SOURCE: Watson-Williams, Helen. “Quintessential Sarraute: A Reading of L'Usage de la parole.” Essays in French Literature, no. 27 (November 1990): 40-5.

[In the following essay, Watson-Williams provides a brief summary of Sarraute's L'Usage de la parole, commenting on the consistency of her thought, especially Sarraute's emphasis on the value of individual authenticity.]

From the publication of Tropismes in 1939 to her recent book L'Usage de la parole,¹ translated as The Use of Speech,² Nathalie Sarraute's work has been astonishingly consistent and individual. Over some sixty years the quiet but unmistakable voice has continued to be heard and to speak memorably to those attuned to her personal view of the world we live in.

It is admittedly a highly personal view of our turbulent century, one which, as Simone de Beauvoir reproached her, deliberately excludes the rough and tumble of everyday European life³ in order to examine in the closest detail the inner life of the human beings who are her concern. A very few comments will suggest the orientation of her interest.

She was born in Russia of Jewish parents at the beginning of this century although she lived in France from early childhood. However, neither of the two European wars enters into her field. Nor does the growth of anti-semitism and the outrage of the Holocaust. Nor does the movement of people, either in concentration or in displacement. Nor does the proliferation of nuclear institutions, let alone Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Nor does the impact of what is summed up as “Future Shock”. The list of exclusions seems endless. What then is left?

People. But people seen in her own way, inhabitants of her own highly personal world. As André Gide once defined the artist's aspiration to create his own world:

un monde spécial, dont il ait seul la clef. Il ne suffit pas qu'il apporte une chose nouvelle, quoique cela soit énorme déjà; mais bien que toutes choses en lui soient ou semblent nouvelles, transapparues derrière une idiosyncrasie puissamment coloratrice.⁴

The transforming and individual vision of Nathalie Sarraute's world cannot be mistaken. It explores the lower levels of human consciousness particularly in its relationship with family and friends and its need to protect the vulnerable self in society, suitably presented within a given and acceptable role.

The importance she has always attributed to the spoken or written word and its effort to express itself in literature is another constant which has clearly given rise to this later work, a collection of ten episodes variously described as stories or tales, games (pp. 14,127), dramas (p. 103), dreams (p. 155) or, when there is a happy ending, a fairy tale (p. 157).

As so often, Nathalie Sarraute herself provides the key to this collection when she defines her fictional intention in her penultimate episode, “Ne me parlez pas de ça”. For whatever the degree of structural complexity or of length all the episodes may be best described as the quintessence of human experience. As the authorial voice says in the confidential tone which is characteristic of the whole series a stance which in earlier works was often adopted by a fictional character like Alain Guimier in Le Planétarium or the anonymous narrator in Les Fruits d'or:

Ah voilà, c'est ce qu'il fallait attendre. Il vous faut un cas précis, vous avez bien raison. Pas un cas particulier dont les implications, la complexité risqueraient de nous embrouiller, de nous distraire de l'essentiel. Il faut un cas-modèle. Un produit pur. Une quintessence. Un réactif assez puissant pour agir de la même façon sur tout le monde.

(pp. 135-6)

And so she launches into an example of two anonymous people “en visite l'une chez l'autre ou réunies à une table de café ou se promenant ensemble, peu importe …” (p. 136). This scenario is merely “un, tenez, parmi tous ceux qu'on peut vous proposer” (p. 136). For out of ten episodes altogether this confrontation appears some seven times.

Certainly there are variations. The opening exposure of the dying Chekhov announcing his own death in a resonant, unequivocal foreign language is framed as an internal monologue concerned with the quality of language but at the same time it is addressed to his wife by his “envers inséparable” (p. 14) which recalls the sorts of words they had once used together, words of lightness, gaiety, sensuality, the words of lovers. So too in “Ton père. Ta sœur” (No. 4), the unnamed woman conducts an enquiry into the quality of her life within society and the family in what is essentially an internal monologue.

But these are contrapuntal variations on what is the basic form of confrontation, the impact of one person on another. This is sometimes elaborated into a sequence of several encounters, as in “A très bientôt” (No. 2) where speakers A and B allude to two other personages, C and D, all involved by their influence one upon the other. Again, in the accumulative incidents of “Ne me parlez pas de ça” (No. 9) the individual responses of those who can or those who cannot use the key phrase accrue into opposing groups, culminating in a battle royal, “the mother of all battles”:

Soudain, les yeux injectés de fureur, “Ceux qui peuvent” marchent sur “Ceux qui ne peuvent pas”, ils crient … Mais on voit que ce n'est plus pour jouer, ce n'est plus pour rire … […] ils leur crient, à eux: “Ne me parlez pas de ça.”

(p. 144)

This episode is the most structurally complex, not only in its incremental form but in the variety of possible responses to the phrase in the camp of “Those who cannot say it”, all of whom are inhibited by nightmare visions of situations of increasing threat by the opposing speaker and consequently of violent danger to the listener (pp. 142ff) until the enemies' onslaught presumably overwhelms them.

Violence of imagery is remarkable elsewhere in many of the episodes but the accumulative structure is not. For the characteristic situation of the two typical interlocutors is more often anodyne and the outcome overtly undramatic. One person may be startled by the intrusion of an unexpected word like “aesthetic” during the trivial exchange in the street; fear of appearing pretentious provokes the speaker into a vulgarism to restore the balance. But any transient sympathy between them is dissipated (No. 6). Another may be so shocked by the speaker's use of an ambiguous term like “mon petit” with its complexity of possible attitudes that the listener is forced to pretend not to have heard it and so let it pass like saliva inadvertently spotting his face. This is the way the world wags, the listener/narrator/author thinks:

Comment vivrait-on si on prenait la mouche pour un oui ou pour un non […] si on faisait pour si peu, pour moins que rien de pareilles histoires?

(p. 112)

Yet it is just such incidents, or as she prefers to say, such “experiences” (pp. 87-8), that provide the subject-matter of her explorations, or, better, her distillations:

[ces] moments […] où se produisent des bouleversements de cet ordre … Mais qui cela intéresse-t-il? Tout le monde est bien trop occupé à ressasser sans fin les mêmes ébranlements, les mêmes grands et petits sentiments, sensations, émotions, joies et souffrances … Inutile de chercher, cela ne se trouve sur aucune liste. […] et pourtant cela devrait être reconnu et même, par sa violence, par ses lointaines et graves conséquences, cela mériterait d'être classé dans un assez bon rang.

(pp. 44-5)

This definition of values closes what is, in my opinion, one of the most successful experiences, “Et pourquoi pas?” (No. 3). In this account of an expansive man whose confidential approach to his listener is undercut by the latter's response, “Et pourquoi pas?”, whose whole being is destroyed, temporarily at least, by such a rebuff, many of Nathalie Sarraute's central concerns are apparent. We never learn the content of the conversational confidences for the authorial voice denies its importance: that would be “lâcher la proie pour l'ombre”, to take the idea for “the prey” which is quite other (p. 37). (The same direction of focus is even more emphasized in the opening of the succeeding episode, “Ton père. Ta sœur”. The quoted words, “Si tu continues, Armand, ton père va préférer ta sœur” (p. 49) recall Nathalie Sarraute's use of the same sentence before in Entre la Vie et la Mort⁵ when the apparently innocuous words become a form of emotional blackmail used by a mother against her son. But here they are repeated—“Il faut (…) que j'y revienne, je dois absolument les reprendre encore une fois”, (ibid) she writes—to reveal the attitudes and relationships within the family quartet. The emphasis now falls on the personal pronoun “your” with all the distancing effect it carries in family relationships.)

If the interest is not to be found in the ideas expressed it always lies in the responses within the listener. These may range from an initial stock response of misunderstanding, simple failure to understand, to his ultimate and devastating riposte, “Et pourquoi pas?”. The effect on the speaker is cataclysmic. Instead of communication with his friend he suddenly perceives himself face to face with “un être inconnu”, confronting “le regard vide et fixe d'un fauve ou le rictus figé d'un maniaque, d'un dément …” (p. 43).

As always, the images convey the magnitude of the experience, destructive as it is for the speaker. But the essence of the incident is to be found elsewhere: in the nature of the words themselves, in their capacity to establish communication with others or, when used “in bad faith”, to destroy such communication. The experience thus concerns the breakdown of communication and the necessity of human authenticity. The two aspects of the experience are of course interdependent. And they have been present throughout Mme Sarraute's work.

Sartre, in his “Préface” to Portrait d'un inconnu, draws attention to her concept of “le mur de l'inauthenticité”,⁶ a defence which takes many forms. It may be, here as elsewhere, a wall (p. 51), the socially imposed role grouped under headings “telles que Parents, Enfants, Mariage. Jeunesse. Vieillesse. Mort …” (pp. 56-7), the carapace (p. 74). Perhaps the most memorable examination of the inauthentic comes in Le Planétarium where the writer, Germaine Lemaire, “our Madame Tussaud”, also furnishes the shaping image of the man-made sky.

This late work may therefore be seen as concerned with Nathalie Sarraute's life-long themes of individual authenticity, frequently betrayed by social pressures of expectations, conformity or sheer pusillanimity; and the fundamental desire for human communication whether it be between acquaintances (“Esthétique”), friends (“A très bientôt”), or lovers (“Le mot Amour”).

The centrality of the human need is emphasized by the final episode, “Je ne comprends pas” (No. 10) where one of the stereotypical couples of interlocutors finds the courage to break through the obfuscating clouds of verbiage to announce that he doesn't understand, thus breaking the embargo on honesty which restrains so many of us so often, which can reduce us to slavery. Totally unexpectedly the listener heroically asserts himself and even more unexpectedly is welcomed and embraced by the speaker who confesses to having conducted an experiment in endurance. Happiness accompanies the banishment of confusion: “L'ennemi s'est métamorphosé en allié” and, whatever the threats to its authenticity and its power, “la parole est en sécurité” (p. 156).

The primacy of the word, written or spoken, so often alluded to in earlier works such as Les Fruits d'or (1963), Entre la vie et la mort, is here directly declared in her title and demonstrated in her scale of values by which society could function and human integrity may evolve.

That the last example of mutual understanding should turn out to be, alas, “rien d'autre qu'un conte de fées” (p. 157) cannot diminish the quintessential impact of Nathalie Sarraute's thought.

Notes

1. Nathalie Sarraute, L'Usage de la parole, Gallimard, 1980, to which all page numbers within the text refer.

2. Nathalie Sarraute, The Use of Speech, translated by Barbara Wright in consultation with the author, George Braziller, 1983.

3. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses, Gallimard, 1963, p. 291: “tous ces objets bien réels, et irréductibles à ses palpitations souterraines, méritent et exigent l'éclairage de l'art”.

4. André Gide, Journal 1889-1939, Gallimard, 1948, “Littérature et Morale”, p. 94.

5. Nathalie Sarraute, Entre la vie et la mort, Gallimard, 1968, p. 78.

6. J.-P. Sartre, “Préface”, Nathalie Sarraute, Portrait d'un inconnu, Gallimard, 1956, pp. 8-10. (First published by Robert Marin, 1948.)