A glance at a page of Nathalie Sarraute's, with its quotation-marks, dashes, trails of dots, broken sentences, clusters of groping quasi-synonyms, and incomplete syntax, is sufficient to indicate that we are in the realm of the undefined. Reading her novels confirms that we are not in pursuit of definition. On the contrary, we move not from the indefinite to the security of definition, but to an open-ended interrogation. The processes of this prose do not dissolve in paraphrase or summary. They are not 'doing' something, they are 'being' something. They are not talking about something, which can be summed up beyond and without them: they are talking to the reader, and saying the something which they are.

In this poetic enterprise, Tropismes at once establishes the poetic tone, and initiates the reader into the dramas of preverbal experience. The first two novels induct the reader into the new modes, using a rather nebulous first-person narrator to question and undermine the distinctions and categorisations we are accustomed to in the novel. They introduce us to a reality whose mobility is attested by proliferation of versions, a reality whose emotive features are mixed, and constantly changing. The categorisations of character-portrayal are experienced, rather than shown, as inadequate and false. Psychological classifications are experienced as unreal: the psychiatrist's advice to N in [Portrait d'un inconnu] has neither strength nor validity against the intensity of gaze of the blurred, unfinished, anonymous portrait, nor, ultimately, against the vitality of N's apparently defeated narrative. The categorisations adduced by, and attributed to, Martereau and his wife, in their self-portraiture, and the narrator's transient efforts at stable characterisations of them, are as false as the arranged smiles and postures of an old family photograph.

In the third novel, where the narrator himself is deposed and narrated, we cannot trust a narrative that reduces Berthe to 'une vieille maniaque' to amuse a social gathering, or interest Germaine Lemaire, when we have, in the course of the novel, been that 'vieille maniaque', and know that she is like us, and that we are like everybody. All three novels disarticulate the narrator and systematically undermine narrative authority. They also take us into the inner pulsations of experience with their repetitive rhythms and dynamic patterns. The repetition indeed reasserts the primacy of experience, and the inadequacy of language: the reality of experience is communicated in the gaps between the quasi-synonyms, in the fumbling and self-correcting, in the palpable rhythms of hesitant or self-assertive voices.

The fourth novel, Les Fruits d'or, is an orchestration of many such voices. It is not a satire of Parisian intellectual life (though it has elements of that). It is an elaborate deconstruction of literary definitions and a reassertion, in the face of the competent and learned, the articulate and arrogant, of the primitive but inalienable rights of the stumbling, the inarticulate, and the timed. It vividly reaffirms the primacy of what lies before and under the words, and this reaffirmation is made with words, and of words. Elaborate rhetoric is deployed but undermined by wit, by humour, and equally elaborate contradiction. If humour and irony perturb and disrupt, they are not allowed to destroy: we are not, in the Sarrautean novel, in the mode of the 'purely comic'. Disrupted images may be disturbed and scattered, but they are not totally dismissed. On the contrary, their richness and the strands that connect them to an inner core of human feelings make them precisely a mobile, discontinuous, and poetic reflection of human reality. When the noise of the sometimes deafening voices and their clashing words—breaking over heads like truncheons, stilling resistance with the force of water-hoses—dies down, we hear, briefly but insistently, the quiet uncertain voice of one neither declaiming nor denouncing, but pursuing his own solitary search for truth, groping at words, turning them over cautiously, thinking, feeling, pondering his experience of a work he loves—impregnable, in his timidity, against the mockeries of fashion.

Entre la vie et la mort takes us to the centre of the artistic struggle to defeat words with words, as the writer, tempted by postures of sovereignty and authority, 'unwrites' the sirensongs of his temptations, and maintains his humility. The novel persuades ultimately that the authentic writer is, after all, a Holy Fool, despite his contradictions and his shortcomings. He embodies the heroism of humility, when he continues and endures, despite multiple rejections, caricatures, and mockery, strong in his faith that his stumbling pursuit of reality is after all worthwhile. (pp. 182-84)

The title of Nathalie Sarraute's most recent work is … L'Usage de la parole …, and here, abandoning the novel-structure, she has collected ten short essay/sketches each exploring as abstractly and generally as possible, the dramatic sub-structure of certain precise locutions. L'Usage de la parole seems to mark an extreme point in Nathalie Sarraute's artistic evolution. Having, in the novels, explored the possibilities of the continuous narrative, she returns to the greater freedom of construction found in the prose-poems of Tropismes. Indeed, centring her concerns on a few banal locutions, she has, here, even more space for exploration in depth than was available there. No characters (save, in a very limited sense, Tchekhov, who appears in the first text—but it is not his character that is at issue), no décors, no specific situations distract the reader from the 'play' of the words. I use 'play' here, in the widest sense, to indicate range, possibilities, purposes, effects, manner of making or losing points, and latent drama…. (p. 189)

In 'Ton père. Ta soeur', the phrase already met in Entre la vie et la mort …: 'Si tu continues, Armand, ton père va préférer ta soeur' (If you go on, Armand, your father will end up preferring your sister) reappears, stripped this time of its status as focus for the preoccupations of a central figure. It is also further stripped of the potentially distracting plot-value of the parental threat it enfolds. Our attention is here securely focused on 'Ton père, Ta soeur' and the characterisations and distances these words create, the tone of voice which they produce—'sa voix résonne comme ces voix anonymes, venant on ne sait d'où, qui dans les lieux publics diffusent les informations' … (her voice resounds like those anonymous voices which, coming from who knows where, relay information in public places).

There is no imaginary narrator in this work, save a Diderot-like authorial first-person, and the 'play' of pronouns is ever more intensely questioned…. If, in Les Fruits d'or, to borrow Ann Jefferson's phrase …, 'Address resolves the impossible problems of definition' for the one reader who silently apostrophises the work itself, in L'Usage de la parole, the work itself addresses us the readers from the very first page.

The first appearance of the first-person pronoun is artfully prepared—first it is the German 'Ich', in the phrase 'Ich sterbe', then it is a purely linguistic 'I' in the phrase which translates it: 'Ich sterbe. Qu'est-ce que c'est? Ce sont des mots allemands, Ils signifient je meurs' (Ich sterbe. What's that? They are German words. They mean I am dying). The 'I' so far has no referent, and therefore provokes the question: 'Mais d'où, mais pourquoi tout à coup?' (But from where, and why, all of a sudden?) The 'person' that now clearly emerges in the narrative is the second-person, the 'you' of the reader directly addressed: 'Vous allez voir, prenez patience' (You will see, have patience). The next significant pronoun that arises is again first-person, but this time it is plural—text and reader joined in an intimate 'nous': 'ne nous hâtons pas, allons au plus près d'abord' … (don't let's hurry, let's get as close as we can first). This is a 'nous' that recalls the we of the writer and judge, joined in creation at the end of Entre la vie et la mort, a union in which the reader is also enclosed. The introductory page of 'Ich sterbe'—a profoundly moving meditation that follows the spoken word to the ultimate point, the point of expiration and death—sets the tone for the texts that follow. They unite writer and reader in a common quest for the reality beneath the words—the shock-waves emanating from the word 'esthétique' (aesthetic), incautiously placed in a banal conversation, the volcanic eruption produced by 'Eh bien quoi, c'est un dingue' (Oh well, after all, he's an oaf), the death-ray of 'Ne me parlez pas de ça' (Don't speak to me about that), the sudden sting of 'Mon petit' (My boy, or Sonny) and the almost imperceptible aeration of the most banal words that communicates the shimmer of feeling far better than 'Le mot Amour' (the word Love), and its derivatives. The aggressive questioning provoked by the failure to find adequate words: 'Comment appelez-vous ça?—je ne vois pas, je ne trouve aucun mot qui le désigne.—Aucun mot? Mais vous savez bien que rien ici-bas ne peut prétendre à l'existence tant que ça n'a pas reçu de nom …'… (What do you call that?—I can't see, I can't find any word that applies to it.—No word? But you know perfectly well that nothing on this earth can claim existence until it has been given a name …)—finds a convincing answer in these successfully exploring texts.

Nathalie Sarraute is not explicitly concerned to moralise. Yet there is clear moral concern and effect in all [her] works. She teaches implicitly that the humble pursuit of truth is always worthwhile, whatever we are doing, creating, or saying; that authority is no substitute for argument; and words, no matter how loaded, no substitute for thought. She persuades that superiorities are transitory, for 'nous sommes bien tous un peu comme ça' (we are all really a bit like that), and have more in common than we are usually prepared to recognise, whatever our class, sex, race, creed, or colour. All [her] works testify to the conviction that reality is always on the underside of language, and humility the natural and only mode of pursuing truth.

The war of the words is never decisively won, but is always worth waging. The works of Nathalie Sarraute reassert the reality that engenders words, but that words, once fixed, deny. It is a reality which necessitates the breaking of the moulds, and the creation of new forms. Such an endeavour generates not rhetoric but poetry, for it is a matter of articulating the virtualities of what is neither spoken nor even formulated, a matter of giving voice to human silence. (pp. 190-92)