SOURCE: King, Adele. “Nathalie Sarraute.” In French Women Novelists: Defining a Female Style, pp. 85-107. London: Macmillan, 1989.

[In the following essay, King examines the works of Nathalie Sarraute, noting that the writer did not associate her strong sense of political feminism with her work.]

When I write, I am neither man nor woman, cat nor dog. I am not me. … I don't exist.

(Rykiel, 1984, p. 40)

I have never understood how some writers can display their life as they do. … What counts is the books.

(Saporta, 1984, p. 23)

Nathalie Sarraute's strong ‘political’ feminism does not, she has said, have a direct relationship to her creative work. She does not think as a woman, she says, and one must not consider men and women as separate, for this leads to a ‘destructive segregation’. Any definition of l'écriture féminine would include elements found in works by male authors, Proust, for example (Rykiel, 1984, p. 40). Women in her work are not militant feminists or even career oriented: ‘These images of women that I have shown are images of feminine behaviour as you continue to see it everywhere. Many women accept playing the role that society imposes upon them’ (Besser, 1976, p. 286). She also considers that her own life has no relevance to her work: ‘You will find nothing there; or else you will be making arbitrary interpretations’ (Saporta, 1984, p. 8). Sarraute's experiences as a Jew in occupied France, for example, have no overt relevance to her work. We are far from the autobiographical work of Colette or Marguerite Duras. Yet while granting the possible divorce between beliefs held and books written (easier to do, perhaps, than granting the divorce between personal experience and written work, as Sarraute also requests us to do), we may find underlying her work a vision of the world that reflects her position as a woman, a use of writing that shows a conscious or perhaps unconscious assumption of gender.

When Sarraute says that at the level of human behaviour and use of language with which she works there is no distinction of gender, she implies a fundamental human nature underlying any divisions. She denies not only gender, but also racial, national and class differences. Yet, in spite of her theory, Sarraute's characters have a certain number of external traits, among them sex. They are il or elle, not on (Brulotte, 1984, p. 45). Sarraute says that the use of ils or elles for a group is ‘sometimes determined simply by a concern for the sound [un souci de phonétique] or by a desire to diversify’ (Sarraute, 1972, p. 35). When she describes movements of consciousness before they exist in words, a level of ‘pre-language’, however, are not these movements to some extent based on perceptions that will vary according to what has been felt before? Will not the sensations she describes in some way reflect previous relations with other people and thus how one's gender is perceived by others? Sarraute is aware of how men and women are perceived differently, as can be seen in her reply to a critic who says she has an emotional relationship (rapports affectifs) to language: ‘you would not look for emotion in Flaubert because he is not a woman’ (p. 57). How could such awareness not be reflected in ‘tropisms’?

Sarraute's works do not usually have female protagonists. She is seeking what is common to all human beings and is aware that women cannot, at least now, represent this communality. She refused, for example, to let an all-female cast perform one of her plays because ‘Women can never, alas, represent the neuter’.¹ She seldom treats directly of what are considered typically feminine themes, such as maternal relations, sexual love, the female body. The lack of communication between individuals in her work, the impossibility of fully comprehending another individual, of which she speaks in L'Ère du soupçon (The Age of Suspicion), is not a result of a battle of the sexes, as in Colette. Where, then, should we look for possible indications of ‘writing as a woman’?

Tropisms, as Sarraute herself defined them, are ‘purely instinctive and are caused in us by other people or by the outer world and resemble the movements called tropisms by which living organisms expand or contract under certain influences, such as light, heat, and so on. These movements glide quickly round the border of our consciousness, they compose the small, rapid, and sometimes very complex dramas concealed beneath our actions, our gestures, the words we speak’ (Sarraute, 1961, p. 428). These movements of approach and withdrawal, of contact and distance between individuals can be considered, according to Ellen W. Munley, as explorations of identity, as a process of alternative merger with or separation from other persons, a process particularly feminine, if we accept Nancy Chodorow's theory that ‘women's sense of self is continuous with others’, that women have ‘more permeable ego boundaries’. In other words, the psychic reality underlying conscious thought—a reality which for Sarraute is shared by everyone—is nevertheless a reality of which women, because of their cultural conditioning, beginning with their experience of being mothered by women, may be especially aware (Munley, 1983).

In speaking of the Nouveau Roman as a possible literary movement, Sarraute makes an important distinction. What interests her is not objects themselves, which are merely ‘catalysts’, but rather ‘the inner movements they release’. For Robbe-Grillet, on the contrary, what is important, she feels, is the ‘play of surfaces’. A text is ‘living’ when its source is in ‘a sensation’, but it dies when it moves away from sensation to mere games, ‘the “beauty” of language’ (Saporta, 1984, pp. 21-3). As Valerie Minorgue has commented, Sarraute's work combines ‘psychological realism with intense linguistic and literary reflexivity’; it is not concerned merely with the play of language, however, but aims at articulating ‘human truths’ (Minorgue, 1981, p. 18). Christiane Makward has observed that while ‘l'écriture féminine’, like the ‘nouveau roman’, does not distinguish between form and content, it nevertheless postulates ‘a direct relation with non-linguistic, non-literary reality’. Sarraute's work is always concerned with this non-literary event.²

Sartre's definition of Sarraute's style in Portrait d'un inconnu (Portrait of a Man Unknown, 1948) may suggest a feminine approach, in the sense that the style is tentative, not aggressive; ‘a style that approaches the object with reverent precautions, withdraws from it suddenly out of a sort of modesty, or through timidity before its complexity, then, when all is said and done, suddenly presents us with the drooling monster, almost without having touched it, through the magic of an image’ (Sarraute, 1956, p. xiv, p. 14). Sarraute herself has described the importance she gives to the unfinished quality of her sentences, to the use of points of suspension: ‘They give my sentences a certain rhythm, through which they breathe. And also they give my sentences this hesitating, groping aspect, as if they were trying to seize something that each minute escapes, slips away, comes back’ (cited Brulotte, 1984, p. 51).

Sarraute's analysis of her style recalls some descriptions of l'écriture féminine: ‘My sentences are unfinished, suspended, cut in pieces. Sometimes in defiance of strict grammar’ (Besser, 1976, p. 285). Although this may appear opposed to the fluidity of which Cixous speaks, it is another means of depicting how sensations are not fixed, and is similar to Cixous's advocacy of a language in which rationality (here ‘strict grammar’) is sacrificed to the need to capture emotions unanalysable in terms of logic. Sarraute's use of separation and suspension might also be compared to the use of ‘blank spaces’ in the work of Marguerite Duras, for example. The lack of conclusion (the ‘unfinished sentences’) is allied to a lack of exciting intrigues, a refusal similar to Colette's to write of great themes, of the destiny of man. What is important is psychological states, an individual's response to events and other persons. More radically, Sarraute has suggested that she is not interested in events at all: ‘In reality all my books are written on two levels. There is the level of the most banal external appearances … and then there is the invisible level, which interests me: the level of tropisms’ (Rambures, 1972, p. 16). To read at the level of banal appearances is to read falsely. Sarraute defines her form as similar to that of other recent novelists, essentially a refusal of previous conventions of the novel: the character is only a trompe-l'oeil and is often part of a group, the plot is almost nonexistent, there is no chronological order, the dialogue is transformed (Sarraute, 1972, p. 26). She refuses any description of her characters; if one could say that a character was ‘timid’ or ‘miserly’, she feels, he would no longer be of interest, as he would be defined in conventional terms. If, after the appearance of tropisms, the reader is still interested in the character of Martereau, Sarraute is, she says, distressed (p. 53). Related to this refusal simply to tell a story with well-defined characters is the lack of a clear genre, another connection between Sarraute's work and various definitions of women's writing. Her books are hardly novels, but rather ‘prose texts which are in a vaguely defined area between interior monologue, intimist theatre and Proustian introspection’ (Arnette, 1976).

Sarraute's quest for tropisms has been described as a quest for spontaneity, for lucidity, a fight against conformism and the language of ‘correct society’:

She comes to the defence of the madness and the passion that people want to lock up. She takes the side of rebels against conventional values … against ‘One must not’, ‘That's not done’, ‘That's the way it is’. … For real contact. Against classifications, labels, definitions.

(Brulotte, 1984, p. 40)

This, as well, is a link to l'écriture féminine in its refusal to accept the categories of thought and language prescribed by conventional (patriarchal) society. There are no absolute truths. In her defence of ‘passion’, of ‘madness’, Sarraute's work might be allied to that of Duras. It is not, of course, working with the same overt themes, is not concerned with the extreme traumas of love and passion that haunt Duras; but it is a similar rejection of the socially acceptable. Might not the narrator of Portrait in his voyeuristic obsession with the elderly father and his daughter be compared to Jacques Hold in Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein? The self for Sarraute has been characterised as ‘a space, unstable and open to attack’, a space without a language. The self without language occurs as well in Duras's work, but for Duras the self retreats into silence or madness. The self in Sarraute's novels often retreats rather into empty mechanisms and clichés. It is only the artist who seeks a language of truth, and the artist is sometimes equated with the ‘mad prophet who denounces the established order’ (Britton, 1982, p. 581).

Sarraute is always consciously concerned with the act of creation, how words influence our perceptions and emotions, how each human being organises his or her own world around clichés as well as individual experience. Narrators are thus, intrinsically, unrealiable. Narration may be a search for truth, but it is also ‘an act of presumptuousness and even of aggression’ (Minorgue, 1981, p. 23). The absence of the omniscient narrator is also the absence of an authority figure: ‘We know that usually the narrator is presented as a projection of the old paternal role in the family. The father-narrator is installed as head of the story.’ Sometimes Sarraute uses narrators who are limited, sometimes she multiplies the points of view. Often she invites a dialogue with the reader. The world of her novels is ‘polymorphous and changing’ (Brulotte, 1984, pp. 48-9).

Portrait d'un inconnu, Sarraute's first ‘novel’ which Sartre in his influential preface termed an ‘anti-novel’, is the story of a man watching an elderly father and his daughter. The narrator is very tentative in his approach, wary of what others may say to him, uncertain, incapable of reaching firm conclusions. He may, therefore, strike the reader as a ‘marginal’ individual, full of vague fears, lacking in aggression, or even in any self-confidence. He seems to want to be proved wrong. He cannot always control himself: ‘I must keep my distance—but I couldn't stop myself. I felt already the attraction they still have for me, like a rush of air that draws everything along, a sort of dizziness, a plunge into the void’ (Sarraute, 1956, p. 32, p. 31). He sees himself not as the seeker, but as the sought, the victim: ‘Underneath his every action, even the apparently trivial and innocuous ones, there is a sort of wrong side, another facet, a hidden one, known only to us, and which is turned in my direction. It is through this, no doubt, that he attracts me and continues to have such a strong hold over me’ (p. 91, pp. 92-3). His description of the old man recalls Claudine Herrmann's theory of the male who dominates his world: ‘It is not only because of the look he has of waiting for his prey when he sits there withdrawn into himself, but also because of his position: in the center—he is in the center, he sits there in state, dominating everything—and the entire universe is like a web of his own weaving, which he drapes at will about himself’ (p. 113, p. 116). The narrator has no such assurance. More radically, he knows that the old man has no such assurance. The feeling of domination that Herrmann ascribes to the male is an illusion in Sarraute's world. There are no essences: ‘Above all, one must be aware of an impression of easy victory which he can give at times, when he accepts a little too willingly, for instance, a frontal attack, with a sort of motionlessness that is so different from the furtive leaps with which he usually escapes’ (p. 117, p. 120). The narrator's role is to be the ‘conducting rod through which all the currents that charged the atmosphere were passing’ (p. 139, p. 144). We might consider that the narrator possesses what are often thought of as ‘feminine’ characteristics. (We can perhaps go this far, while remembering that for Sarraute there are no fixed personalities or characters.)

The narrator is looking for ‘tropisms’ initially, trying to catch the movements of the father and his daughter, not to reduce them to characters. He does not consider identity as fixed, but as fluid. He looks for

the crack, the tiny crevice, the weak point, as delicate as a baby's fontanelle, at which I seem to see something that resembles a barely perceptible pulsation suddenly swell and begin to throb gently. I cling to it and press upon it. And then I feel a strange substance trickling from them in an endless stream, a substance as anonymous as lymph, or blood … And all that remains of the firm, rosy, velvety flesh of these ‘live’ persons is a shapeless gray covering.

(Sarraute, 1956, p. 69, p. 72)

In so far as she accepts anything of herself entering into the novel, Sarraute would identify with this narrator, the seeker of tropisms: ‘In fact, I am rather this observer, who is passionately interested in the still unknown that is happening between the father and the daughter. … What I would be in this story would be the “seeker of tropisms”.’ The narrator gives up: ‘Then the déjà vu comes back. The traditional novel invades everything. A “normal” character, the fiancé, appears’ (Saporta, 1984, pp. 6-7). When he creates an ordinary novel, he is dissatisfied with himself. The old man is not, he knows, ‘the cheaply manufactured puppet, the dime-store trash intended for the common herd, but as he was in reality, indefinable, without outlines’ (Sarraute, 1956, p. 203, p. 216). Finally, however, he accepts a place among those—in fact, the old women of the neighbourhood—who see life simply, as a series of clichés. Thus, he differs from Sarraute: ‘He finally treats his obsession as madness. … I have never considered that I was mad’ (Saporta, 1984, p. 7).

The unnamed narrator of Portrait, in refusing solidity to others, in hesitating to attribute to himself any authority, in his confusion of witnessed and imagined scenes (so that the reader is never sure what has ‘in fact’ taken place—was there a grand scene between the old man and his daughter or not?), undermines any sense of security. The world is fluid, language cannot seize it, the undercurrents of emotion are also unstable and often seem to emanate from a childish world of malevolent witches. Such a vision, appropriate to the ‘age of suspicion’ as Sarraute has defined it, may be considered feminine in its refusal of authority.

In Martereau (1953), according to Sarraute, there is a contrary movement to that of Portrait. Rather than tropisms being abandoned for a conventional view of the world, Martereau is initially seen as a conventional character and is gradually dissolved into an amorphous being:

It's again a question of a literary experience, of a contrast between the monolithic character of Martereau as he fascinates the nephew at the beginning of their relationship and the same character as he is disintegrated by tropisms.

(Saporta, 1984, p. 15)

The narrator of Martereau is another insecure, passive individual, who characterises himself as having an ‘extreme self-effacement’ (Sarraute, 1953, p. 2, p. 8). Like the narrator of Portrait he is thus in a good position to observe others and to discover what their behaviour may conceal beneath the surface. His lack of conventional aggressivity would seem to predispose him towards a less preconceived notion of other individuals, and also lead others more readily to drop their social masks, or at least, to be less than normally wary. Again, although Sarraute denies being interested in creating ‘characters’, ‘personalities’, she has chosen a narrator whose approach towards others leads him to a greater than normal ability to detect ‘tropisms’, a narrator who is conscious of what is

expressed not in so many words, of course, as I am obliged to do now for lack of other means, not with real words like the ones we articulate distinctly out loud or in our thoughts, but suggested rather by certain sorts of very rapid signs … signs so brief and which slip so quickly through him and through me that I could never succeed in really understanding or seizing them, I can only recover them in bits and snatches and translate them awkwardly by the words these signs represent, fleeting impressions, thoughts, feelings, often forgotten.

(Sarraute, 1953, p. 25, pp. 34-5)

The narrator's behaviour may often remind the reader of typically ‘feminine’ reactions:

I try to make up for it, I should like to be forgiven. I resume our conversation in a slightly uneasy voice, I begin to ask questions.

(p. 32, p. 42)

I have often wondered what devil eggs me on at those moments … Some might say, a love of suffering … a morbid need to be humiliated, a vague desire to see that thing that has remained dangerously live under the ashes, finally burst into flame and devour me.

(p. 33, p. 43)

Always, even when I feel their teeth about to sink delicately into me, I am prepared to blame everything on myself.

(p. 68, p. 83)

Indeed, he compares himself to a ‘hysterical woman’ (p. 77, p. 93). (Sarraute, of course, is not suggesting that either sex has a monopoly of hysteria, but rather that the narrator sees in a conventional way, and thus expects women to be more readily hysterical.)

In the narrator's aunt, Sarraute portrays typically feminine behaviour: pleasure in her appearance and how it is judged by others, pride in having accomplished things behind the scenes, while always remaining soft:

‘Well, that little woman with her air of not lifting a finger, is all-powerful just now. That made your uncle very proud.’ … It wouldn't need much to set her to twisting about with that simpering, falsely innocent manner that certain precocious little girls assume when they want to play the baby.

(p. 4, pp. 10-11)

If no moral judgement is intended, according to Sarraute, it is still difficult not to read this opening scene of Martereau as a satire on a type of bourgeois woman, playing a role, or rather several roles, including that of the woman who gives up comfort to be independent. What is added, undoubtedly, to a typical portrait is the awareness of fluctuations, changes in sensations beneath the overt level of character.

The description of the relationship between the aunt and uncle, while showing the similar kinds of ploys for dominance, submission, role-playing engaged in by the two individuals, is also on one level a picture of the battle of the sexes. Sarraute's tropisms may be essentially identical for all individuals, but they still function with particular force in a marriage; Martereau is a fine portrayal of the tensions between man and wife in which, in spite of Sarraute's own comments, the differences in male and female reactions are evident. He is the wounded ‘Samson’ (p. 125, p. 149), she affects the ‘“Woman Reading” prose’ (p. 90, p. 108). He wants to be ‘Lord of creation’ (p. 127, p. 151); she knows how to bring up topics, such as a letter from her brother, that will soothe him.

When he meets Martereau, the narrator already has a fixed image in his mind. Martereau is not like his aunt and uncle; there are no undercurrents in him: ‘without the slightest crack through which anything whatsoever that was suspicious might seep, nothing but sincere solicitude, the frankest sort of good-heartedness’ (p. 76, p. 92). Martereau's life seems to be summed up in a series of photos of contentment, with troubles only ‘like big thick, heavy, blocks with clear outlines, clearly drawn … clear and clean, in one block, like Martereau himself. Worthy of him. Made to his measure’ (pp. 83-4, p. 101). Thus the narrator believes that for Martereau the world and language are consistent: ‘Words are not for him what they are for me—thin protective capsules that enclose noxious germs—but hard, solid objects, from one casting, it's useless to open them up, make cross-sections, examine them, we should find nothing’ (p. 112, p. 133).

When his doubts about Martereau begin, they are immediately connected to a memory of his doubts as a child about his mother's generosity, doubts aroused by remarks of the servants concerning the poor bits of meat she leaves for them. (The incident is a memory of Sarraute herself, which she recalls in Enfance.) Thus the destruction of the narrator's confidence in stable personality is linked to a child's awareness that his parents are not perfect. The narrator initially swings from a vision of a perfect Martereau to a vision of a scoundrel. Maturity of vision, it is implied, means giving up notions of good and bad characters.

Martereau is a series of narrative constructions, in which the narrator shows alternative versions of various events from what he imagines to be the point of view of various individuals, or different alternatives that might have been experienced by a single consciousness. None of the versions is authoritative. Each individual, at least in his reconstruction (for we are always aware that the words are filtered through his perceptions), uses words and gestures, often commonplace expressions—clichés and literary stereotypes—to ‘establish an approved version of himself and the surrounding world’ (Minorgue, 1981, p. 66). The narrator—and here, at least, he can be seen as similar to Nathalie Sarraute, his creator—is aware that words are weapons in a dangerous game of attack, in the world of society and especially of the family. This realisation of the undercurrents of all social discourse is, I would argue, particularly acute in marginal people—such as the narrator, a sickly young man dependent upon the financial support of his uncle—and thus also of such members of marginal groups as women, for, in the society that Sarraute depicts, as indeed in most societies, women are usually dependent upon the financial support of men.

Sarraute is not making moral judgements about this society. In showing how human discourse is a kind of war, and in portraying the reactions of the most vulnerable participants in this war, she makes, however, a deeper analysis of the psychological dangers of the roles of the dominating and dominated (or of the sexes) than might be found in explicitly polemical work. By its ironic unmasking of conventional behaviour, stereotypes, verbal simplifications of emotions, the novel makes fun of any attempts to categorise social roles, thus mocking assigning women to roles as victims or men to roles as masters, and showing the fallacies both of accepting societal gender constructions and of doctrinaire attempts to deconstruct gender roles. This refusal of easy categorisation might well be seen as a more profoundly ‘feminist’ vision of the world—if we accept that ‘feminism’ can include the recognition of the essential similarities of all human psychological reactions—than more overt polemics.

Martereau is often very funny; Sarraute uses humour in her exploration of the war games of social relationships, a weapon perhaps too often avoided by explicitly feminist writers. Her sense of the ambiguities, the mutations in human relationships, and especially of how each of us plays various roles (often based on literary stereotypes), leads her to see the comedy as well as the deceptions of life. The world presented in Martereau may be more easily made comic because it is essentially, of course, a comfortable bourgeois world; in her fiction Sarraute avoids problems of economics and politics.

In Le Planétarium (The Planetarium, 1959) there is still a timid, self-conscious character, similar to the narrators of Portrait and Martereau. He is Alain Guimier, who first appears as a narrator at a social gathering, telling the story of his aunt's problems with her new door. In Planétarium, however, this character is not a first-person narrator, and is not the only narrative voice. Rather, we have a ‘polyphonic narrative’, a multiplicity of voices.³ In the earlier novels, the unreliability and the self-interest of the narrative voices were evident in their partial points of view. In Planétarium, Sarraute takes her criticism of the single dependable narrative voice still further. The idea that the multi-voiced text is ‘feminine’ appears in many feminist theories. In Sarraute's work, polyphonic voicing is not overtly ‘feminine’, but might be considered as a formal stratagem particularly appropriate to expressing the view of the marginal individual—either a self-conscious, alienated person aware of a vague guilt, or a member of a subordinate group in the dominant culture.

There is very little ‘action’ in Planétarium, but rather, as in the earlier novels, a focus on the underlying struggles of the characters to create worlds (all whirling in a planetarium) in their own image. It is at this psychological level, beneath the rather banal surface, that Sarraute considers that her characters are all similar, not differentiated by sex, or age (in moments of stress, they all often revert to images from childhood). While she never portrays at any length characters from social classes other than the bourgeoisie, one must assume that such characters would also engage in similar struggles to impose their views, and in similar feelings of inadequacy, although their choice of clichés and images might be different. The creation of one's own world is basically a process of narration, thus a matter of words; these words are weapons of attack against the worlds created by others. While the surface of Planétarium is somewhat calmer than that of Portrait—there is no violence quite to equal that of the father's possible attack on his daughter—or of Martereau—there is no illegal behaviour equal to that of Martereau's possible attempt at appropriating the property of others—the in-fighting and the implicit domination are just as great.

Planétarium also includes, however, a use of words not developed in Sarraute's earlier work—words for explicitly literary creation. Alain wants to become a writer, and seeks the approval of an established writer, Germaine Lemaire. It is a theme that will be developed in some of Sarraute's later works—Les Fruits d'or, Entre la vie et la mort—where the creation and reception of a book are of primary importance, where the book itself becomes the main character (an obvious rejection of gender!). Planétarium is particularly rich because the two uses of words—in battles within the sphere of social relations, and in battles within the creator struggling to find the right word—are interrelated. Since Germaine Lemaire seems a rather conventional novelist (though how can we judge?) and since Alain is only aspiring to write, literary creation in this novel is not a more important theme than the social creation of a world through the use of words.

There are no fixed values, no stable characters, no certainties, no truths. Everyone's opinions of everyone else vacillate. It is a frightening world, in which each individual seeks an illusory security by establishing a fixed persona, or by the possession of objects. The anguish that Sarraute's characters feel, and seek to overcome, is comic, because expressed in terms of the insignificant—Aunt Berthe's obsession with the vulgar fingerplate installed on her door, for instance—but it is finally tragic, as it reveals the instability of all human projects. Alain worries about the impression he makes on others, feels people are laughing behind his back. His mother-in-law worries about being judged as a meddling old idiot. Gisèle is aware of ‘the old sensation she used to have, her own peculiar fear, still the same, the terror that had never left her’ (Sarraute, 1959, p. 65, p. 66). Even Germaine Lemaire, surrounded by admirers, is aware of the precariousness of her situation, of the need to ‘watch herself. Try to understand. Each time she must make the effort to tilt over towards them’ (p. 190, p. 201).

Within this fluctuating world, the relations between the sexes are obviously unstable. Gisèle's stereotyped view of a perfect marriage, beginning with a perfect wedding, crumbles quickly. She hears two ‘wicked fairies’ (p. 67, p. 69) talking at the wedding reception about Alain's small income. (Such images from childhood literature—evoking a world of the clearly good and clearly evil—are frequently used in Sarraute's work to point to the fixed values to which people cling, and which have little to do with real life.) Gisèle is increasingly aware that ‘Complete fusion exists with no one’ (p. 75, p. 77), a theme similar to that of Colette. Often Alain and Gisèle see each other in conventional roles. For her, men are ‘strong, intelligent’ (p. 127, p. 132); for him, she is one of the ‘tender little children’ who need protection (p. 140, p. 146). But such stereotyped emotions are not stable. Gisèle's admiration for her husband, like that he feels for Germaine Lemaire, is capable of quick reversal. Germaine Lemaire's experiences as a writer offer a parallel to those of characters involved in more commonplace activities. She too tries to impose order on her world, and finds that it is instable. Narrative, like reality, can never be ordered. Sometimes her writing seems to have caught a ‘vivid impression of reality’; a moment later she sees it as ‘congealed’, ‘frozen’, ‘hollow’ (pp. 181-3, pp. 190-2).

To see the tragedy of life in terms of the everyday, the trivial, may be to see from the point of view of someone whose assigned world is the private rather than the political, but also of someone whose alienation is not so extreme as to seem to require radical solutions—in other words, someone in the situation of a woman, both inside and outside the social and political sphere. Sarraute herself suggested that her characters' anguish can be linked to that of Samuel Beckett's characters, but that her characters don't talk about it.⁴ Sarraute's characters avoid the grand gesture, but also even speculations about identity and purpose. They wait, not for Godot, but for the repairman, or for the chance to establish themselves momentarily through a cutting judgement on one of their acquaintances. Sarraute comically allows a character to equate her preoccupations with more ‘serious’ events. Gisèle's words, as she tells her mother she would rather have a bergère than a pair of leather armchairs, ‘like those that once revealed heresy and led directly to the stake, showed that evil was still there, as alive and strong as ever’ (pp. 49-50, p. 51).

In Planétarium, the absence of a first-person narrator, combined with the prominence of scenes set in social groups, produces more frequent juxtapositions of various clichés and incomplete sentences than found in Sarraute's earlier fiction. The style is thus even more fluid, sustaining the theme of instability, but also creating a poetic effect:

‘Good heavens, it's awful, we enjoy ourselves so much at your house that we forget how late it is …’ Noise of chairs … and he, scowling in his corner, ignored, almost forgotten already. … ‘It was delightful. So when shall I see you? Oh, very soon. Don't forget to let me hear from you. One of us will telephone at the beginning of next week. I'll count on you, then, surely?’

(p. 41, p. 42)

‘Grated carrots’, ‘tender’, ‘finely chopped’, ‘well seasoned’ (p. 115, p. 120) become poetic leitmotifs in a conversation between Alain and his in-laws. Images are drawn frequently from fairy tales, children's games, stories of American Indians. Occasionally, however, a more sinister note intrudes:

Escaped prisoners, members of the resistance, Jews hiding under false names, were lolling in the sun, chatting on village squares, seated about fountains, drinking together in bistros, as though nothing had happened, cunning, disquieting prey, cunningly forcing the others, the pure who had done nothing, the strong who had nothing to fear from anybody, into loathsome complicity … until one fine morning, a man got up—after all some one had to take it upon himself to do it—and hurried, slinking along the walls, to denounce them.

(p. 220, p. 231)

This memory, or perhaps false memory, from Alain's childhood, which he recalls as he considers how to get Aunt Berthe's apartment, is as close as Sarraute comes to evoking her own experience of the war years in her fiction.

Entre la vie et la mort (Between Life and Death, 1968), which Sarraute considers her most important work, is a difficult book, a book about writing, the hesitations and uncertainties of the writer, the relation of the writer to the social milieu in which he or she lives, the possibility of producing a work that lives. What is ‘between life and death’ is not a person but a text. The writer, who is, along with ‘his’ work, the principal character of this novel, is a composite, not really an individual. What little we know about him is often contradictory. In what sense, even, beyond the use of the pronoun ‘he’, can we speak of this writer as male? He has no distinguishing characteristics, except that he has a mother before whom he feels shy and childish, is obviously middle class, and likes to drink tea. This writer, however, and what we can intuit about the way he works, bears striking resemblances to Sarraute herself and her method. He is, from an early age, aware of the power of words, an awareness which, initially, seems to him the mark of a poet, not ‘someone who knows better than others how to look’ but ‘the man who knows how to make a poem out of words’ (Sarraute, 1968, p. 26, p. 42). Later, however, he seems to consider that pure word-play may indicate a divorce from the real world, that what is important is capturing ‘movements’, neither images nor words, but what Sarraute terms ‘tropisms’. Like Sarraute, the writer in Entre la vie et la mort is interested in platitudes, does not criticise but describes, rejects rigid forms. He is of a more than ordinarily ‘porous’ material, soaking up the world around him. When he comes to the moment of creation, he experiences great difficulties, working slowly, often feeling himself divided between creator and judge. In his attitudes towards the treatment of the writer by literary society, he is also like Sarraute. He rejects classification in any school, finds many of his readers insensitive to what he is doing, is annoyed by attempts to make him a public figure, denies that his work can be read as autobiographical. He even shares with Sarraute a similar memory of the joy of writing his first school composition on the death of an imaginary dog. Finally, what matters is whether the work itself is living: ‘Nearer to me, but not too near … you my double, my witness … there, lean over with me … let's look together … does it emit, deposit … as on the mirror we hold before the mouth of the dying … a fine mist?’ (p. 183, p. 204). Entre la vie et la mort is therefore a book about how Sarraute feels that the artist works, but a book in which not only the author herself, but also her fictitious writer, are of secondary importance.

If we try to find a feminine perspective in this text, it is perhaps necessary to speak of the modesty and the self-effacement of the author behind the text, as well as the shyness, uncertainty and social insecurity of the writer as character. The record of creativity, in which the artist's ego doesn't finally matter at all, in which the product is all that counts, is in contradiction, for example, to the Romantic impulse, an impulse that seems to many critics particularly masculine.⁵ Stephen Heath suggests that Proust and Sarraute are similar in seeking what lies beneath the superficiality of conversation, but that Proust seeks what is individual beneath the surface, and Sarraute seeks what is shared (Heath, 1972, p. 50). Is Sarraute's concentration on what every person shares perhaps feminine in its reduction of human experience to fundamental emotions, in its refusal to attribute supreme importance to a ‘romantic’ individual sensibility? She is, of course, creating a picture of an ‘ungendered’ writer and work. In spite of her stated intention, however, the work, even the fictitious writer ‘himself’, may well seem to the reader ‘feminine’. His world, like that of many of her earlier characters, is a world of fear and solitude, a world in which he feels out of place but would like to be accepted.

The basic preoccupation with states of consciousness and of awareness just below the level of consciousness, and of how such states are expressed or masked by words, exists in all Sarraute's writing from Tropismes through the novels to L'Usage de la parole (The Use of Speech, 1980), which combines elements of earlier works. It is in some ways closer to Tropismes as it dispenses with the sustained plot and characters of the novels; short sketches are related only in the most general thematic sense of showing how words are used. L'Usage also continues an examination of various themes from the novels. One theme is the recognition that beneath the surface meanings of conversation may lie words not used to communicate thoughts: words, for example, addressed to a friend ‘so as to destroy those morbid cells in him in which his hostility, his hate proliferate’ (Sarraute, 1980, p. 29, p. 32), words used to assert one's position, or to terrorise another. Another theme is an awareness of the impossibility of communication: ‘he sees, facing him, his fellow man, endowed with an identical brain, capable of using an identical language. … Transformed … an unknown being’ (pp. 40-41, p. 44). Our perceptions of others are always far from the indefinable reality; they are rather ‘a roughly-sketched form, a crude diagram, a robot-portrait … a doll like the ones children cut out of cardboard’ (p. 85, p. 85). The human personality, normally constructed according to social roles, is fragile and can crumble with terrifying results: ‘a crevasse will open out between us … we'll be wrenched away from one another, ejected from our broken shells … two solitary souls errant’ (p. 89, p. 88). Usually, however, the family tends to give individuals a socially constructed identity. This produces a loss of awareness of true individuality, but also a barrier against the terror of the void. In one family group we find: ‘their soft, responsive contours melting and merging into one another, so that they no longer knew where one ended and the other began … they are a living ball … imbued with intimate, bland, sweet odours’ (p. 51, p. 53). (So much for Plato's dream of the ball uniting lovers, a dream that, following Irigaray, we can see as an appropriation of the female into the male.)

If communication is impossible, it is both because of this unknown quality in any human being and also because of the vagueness of words, particularly abstract words: ‘how rough and vague they are, how incapable of bringing out into the open and enabling us to see what might impel these people to take evasive action’ (pp. 84-5, p. 84). Normally, however, we behave as if we understood others' language. The person who dares to say ‘I don't understand’ would break the hold ‘of charlatanism, of terrorism, of conformism’ (p. 150, p. 149). Such an action is perhaps only possible in a fairy-tale. Alexandra Sévin, writing in a politically radical magazine, uses Sarraute's work to attack the way the French Communist Party uses the language of power. She reads the Je ne comprends pas text, as the present-day revolt of women, since they are ‘always dispossessed of the use of speech, reduced to repeating only words that are officially allowed’.⁶ Perhaps she is too optimistic, since Sarraute talks of the fairy-tale ending of Je ne comprends pas; Sévin also finds a more overt political meaning than Sarraute's work would, I think, justify. Still, Sévin's article shows the extent to which Sarraute can appeal to militant feminist readers.

The language in L'Usage is more pared down and the perspective more readily comprehensible to the reader than in some of Sarraute's earlier work. The opening text, ‘Ich sterbe’, for example, addresses the reader directly: ‘You'll see; be patient’ (p. 7, p. 11); and explains the meaning of words: ‘they come back (as people say: “It's coming back to me”)’ (p. 7, p. 11). This narrator uses the first person, directs the reader, anticipates our questions: ‘What is there to look for in these signs that are so easy to read?’ (p. 19, p. 22); ‘What's so surprising about that, then? Nothing in that, of course, but just a moment …’ (p. 27, p. 30). The narrator tells the reader how to respond not only to the text, but to the words of the dying Chekhov that lie behind the text:

All we have here, as you see, are a few slight eddies, a few brief ripples captured amongst the infinite number that these words produce. If some of you find this game diverting, they may—with patience and time—amuse themselves by discovering others. At all events they may be sure that they are not mistaken, for everything they may perceive is really there, in every one of us: circles that continue to increase when, propelled from such a distance and with such force, these words fall on us and shake us to the depths of our being: Ich sterbe.

(p. 14, pp. 17-18)

Sarraute's suggestion that the reader cannot be mistaken might be seen as feminist, in so far as both reader-response theory and feminist theory reject the definitive, the authoritarian reading. Sarraute is, of course, speaking directly not of how to read her text, but of how to see the possible implications of Chekhov's last words—‘I die’—and thus of the universality of the experience of death. But her words are also applicable to the level of awareness that her own texts strive to reach, a level at which authority, the voice of reason or established truth, is of less importance than the subconscious reactions of each individual. Our personal awareness cannot deceive us; each individual's examples have an equal validity:

You could easily, if you agree, add to them; or substitute others you may find amongst those in your possession. … Which of us has not stockpiled some of them in the limitless reserve funds which we never have either the leisure or the desire to inspect, to inventory, but which nevertheless nourish our existence.

(p. 35, p. 39)

Implicit in these appeals to the reader is a recognition that human beings, in spite of the difficulties of communication, share a common experience, that we are inseparable as well as separate.⁷

Each of the texts continues the appeal to the reader to enter into the creation of the experience, and gives this reader a clear orientation: ‘We must observe that all the conditions are present that would justify us in assuming that we are witnessing a meeting of two friends’ (pp. 20-1, p. 24); ‘Here are two more interlocutors. … But here too, a little more patience is required’ (p. 33, p. 37); ‘and the whole of this story has been leading up to this dénouement’ (p. 40, p. 43). L'Usage de la parole contains what Ellen Munley has termed a ‘self-styled narrator-doctor of words who joins all of its loosely connected vignettes by virtue of her presence’ (Munley, 1983, p. 238). There is even a certain tone of mockery, a suggestion that this narrator has written other, often misunderstood texts and that now, in a pedagogical fashion, she must clarify her intentions. Occasionally she mocks her own preoccupations, her own careful, meticulous examination of all facets of a word: ‘no, don't be afraid, I'm not going to start again’ (p. 110, p. 110); she realises that she herself might be the object of ridicule similar to that levelled at some of her characters. (If the narrator is a writer conscious of, and responding to, the criticisms sometimes levelled at Sarraute's work, we cannot, of course, identify the ‘I’ with Sarraute herself.)

In ‘Ich sterbe’, the description of Chekhov's last words, and therefore the text the furthest removed from the examination of minute movements between two unidentified speakers—the usual subject of these sketches—the narrator describes Chekhov as ‘Wise. Modest. Reasonable. Always so undemanding’ (p. 9, pp. 12-13), thus rather similar to the narrator of L'Usage in rejecting patriarchal authority. ‘Ich sterbe’ contains an implicit criticism of the ability of language to fix experience. ‘The unsayable will be said’, but only at the moment of death. All is vacillating, trembling, an ‘infinite disorder’ (p. 9, p. 13), until it is immobilised, tranquillised in the words ‘Ich sterbe’, in which, finally, there is an order, but only the order of death. ‘Ich sterbe’ speaks as well of how, in saying that he is dying, Chekhov would choose foreign words, those most removed from previous experience, thus without the breath of any passion. Sarraute, for whom Russian is the mother language (the language of the mother whose rejection she felt so bitterly in her childhood), writes in French, perhaps also a way of retaining a certain distance from passion. Chekhov's words are addressed to the German doctor, not to Chekhov's wife, for, it is implied, at the moment of death there is no more ‘we’: ‘No, not our sort of words, they are too light, too limp, they would never be able to cross what is now opening, yawning, between us … an immense chasm’ (p. 12, p. 15). Perhaps in this rejection of the ‘couple’ there is another implicitly feminist theme.

The text most directly related to feminist concerns, however, is ‘Your father. Your sister’. It is a strange piece, both in the uncertainty of the narrative tone and in the fluctuating perspective. The narrator wants to capture the force of the words ‘Your father. Your sister’ as indicating social roles, how the family is defined, how the mother, who speaks these words, sees herself as fixed within an identity. But the sentence chosen to embody these words—‘If you go on like that, Armand, your father will prefer your sister’—suggests more, ‘an unnatural mother’, ‘a vile, vulgar person’ (p. 60, p. 61). The narrator insists that this other resonance in the sentence is of no interest, that the sentence could as well have been ‘You know, Armand, your father will take your sister to the doctor's’. But finally, the narrator is uncertain that the words ‘Your father. Your sister’ have in themselves, without the rest of the sentence, the force attributed to them. The element of doubt here may be considered, I believe, as Sarraute's reflection on the possible feminist import of her work. She says she is interested in how fixed family roles are perceived and how they influence speech and conduct, how both the mother and the father are enclosed in certain patterns of behaviour, even if the woman may feel their force more fully. The possibility that the mother's setting of son and daughter against each other, her assumption that the father should prefer the son, might reflect the patriarchal bias of society has never, according to the narrator, been a consideration. (The narrator, of course, does not use such terms as ‘patriarchal’.) And yet, she wonders if perhaps she has been wrong not to consider such issues.

Enfance (Childhood, 1983) is Sarraute's only autobiographical work, and the story stops when she enters the lycée. The implication is that the later life of the author, like that of the writer in Entre la vie et la mort, is only, really, the creation of her work. Occasionally in interviews Sarraute has referred to harrowing experiences, and indirectly to her own bravery as a Jew in occupied France during the war, but she has denied the relevance of personal experience to an interpretation of her work. Her childhood, however, she is willing to recount, while suggesting that such a project may be a sign of creative sterility.

Enfance is of interest to the reader of Sarraute's fiction, as it shows some of the personal emotions and experiences that underlie her work (‘all the memories that she has killed, all the childhood that was stolen from her’ [Cournot, 1986]), but are never allowed to surface. In this respect, she is rather like Marguerite Yourcenar (or Samuel Beckett) and in considerable contrast to those women novelists, such as Colette and Marguerite Duras, whose ‘I’ is often confounded with fictional characters. It is an attitude, I would suggest, that is also ‘feminine’ in its origins. Either the boundaries between the self and the other become blurred (which Chodorow would attribute to the role of the mother in a daughter's childhood), or the self is rigidly kept in the background. It is interesting, in this regard, to remember that Marguerite Yourcenar's mother died soon after giving birth to her daughter, and that Sarraute shows, in Enfance, the trauma of being rejected by a beautiful and inaccessible mother, who in a letter calls her daughter a ‘monster of egotism’ (Sarraute, 1983, p. 229, p. 240); Sarraute had to choose to stay with her father and her difficult, uncaring stepmother. We may also consider Sarraute's work as in some ways related to that of her mother, as a reaction to her mother. This does not appear as a theme in her work, cannot be analysed directly as in the work of Colette and Duras. Nevertheless, her comments on her mother's own writing show both similarities and contrasts:

My mother wrote ‘romans-fleuves’, children's stories and short stories. She wrote, in contrast to me, with great ease and much joy. She used a very rich vocabulary. The stories often took place in peasant settings. She wrote under a masculine pseudonym and was rather proud that no one—critic or reader—realised that her work was written by a woman.

(Cited in Saporta, 1984, p. 8)

If Nathalie Sarraute's style is very different from her mother's, there is a similar refusal to be identified by gender.

As a child, Sarraute is obsessed with the instability of her own family life, and attracted to those whose childhoods are spent with ‘unified, fair and calm parents’ (Sarraute, 1983, p. 233, p. 244). In spite of the traumas of her childhood, however, she often wants to assert, against the alter ego with whom she conducts her dialogue in Enfance, that she behaved ‘in the same way as a lot of children do’ (p. 16, p. 25). Even as a child, she rejected her own emotions, rejoiced when her mind seemed ‘clean, flexible, healthy’ (p. 119, p. 130). This control, this need to dominate the irrational, may explain to some degree Sarraute's insistence that she is writing about what all individuals share, and writing from an ungendered position, asserting a ‘healthy’ neutrality. Enfance also mentions another, more overt explanation for her refusal to consider her writing as feminine. In the intellectual discussions among her father's émigré friends in Paris, she is conscious that ‘no one made the slightest distinction between men and women’ (p. 177, p. 189). Her childhood world is thus one in which the sexes are united in intellectual pursuits, while widely differentiated in their expressions of emotion.

Enfance portrays a distrust of such abstract terms as ‘happiness’ and of emotional states—particularly irrational fear and sudden terror—that is shared by many of the characters in her novels. It also shares formal qualities with her fiction: a plurality of voices, with continual interruptions (there is Sarraute in dialogue with herself, and with her childhood self, who sometimes speaks directly in the present tense); a preoccupation with the need to find a word to pin down a feeling; a denial of any conventional interpretations. As a child Sarraute often read The Prince and the Pauper, important to her because of its theme of uncertain identity. While the book is obviously relevant to her own situation as a child without a clear sense of a ‘home’, it may also be seen as a prototype for the kind of fiction she creates in her maturity, in which characters have fluctuating, unstable qualities, and are haunted by fears of rejection.

An essential aim of Sarraute's work would seem to be to show a basic equality, the existence for both men and women of similarly banal conversations, a language filled with clichés, stereotyped reactions to the other sex, unstated emotions and sensations beneath the surface masks. The satiric element in her work thus functions finally toward a feminist end: a denial of any fundamental difference that might be used to prove the superiority of either sex. At the same time, these portraits of states of mind, because they exist within identifiable social situations, show the prejudices upon which relations between the sexes are based. There are no privileged characters in Sarraute's world. If women are not simply victims, neither are men naturally superior or inferior. Everyone is both aggressor and victim, just as everyone is unable to communicate with others.

What is the effect upon the reader of Sarraute's narrative technique and her preoccupations? First of all, it demands considerable co-operation from the reader, invites the reader to participate, in a manner that might be considered to undermine any air of authority, or any appearance of knowing the truth, on the part of the author. The reader is placed in a vacillating atmosphere where there are no rounded characters, no clearly discernible plot line, frequently no chronology. Expectations of stability in fiction are destroyed, and with them comes at least a questioning of stability in ‘real life’ beyond the novel.

Because of the very triviality of many of the situations, the reader may tend to find her or his own similarity to the reactions of the characters, see the fundamental common experiences that we all share, beneath our expectations of permanency, beneath our belief in such entities as ‘love’, ‘respect’. This presumed reader is, finally, neither male nor female, but simply human. Sarraute's fiction describes a common store of human reactions underlying all gender determinations. Militants may discuss the political efficacy of such a vision in terms of political action, but in fiction it works as one way of breaking down categorisation, a method that may be as effective as either glorification of a female ‘essence’ or satire of socially imposed barriers.

Notes

1. Cited in Marion Scali, ‘Sarraute, promenade’, Libération (24 July 1986) p. 30.

2. Christiane Makward, ‘Corps écrit, corps vécu’, in Suzanne Lamy and Irene Pages (eds), Féminité, subversion, écriture (Quebec: Éditions du Remue-Ménage, 1983) pp. 127-38. Makward finds in Robbe-Grillet's work a great distance between the subject and the world, a distance which makes his work evolve towards sado-masochism, the contrary of ‘l'écriture féminine’. See also Ann Jefferson, ‘Representation in the Novels of Nathalie Sarraute’, Modern Language Review, 73 (1978) pp. 513-24: ‘the texts specifically deconstruct both the more traditional realist reading whereby the language of the text behaves as if it were a copy, and the more radical anti-representational reading implied by pure scriptural activity, in order to produce as much meaning as possible. In this respect Sarraute occupies a somewhat anomalous position among her contemporaries’ (p. 524). For a quite different reading of the contrast between Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet, see Lucien Goldmann, ‘The Nouveau Roman and Reality’, in Towards a Sociology of the Novel, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1975) pp. 132-51. Goldmann sees Sarraute as still believing in a human reality which writers can explore, whereas Robbe-Grillet fits into a later historical stage, accepting, as does Goldmann, the lack of any immutable reality. Goldmann's reading seems to accept the importance of the political and economic world, an importance that Sarraute, in fact, discounts. Perhaps this is another ‘feminine’ characteristic?

3. Minorgue suggests, however, that Alain is the narrator, who gives up the privileges of his role and displaces himself (Minorgue, 1981, pp. 87-8).

4. This is similar to Marguerite Duras's remark that a man would intervene, where she doesn't.

5. Dorothy Wordsworth, for example, wrote ‘I should detest the idea of setting myself up as an Author’. See The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Middle Years, 1806-1811, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman (London: Clarendon Press, 1969) p. 454.

6. Alexandra Sévin, ‘Nathalie Sarraute ou le piège des mots’, Elles voient rouge, no. 4 (1980) esp. pp. 38-9.

7. Ellen Munley sees in L'Usage de la parole a positive message: ‘With enough give and take, we can not only mutually understand but contribute to each other's development’ (Munley, 1983, p. 246). This is perhaps overstating the case.