SOURCE: Jefferson, Ann. “Difference and Dissension.” In Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference, pp. 17-38. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Jefferson notes that despite the critical commentary Sarraute has provided on her own work, interpretations of her text vary widely, and are deeply influenced by the reader himself.]

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. 149 [156])

‘DIFFéRENCES’ AND ‘DIFFéRENDS’

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 [Vous les entendez?])

[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 [Disent les imbéciles])

[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 [Tu ne t'aimes pas])

[‘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 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 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 opposition 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 1964, 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 1971 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 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 [Enfance], p. 160)

[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.]

(141)

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.

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 constitute 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 [Le Planétarium], pp. 63-4)

[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, antique-shop windows, visions that cross the minds of people in a swoon, of people drowning, frozen …]

(pp. 74-5)

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. 60)

[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, everything fell back into place. Things assumed form, moulded by him, reflected in his glance …]

(p. 71)

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. 59)

[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. 69)

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'arrachement, de chute dans le vide’, p. 59, [‘it was this same fear, this same sensation as now, of being wrenched away, of falling into the void’ (p. 69)] 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. 64) [‘Complete fusion exists with no one’ (p. 75)]). 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. 66, my emphasis) [‘The wrench, the frightful separation will soon be complete (p. 78)]. 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. 89 [p. 67]). 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. 91) [‘everything about her [the doll] was beautiful. Beauty—was that. That was what it was—to be beautiful’ (p. 81)]. 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 enfant qui aime sa mère,’ she says, ‘trouve que personne n'est plus beau qu'elle’ (p. 95) [‘A child who loves its mother thinks that no one is more beautiful than she’ (p. 84)]. 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. 92)

[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. 81)

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. 94)

[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. 83)

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. 96)

[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. 85)

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. 95) [“‘But of course, you big silly, of course she's more beautiful than me’” (p. 84)], 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. 98)

[[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. 86)

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 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. 98) [‘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. 86)]. 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. 131 ff.) [‘You're the one who's judged by it’ (p. 128)]. 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. 103) [‘destroys me’, lit. ‘tears me apart’, (p. 90)]; the half-forgotten farewells with Gacha, the maid who looks after Natacha in St Petersburg, were ‘probablement déchirants’ (p. 105) [‘probably heart-rending’ (p. 92)]; 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. 114) [‘a nostalgia that was sometimes heart-rending […] the word is not too strong’ (p. 100)]; 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. 131) [‘a new heartache’ (p. 116)]; 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. 260) [‘I was heart-broken … and what broke my heart even more was her joy, which she didn't even try to conceal’ (p. 231)]. 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.

DIFFERENCE DENIED

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. 29)

[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. 33)

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 working-class 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 n'entraient dans l'esprit de personne’ (E, p. 236) [‘it was obvious that any ideas about differences of race or religion never entered anyone's head’ (p. 209)]. 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. 172-3) [‘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. 154)] (my emphases).

In another vision of an ideal community observed during a stay in a kibbutz in 1969, 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 washer-up 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.]

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. 200) [‘no one made the slightest distinction between men and women, either from the intellectual or the moral point of view’ (p. 178)]. 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 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. 182-3) [‘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. 161-2)]. 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. 252) [‘these are things which don't shock people in Russia as they do here’ (p. 224)]. 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:

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. 107-8)

[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. 94-5)

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. 258)

[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 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. 228)

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. 68) [‘the common woof that each of us contains in its entirety’ (p. 88)]. 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. 90) [‘entice him at all costs onto the author's territory’ (p. 93)]. 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.]

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. 81) [‘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 [Tropismes], pp. 16-17)

[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. 16-17)

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; 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.

BEYOND COMPARE

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 1960s.¹³ And if it is sometimes 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 [Entre la vie et la mort], p. 81)

[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. 80)

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. 85)

[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. 80)

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. 93) [‘It seemed as if no criticism, no praise could alight on her’ (p. 82)]. 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 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. 66-7) [‘life in its pure state, no lurking menace, no mixture’ (pp. 56-7)]. 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 self-assertion 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 self-affirmation 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 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. 116) [‘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.

Notes

1. L'Ère du soupçon, p. 8. The preface to the English translation of these essays appeared the year before the publication of the 1964 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).

2. 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, 7:72, (1957) pp. 76-81 (p. 76)). This essay was later published in book form in L'Alittérature contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958), 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.

3. Mary McCarthy, ‘Hanging by a Thread’ in The Writing on the Wall (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), pp. 172-88 (p. 187). The review first appeared in The New York Review of Books (31 July 1969). 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, 7-13 May 1964, p. 3.

4. See Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing (London: Elek, 1972), pp. 58-66, and Nathalie Sarraute, ‘Ce que je cherche à faire’, OC, p. 1700.

5. Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, p. 166.

6. 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. 9) [‘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.

7. See ‘Interview de Nathalie Sarraute’, by Grant E. Kaiser, Roman 20-50, 4, (1987), pp. 118-27 (pp. 119-20); interview with Nathalie Sarraute broadcast on France Culture, 5 February 1988; ‘Rencontre: Nathalie Sarraute’, interview with Isabelle Huppert, Cahiers du cinéma, 177, (1994), pp. 8-14 (p. 10); and the interview cited below in note 8, 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.

8. ‘Nathalie Sarraute au kibboutz, Propos recueillis par Erwin Spatz’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 16-31 October 1969, pp. 12-13 (p. 13).

9. See, for example, the first interview she ever gave (to Gabriel d'Aubarède) in Les Nouvelles littéraires, 30 July 1953, p. 4, 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 1984) (Arles: Actes Sud, 1985), pp. 129-47, 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. 130) [‘I came to France at the age of two … I was in kindergarten at the age of three …’].

10. For this see the Folio edition of 1985 and the Pléiade edition of the Œuvres complètes. The ‘slip’ was drawn to her attention in a letter sent by a reader.

11. Nathalie Sarraute: Qui êtes-vous? Conversations avec Simone Benmussa (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), pp. 140-1, (hereafter referred to as Qui êtes-vous?). See Chapters 4 and 5 below for further discussion of the issue of sexual difference in Sarraute.

12. Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, Language in Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap and Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 62-94 (p. 71). Original emphasis.

13. 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 6, ‘Criticism and the “Terrible Desire to Establish Contact”’.

14. Interview with Nathalie Sarraute, ‘Virginia Woolf ou la visionnaire du “maintenant”’, Les Lettres françaises, 29 June-5 July 1961, pp. 1, 3 (p. 3). She makes the same point again in an interview nearly 25 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, 9 (1985), pp. 3-16 (p. 11) [‘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’].

15. Jean Blot, ‘Nathalie Sarraute: une fine buée’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 188, (1968), pp. 111-18 (p. 116).

Abbreviations

T Tropismes

PI Portrait d'un inconnu

M Martereau

P Le Planétarium

FO Les Fruits d'or

EVM Entre la vie et la mort

VLE Vous les entendez?

DLI «disent les imbéciles»

UP L'Usage de la parole

E Enfance

TNTP Tu ne t'aimes pas

I Ici

O Ouvrez

OC Œuvres complètes

ES L'Ère du soupçon

‘Ce que je cherche’ ‘Ce que je cherche à faire’

‘Ce que voient’ ‘Ce que voient les oiseaux’

‘Conversation’ ‘Conversation et sous-conversation’

‘Dostoïevski’ ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’

‘LeÈre’ ‘L'Ère du soupçon’

‘Flaubert’ ‘Flaubert le précurseur’

‘Forme’ ‘Forme et contenu du roman’

‘PV’ ‘Paul Valéry et l'Enfant d'Éléphant’

Works by Nathalie Sarraute

Prose

Tropismes (1939) (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1957). Translated in Tropisms and The Age of Suspicion by Maria Jolas (London: John Calder, 1963).

Le Planétarium (1959) (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1972). Translated as The Planetarium by Maria Jolas (London: John Calder, 1961).

Entre la vie et la mort (1968) (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1973). Translated as Between Life and Death by Maria Jolas (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970).

Vous les entendez? (1972) (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1976). Translated as Do You Hear Them?, by Maria Jolas (London: Calder & Boyars, 1975).

«disent les imbéciles» (1976) (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1978). Translated as ‘Fools Say’ by Maria Jolas (London: John Calder, 1977).

Enfance (1983) (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1985). Translated as Childhood by Barbara Wright in consulation with the author (London: John Calder, 1984).

Tu ne t'aimes pas (1989) (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1991). Translated as You Don't Love Yourself by Barbara Wright in consultation with the author (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1990).

Criticism

L'Ère du soupçon (1956) (Paris: Gallimard, Folio/Essais, 1987). Translated in Tropisms and the Age of Suspicion by Maria Jolas (London: John Calder, 1963).

includes: ‘De Dostoïevski à Kafka’ (1947)

‘L'ère du soupçon’ (1950)

‘Conversation et sous-conversation’ (1956)

‘Ce que voient les oiseaux’ (1956)

‘Roman et réalité’ (1959)

‘La littérature, aujourd'hui’ (1962)

‘Flaubert le précurseur’ (1965)

‘Forme et contenu du roman’ (undated)

‘Le langage dans l'art du roman’ (undated)

‘Ce que je cherche à faire’ (1972)

‘Le gant retourné’ (1975)

All references to essays other than those contained in L'Ère du soupçon are to the Œuvres complètes.

Interviews with Nathalie Sarraute Cited

Interview with Gabriel d'Aubarède, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 30 July 1953, p. 4.

‘Virginia Woolf ou la visionnaire du “maintenant”’, Les Lettres françaises, 29 June 1961, pp. 1, 3.

‘Interview de Nathalie Sarraute’, by Grant E. Kaiser, Roman 20-50, 4 (1987), pp. 118-27.

Critical Studies of Nathalie Sarraute

Blot, Jean, ‘Nathalie Sarraute: une fine buée’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 188, (1968), pp. 111-18.

Heath, Stephen, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing, (London: Elek, 1972)

Mauriac, Claude, ‘Nathalie Sarraute et le nouveau réalisme’, Preuves, 7:72, (1957) pp. 76-81.

L'Alittérature contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958)

General

Jakobson, Roman, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, Language in Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap and Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 62-94.

Johnson, Barbara, The Critical Difference (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)

Lyotard, Jean-François, Le Différend (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983). Translated as The Differend: Phrases in Dispute by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester University Press: 1988)

Saussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de linguistique générale, edited by Tullio de Mauro, (Paris: Payot, 1984). Translated as Course in General Linguistics by Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983)