[Nathalie Sarraute's intention] seems to be to rule out—not arbitrarily but necessarily—most of the technical props which traditionally helped bridge the gap between the world of the writer and the world of the reader. The goal she has set herself not only is extraneous to those props, but is contrary to them. In two cases, nevertheless, modified versions of the traditional props reappear in Sarraute's novels. Her quest for reality leads her to demystify those fictions which conceal the real. The plot is no longer for her the indispensable ingredient of a fictive work; and the adventures of the tropisms she projects constitute an action that takes place within a single consciousness, but on two distinct levels: the tropisms either confront one another; or, when they are caught in the nets of verbal consciousness, they confront the external, social, and collective world.

Sarraute's modified versions of fiction and action, however, exclude all concern other than what is required by her initial goal: to intercept inner reality. The game is therefore played between the writer and his double, not between the writer and his public. She is engaged in a creative act that goes far beyond the definition of literature as a universally recognizable art form. Literature for Nathalie Sarraute becomes a strictly personal pursuit, a quest for identity which revolves entirely around the subject's psyche. From inspiration through form to the author's ultimate reincarnation, a loop is looped.

Nathalie Sarraute sets up for herself two very stringent criteria of success: the work must come alive, and some kind of contact must be made. But two questions immediately arise: for whom should the work come alive? and with whom is the contact made? The life of the work is subordinated to tropisms which must remain intact throughout their verbal translation. Tropisms are transferred from the subconscious to the conscious with the help of language. This means that any man for whom an articulate awareness of his deeper self is vital engages in a literary quest of his own. This literary pursuit then becomes a matter of "life or death" for the writer, the life or death of the work being equivalent to the life or death of his own psyche. But in itself the content of a psyche has no meaning for another psyche. It is too shapeless and too erratic; it offers no essential point of reference, no basis for analysis and interpretation. As a result, the more accurate, the more faithful, the more literal even its verbal, or literary translation happens to be, the more opaque that translation becomes to a consciousness other than the subject's. The very qualities of a literary technique aiming at the linguistic expression of a preverbal state consequently become directly responsible for the probable hermetism of the finished product. A second argument reinforces the first: only the author can evaluate the life of a work that sets out to reproduce an experience known to the author alone. Only Sarraute possesses the frame of reference against which the life of her novels can be measured: the initial tropisms that are her models and her inspiration, the personal impulse that gave birth to the literary form. As a result, no one but Nathalie Sarraute can fully evaluate the life or death status of her production.

Contact is established mainly between the writer and her work for very similar reasons. Such contact can come about only within a very closed circuit. The literary form best capable of capturing tropisms does not include universal frames of reference and does not yield to universal recognition and understanding. For Sarraute, tropisms are privileged means of communication, not with the outside world, but with her double, with her many doubles. The consciousness at work in Sarraute's novels is that of a character looking for an author. The contact takes place and the work comes alive when there is a fusion between both.

This does not necessarily mean that contact between work and reader is totally out of the question. But the nature of tropisms makes any subjective form of interpretation hazardous, if not preposterous…. Sarraute entrusts the translation of tropisms into words almost exclusively to images; but Bachelard's intense faith in the communicative power of images is of no avail in Sarraute's case: her brand of "rêverie" does not purport to transcend reality, but rather to grasp and possess it in its entirety. In other words, the deeper the reality which she tries to express, the more subjective the form she adopts in order to do so. The decoding of such images may be rich in possibilities for the outsider; but there can be no guarantee whatsoever that the result will coincide with the reality behind the image itself. The opacity of Sarraute's images is the by-product of a self-contained psyche which must block out all outside interferences in order to communicate with itself.

For the critic, therefore, only one avenue of investigation perhaps remains open: the linguistic, semantic and formal analysis of the work. The reader confronts what is, in fact, an individual language within a code language. The code language consists of very common words, about which Sarraute herself wrote: "I had to create … an unreal dialogue made up of usual words to express what is not ordinarily spoken about. The most ordinary words are used, but what is said is not what is being talked about…." This code language, which is immediately accessible to the reader, does not reveal the writer's inner truth; to the contrary, it constitutes the fictive portion of the work. It relies largely on humor, which Sarraute manipulates in order to denounce the collective myths—mostly verbal—which blur our vision of reality. The techniques that preside over the writing at this level can be analyzed systematically, but such an elucidation leads only to the negative aspect of the work: a void is created, which tropisms will fill once the clichés have been swept away. In contrast, Sarraute's individual language, which is immediately accessible to her, is not immediately accessible to the reader; and its deciphering is an exercise in hermeneutics. Sarraute's literary techniques seem to rest on the double postulate that the usual semantic content of words is deeply misleading, and that reality is best expressed through whatever escapes the linguistic conventions of symbolic meaning. (pp. 32-5)

Sarraute's novels come the closer to the truths she wishes to express as their form breaks more sharply away from accepted formal codes. There is a definite progression in her literary production, a progression that goes from her relatively accessible works like Tropismes and Le Planetarium to her latest (and more obscure) novels, Entre la vie et la mort and Vous les entendez? The earlier works include, if not characters, at least occasional proper names and the embryo of a story; but the expression of tropisms in these novels remains somewhat ambiguous; it owes too much to psychology, to introspection, to the form of introspection which reasons, argues, discusses—i.e., analyzes. It stems from the writer's intellect. The role of the intellect, in her latest works, is much more strictly delineated: as a professional writer, she uses it to choose her techniques and control the structure of her works; she is definitely highly conscious of her goals, of her efforts and of the results obtained. But she no longer allows her intellect to tamper with the raw material she starts from. It is quite possible that the closer she gets to her goal, the greater will be the distance between novel and reader. The reader approaches the novel through the formal deciphering of a work that rejects formalism: a certain discrepancy seems unavoidable. Yet, formalism may well be the most valid approach for the reader or critic anxious to break through the deceptive layer of her code language in order to reach the inner core of her private world. Her work, which sets itself over and beyond style, is nevertheless at the mercy of stylistic analysis. The public is likely to feel somewhat alienated from novels written not only by but mostly for the author herself. (p. 36)