The basis for judgement is ultimately a linguistic one, and, as we shall see, the lack of a common language is a frequent problem for Sarraute’s characters. Barbara Johnson has argued that dissent is inseparable from discrimination: ‘the very fact that it is impossible to know whether something constitutes description or disagreement, information or censure is perhaps the most problematic and critical difference of all.’ Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference, p. x. See ‘Interview de Nathalie Sarraute’, by Grant E. Kaiser, Roman –, , (), pp. – (pp. –); interview with Nathalie Sarraute broadcast on France Culture,  February ; ‘Rencontre: Nathalie Sarraute’, interview with Isabelle Huppert, Cahiers du cinéma, , (), pp. – (p. ); and the interview cited below in note , where a kibbutznik is reported by Sarraute to have said to her, ‘ici, aussi, il y a beaucoup de tropismes’ [‘there are a lot of tropisms here as well’]. I have also summarised remarks made to me in conversations with Nathalie Sarraute. ‘Nathalie Sarraute au kibboutz, Propos recueillis par Erwin Spatz’, La Quinzaine littéraire, – October , pp. – (p. ). See, for example, the first interview she ever gave (to Gabriel d’Aubarède) in Les Nouvelles littéraires,  July , p. , where she states that ‘le français fut ma première langue’ [‘French was my first language’]. Or her interview with her German translator, Elmar Tophoven, in ‘Nathalie Sarraute et ses traducteurs européens’, in Actes des premières assises de la traduction littéraire (Arles ) (Arles: Actes Sud, ), pp. –, where again she says, ‘Le français a été ma première langue’ [‘French was my first language’], an assertion which she supports with the comment that ‘Je suis venue en France à l’âge de deux ans . . . J’étais à l’école maternelle à l’âge de trois ans . . .’ (p. ) [‘I came to France at the age of two . . . I was in kindergarten at the age of three . . .’]. For this see the Folio edition of  and the Pléiade edition of the Œuvres

Notes to pages ‒



complètes. The ‘slip’ was drawn to her attention in a letter sent by a reader. . Nathalie Sarraute: Qui êtes-vous? Conversations avec Simone Benmussa (Lyon: La Manufacture, ), pp. –, (hereafter referred to as Qui êtes-vous?). See Chapters  and  below for further discussion of the issue of sexual difference in Sarraute. . Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, Language in Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap and Harvard University Press, ), pp. – (p. ). Original emphasis. . See ‘Paul Valéry et l’Enfant d’Éléphant’, L’Ère du soupçon, and ‘Ce que je cherche à faire’. I shall be discussing Sarraute’s choice of the role of renegade at greater length in Chapter , ‘Criticism and the “Terrible Desire to Establish Contact”’. . Interview with Nathalie Sarraute, ‘Virginia Woolf ou la visionnaire du “maintenant”’, Les Lettres françaises,  June– July , pp. ,  (p. ). She makes the same point again in an interview nearly  years later when she says: ‘On dit parfois que mes textes font penser à ceux de Virginia Woolf, mais je pourrais presque dire que son travail est à l’opposé du mien. Il est exacte qu’elle se sert d’images – et de très belles images poétiques –, mais les consciences qu’elle décrit sont des consciences ouvertes dans lesquelles le monde s’engouffre. Chez moi, elles ne sont [pas] passives, elles sont toujours en train de s’agiter comme des âmes en peine, de chercher, dans la bataille, la lutte et l’effort.’ See Carmen Licari, ‘Entretiens avec Nathalie Sarraute’, Francofonia,  (), pp. – (p. ) [‘People say to me sometimes that my texts remind them of Virginia Woolf ’s, but I could almost say that her work is the very opposite of mine. It is true that she uses images – and very beautiful poetic images –, but the consciousnesses which she depicts are consciousnesses that are open to the world and into which the world is absorbed. In my work they are not passive, they are always in a state of agitation like souls in torment, always searching for something, engaged in conflict, struggle and effort’]. . Jean Blot, ‘Nathalie Sarraute: une fine buée’, La Nouvelle Revue française, , (), pp. – (p. ).       . ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’, p. . . This is a point which has been made by a number of critics of Sarraute’s work. See for example, Celia Britton, ‘Reported Speech and Sous-conversation’, Romance Studies,  (), pp. –. Arnaud Rykner writes: ‘L’Autre est toujours l’élément fondateur qui met en branle la dynamique du moi. Je ne suis que dans la mesure où je suis en relation’, Nathalie Sarraute (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ), p.  [‘The Other is always the founding element which sets the dynamic of the self in motion. I am only to the extent that I am in relation’]. The term ‘intersubjectivity’ is one that I shall use for convenience here, although in a sense, subjects involved in the human relations portrayed by



. . . . .

. . . .

Notes to pages ‒

Sarraute never seem to achieve anything more than a purely phantasmatic notion of the subjectivity of the other. Strictly speaking, intersubjectivity should imply a mutual availability of the minds and intentions of all parties to each other. Or as The Oxford Companion to Philosophy defines it: ‘the status of being somehow accessible to at least two [. . .] minds or “subjectivities”. It thus implies that there is some sort of communication between those minds; which in turn implies that each commmunicating mind is aware not only of the existence of the other but also of its intention to convey information to the other.’ The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, ), p. . I shall follow Nathalie Sarraute in using the masculine pronoun as the unmarked form, and will be exploring her reasons for this preference in Chapter . ‘Nathalie Sarraute: “Mon théâtre continue mes romans . . .”’, La Quinzaine littéraire,  December , pp. – (p. ). Journal of Katherine Mansfield, definitive edition, edited by J. Middleton Murry (London: Constable, ), pp. –. The passage dates from September . For further discussion of territorial imagery in Sarraute see R.J. Nelson, ‘Territorial Psychology in Nathalie Sarraute’s Les Fruits d’or’, Symposium,  (–), pp. –. Spatial metaphors for subjectivity become increasingly widespread in Sarraute as she moves further and further away from concepts of identity and towards a notion of subjectivity simply as a space that one inhabits. e.g. ‘À l’intérieur, où je suis . . .’ Qui êtes-vous?, p.  [‘On the inside, where I am . . .’]. The implications of the title of Ici are borne out by the texts themselves. Françoise Asso uses the expression ‘le lieu des tropismes’ [‘the place of the tropisms’] to describe the place about which and from where Sarraute writes her work, identifying L’Usage de la parole () as the moment when Nathalie Sarraute began to write ‘d’ici pour dire ce qui se passe ici’ [‘from here in order to say what happens here’]. See Françoise Asso, ‘Le lieu des tropismes’, in Nathalie Sarraute: Portrait d’un écrivain, edited by Annie Angremy, (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, ), pp. – (p. ). For example, PI, p.  [p. ]. See also Chapter  below. René Girard, La Violence et le Sacré, pp.  and  [pp.  and ], respectively. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger () (London: Routledge, ). See radio interview with Danièle Sallenave, ‘À voix nue’, broadcast on France-Culture, – March , p.  of transcript, and ‘Nathalie Sarraute talks about her Life and Works: Extracts from a Conversation’, Romance Studies,  (), pp. –, p. .

Notes to pages ‒



    . Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection () (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, Collection Points, ). This is the edition to which I shall be referring. English translation, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, ). . It is intriguing to note that the modern tradition of a literature of abjection identified by Kristeva includes some of the key figures in Nathalie Sarraute’s own literary pantheon: Dostoevsky, Proust and Joyce. . See C’est beau, Pour un oui ou pour un non, Le Mensonge, Le Silence and Isma, respectively. For a full discussion of language in Sarraute’s theatre see Arnaud Rykner, Théâtres du nouveau roman (Paris: José Corti, ), esp. Ch. , ‘Nathalie Sarraute et le logodrame’. . Interview with Lucette Finas, ‘Nathalie Sarraute: “Mon théâtre continue mes romans . . .”’, p. . The essential account of this dimension of Sarraute’s work is to be found in Valerie Minogue, Nathalie Sarraute and the War of the Words (Edinburgh University Press, ). . J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words, Chapter . . Monique Wittig, ‘The Place of the Action’, in Three Decades of the New Novel, edited by Lois Oppenheim (Urbana: Illinois University Press, ), pp. – (p. ). On the importance of dialogue in Sarraute see also Françoise Asso, ‘La forme du dialogue’, L’Esprit créateur, : (), pp. –, and Emer O’Beirne, Nathalie Sarraute: Dialogue and Distance (Oxford University Press, ). . Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, pp. –. Arnaud Rykner has noted the same preference. See his Nathalie Sarraute, p. . . This is the point made by Valerie Minogue in her article ‘Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance: From the Experience of Language to the Language of Experience’, in Studies in French Fiction: Essays in Honour of Vivienne Mylne, edited by Robert Gibson (London: Grant & Cutler, ), pp. –. . Lucette Finas, ‘Nathalie Sarraute ou les métamorphoses du verbe’, Tel Quel,  (), pp. – (p. ). . I shall be exploring this in more detail in Chapter . . Interview with Serge Fauchereau and Jean Ristat, ‘Conversation avec Nathalie Sarraute’, Digraphe,  (), pp. –, p. . This is just one example of a point made in many interviews by Sarraute. . See ‘Paul Valéry et l’Enfant d’Éléphant’ and ‘Flaubert le précurseur’. . Some of the features of Sarraute’s writing noted in Chapter  illustrate the poetic character of her writing in the sense I am discussing it here.  ,      . Allusions to La Princesse de Clèves are scattered throughout both Sarraute’s critical and her fictional writing, but are never more than glancing. Their function is on the one hand to acknowledge the tradition, and, on the other,



.

. . .

.

. . . . .

. .

.

Notes to pages ‒

in their glancing character, to block any possibility that the association with Mme de Lafayette might be used to create an image of lady-novelists with sensitive insight into the human heart. Michael Moriarty remarks that ‘it is represented above all as a signifying surface’, ‘Discourse and the Body in La Princesse de Clèves’, Paragraph  (), pp. – (p. ). Moriarty provides an illuminating and wide-ranging discussion of the body in La Princesse de Clèves. La Princesse de Clèves, edited by Émile Magne (Paris: Classiques Garnier, ), p. . Roger Kempf, Le Corps romanesque (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Peter Brooks, ‘The Body in the Field of Vision’, Paragraph : (), pp. – (pp. –). The term ‘epistemophilia’ is coined by Toril Moi in her feminist account of this problem (which Brooks also draws on for his discussion), ‘Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge’, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, edited by Teresa Brennan, (London: Routledge, ), pp. –. And, according to Peter Brooks, shares with that transcendental signified all that is problematic, if not downright impossible about itself since the absence of the phallus always leaves the philosopher who gazes upon the truth/ woman’s body feeling that the object is somehow incomplete. She later abandons the term ‘psychologie’ with its connotations of classical psychological analysis for that of ‘psychisme’. See, for example, ‘Flaubert le précurseur’, p. . See ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’ in L’Ère du soupçon. See Chapter  above for an exploration of these permutations. For another discussion about the relation between the responsiveness of the body and its morselisation, see Rachel Boué, ‘Lieux et figures de la sensation dans l’œuvre de Nathalie Sarraute’, Littérature,  (), pp. –. Jean Pierrot is one of the few critics to have devoted any serious and sustained attention to the body in Sarraute and he writes particularly well about the liquefaction that constantly threatens the Sarrautean body. He comments on the ‘réduction fréquente des rapports humains à des phénomènes d’absorption et de dévoration, et aussi l’insistance sur la réalité des humeurs, de tout ce qui est suintement, pénétration, imprégnation de la chair par une liquidité à la fois nécessaire et louche’ [‘the frequent reduction of human relations to phenomena of absorption and devouring, and also the insistance on the reality of the humours, of everything that is seepage, penetration, saturation of the flesh by a liquidity which is both necessary and suspect’]. Nathalie Sarraute (Paris: Corti, ), p. . See Le Planétarium, p.  [pp. –]. I have explored some of these issues elsewhere, in ‘Bodymatters: Self and Other in Bakhtin, Sartre and Barthes’, in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, edited by Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (Manchester University Press, ), pp. –. E.g. ‘Finis les mordillements, les morsures, les embrassements, la chaleur

Notes to pages ‒

.

.

. .

. . .

. . .



vivante des corps à corps’(P, p. ) [‘They’re finished, the nibbling, the biting, the embracing, the living warmth of the hand-to-hand tussle (p. )]; or ‘une peur insurmontable le tient cloué, plus même que la peur, un insurmontable dégoût devant ce qui se produirait, ce corps à corps atroce, ignoble’ (EVM, p. ) [‘an insuperable fear pins him down, more even than fear, an insuperable disgust for what would happen, the appalling, shameful handto-hand fight’ (p. )]; and ‘ma qualité de corps conducteur à travers lequel passaient tous les courants dont l’atmosphère était chargée’ (PI, p. ) [‘my role of conducting rod through which all the currents that charged the atmosphere were passing’ (p. )]. Gaëtan Brulotte has some very penetrating things to say about the role of gesture in interaction in Sarraute in his article ‘Le gestuaire de Nathalie Sarraute’, Revue des sciences humaines,  (), pp. –. He remarks rightly that, ‘Ce corps est essentiellement un corps en interaction’ [‘This body is essentially a body in interaction’] (p. ). ‘Ces pensées sont devenues le lieu de rencontre de la communauté. Chacun s’y retrouve, y retrouve les autres. [. . .] C’est par essence la généralité.’ ‘Préface’ to Portrait d’un inconnu, pp. – (p.) [‘These thoughts have become the meeting place of the community. [. . .] In essence it is generality’ (p. ix)]. Elaine Scarry, ‘Introduction’ to Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, Selected Papers from the English Institute, , New Series, no.  (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), pp. vii–xxvii (p. xxi). Incidentally, music, the art form that is traditionally thought of in aesthetic theory as the one most susceptible of creating physical response is never depicted in Sarraute. Nevertheless, music does exist for her as a quality of style where its effects are evaluated in terms of rhythm (etc.) whose role in creating physical response in the reader can be relatively easily inferred. ‘Le langage dans l’art du roman’, p. . The deadly effects of language upon its object are described by Nathalie Sarraute in ‘Ce que je cherche à faire’. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in New French Feminisms, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester Press, ), pp. – (pp. , , ). The English translation by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen is based on a revised version of the original French, published in . See, for example, Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l’autre femme (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, ). Translated as Speculum of the Other Woman by Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ). Gaëton Brulotte, ‘Le gestuaire de Nathalie Sarraute’, p. . ‘Je place souvent ce “ressenti” dans des consciences féminines ou masculines pour des raisons, quelquefois, simplement de variations du dialogue’ [‘I often place this felt quality in women’s or men’s consciousnesses for reasons which, sometimes, are simply to do with varying the dialogue’] (Qui êtes-vous?, p. ).



Notes to pages ‒

. Qui êtes-vous?, p. . For bibliographical references to feminist readings of Nathalie Sarraute see Sheila Bell, ‘The Conjuror’s Hat: Sarraute Criticism since ’, Romance Studies,  (), pp. – (esp. pp. –). See also, John Phillips, Nathalie Sarraute: Metaphor, Fairy-tale and the Feminine of the Text (New York and Washington: Peter Lang, ), and Michelle Marini, ‘L’élaboration de la différence sexuelle dans la pratique littéraire de la langue’, of which an extract appears in Monique Gosselin, Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ), pp. –.    . Interview with Sonia Rykiel, Les Nouvelles, – Februrary , pp. – (p. ). . Pierre Demeron, ‘Nathalie Sarraute ou littérature sans cabotinage’, Arts, – June , p. . . I owe this anecdote (whose implications I hope I have not overstated) to a conversation with Robbe-Grillet in June . It should, of course, be recognised that Robbe-Grillet’s self-appointed role as historian of the nouveau roman in his autobiographical writings has its own interests and biases. Both versions of the Minuit photograph are common. See Arnaud Rykner, Nathalie Sarraute, p.  for a touched-up version, and the special number of L’Arc,  (), p.  for the original one. . Interview with Michèle Gazier, ‘Nathalie Sarraute et son “il”’, Télérama,  July , pp. – (p. ). Here she goes on to say ‘et plus elles sont androgynes, mieux ça vaut’ [‘and the more androgynous they are, the better’] but later she will argue for ‘neutre’ instead of the more Woolf-ian ‘androgyny’. See below note . For equally trenchant comments on écriture féminine, see also the interview with Sonia Rykiel, Les Nouvelles. . For example, she says to Isabelle Huppert, ‘J’ai un engagement politique en tant que citoyenne, pas en tant qu’écrivain’ [‘I am politically committed as a citizen, but not as a writer’], ‘Rencontre: Nathalie Sarraute’, p. . . Interview with Michèle Gazier, p. . . ‘À Fénélon [the girls’ lycée she attended] très peu de filles se présentaient au bachot’ [‘At Fénélon very few girls went in for the baccalauréat’], recalls Nathalie Sarraute in an interview. The men teachers who came from boys’ lycées to teach some of the top classes were very different from the women teachers she was used to: ‘Cela faisait une grosse différence avec les professeurs que nous avions avant, qui étaient formées à Sèvres et qui avaient une tout autre façon d’enseigner’ [‘There was a huge difference from the teachers we’d had before, who had been trained at Sèvres and who had a completely different way of teaching’], interview with Danièle Sallenave, ‘Sur la langue, l’écriture, le travail’, Genesis, , (), pp. – (pp. –). For a full and very sobering discussion of the nature and extent of the differences between the education of girls and of their teachers at the École Normale Supérieure for women at Sèvres, as compared to their male

Notes to pages ‒

. . .

. . . . . .

.



counterparts, see Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, (Oxford: Blackwell, ), esp. Chapter . Leah D. Hewitt also makes a comparison between Sarraute and Simone de Beauvoir in her discussion of Sarraute in her Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, ) pp. –. Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe, vol. , p.  [ p. ]. Qui êtes-vous?, p. . Sarraute invokes the notion of ‘le neutre’ here to define the gender status of the ‘human being’. Monique Wittig has made a strong case for the eradication of gender in writing, and mentions the example of Sarraute whose work ‘while being of another nature’ nevertheless inspired some of the strategies of her own writing. See ‘The Mark of Gender’, in The Poetics of Gender, edited by Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, ), pp. – (p. ). See also TNTP, p. . Prière d’insérer from the Gallimard edition. From Le Planétarium onwards, Sarraute has always written her own prières d’insérer (or blurbs). This passage refers to a personification of an ‘idée’, but the fact that it is possible to personify an idea in the form of a woman says a great deal about the terms in which the ‘image of woman’ functions in Sarraute’s world. See interview with François-Marie Banier in Le Monde des livres,  April , p. . The name Vikhrovski has a masculine ending. Kolia was Sarraute’s mother’s second husband. Interview with François-Marie Banier. The extent and popularity of the writing of Sarraute’s mother is hard to assess, but there are far fewer traceable references to work by her than Sarraute’s own account would lead one to believe. ‘N.Vikhrovski’ does not feature in any of the histories or bibliographies of Russian women’s writing, although the use of male pseudonyms, widespread in the mid-th century, had become rare at this time. Indeed, I have been able to establish only two references to publications by her, the first to a serialised novel, Ikh Zhizn’ (Their Life) in Russkoe Bogatstvo in , nos. –), and the second to a novel entitled Vremya (Time) published by an émigré publishing house, Maison du livre étranger in Paris and Parabola in Berlin in , the year in which Sarraute began to write Tropismes. (I am grateful to Catriona Kelly, G.S. Smith and Galin Tihanov who have helped me with information on this matter.) This leads one to speculate that Sarraute has inflated the status and extent of her mother’s writing in order to have a worthy opponent for her own enterprise. In conversation Sarraute told me that after her mother’s death she came across the copy of Portrait d’un inconnu that she had given her mother when the book appeared, and found that only the pages of the Preface by Sartre had been cut (and therefore read). It was hard to interpret exactly the tone of Sarraute’s anecdote, but there was a sense of resignation in the face of a predictable (and who knows?, perhaps merciful) indifference on her mother’s part. The gesture in Enfance is described as follows: ‘Je ne peux pas la [Maman]



Notes to pages ‒

revoir se regardant dans un miroir, se poudrant . . . seulement son coup d’œil rapide quand elle passait devant une glace et son geste pressé pour remettre en place une mèche échappée de son chignon, rentrer une épingle à cheveux qui dépasse . . .’ (p. ) [‘I can’t remember her looking at herself in the mirror, powdering her face . . . only her rapid glance when she passed a looking glass, and her hasty gesture to push a stray wisp of hair back into her bun, push in a protruding pin . . .’ (p. )]. . Interview with Isabelle Huppert, p. . See also Chapter , p. , and note . . Naomi Schor makes some interesting remarks about this passage in her essay ‘The Portrait of a Gentleman: Representing Men in (French) Women’s Writing’, in Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), pp. –. In particular she argues that this ‘curious form of mutual resonance [. . .] bypasses the specular in favour of the vocal’ (p. ). . For further discussion on this ‘usual’ direction of identification where the subject identifies with the other see for example Diane Fuss, Identification Papers (New York and London: Routledge, ) and Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, ), esp. pp. –. . Nathalie Sarraute, ‘Tolstoï’, Les Lettres françaises, no. , – September , pp. , . . The reference is to War and Peace, Book , Chapter . . In L’Usage de la parole Sarraute stages another deathbed scene in which she picks up the words of the dying Chekhov, amplifies them and gives them resonance, so that he too ends up being ‘like her’. See ‘Ich sterbe’, also discussed below in my Conclusion. . Portrait d’un inconnu was first published by Robert Marin in Paris in  with a preface by Sartre. . See Qui êtes-vous?, p. . . See Chapter , p.  and note . . ‘Un anti-portrait de la romancière’, interview in Le Monde,  April , p. . . See notes to both these essays in Nathalie Sarraute, Œuvres complètes. . See La Force des choses, (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. . Translated as Force of Circumstance (London: André Deutsch, ). . In this interview with Thérèse de Saint Phalle, Sarraute comments on Beauvoir’s latest novel, Les Belles Images, as follows: ‘J’ai lu le roman de Simone de Beauvoir. Il m’est impossible de voir le moindre rapport entre son livre et les miens. Il n’y a pas un trait de commun! Ni dans la forme, ni dans le fond!’ [‘I’ve read Simone de Beauvoir’s novel. It’s impossible for me to see the slightest connection between her book and my books. There isn’t a single thing in common! Neither in their form, nor in their content!’]. See Le Figaro littéraire,  January , p. . . The metaphor of the relay race for literary evolution is implied in much of

Notes to pages ‒



Sarraute’s critical writing and is made explicit in an interview published under the title ‘Où va le roman?’, in Le Canada français, , (), pp. –: ‘Je crois que chacun de nous vient après d’autres, que chacun de nous a des précurseurs, que la littérature est une course de relais où l’écrivain passe le témoin à l’écrivain qui le suit’ (p. ) [‘I believe that each of us comes after others, each of us has precursors, and that literature is a relay race where the writer hands on the baton to the person who comes after’]. For further discussion of this idea, see Chapter .    ‘  ’     . In this connection see Jacques Derrida on Blanchot, ‘La loi du genre/ The Law of Genre’, Glyph,  (), pp. –; Leyla Perrone-Moisés on Blanchot, Barthes and Butor, ‘L’intertextualité critique’, Poétique,  (), pp. –; and Roland Barthes on Sollers, Sollers écrivain (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). . ‘Nathalie Sarraute’, Interview with Jean-Louis Ézine in Les Écrivains sur la sellette (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, , pp. –), pp. –. See also ‘Forme et contenu du roman’, p. . . ‘Ce que voient les oiseaux’, p. . The Cinderella allusion appears in ‘Le langage dans l’art du roman’, p. . In an interview in  at the time of the publication of Les Fruits d’or Sarraute asserted that, ‘Painting has developed much, much faster than literature. In literature we are still at the Impressionist phase. We are gradually moving towards abstraction, whereas in painting, abstraction has long since been established.’ Interview with François Bondy, ‘Vom Nichts an schaffen’, Der Monat,  (December ), p. . Translation from the German mine. . Derrida notes that ‘it comes as no surprise that, in nature and art, genre, a concept that is essentially genealogico-taxonomic, itself engenders so many classificatory vertigines [tant de vertiges classificatoires] when it goes about classifying itself and situating the classificatory principle or instrument within a set’ (‘La loi du genre/ The Law of Genre’, pp.  and ). JeanMarie Schaeffer also offers a good discussion of the variety of criteria used in defining genre. And he draws attention to a slightly different classificatory panic elicited by literary genre when he points out that the issue of genre is uniquely contentious in literature as compared to other arts, such as music and painting, which also use generic classifications. See his Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ), pp. –. For a more positiveminded (and panic-free) argument for restoring ‘a sense of the variety of literary forms’, see Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). . ‘Le gant retourné’, p. . See also the discussion in the Notice to the ‘Théâtre’ by Arnaud Rykner, OC, p. . . Lucette Finas, ‘Nathalie Sarraute: “Mon théâtre continue mes romans . . .”, La Quinzaine littéraire,  December , pp. –.



Notes to pages ‒

. For a full discussion of this subject and other aspects of the essay, see Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism and the Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). For a good example of a blurring of generic boundaries see Barthes’s Preface to his Essais critiques where in spelling out the hopeless longing to be a writer (‘le roman est toujours l’horizon du critique’ [‘the novel is always the critic’s horizon’]), he actually incites his reader to see him as being a version of such a writer through his resemblance to Proust’s narrator, ‘celui qui va écrire’ [‘the person who is going to write’]. Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (p.  [p. xxi]). Sarraute is, of course, someone who has already written and who will continue to write, thus placing the novel and the critical essay in a rather different relation to the one so painfully evoked by Barthes. . Reviewing the volume in , Paul de Man sums up L’Ère du soupçon as ‘un diagnostic sur l’état actuel d’un genre littéraire devenu problématique’ [‘a diagnosis of the current state of a literary genre which has become problematic’], ‘Situation du roman’, Monde nouveau, : (), pp. –. See also Claude Mauriac, ‘Nathalie Sarraute et le nouveau réalisme’ for a similar view. Extracts from these and other contemporary reviews can be found in the ‘Accueil de la critique’ of Sarraute’s œuvre critique in the Œuvres complètes, pp. –. . See Celia Britton, The Nouveau Roman: Fiction, Theory and Politics (London: Macmillan Press, ). . Sarraute gave her first lectures in Italy and in Lausanne in . For a list of all the countries in which she has lectured, see Qui êtes-vous?, pp. –. . Jean-Yves Tadié, ‘Un traité du roman’, L’Arc,  (), pp. –. Tadié’s is the only discussion L’Ère du soupçon that I know which treats it as a text in its own right. . Noone has argued more clearly for this kind of reading of Sarraute’s language than Valerie Minogue in Nathalie Sarraute and the War of the Words. Celia Britton also puts the emphasis on the strategic role of the theory in the nouveau roman. See The Nouveau Roman: Fiction, Theory and Politics. . Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ), pp. –. . I owe this observation to Mark Lee. . Roland Barthes, Critique et vérité (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ), p. , translated as Criticism and Truth by Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (London: The Athlone Press, ) (p. ). In fact Sarraute does cite Barthes on this topic with positive approval in an interview in . See below pp. ‒ and note . . Interview with Nicole Zand, ‘Entretien avec Nathalie Sarraute’, Le Monde,  January , p. . . For a full discussion of this aspect of Sarraute’s writing see A.S. Newman, Une Poésie des discours: Essai sur les romans de Nathalie Sarraute (Geneva: Droz, ). . Interview with Serge Fauchereau and Jean Ristat, p. . . Interview with Geneviève Serreau, Lettres nouvelles,  April , pp. –

Notes to pages ‒



(p. ). In the light of the remarks I have quoted from Critique et vérité it is interesting to see Sarraute put her seal of approval on Barthes’s views on the matter. Since Critique et vérité did not appear until , one can only speculate about what essay or work by Barthes Sarraute might be referring to here. . Interview with François Poirier, Art press, July–August , pp. –, p. . . Some of these have been briefly noted by Jean-Yves Tadié, ‘Un traité’, pp. –. . E.g. Claude Mauriac in his review of L’Ère du soupçon. See Chapter , note . . ‘Le langage parlé et le langage pensé sont le sujet de la fiction; ils envahissent la critique du roman’ [‘Spoken language and the language of thought are the subject of the fiction; they have invaded the criticism of the novel’]. But his explanation for this phenomenon (‘l’essai se fragmente en dialogue et devient un roman d’idées’ [‘the essay is being broken up into dialogue and is becoming a novel of ideas’]) fails to explain why Sarraute’s critical writing needs to take the form of fiction. See Tadié, ‘Un traité’, p. . . In addition to the three unpublished lectures, the articles ‘Ce que je cherche à faire’ and ‘Le gant retourné’ were both delivered as lectures before appearing in written form. The interview with Tel Quel is a special case since although it takes the form of a dialogue, the answers were provided in writing in reponse to written questions. It is, however, quite manifestly a dialogue, even if not a spoken one. . Information gleaned from a conversation with Nathalie Sarraute. . Interviews with Carmen Licari, Francofonia  (), pp. – (p. ).   :    . Examples of the first category of critical approach are too numerous to mention. For accounts of Enfance in an autobiographical perspective see Sheila Bell’s bibliographical commentary in ‘The Conjuror’s Hat: Sarraute Criticism since ’, esp. pp. –. . I have explored some of these issues in ‘Autobiography as Intertext: Barthes, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet’, in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, edited by Michael Worton and Judith Still (Manchester University Press, ), pp. –. . Gender – as ever in Sarraute – presents a slightly tricky problem here, since the narrator portrays himself grammatically as masculine even while acknowledging authorship of works by Sarraute. I shall refer to the writernarrator of L’Usage de la parole as ‘he’ in recognition of the staged nature of the narratorial role he has in the texts which comprise the work. . For a full and illuminating discussion of these relations see Philippe Lejeune, ‘Paroles d’enfance’, Revue des sciences humaines,  (), pp. –. . For a good discussion of these continuities see Françoise van Roey-Roux, ‘Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute ou de la fiction à l’autobiographie’, Études littéraires,  (), pp. –.



Notes to pages ‒

. ‘Document: Interview avec Nathalie Sarraute’, by Bettina Knapp, Kentucky Romance Quarterly,  (), pp. – (p. ). . ‘Entretien avec Nathalie Sarraute’, in Arnaud Rykner, Nathalie Sarraute, pp. – (p. ). . ‘L’ère du soupçon’, p.  [p. ]. For a fine example of this kind of reading see Valerie Minogue, ‘Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance: From the Experience of Language to the Language of Experience’, in Studies in French Fiction: Essays in Honour of Vivienne Mylne. . Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Extract translated as ‘The Autobiographical Pact’ by Katherine Leary, in On Autobiography, edited by Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), pp. –. . ‘Nathalie Sarraute et son “il”’, interview with Michèle Gazier, Télérama, p. . . Pierre Demeron, ‘Nathalie Sarraute ou littérature sans cabotinage’, p. . . See OC, note  on p.  for details about the letter Sarraute received after the publication of Enfance from the daughter of Mme Bernard confirming the portrait of her mother and the description of their home. Nathalie Sarraute also mentioned in conversation that her cousin confirmed the accuracy of her depiction of the holidays spent with her uncle and aunt at Kamenetz-Podolsk (E, pp. –). . For further examples of these parallels, see Monique Gosselin, Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute, pp. –, and notes in the Œuvres complètes, passim. . See OC, p.  and note , p.  and note , and p.  and note . . See ‘Théâtre: Notice générale’ in OC, pp. –, the ‘Notice’ for Pour un oui ou pour un non, OC, pp. –, and p. , note . In an interview with Arnaud Rykner, Sarraute claims that the reworking of the original phrase in Entre la vie et la mort was entirely unconscious. In response to Rykner’s comment that ‘on est frappé par les liens très étroits qui existent entre votre théâtre et vos romans, notamment parce que vos pièces semblent directement naître de ces derniers. À chaque fois, elles en développent un passage, un chapitre . . .’ [‘one is struck by the very close links which exist between your theatre and your novels, particularly because your plays seem to derive directly from the novels. Each time, they develop a passage, or a chapter from them . . .’], Sarraute replies: ‘Je n’en suis pas du tout consciente quand j’écris une pièce. Comme je vous l’ai dit, je relis très rarement mes romans. Si bien que, par exemple, je ne me souvenais absolument pas d’avoir écrit tout un chapitre sur “C’est bien, ça”, dans Entre la vie et la mort. C’est seulement par la suite que des gens qui ont vu Pour un oui ou pour un non me l’ont fait remarquer. Mais cela veut uniquement dire que “C’est bien, ça” était une expression qui m’avait frappée et que je désirais voir ce qu’elle cachait. Je l’ai fait pour le livre, puis je l’ai oublié, et j’ai cherché de nouveau pour la pièce. Mais je n’ai rien repris du roman. Ce sont des choses tout à fait séparées’ [‘I am not at all conscious of it when I write a play. As I said to you, I rarely reread my novels. So that for example, I had no memory at all

Notes to pages ‒



of having written a whole chapter on “C’est bien, ça” in Entre la vie et la mort. It was only afterwards that people who had seen Pour un oui ou pour un non pointed it out to me. But that just means that “C’est bien, ça” was an expression which had struck me and that I wanted to see what it concealed. I did it for the book, then I forgot about it, and I looked again for the play. But I didn’t repeat anything from the novel. They are two quite separate things’]. See Arnaud Rykner, Nathalie Sarraute, pp. –. This disclaimer raises as many problems as it seems to explain and I shall be exploring some of them in the remainder of this chapter. . See OC, p.  and note. , and p. , note . . See ‘Théâtre: Notice générale’, OC, pp. –. . See p.  [p. ], and the ‘Notice’ to Les Fruits d’or, OC, p. . . ‘Nathalie Sarraute’, interview with Germaine Brée, Contemporary Literature,  (), pp. – (p. ). . Interview with Arnaud Rykner, in Rykner, Nathalie Sarraute, p. . . Françoise Asso’s study of Sarraute’s work takes this principle of return in Sarraute’s writing as its starting point: ‘on verra dans ce mouvement qui conduit l’écrivain à repartir d’un point, éventuellement le même mais comme toujours nouveau, une caractéristique de l’œuvre’ [‘one can see in this movement which leads the writer to keep starting out from the same point, which is possibly the same one but is as if it was always new, a characteristic of the work’], Nathalie Sarraute: Une écriture de l’effraction (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), p. . . André Allemand, L’Œuvre romanesque de Nathalie Sarraute (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, ), p. . . Interview introducing Sarraute’s reading of Les Fruits d’or (Audivis, ). Quoted in Œuvres complètes, p. . . See Françoise Asso, Nathalie Sarraute: Une écriture de l’effraction, esp. pp. –. . As Françoise Calin says of this scene, ‘les variantes offertes par les réitérations, tout en cernant chaque fois d’un peu plus près la vérité de l’anecdote, attaquent la notion même de l’existence d’une telle vérité. Une page en recommence une autre en l’annulant’ [‘the variants provided by the repetitions, while they get a little closer to the truth of the story each time, attack the very notion of the existence of such a truth. One page starts another by erasing it’]. See Françoise Calin, La Vie retrouvée: Étude de l’œuvre romanesque de Nathalie Sarraute (Paris: Minard, Lettres Modernes, ), p. . . Quoted in the ‘Documents’ of the ‘Notice’ for Tropismes in the Œuvres complètes, p. . :      . Interview with Carmen Licari, Francofonia, p. . . ‘Narrator’ is not quite the right word for someone whose consciousness seems to be conveyed in something very like speech, but who never says ‘je’.



Notes to pages ‒

In some of the other texts in Ici, the central consciousness is referred to in the third person as ‘il’ or ‘ils’. However, for the sake of convenience I shall use the term ‘narrator’ for these first three texts because it approximates so closely to the position of the central consciousness in them. . EVM, p.  [pp. –]. The anecdote is taken from Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. See OC, note to p. . Neither the source nor the poet’s name is given in Sarraute’s text.

Bibliography

WORKS BY NATHALIE SARRAUTE  Tropismes () (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, ). Translated in Tropisms and The Age of Suspicion by Maria Jolas (London: John Calder, ). Portrait d’un inconnu () (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ). Translated as Portrait of a Man Unknown by Maria Jolas (London: John Calder, ). Martereau () (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ). Translated as Martereau by Maria Jolas (London: John Calder, ). Le Planétarium () (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ). Translated as The Planetarium by Maria Jolas (London: John Calder, ). Les Fruits d’or () (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ). Translated as The Golden Fruits by Maria Jolas (London: John Calder, ). Entre la vie et la mort () (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ). Translated as Between Life and Death by Maria Jolas (London: Calder & Boyars, ). Vous les entendez? () (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ). Translated as Do You Hear Them?, by Maria Jolas (London: Calder & Boyars, ). «disent les imbéciles» () (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ). Translated as ‘Fools Say’ by Maria Jolas (London: John Calder, ). L’Usage de la parole () (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ). Translated as The Use of Speech by Barbara Wright in consultation with the author (London: John Calder, ). Enfance () (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ). Translated as Childhood by Barbara Wright in consulation with the author (London: John Calder, ). Tu ne t’aimes pas () (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ). Translated as You Don’t Love Yourself by Barbara Wright in consultation with the author (New York: George Braziller, Inc., ). Ici () (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ). Translated as Here by Barbara Wright in consultation with the author (New York: George Braziller, ). Ouvrez (Paris: Gallimard, ().





Bibliography 

Le Silence () Le Mensonge () Isma ou Ce qui s’appelle rien () C’est beau () Elle est là () Pour un oui ou pour un non () all in Nathalie Sarraute, Œuvres complètes, edited by Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, ).  ‘Paul Valéry et l’Enfant d’Éléphant’ () L’Ère du soupçon () (Paris: Gallimard, Folio/Essais, ). Translated in Tropisms and the Age of Suspicion by Maria Jolas (London: John Calder, ). includes: ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’ () ‘L’ère du soupçon’ () ‘Conversation et sous-conversation’ () ‘Ce que voient les oiseaux’ () ‘Roman et réalité’ () ‘La littérature, aujourd’hui’ () ‘Flaubert le précurseur’ () ‘Forme et contenu du roman’ (undated) ‘Le langage dans l’art du roman’ (undated) ‘Ce que je cherche à faire’ () ‘Le gant retourné’ () All references to essays other than those contained in L’Ère du soupçon are to the Œuvres complètes. Page references are to the cited editions and translations. I have modified translations where it seemed necessary or desirable. INTERVIEWS WITH NATHALIE SARRAUTE CITED Interview with Gabriel d’Aubarède, Les Nouvelles littéraires,  July , p. . ‘Nathalie Sarraute ou littérature sans cabotinage’, interview with Pierre Demeron, Arts, – June , p. . Interview with Geneviève Serreau, Les Lettres nouvelles,  April , pp. –. Nathalie Sarraute, ‘Tolstoï’, Les Lettres françaises, , – September , pp. ,. ‘Où va le roman?’, Le Canada français, , (), pp. –. ‘Virginia Woolf ou la visionnaire du “maintenant”’, Les Lettres françaises,  June , pp. , . Bondy, François, ‘Vom Nichts an schaffen’, Der Monat,  (December ), p. . ‘Document: Interview avec Nathalie Sarraute’, by Bettina Knapp, Kentucky Romance Quarterly,  (), pp. –.

Bibliography



‘Nathalie Sarraute ne veut rien avoir de commun avec Simone de Beauvoir’, interview with Thérèse de Saint Phalle, Le Figaro littéraire,  January , p. . Interview with Nicole Zand, Le Monde,  January , p. . ‘Nathalie Sarraute au kibboutz, Propos recueillis par Erwin Spatz’, La Quinzaine littéraire, – October , pp. –. ‘Nathalie Sarraute’, interview with Germaine Brée, Contemporary Literature,  (), pp. –. ‘Nathalie Sarraute: “Mon théâtre continue mes romans . . .”’, interview with Lucette Finas, La Quinzaine littéraire,  December , pp. –. Interview with Jean-Louis Ézine in Les Écrivains sur la sellette (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ), pp. –. Interview with François-Marie Banier in Le Monde des livres,  April , p. . Interview with François Poirier, Art press, July-August , pp. –. Interview with Sonia Rykiel, Les Nouvelles, – Februrary , pp. –. ‘Conversation avec Nathalie Sarraute’, interview with Serge Fauchereau and Jean Ristat, Digraphe,  (), pp. –. ‘Nathalie Sarraute et son “il”’, interview with Michèle Gazier, Télérama,  July , pp. –. ‘Nathalie Sarraute talks about her Life and Works: Extracts from a Conversation’, Romance Studies,  (), pp. –. ‘“Qu’est-ce qu’il y a, qu’est-ce qui s’est passé? Mais rien”: Entretiens avec Nathalie Sarraute’, by Carmen Licari, Francofonia,  (), pp. –. ‘Nathalie Sarraute et ses traducteurs européens’, interview with Elmar Tophoven, in Actes des premières assises de la traduction littéraire (Arles ) (Arles: Actes Sud, ), pp. –. Nathalie Sarraute: Qui êtes-vous?, Conversations with Simone Benmussa, (Lyon: La Manufacture, ). ‘Interview de Nathalie Sarraute’, by Grant E. Kaiser, Roman –,  (), pp. –. Interview with Nathalie Sarraute broadcast on France Culture,  February . ‘Entretien avec Nathalie Sarraute’, in Arnaud Rykner, Nathalie Sarraute (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ), pp. –. ‘À voix nue’, interview with Danièle Sallenave, broadcast on France-Culture, – March . ‘Rencontre: Nathalie Sarraute’, interview with Isabelle Huppert, Cahiers du cinéma, , (), pp. –. ‘Sur la langue, l’écriture, le travail’, interview with Danièle Sallenave, Genesis, , (), pp. –. CRITICAL STUDIES OF NATHALIE SARRAUTE Allemand, André, L’Œuvre romanesque de Nathalie Sarraute, (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, ) Angremy, Annie (ed.), Nathalie Sarraute: Portrait d’un écrivain (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, )



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‘Nathalie Sarraute et R.M. Rilke: Une course de relais jamais interrompue’, Le Nouveau Roman en questions,  (), pp. –. Cranaki, Mimica et Yvon Belaval, Nathalie Sarraute (Paris: Gallimard, ) De Man, Paul, ‘Situation du roman’, Monde nouveau, : (), pp. –. Digraphe,  () Aujourd’hui Nathalie Sarraute Eakin, Paul John, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton University Press, ) Eliez-Rüegg, Elisabeth, La Conscience d’autrui et des objets dans l’œuvre de Nathalie Sarraute (Frankfurt-am-Main and Berne: Herbert Lang, and Peter Lang, ) L’Esprit créateur, : () Nathalie Sarraute ou le texte du for intérieur Finas, Lucette, ‘Nathalie Sarraute ou les métamorphoses du verbe’, Tel Quel,  (), pp. –. Fleming, John, ‘The Imagery of Tropism in the Novels of Nathalie Sarraute’, in Image and Theme: Studies in Modern French Fiction, edited by W.M. Frohock (Harvard University Press, ), pp. –. Gosselin, Monique, ‘Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute: Les mots de la mère’, Revue des sciences humaines,  (), pp. –. Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute, (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, ) Gratton, Johnnie, ‘Towards Narrativity: Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, : (), pp. ‒. Heath, Stephen, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing, (London: Elek, ) Hewitt, Leah D., Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, ) Jaccard, Jean-Luc, Nathalie Sarraute Zurich: Juris, ) Janvier, Ludovic, Une Parole exigeante: Le nouveau roman (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, ) Jefferson, Ann, ‘Autobiography as Intertext: Barthes, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet’, in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, edited by Michael Worton and Judith Still (Manchester University Press, ), pp. –. Lejeune, Philippe, ‘Paroles d’enfance’, Revue des sciences humaines,  (), pp. –. King, Adèle, French Women Novelists: Defining a Female Style (London: Macmillan Press, ) McCarthy, Mary, ‘Hanging by a Thread’ in The Writing on the Wall, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ), pp. –. McLure, Roger, Sarraute: ‘Le Planétarium’ (London: Grant & Cutler, ) Magazine littéraire,  () Nathalie Sarraute Marini, Michelle, ‘L’élaboration de la différence sexuelle dans la pratique littéraire de la langue’, in Monique Gosselin, Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute, pp. –. Mauriac, Claude, ‘Nathalie Sarraute et le nouveau réalisme’, Preuves, :, () pp. –. L’Alittérature contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel, )

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Rykner, Arnaud, Théâtres du nouveau roman (Paris: José Corti, ) Nathalie Sarraute (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ) ‘Narcisse et les mots-miroirs (Sartre, Leiris, Sarraute autobiographes)’, Romanic Review,  (), pp. –. ‘Théâtre et exorcisme: Les écorchés de la parole’, Poétique,  (), pp. –. Sartre, Jean-Paul, ‘Préface’, in Nathalie Sarraute, Portrait d’un inconnu, pp. –. Schor, Naomi, ‘The Portrait of a Gentleman: Representing Men in (French) Women’s Writing’, in Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), pp. –. Sheringham, Michael, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires (Oxford University Press, ) Tadié, Jean-Yves, ‘Un traité du roman’, L’Arc,  (), pp. –. ‘Musicienne de nos silences’, in Nathalie Sarraute: Portrait d’un écrivain, edited by Annie Angremy, pp. –. Temple, Ruth, Nathalie Sarraute (New York: Columbia University Press, ) Tison Braun, Micheline, Nathalie Sarraute ou la recherche de l’authenticité (Paris: Gallimard, ) Vercier, Bruno, ‘(Nouveau) roman et autobiographie: Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute’, French Literature Series,  (), pp. –. Watson-Williams, Helen, The Novels of Nathalie Sarraute: Towards an Aesthetic (Amsterdam: Rodopi, ) Wetherill, P.M., ‘Flaubert et les distortions de la critique moderne’, Symposium, : (), pp. –. Wittig, Monique, ‘The Place of the Action’, in Three Decades of the New Novel, edited by Lois Oppenheim (Urbana: Illinois University Press, ) ‘The Mark of Gender’, in The Poetics of Gender, edited by Nancy K. Miller, (New York: Columbia University Press, ), pp. –. Wunderli-Müller, Christine B., Le Thème du masque et les banalités dans l’œuvre de Nathalie Sarraute (Zurich: Juris Druck Verlag, ) Zants, Emily, ‘Valéry and the Modern French Novel’, L’Esprit créateur, : (), pp. –. OTHER LITERARY TEXTS Balzac, Honoré de, ‘Avant-propos’, La Comédie humaine, edited by Marcel Bouteron, (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, ), vol. . Le Père Goriot (Paris: Classiques Garnier, ). Translated as Old Goriot by Ellen Marriage (London: Everyman’s Library, ) Barthes, Roland, Roland Barthes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Translated as Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes by Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, ) Beauvoir, Simone de, La Force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, ). Translated as Force of Circumstance (London: André Deutsch, ) Camus, Albert, La Chute (Paris: Gallimard, ). Translated as The Fall by Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, )

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

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McKenna, Andrew J., Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida and Deconstruction (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, ) Moi, Toril, ‘Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge’, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, edited by Teresa Brennan, (London: Routledge, ), pp. –. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, (Oxford: Blackwell, ) Moriarty, Michael, ‘Discourse and the Body in La Princesse de Clèves’, Paragraph,  (), pp. –. Obaldia, Claire de, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism and the Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ) Perrone-Moisés, Leyla, ‘L’intertextualité critique’, Poétique,  (), pp. –. Robbe-Grillet, Alain, Pour un nouveau roman () (Paris: Gallimard, Collection Idées, ). Translated in Snapshots and Towards a New Novel by Barbara Wright (London: Calder and Boyars, ) Russkoe Bogatstvo, – () Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ) Sartre, Jean-Paul, Qu’est-ce que la littérature: Situations II (Paris: Gallimard, ). Translated as What is Literature? by Bernard Frechtman (London, Methuen: ) Saussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de linguistique générale, edited by Tullio de Mauro, (Paris: Payot, ). Translated as Course in General Linguistics by Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, ) Scarry, Elaine, (ed.), Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, Selected Papers from the English Institute, , New Series, no.  (Baltimore, Md. Johns Hopkins University Press, ) Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ) Showalter, Elaine, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’, in The New Feminist Criticism, edited by Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, ), pp. –. Volosˇinov, V.N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (New York and London: Seminar Press, ) Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing, History and the West (London: Routledge, ) Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, )

Index

abjection, ‒, ‒, , ,  Allemand, André, ‒,  n.  alter ego, see double Andersen, Hans Christian,  art, ‒, , , , ‒, ,  n. ,  n.  Arvers, Félix,  Asso, Françoise, ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Aubarède, Gabriel d’,  n.  Austin, J. L., ‒, ,  n. ,  n.  Baker, Ida,  Bakhtin, M. M.,  Balzac, Honoré de, , ‒, , , , , , , ,  n.  Eugénie Grandet, , ,  Le Père Goriot,  Banier, François-Marie,  n. ,  n.  Barthes, Roland, ‒, , , , ‒,  ‒ n.,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Beauvoir, Simone de, ‒,  n.  Le deuxième sexe, , ‒, , ,  n. ,  n.  La Force des choses, ,  n.  Beckett, Samuel, ‒, Bell, Sheila,  n. ,  n.  Benmussa, Simone, , ,  Blanchot, Maurice, ,  n.  Blot, Jean, ‒, ,  n.  Bondy, François,  n.  Boué, Rachel,  n.  Brée, Germaine, ,  n.  Breton, André,  Britton, Celia, ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Brooks, Peter, ,  n. ,  n.  Brulotte, Gaëtan, ,  n. ,  n.  Butor, Michel,  n.  Caldwell, Erskine,  Calin, Françoise,  n. 

Camus, Albert,  La Chute,  L’Étranger, ,  character, , , , , ‒, ‒, , ‒, , ‒, , , , , , , ,  Chekhov, Anton, , , ‒,  n.  Cixous, Hélène, , ,  n.  Compton-Burnett, Ivy,  Constant, Benjamin,  contact, , , , ‒, ‒, , , , , , ‒, ‒, , , ‒ contamination, ‒, , , , , , ,  see also pollution Cubism,  Culler, Jonathan, ,  n.  death, ‒, ‒, , , ‒, ‒,  n. ,  n.  Deleuze, Gilles, ,  n.  Demeron, Pierre, ,  n. ,  n.  Derrida, Jacques, ‒,  n. , n. , n.,  n. ,  n.  différence, ‒,  n. , n.  différend, , ‒, ‒,  n. ,  n.  Dostoevsky, Fyodor, , , , , ,  n.  The Brothers Karamazov,  Letters from the Underworld,  double, , , , , , ‒ Douglas, Mary, ‒,  n.  écriture féminine, ,  n.  see also feminist theory, women writers exclusion, , , ‒, , ‒, , , , , , , , , ,  Ézine, Jean-Louis,  n.  Fauchereau, Serge, ,  n. ,  n.  feminism, ‒ feminist theory, ‒, ,  n. ,  n. 





Index

Finas, Lucette, , ‒,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Flaubert, Gustave,  Salammbô, ,  Fowler, Alistair,  n.  fragment, ‒, ‒ Freud, Sigmund, , ,  Fuss, Diane,  n.  Gates, Jr., Henry Louis,  n.  Gazier, Michèle,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  gender, , , , , , , , ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, , ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  see also sexual difference, woman genre, , , ‒, ‒, ‒, , ‒, ‒, ,  n. ,  n.  Gide, André, , , Les Faux-monnayeurs, ,  n.  Journal des faux-monnayeurs, ,  n.  Gilbert, Sandra M.,  Girard, René, , ‒,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Gosselin, Monique,  n. ,  n.  Gubar, Susan,  Heath, Stephen, ,  n.  Heidegger, Martin, ‒,  Hemingway, Ernest, , ,  Hewitt, Leah D,  n.  Huppert, Isabelle, ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  identification, , ‒, ‒, , , , ‒, ,  n.  intersubjectivity, , , , , , ‒, , , , , , , ‒, ‒, , , , ‒, ‒ n.  Irigaray, Luce, , ,  n.  Jakobson, Roman, ,  ,  n. ,  n.  Johnson, Barbara,  n. ,  n.  Joyce, James, ,  n.  Kafka, Franz, . The Trial, ‒ Kaiser, Grant E.,  n.  Kelly, Catriona,  n.  Kempf, Roger, ,  n.  Knapp, Bettina,  n.  Kristeva, Julia, ‒,  n. ,  n.  Lafayette, Mme de, ,  n.  La Princesse de Clèves, ‒,  n. ,  n. ,  n. 

language, ‒, ‒, , ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, , , , ‒, , ‒, ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  see also words Lazhechnikov, Ivan Ivanovich La Maison de glace,  Lee, Mark,  n.  Leiris, Michel,  Lejeune, Philippe, ,  n. ,  n.  Licari, Carmen, ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Lindon, Jérôme,  Lyotard, Jean-François, , ,  n. ,  n.  Man, Paul de,  n.  Mansfield, Katherine, , ,  n.  McCarthy, Mary, , ‒ n.  McKenna, Andrew,  n.  Marini, Michelle,  n.  Marx, Karl,  Maulnier, Thierry,  Mauriac, Claude, , ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  metaphor, ‒, , , ‒, , ‒, , , , ,  n.  Minogue, Valerie,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Moi, Toril,  n. ,  n.  Moriarty, Michael,  n.  mothers, ‒, , , , ‒, , ‒, , , ‒,  n.  Nelson, R. J.,  n.  Newman, A. S.,  n.  nouveau roman, , , , ‒, ‒,  Obaldia, Claire de,  n.  O’Beirne, Emer,  n.  Ollier, Claude,  other, , , , , ‒, , , ‒, , , , , ‒, ‒, ‒, , , , ,  n.  Pascal, Blaise,  Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich,  Perrone-Moisés, Leyla,  n.  Phillips, John,  n.  Picasso, Pablo, ,  Pierrot, Jean,  n.  Pinget, Robert,  Pivot, Bernard,  n.  poetry, , ‒, ‒, , ,  n. ,  n. 

Index Poirier, François,  n.  pollution, ‒, ,  see also contamination Proust, Marcel, , , ‒, ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  reader, ‒, , , , , ‒, ‒, ‒, , , , , ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, , ‒, ‒, ,  realism, , , , , ‒ Ricardou, Jean,  Rilke, Rainer Maria,  n.  Rimbaud, Arthur, ‒ Ristat, Jean, ,  n. ,  n.  Robbe-Grillet, Alain, , ,  n. ,  n.  Roey-Roux, Françoise,  n.  Rykiel, Sonia,  n. ,  n.  Rykner, Arnaud, , ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. , ‒ n. ,  n.  Said, Edward,  n.  Saint Phalle, Thérèse de,  n.  Sallenave, Danièle,  n. ,  n.  Sand, George,  Sarraute, Nathalie, ‘Ce que je cherche à faire’, , ‒,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  ‘Ce que voient les oiseaux’, , ‒, , ‒,  n. , C’est beau, , ,  n.  ‘Conversation et sous-conversation’, , , , , , , ,  ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’, , , , , , , , , , ,  n. ,  n.  «disent les imbéciles», , , ‒, , ‒, , , ‒, , , ‒, , , , ‒ Enfance, , ‒, , ‒, ‒, , , , , ‒, ‒, , ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Entre la vie et la mort, , ‒, , , , ‒, , , ‒, , , , ‒, ,  n. , ‒ n. ,  n.  ‘L’ère du soupçon’, , , , , ‒, , ‒,  n.  L’Ère du soupçon, , , , , , , ‒, ‒, , , ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  ‘Flaubert le précurseur’, ,  n. ,  n.  ‘Forme et contenu du roman’, ‒, , ,  n. 



Les Fruits d’or, , , ‒, , , , , , ‒, , , , , ,  ‘Le gant retourné’,  n. ,  n.  Ici, , , ‒, ‒, ‒,  n. , , n.  Isma, ,  n.  ‘Le langage dans l’art du roman’, ,  n. ,  n.  Martereau, , , ‒, , , , , ‒, , , , , , ‒, , , , , , ‒, ,  n.  Le Mensonge, , ,  n.  Ouvrez, ‒, ,  ‘Paul Valéry et l’Enfant d’Éléphant’, , , , , , , ,  n. ,  n.  Le Planétarium, ‒, , , , ‒, , , ‒, ‒, , , , ‒, ‒, , ‒, , ‒,  n. , ‒ n. ,  n.  Portrait d’un inconnu, , , , , , , , , , ‒, , , , , , , ‒, , , , , , , , , ‒,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Pour un oui ou pour un non, , , , ‒ n.  Qui êtes-vous?, , , , ‒, , , ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  ‘Roman et réalité’, ,  Le Silence, , ,  n.  theatre, , ‒, , ‒, , ,  n. , ‒ n.  Tropismes, ‒, ‒, , , , , , ‒, , , , ‒ Tu ne t’aimes pas, , , , , , , , ,  n.  L’Usage de la parole, ‒, , , ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, , ‒, ‒, ‒,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Vous les entendez?, , , , , , , , , ,  Sarraute, Raymond, ,  Sartre, Jean-Paul, , , , , , ‒, ‒, , ,  n. ,  n.,  n.  Les Mots, ,  n.  Qu’est-ce que la littérature?,  n.  Saussure, Ferdinand de, ‒, , , , , , , , ,  n. ,  n.  Scarry, Elaine, ‒,  n.  Schaeffer, Jean-Marie,  n.  Schor, Naomi,  n.  Serreau, Geneviève,  n.  sexual difference, , , , ,  see also gender



Index

Showalter, Elaine,  Simon, Claude,  Smith, G. S.,  n.  Sollers, Philippe, ,  n.  Spatz, Erwin,  n.  Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom’s Cabin,  Tadié, Jean-Yves, , ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Temps modernes, Les, , ,  Tihanov, Galin,  n.  Tolstoy, Leo,  n.  War and Peace, , ,  n.  Tophoven, Elmar,  n.  tropism, , , , , , , , , , ‒, , , , , , , , , ,  n.  Twain, Mark, The Prince and the Pauper,  Valéry, Paul, , , , , , , ‒,  ‘La Jeune Parque’, 

Vikhrovksi, N., , ,  n.  violence, , ‒, , , ‒, , ‒, , , ,  n.  Volosˇinov, V. N., ‒,  n.  Wittig, Monique, ,  n. ,  n.  woman, , , ‒, , ,  n. ,  n.  see also gender, sexual difference women writers, , ‒, ‒, ,  n.  Woolf, Virginia, , , ‒,  n.  The Years,  words, , ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, , , ‒, ‒ Wright, Barbara,  writing, , , , , ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, , ‒, , ‒, , , , , , ‒ Young, Robert, ,  n.  Zand, Nicole,  n.  Zˇizˇek, Slavoj,  n.  Zola, Émile, 

                 : Michael Sheringham (Royal Holloway, London)            : R. Howard Bloch (Columbia University), Malcolm Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford), Terence Cave (St John’s College, Oxford), Ross Chambers (University of Michigan), Antoine Compagnon (Colombia University), Peter France (University of Edinburgh), Christie McDonald (Harvard University), Toril Moi (Duke University), Naomi Schor (Harvard University)                               

J.M. Cocking: Proust: Collected Essays on the Writer and his Art Leo Bersani: The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé Marian Hobson: The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France Leo Spitzer, translated and edited by David Bellos: Essays on Seventeenth-Century French Literature Norman Bryson: Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix Ann Moss: Poetry and Fable: Studies in Mythological Narrative in Sixteenth-Century France Rhiannon Goldthorpe: Sartre: Literature and Theory Diana Knight: Flaubert’s Characters: The Language of Illusion Andrew Martin: The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne Geoffrey Bennington: Sententiousness and the Novel: Laying down the Law in EighteenthCentury French Fiction Penny Florence: Mallarmé, Manet and Redon: Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning Christopher Prendergast: The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, and Flaubert Naomi Segal: The Unintended Reader: Feminism and Manon Lescaut Clive Scott: A Question of Syllables: Essays in Nineteenth-Century French Verse Stirling Haig: Flaubert and the Gift of Speech: Dialogue and Discourse in Four ‘Modern’ Novels Nathaniel Wing: The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarmé Mitchell Greenberg: Corneille, Classicism and the Ruses of Symmetry Howard Davies: Sartre and ‘Les Temps Modernes’ Robert Greer Cohn: Mallarmé’s Prose Poems: A Critical Study Celia Britton: Claude Simon: Writing the Visible David Scott: Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France Ann Jefferson: Reading Realism in Stendhal Dalia Judovitz: Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity Richard D. E. Burton: Baudelaire in  Michael Moriarty: Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France John Forrester: The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida Jerome Schwartz: Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion David Baguley: Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision Leslie Hill: Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Worlds F.W. Leakey: Baudelaire: Collected Essays, – Sarah Kay: Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry

 Gillian Jondorf: French Renaissance Tragedy: The Dramatic Word  Lawrence D. Kritzman: The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance  Jerry C. Nash: The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Scève: Poetry and Struggle  Peter France: Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture  Mitchell Greenberg: Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism  Tom Conley: The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing  Margery Evans: Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads  Judith Still: Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: ‘bienfaisance’ and ‘pudeur’  Christopher Johnson: System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida  Carol A. Mossman: Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola  Daniel Brewer: The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing  Roberta L. Krueger: Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance  James H. Reid: Narration and Description in the French Realist Novel: The Temporality of Lying and Forgetting  Eugene W. Holland: Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism  Hugh M. Davidson: Pascal and the Arts of the Mind  David J. Denby: Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, –: A Politics of Tears  Claire Addison: Where Flaubert Lies: Chronology, Mythology and History  John Claiborne Isbell: The Birth of European Romanticism: Staël’s ‘De l’Allemagne’  Michael Sprinker: History and Ideology in Proust: ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ and the Third French Republic  Dee Reynolds: Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space  David B. Allison, Mark S. Roberts and Allen S. Weiss: Sade and the Narrative of Transgression  Simon Gaunt: Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature  Jeffrey Mehlman: Genealogies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France  Lewis C. Seifert: Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France –: Nostalgic Utopias  Elza Adamowicz: Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse  Nicholas White: The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction  Paul Gifford and Brian Stimpson: Reading Paul Valéry: Universe in Mind  Michael R. Finn: Proust, the Body and Literary Form  Julie Candler Hayes: Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion  Ursula Tidd: Simone de Beavoir, Gender and Testimony  Janell Watson: Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities  Floyd Gray: Gender, Rhetoric and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing  Ann Jefferson: Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference