SOURCE: Willging, Jennifer. “Partners in Slime: The Liquid and the Viscous in Sarraute and Sartre.” Romanic Review 92, no. 3 (May 2001): 277-96.

[In the following essay, Willging compares the work of Sarraute to that of Sartre and notes the similarities between them.]

Nathalie Sarraute would not have appreciated this essay, because in it I propose to compare, as other critics have done in the past, her work with that of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sarraute's testiness about the nature of her intellectual relationship with Sartre simply “oozes” (in keeping with the theme of this essay) from the pages of a 1989 interview with Françoise Dupuy-Sullivan (“Dialogue avec Nathalie Sarraute”) in which Sarraute describes her first contact with Sartre. At her publisher's suggestion, she says, she sent him a copy of her first text, Tropismes (1939). He responded to her with “un mot, très gentil,” telling her that the text interested him very much (188). She met him in person through a mutual friend during the war when Sartre was organizing “des groupes de résistance. C'étaient plutôt,” Sarraute then corrects herself, “des recherches théoriques sur ce qu'on ferait quand les Allemands partiraient” (188). As a Jew, Sarraute herself had had to go into hiding during the latter part of the war, and the irony which fills the pages of her fiction seems also present in this last comment.¹ Sartre's interest in her work, she goes on, prompted him to provide a laudatory preface for her second publication, Portrait d'un inconnu (1947) (188). When asked by Dupuy-Sullivan why she thinks Sartre admired Portrait, Sarraute replies: “Dans ce livre, les choses sont en train de se faire. Tout est en perpétuel devenir. Cela lui avait paru très original […]” (189). Yet her novel seemed to him, she also believed, “comme une sorte d'expérience à part et qui ne pourrait pas être recommencée. Après ça, il faudrait écrire des romans comme tout le monde, comme il en écrivait lui-même à ce moment” (189). Because she had only read La Nausée (1938), she says, after having already begun writing Tropismes, and because Sartre, unlike her, wrote novels “comme tout le monde,” Sarraute firmly asserts that, “[i]l est donc absolument impossible et aberrant de parler d'une influence quelle qu'elle soit de Sartre sur moi. C'est tout à fait faux. Lui-même n'y aurait pas cru” (189). Dupuy-Sullivan had herself not yet spoken of such an influence, but Sarraute seems here to have smelled the question in the air and to have thus attempted to arrest its launch.

When Dupuis-Sullivan characterizes as “surprising” the 1947 publication in Les Temps Modernes, the literary review Sartre had created after the war, of two of Sarraute's critical essays “côte à côte” with what would later become chapters of Sartre's Qu'est-ce que la Littérature? (1948), Sarraute's response is unequivocal, even if the implication of the question (that Sarraute and Sartre had worked together on their essays? that Sartre had somehow guided the writing of Sarraute's essays?) is not entirely clear. “Pourquoi [surprenant]?” Sarraute demands. “D'abord ce n'est pas la même date, ce n'est pas côte à côte. C'est dans un autre volume des Temps modernes. […] Ce n'était pas écrit en même temps,” she insists (189-90). From this point on, Sarraute's answers to Dupuy-Sullivan's questions concerning Sartre become for the most part increasingly terse and increasingly negative, as the following excerpt shows:

F.D.S.:
Quel rôle avez-vous joué en 1962 lors des tentatives de ce que l'on a pu appeler coexistence culturelle entre écrivains occidentaux et écrivains soviétiques et quels furent vos rapport dans ce cadre avec Jean-Paul Sartre?
N.S.:
Absolument aucun, je ne m'en suis pas occupée.
F.D.S.:
Pouvez-vous décrire la situation de l'écrivain telle que vous l'avez ressentie en 1947 [a situation which Sartre outlines in Qu'est-ce que la littérature?] et comment vous semble-t-elle avoir évolué depuis?
N.S.:
Je ne peux absolument pas répondre à cette question, je ne la comprends même pas …
F.D.S.:
Quelle place accordez-vous au contexte historique dans la création littéraire?
N.S.:
Chez moi, je ne le vois pas.
F.D.S.:
Y a-t-il certaines expressions picturales qui vous paraissent donner un équivalent des tropismes?
N.S.:
Non, je ne crois pas.

(190-91)

The reader can surmise the suffering of the interviewer, which does not end here. When asked, then, to describe her relations with Simone de Beauvoir, Sarraute flatly answers that they were “[q]uelconques.” “Personnellement,” she adds, “je crois qu'il n'y avait pas de sympathie” (191).²

Perhaps worn down by Sarraute's Sartre-inspired surliness, Dupuy-Sullivan changes tack. “Voici une question qui change d'orientation,” a seemingly penitent interviewer proposes. “A votre avis, en quoi votre bilinguisme a-t-il pu influencer votre rapport au langage?” (191). What could be more innocuous than asking a writer to comment on her use of language? But Sarraute's mortifying response is, “En rien, parce qu'il n'y a pas eu de bilinguisme. C'est une erreur complète qu'on répète toujours” (191). Shortly thereafter and none too soon, the interview comes to an end.

As an example of an encounter replete with hostile sous-conversation, this interview is unparalleled even in Sarraute's own fiction. Yet speaking of sous-conversation here is perhaps imprecise, as the outward conversation is already as explicitly antagonistic as an academic interview is likely to become. While it is true that since the interview was transcribed and not videotaped, the reader cannot gauge for certain the degree to which Sarraute was truly irked by Dupuy-Sullivan's questions, it is nevertheless safe to say that the subject of Jean-Paul Sartre was at least a sensitive one for Sarraute. But being compared to any writer, and not just Sartre, bothered Sarraute, who placed a premium on originality and newness in all intellectual and artistic endeavors. The numerous characters of a literary bent who appear in her fictional works (Alain Guimier and Germaine Lemaire in Le Planétarium [1959], the “writer” in Entre la vie et la mort [1968], the various writers and critics in Les Fruits d'or [1963], to name a few) all seek either to create or to identify an original work of art. It is this implacable desire and the self-doubt that accompanies it that drive them, roller coaster-like, up to the manic heights of creative triumph, down to the depressive depths of poetic bankruptcy, and back again. For Sarraute, what the masters did in the past was all well and good for their time, but new artists have the responsibility of going beyond their masters and discovering through their work new realities, using new artistic forms.³

Despite the particular objections Sarraute may have made to being compared to Sartre, it is of course not as inappropriate a juxtaposition as she seems to suggest in Dupuy-Sullivan's interview. One similarity in the works of these authors is the way in which characters' conception of their identity depends to a large extent upon others' conceptions of them, or more precisely, upon what they imagine to be others' conceptions of them. The imposing gaze of the Other is of course a subject Sartre treats in both his theoretical and fictional writing. In Huis clos (1947), for example, the three characters damned to hell relentlessly alternate between soliciting the others' approval of an image of themselves they have created, and rejecting images the others seek to impose on them. Sarraute's characters are also constantly seeing themselves through the eyes of others and desperately trying to destroy that specular image before it destroys them. In his preface to Portrait d'un inconnu, Sartre also underscores Sarraute's dead-on portrayals of the fundamental inauthenticity of human identity and interaction, which looms large in Sartre's own vision of humanity. But the main point here is not to reopen old debates about whether Sarraute's work can be characterized as “existentialist,” or to what extent if any Sartre did have an influence on Sarraute's work.⁴ Rather it is to call attention to and comment on the recurrence in both authors' work of a particular motif, which is that of the slimy. In comparing Sarraute's and Sartre's obsession with and treatment of this theme, my principal objective will be to point out some of the similarities, and more importantly, many of the differences, between their theories about two issues in particular: the human subject's perception of and interaction with the world, and the nature and function of “good” literature. These are issues with which both repeatedly grapple in their theoretical and literary writing and which, in their work, are not as unrelated as they might at first appear.

It is well known that the slimy is an important concept in Sartre's writing, yet it has often been overlooked or under-appreciated in Sarraute's.⁵ In his preface to Portrait, Sartre himself notes its presence in Sarraute's first novel: “Nathalie Sarraute,” he affirms,

a une vision protoplasmique de notre univers intérieur: ôtez la pierre du lieu commun, vous trouverez des coulées, des baves, des mucus, des mouvements hésitants, amiboïdes. Son vocabulaire est d'une richesse incomparable pour suggérer les lentes reptations centrifuges de ces élixirs visqueux et vivants.

(13 my emphases)

The continual va-et-vient of human tropismes, those tiny movements of psychological attraction and repulsion that assail each individual in her interaction with others, is figured not only in Portrait but also in many of Sarraute's subsequent texts as being carried upon a slipping, slimy substance that threatens always to escape the boundaries of the individual and to infect those around her. Sarraute uses many different images to represent the concept of tropisms, but a frequent one shows it as a sort of “substance fluide qui circule chez tous, passe des uns aux autres, franchissant des frontières arbitrairement tracées” (Sarraute, “Ce que je cherche à faire” 35). But before exploring Sarraute's uses of the liquid and the slimy in several of her novels throughout the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s (where they are most palpable), I will briefly summarize Sartre's conception of these qualities, which is illustrated most explicitly in La Nausée (1938) and L'Etre et le néant (1943).

In one of the final sections of L'Etre, “De la qualité comme révélatrice de l'être,” Sartre uses the slimy or the viscous as an example of a material quality, among an infinite number of qualities, that belongs to the en-soi (all material phenomena in the world) and that is imbued with psychic meaning or value in its revelation to human consciousness, the pour-soi. For the author of L'Etre, the slimy has exclusively negative psychic value because it resists appropriation by the pour-soi, whose attempts at appropriation of the en-soi are part of its necessary and continual project to give meaning to a world that is meaningless in and of itself. Indeed, the slimy not only resists appropriation by the pour-soi but turns the tables and attempts itself to appropriate the pour-soi. The slimy is especially nefarious because it exerts a certain fascination upon the pour-soi; it seems to beckon it into its compliant softness: “Le visquex est docile. Seulement, au moment même où je crois le posséder, voilà que, par un curieux renversement, c'est lui qui me possède. C'est là qu'apparaît son caractère essentiel: sa mollesse fait ventouse” (655 author's emphasis). The slimy is neither like water, which in its purity and transparency leaves no trace upon that which it touches (656), nor like solids, which can be manipulated without danger by the pour-soi:

L'objet que je tiens dans ma main, s'il est solide, je peux le lâcher quand il me plaît; son inertie symbolise pour moi mon entière puissance: je le fonde, mais il ne me fonde point; c'est le pour-soi qui ramasse en lui-même l'en-soi et qui l'élève jusqu'à la dignité d'ensoi, sans se compromettre, en restant toujours puissance assimilante et créatrice; c'est le pour-soi qui absorbe l'en-soi. […] Mais voici que le visqueux renverse les termes: le pour-soi est soudain compromis.

(655 author's emphasis)

When attempts are made to mold the slimy, it spontaneously “melts” back into an inchoate mass and so cannot be used as a tool for the realization of the pour-soi's projects. It clings when touched, sucks inward when penetrated; it invites in but will not release, depriving the pour-soi of its most essential quality, that which distinguishes it above all from the en-soi: its liberty.

Before publishing this formal analysis of the slimy in L'Etre et le néant, Sartre had already explored the theme in his 1938 novel, La Nausée. In the climactic scene in the public garden of Bouville (a town whose very name calls to mind the sliminess of mud), Roquentin suddenly intuits the undifferentiated, powerless, and contingent character of nature and objects, their “gratuité parfaite” (La Nausée 187). What he sees when he looks upon the garden are no longer distinct objects, but an oozing, indistinct mass of goo: “la racine, les grilles du jardin, le banc, le gazon rare de la pelouse, tout ça s'était évanoui; la diversité des choses, leur individualité n'était qu'une apparence, un vernis. Ce vernis avait fondu, il restait des masses monstrueuses et molles, en désordre—nues, d'une effrayante et obscène nudité” (182). The root of the chestnut tree next to him is “une petite mare noire à [s]es pieds” (187). “Est-ce que je l'ai rêvée, cette énorme présence?” he ponders later. “Elle était là, posée sur le jardin, dégringolée dans les arbres, toute molle, poissant tout, tout épaisse, une confiture. Et j'étais dedans, moi, avec tout le jardin” (191). His first visceral reaction at the sight of this “confiture” is fear, but his next is anger, anger at the pure gratuity and meaninglessness of this mess deprived, as it seems to him now, of human intention: “je trouvais ça si bête, si déplacé, je haïssais cette ignoble marmelade. Il y en avait, il y en avait!” (191). It is here in the garden that Roquentin fully comprehends the origin of his bouts of nausea, which is the en-soi's revelation of its true nature to him. The world is only full of distinguishable objects when human consciousness chooses to intend those objects, when it chooses to distinguish them one by one from the gelatinous mass of being and to raise them up to its own level. But when Roquentin doubts his choices and projects, principally that of writing the biography of an eighteenth-century statesman, the concrete objects around him seem to melt away into a pool of slime.

Although slime and fluid appear almost throughout Nathalie Sarraute's oeuvre (but most heavily in her earlier works), Sarraute, unlike Sartre, never formulated in her critical writing a theory about the phenomena per se, except to suggest, as noted above, that tropisms flow like liquids. Again as noted above, in his preface Sartre had already remarked the presence in Portrait d'un inconnu of “ces élixirs visqueux et vivants” that are, as Sartre describes such liquid in L'Etre et le néant, like “[le] suc des fruits et [le] sang de l'homme … notre secrète et vitale liquidité” (647). That is, according to Sartre, in Sarraute's text they make up the liquid reality, existence, that lies beneath solid and illusory appearances. Sarraute did in fact state over and over again that her chief preoccupation in writing was to reveal to the reader a previously hidden reality, using the imperfect and distinctly unreal, or at least nonmaterial, tool that is language: “J'en ai la conviction,” she said, “c'est bien en une recherche que consiste le travail du romancier. Et cette recherche tend à dévoiler, à faire exister une réalité inconnue” (“Nouveau roman et réalité” 432).

Sarraute's principal strategic use of language toward this end is the incessant and obsessive creation of metaphors, whether brief or prolonged, beautiful or grotesque, common-place or fantastic. These myriad metaphors are used to represent the psychological tropisms that occur within and between human psyches. The kinds of images these metaphors produce vary enormously, but a very significant number of them involve liquids of varying viscosities. Many are of a slimy nature, and as in Sartre's oeuvre, they are often portrayed as having nefarious effects on the characters who come into contact with them. In Le Planétarium, slimy and dangerous liquids appear in a scene where Alain Guimier, the conflicted young thesis-writer, is feeling caught between the bourgeois world of his in-laws and the bohemian, intellectual circle to which he aspires. At a soirée at his in-laws' home, he is encouraged to gossip about his eccentric Aunt Berthe, and he is caught between his love of being the center of attention and his desire to appear above such pettiness. Here in his in-laws' bourgeois salon, Alain fears that “ça,” the pressure to gossip emanating both from the others' and his own psyche (McLure 60), “va déferler sur lui, l'étouffer, lui emplir la bouche, le nez, d'un liquide âcre, brûlant, nauséabond …” (22 my emphasis).⁶ These pressures to gossip are metaphorically contained in a strange, noxious liquid that sickens and overcomes him, dissolving his determination not to give in to the others', as well as his own, less than noble inclinations.

In Entre la Vie et la mort, another writer, the text's sketchily-portrayed protagonist, is as sensitive as Alain Guimier to the tropismic pulsations others emit. He must be made, he decides,

d'une matière plus poreuse, absorbante … Chaque gouttelette sécrétée par eux, un simple mot sans importance, un accent, n'importe quoi, pénètre en lui, provoque des troubles … Il est une terre propice où cela pousse, s'épanouit, exhale des relents, des vapeurs … Il en est tout imbibé, rempli … Il en est gorgé jusqu'à la nausée, jusqu'à une sorte de douloureuse jouissance … une étrange joie … C'est une drogue dont il ne peut se passer …

(58 my emphases)

Here others' tropismic movements are carried along by a liquid drug that penetrates the writer, nauseating him but at the same time filling him with rather perverse feelings of pleasure. Doped up by random words he hears others pronounce (“[de] simple[s] mot[s] sans importance”), pen rather than hypodermic needle in hand, the writer exploits the delirium provoked by this linguistic liquid in order to produce more freely his own words, those of the literary text he is struggling to write. That others' words can pierce him like needles and infect him as they do attests, in fact, to his privileged status as a writer, as a “terre propice” (58) in which language can take root and thrive. So while the potentially positive outcome of the writer's infection (the production of a text) is attenuated by the dubious nature of the (sexually suggestive) metaphor (the drug induces a “strange” and “painful” joy), the liquid Sarraute describes here is not entirely nefarious. There are other examples of more positive liquids in Sarraute, but here I will continue to explore the “Sartrean” passages where lurk more lugubrious liquids.

In several of Sarraute's texts, metaphors of liquid are accompanied by another image that Sartre also often associates with his own noxious liquids, and this is the image of the bestiole. Both writers display a certain fascination with various creeping, crawling, sucking, and stinging creatures of both land and sea, most of which share the characteristic of sliminess. In Entre la Vie et la mort, during the writer's rather pretentious lecture on the sources of his creative inspiration, an anonymous female auditor who stares skeptically back at him appears to the insecure writer as a ventouse-covered bloodsucker (une sangsue) that empties him of his vital fluids as well as of his hot air (152). In Les Fruits d'or, a critic argues that the eponymous novel around which Sarraute's novel centers is a great work of art because in it, “on n'y trouve pas … de grouillements de larves, de pataugeages dans je ne sais quels fonds bourbeux qui dégagent des miasmes asphyxiants, dans je ne sais quelles vases putrides où l'on s'enlise” (42 my emphases). Here the slimy creatures evoked are inextricably associated with oozing depths, from which they emerge like the first prototypes of life crawling out of the cosmic soup. In Portrait d'un inconnu, the narrator—a great detector of tropisms and a wouldbe writer—describes the hostile tropismic exchanges between the father and daughter he studies as “[des] déroulements de serpents” (35), creatures whose slithery movement and shiny skin are both affectively associated with the slimy. For the father, moreover, the daughter is “toujours plus insatiable, plus avide, sur lui comme une sangsue, elle draine toutes ses forces, elle le vide …” (118 my emphases). In this sexually suggestive metaphor, in a body of work perfectly devoid of direct references to sex, the daughter takes on the shape of a vampire-like blood sucker and incestuously drains her father of both his liquid “forces” and his fortune. In yet another passage in Portrait, the narrator remarks that certain people seem to emit “un suc poisseux comme la soie que sécrète la chenille; quelque chose d'indéfinissable, de mystérieux, qui … se répand sur lui comme un enduit gluant sous lequel il se pétrifie” (60 my emphases). Rather than emerging from slime, the creature evoked here (the caterpillar who represents imperious personalities such as the father) produces it, using it to entrap and immobilize its prey (the timid, irresolute people upon whom the dominators attempt to impose their viewpoints).

As in Sarraute's texts, the creatures that appear in Sartre's writing are not real but rather serve as metaphors for ideas. Evoking in L'Etre one of Sarraute's favorite bestioles, Sartre says of the viscous that “il s'accroche comme une sangsue” (655). In La Nausée, Roquentin describes all of existence as “une grosse bête immobile” (188) that weighs upon the human being, immobilizing him and not allowing him to gain the control over the world that he as the pour-soi seeks. In this novel, again as in many of Sarraute's novels, where there is liquid or slime there are repugnant creatures, since for Sartre, both represent base, ignoble existence. Gazing out at the sea upon whose coast Bouville lies, Roquentin's fellow strollers see a solid, brilliant sheet of green glass reflecting the sun's rays. But “[l]a vraie mer,” the one that Roquentin sees,

est froide et noire, pleine de bêtes; elle rampe sous cette mince pellicule verte qui est faite pour tromper les gens. Les sylphes qui m'entourent s'y sont laissé prendre: ils ne voient que la mince pellicule, c'est elle qui prouve l'existence de Dieu. Moi je vois le dessous! les vernis fondent, les brillantes petites peaux veloutées, les petites peaux de pêche du bon Dieu pètent de partout sous mon regard, elles se fendent et s'entrebâillent.

(177-78 author's emphasis)

The sea is here a metaphor for all of existence, all of the non-human world, in its true, inchoate, and liquid state. The scurrying beasts within it represent that which is “alive,” in a distinctly non-human, non-intentional way, in the en-soi. In their sliminess and their mindless scurrying, these little beasts are capable of escaping the pour-soi's intentional, appropriating grasp. Moreover, their skins burst open before Roquentin's gaze, revealing to him their soft and viscous viscera, like the objects in the world whose reassuringly familiar exteriors have of late been melting away, revealing to Roquentin their nauseating inner reality.

In her work, Sarraute also constantly contrasts appearances with inner realities. Surfaces, like Sartre's “pellicule verte,” are always hard and smooth, while interiors are soft and fluid. Many of the creatures scurrying through her texts have shells or exoskeletans that hide soft and slimy interiors, and they thus serve as metaphors for this dichotomous vision of the world. In Entre la Vie et la mort, for example, some particularly threatening women the writer encounters seem to his fragile sensibilities to have fingers like scorpion tales (37, 104, 122). When Portrait's narrator approaches and surprises the daughter he has been spying on, she jumps and squirms, “fragile et nue comme un bernard-l'ermite qu'on a tiré hors de sa coquille” (38). Her self-important father who lords over her and who intimidates the narrator “est là, dans son bureau, tapi comme une grosse araignée qui guette” (35). And when the imposing father speaks to the narrator, this latter notes, “Il sent vaguement avec son flair subtil quelque chose en moi, une petite bête apeurée tout au fond de moi qui tremble et se blottit. Il cherche, comme on fouille avec le bout d'une tige de fer pour dénicher un crabe dans un creux de rocher” (37). Here the narrator's lack of self-confidence, a reality he is desperately trying to hide from the probing father, appears as a crab, a viscous and vulnerable creature that hides under two hard surfaces, his own hard shell and the impenetrable rocks around him. Sartre also, Marie-Denise Boros points out, was particularly fond of the crab, a creature which scuttles its way into everything from his philosophical texts to his plays (450). His use of the image is in many ways similar to Sarraute's in that its shell, Boros suggests, “évoque un espace clos, une prison inhérente à la nature de son prisonnier, secrétée en quelque sorte par ce dernier, qu'il transporte avec lui partout où il va et dont il ne peut plus s'évader. Il se protège ainsi de la réalité extérieure, mais en même temps il s'en aliène radicalement” (447-48).

While Sarraute's crustecean characters also attempt to hide and protect their soft and impressionable interiors from the attacks of others, they usually do so to no avail. These metaphoric attacks are carried out alternately with devices that pierce (like the rather phallic scorpion-tail fingers and iron rods cited above), suck (like the more feminine ventouses), or absorb (as in the example I give below). Their double objective is first to expose the individual's elusive, fluid interior and then to drain it so that the individual can be more easily fixed and categorized. Tropisms, that psychic reality which Sarraute pursues in her writing and which make up “cette substance fluide qui circule chez tous,” are in constant danger, she warns, of being absorbed by a particularly deadly instrument, which is hackneyed, lazy language (“Ce que je cherche à faire” 35). “Il suffit, en effet,” Sarraute writes, “que le langage perde ce contact avec le non-nommé, qu'il s'éloigne de cette source d'où il tire sa vitalité … et comme le cheval qui retourne à l'écurie, il reviendra à la sécurité de cette terre ferme sur laquelle il espère ne courir aucun risque” (“Ce que je cherche” 33). In this equine metaphor Sarraute figures the “nonnommé” as a body of water—“cette source”—and contrasts it with a hard surface—“cette terre ferme”—that, while giving the cowboy-writer a surer footing, will inevitably lead him away from the life-giving spring and cause him and his horse-text to perish from thirst. Sarraute's own poetic language is diametrically opposed to the kind of “girdle” language that a character claims to find and praises the novel in question in Les Fruits d'or:

Aucun critique ne vantera jamais assez, n'imposera jamais avec assez de rigueur cette langue écrite qui tamise, raffine, épure, resserre entre ses contours fermes, un peu rigides, ordonne, structure, durcit ce qui doit durer. / Elle rejette tout naturellement, elle ne laisse jamais passer ce qui est mou, flou, baveux, gluant. Tout ce que le langage vulgaire charrie et répand dans ses flots bourbeux.

(31)

This language, with its pristine imparfaits du subjonctif (31), perfectly contains the viscous and vulgar verity of life, which truly good literature, Sarraute's irony here makes clear, must in fact expose and explore rather than hide. These slimy interiors are nevertheless still repulsive to most of Sarraute's characters, because when they are permitted to break through the literal or figurative shells covering individuals or objects, they challenge characters' accepted ways of perceiving and understanding the world. Unlike the solid surfaces that contain them, these “flots bourbeux” cannot, as Sartre maintains in L'Etre, be either physically or intellectually saisis. For this reason, Sarraute's bourgeois characters panic when a liquid reality begins to seep through a too-porous surface: “comme on recouvre de sel pour l'absorber la vilaine tache de vin qu'un maladroit a faite sur la nappe blanche, eux aussitôt se dépêchent de jeter là-dessus les mots qui vont résorber cela …” (Entre la Vie 39). Their last recourse when the liquid escapes is to use stock language to absorb it—that is, to define, categorize, and otherwise render familiar the unfamiliar and therefore intolerable realities it carries.

Yet in Sarraute's work, as noted above, these interior liquids are not always perceived as nauseating and repulsive, as they are in Sartre's. When she is feeling particularly secure with her father-in-law, Gisèle Guimier in Le Planétarium senses “une sorte de rayonnement qu'il dégage, comme un fluide, cela coule vers vous de ses yeux étroits, de son sourire de Bouddha, de son silence … elle ne sait pas ce que c'est … c'est son charme … il est charmant” (112). The liquid tropisms that the father-in-law releases and that cover Gisèle are warm and comforting rather than offensive. When the writer's work in Entre la Vie is going well, “[l]es mots suintent en une fine traînée de gouttelettes tremblantes [et] se déposent sur le papier …” to form a living as opposed to an ossified and dead literary text (166). In these passages, the benign liquids seem to carry not deadly venom but rather the unperverted truth of the person or object (the father-in-law or the literary text) from which they flow. When Sarraute's bourgeois characters do perceive as negative the various liquids that constantly suintent and coulent around them, they usually do so from fear of having to face the sometimes shocking or undesirable realities these liquids reveal. For Sarraute the writer, however, the revelation of reality is always positive, as ultimately must be, then, the liquid, however slimy or rank, that facilitates this revelation.

While water does carry positive connotations for Sartre in that it is pure and insaisissable like human consciousness and does not contaminate that which it touches (L'Etre 656-57), viscous liquid is never portrayed in his work as anything but insidious. Yet it does share one very important quality with Sarraute's more multi-faceted slime, and that is its capacity, as I have suggested, to reveal hidden reality. After all, it is only when the chestnut tree's root “melts” into a black puddle at his feet and when the sea's glass surface shatters to reveal the teeming mire beneath that Roquentin truly understands the contingency, the absolute meaninglessness, of the en-soi. When he is not suffering from nausea, when he sees the stuff of the world as divided up into discrete and recognizable solids, his consciousness lending borders, intentionality, and names to all before it, he is in fact seeing a false world, a world in which meaning seems to pre-exist the pour-soi's intervention in it. Roquentin's nausea-provoking perception of the slimy places him therefore in a privileged position in relation to the oblivious, complacent people he encounters on the streets and in the cafés of Bouville. Because the slimy reveals itself to him, Roquentin will, by the end of the novel, attempt to change his life in order to stave off the meaninglessness that threatens to engulf him. Like the composer and the singer of the song that temporarily relieves him of his nausea, he desires to be “lav[é] du péché d'exister … tout autant qu'un homme peut faire” (249). Like them, he will use the pure water of creative consciousness to wash the slime of contingent existence from him. He will do this by creating something, like the melody of the song, “qui n'existerait pas, qui serait au-dessus de l'existence” (249); that is, he will create something without material substance which will thus be immune to the degrading laws of the physical world. Unlike the absurd stuff of the en-soi which came into existence without meaning and only fleetingly and artificially contains it when the pour-soi “thinks” it, Roquentin's creation will independently contain meaning—that which his consciousness originally intended for it—and will have done so from its very birth, from the moment of its production by him. The form Roquentin's creation will take is a novel in which, unlike in the biography he had been struggling to write, he will not attempt to “revive” a dead human being or to reinvest a spent life with meaning; history, Roquentin disdainfully concludes, “ça parle de ce qui a existé—jamais un existant ne peut justifier l'existence d'un autre existant” (249). In a fictional story, on the other hand, characters “exist” only in and because of his and his readers' imagination. It is ironic for us that the “adventure” he will produce, he insists, will be “belle et dure comme de l'acier” (250), exactly unlike real life, which overflows with the slime that, though repulsive, has nevertheless led him to the truth of existence. In the end, Roquentin chooses a project that will save him, raft-like, from drowning in the liquid of his own nausea. For Sarraute, to the contrary, the literary work which is beautiful and hard as steal misleads and deludes; it is dead, and therefore sinks rather than saves the writer or reader attached to it.

No discussion of the slimy in Sartre would be complete without reference to Marjery L. Collins's and Christine Pierce's important article, “Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre's Psychoanalysis,” in which the authors are first to point out and object to Sartre's association of the slimy, contingent en-soi with (cultural) femininity and even, they argue, with (biological) femaleness. “Sartre's analysis of slime,” Collins and Pierce state,

leaves him in an ambiguous position at best, for what emerges here is a traditional concept of the feminine, a sweet, clinging, dependent threat to male freedom. Like his predecessors Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Sartre identifies his concept of femininity with female and rails against these qualities in women as if they were natural characteristics, evidence of a given nature.

(117-18)

While in recent volumes such as Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre, some critics have tried to rehabilitate Sartre's reputation among feminists and to salvage from his ontology what can be useful to feminist theory, others still answer the question, “L'existentialisme est-il un féminisme?” with a resounding no (Léon).

However one chooses to interpret it, an association most definitely exists in Sartre's work between women (whether as biologically or culturally produced creatures) and slime. The mode of being of the viscous, Sartre writes in L'Etre, “est une activité molle, baveuse et féminine d'aspiration … il m'attire en lui comme le fond d'un précipice pourrait m'attirer” (655). The allusion to heterosexual intercourse is evident. “Le visqueux,” he goes on to say, “c'est la revanche de l'en-soi. Revanche douceâtre et féminine qui se symbolisera sur un autre plan par la qualité de sucré” (656 author's emphasis). Like the jilted mistress, the slimy refuses to be cast aside and clings alarmingly to her indifferent master. Not only does woman's character but also her body recall the slimy for Sartre, as when, again in L'Etre, he likens the slow dripping of honey (a prototypically viscous and therefore disgusting substance) from a spoon and its “melting” back into the honey still contained in the jar to “l'étalement, le raplatissement des seins un peu mûrs d'une femme qui s'étend sur le dos” (654). In a disturbing passage in La Nausée in which Roquentin becomes sexually aroused when reading a newspaper article about the rape and murder of a little girl, female genitalia are unambiguously identified with slimy, sinister existence:

entrer dans l'existence de l'autre, dans les muqueuses rouges à la lourde, douce, douce odeur d'existence, me sentir exister entre les douces lèvres mouillées, les lèvres rouges de sang pâle, les lèvres palpitantes qui bâillent toutes mouillées d'existence, toutes mouillées d'un pus clair, entre les lèvres mouillées sucrées qui larmoient comme des yeux.

(148)

Although Roquentin also perceives the soft, sickening existence of his own body here—“Mon corps de chair qui vit, la chair qui grouille et tourne doucement liqueurs, qui tourne crème …” (148)—these feelings are only provoked by the imagined engulfment in a beckoning but threatening female chasm (“me sentir exister entre les douces lèvres mouillées”). After all, his own male sex is hard (“beau et dur comme de l'acier,” he might say) until the slimy feminine lips suck from it its vitality. In La Nausée there is also the frequently quoted passage in which Roquentin dreams that the sex of the woman with whom he has just had intercourse is a thick garden crawling with insects and crabs and imbued with vomit (90-1). Janette Bayles argues that in this novel, Roquentin's encounters with women and a feminized nature “are suffused with overtones of what Julia Kristeva has termed abjection, that is, a mixed reaction of fascinated horror elicited by the imminent transgression or collapse of the boundaries of the self” (1-2).⁷ In other words, in vulnerable moments when the Sartrean subject feels he is losing his “shell,” so to speak, he is particularly susceptible to the clinginess of the slimy which recalls to him the soft clinginess of the mother before his separation from her and his entry into the hard, Symbolic world of language. While on some level the Sartrean subject longs for this reunion, as John Phillips (in a text to which I will refer again below) argues the Sarrautean subject does, he must in the end overcome this fascination and reject the slimy if he is to transcend the (feminine) en-soi and assert his primacy and independence as the (masculine) pour-soi.

In Sarraute's Le Planétarium, Alain Guimier's father Pierre is also guilty, like Sartre, of associating both the sucré and, if not exactly the visqueux then the boueux, with a degraded feminine. Blaming what he perceives as Alain's affected bohemianism and scholarly impotence (Alain cannot seem to finish his doctoral thesis) on the feminine influence of Pierre's sister Berthe, Pierre imagines in the following passage Berthe's conception of Alain as a little boy: “le pauvre ange, il aime tant les petites gâteries, les sucreries, ah le petit coquin, gourmand comme une chatte, et coquet … pire qu'une fille” (137-38 my emphases). With her interference in his rearing of Alain, Berthe, according to the ultra-macho Pierre,

ne relâchait jamais sa pression. Elle avait la puissance aveugle d'une force naturelle et [Pierre] luttait toujours, comme les Hollandais contre l'envahissement de l'eau, cédant du terrain, construisant plus loin des digues: jeux virils, instructifs, discours moraux, herbiers, promenades dans les musées, collections de papillons … mais le flot irrésistible s'infiltrait partout, le terrain était poreux, s'imbibait rapidement. Molle terre spongieuse, bourbeuse, sur laquelle il s'acharnait, qu'il essayait d'améliorer suivant les méthodes modernes les plus perfectionnées, avec les plus riches terreaux, avec de nouveaux engrais … il asséchait, remuait, retournait, désherbait, sarclait, plantait …

(137-38)

In this particularly rich metaphor, the young Alain is a vulnerable, porous land that Berthe's wet femininity regularly inundates and that Pierre must attempt to keep dry through the virile work of construction (of dams) and cultivation, but here it is the father rather than the mother who desperately combats the insidious fluid). Pierre sees Berthe's feminine power as aveugle and naturelle—like women's jealousy or intuition—and is therefore reassured that it can be combated with superior rationality and a masculine use of science. Yet rather than revealing in Sarraute herself a Sartrean repulsion for women's wetness, this metaphor is, as are most in her work, a cultural lieu commun, a representation of the assumptions of the society and the people her work mirrors. Pierre is a typical male, French bourgeois of the 1950s, and the metaphors his consciousness tropismically generates reflect his sexist world view.

Nevertheless, the question of whether Sarraute, like Sartre, associates the liquid and/or the slimy with the feminine can still be posed and can reveal interesting insights. In his Nathalie Sarraute: Metaphor, Fairy-Tale and the Feminine of the Text (1994), John Phillips argues that, since the metaphor is a rhetorical device that suppresses differences between the two objects being compared, the abounding metaphors in Sarrraute's work suggest a desire for the suppression of linguistic differences imposed by the masculine symbolic (4). Phillips sees throughout Sarraute's work a floating desire for a return to a pre-linguistic origin, which is, in Lacanian terms, an Imaginary wholeness or sameness with the mother. Sarraute's endlessly evolving and returning metaphors signal an eternal desire for a reunion with the mother that cannot be effected (5). Setting aside Sarraute's own unqualified disdain for psychoanalysis, Phillips's interpretation of Sarrautean metaphor is useful to the present discussion (if somewhat reductive overall) in that he calls the anonymous and incorporeal voice or voices that run through Sarraute's texts and that produce the endless stream of metaphors both “feminine” and “fluid” (9-10).

In her Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference (2000), Ann Jefferson also argues, through different means, for the importance of the concept of sameness in Sarraute's work. She shows that in Sarraute's texts, perceived differences between individuals are always undermined, and that one of Sarraute's principal preoccupations as a writer is the revelation of the fundamental universality of the workings (tropisms) of the human psyche (Jefferson 40-1, 51-2, for example). Jefferson is one of the few critics who notes the frequency in Sarraute of metaphors in which, as in many of the passages reproduced above, individuals secrete a liquid or slimy substance that infect those around them. “The world of Tropismes (as of Portrait d'un inconnu and Martereau),” Jefferson writes, “is one of seeping secretions which threaten to engulf a being who, for all his claims about underlying sameness, lives in perpetual fear of the consequences of being found to be different” (42-3). Sarraute's characters, Jefferson points out, continually attempt to connect with others and affirm their sameness with them. But while they are terrified to find differences between themselves and others (which at any rate, Sarraute shows, they are unlikely in the end to find), at the same time they also fear the imposition upon them of others' thoughts and opinions, which are dangerously embodied in the sticking slime they emit. Sarrautean characters want at one and the same time to assert a presumed difference from (and often superiority to) others, and to see mirrored in others their own opinions, insecurities, hopes, and passions.

While in his analysis Phillips associate sameness with the feminine (the world of the feminine Imaginary), Jefferson takes into account Sarraute's categorical dismissal of the claim that femininity and masculinity are anything but cultural constructs⁸ and emphasizes that Sarraute's psychic sameness is just that: the fundamental, inner sameness of all human beings, male or female. As Jefferson notes, all of Sarraute's characters, male and female, share a certain fluidity and amorphousness; for Sarraute, she argues, “the inherent nature of subjectivity [is] matter that lacks shape and consistency and which therefore cannot easily be contained within limits. …” (44). Subjectivity's “characteristic mode of being,” she goes on, “is insinuation, adherence, infiltration, absorption—all of which the other seems instinctively inclined to resist. … And where the avidities and intrusions of subjectivity do not elicit recoil in the other who encounters it, they are embraced as self-abasement” (45), a self-abasement which, again, is not characteristic of women only but of all human subjects. This underlying desire for self-abasement by the dissolution of barriers between self and other and contact with the other's “slime,” moreover, is not unlike Roquentin's ambiguous reaction to the abject, as Bayles sees it. Both Roquentin and Sarraute's shadowy characters alternately seek and flee from a union with slimy otherness.

Sarraute's conception of the slimy is nevertheless more positive overall than is Sartre's. For both authors, sliminess and amorphousness are natural, usually hidden qualities of all objects in the world. Yet significantly, Sarraute extends the metaphor to include not only objects and, as does Sartre, the human body (especially the female body), but also human consciousness, an inclusion which Sartre would heartily reject. While Sartre does liken consciousness to pure, unclinging water, he never characterizes it as slimy. Consciousness for Sarraute, which is nothing but the constant and inescapable flow of fluid tropisms, does take on a viscous aspect, does cling to, and does contaminate that which it touches. While in both writers' work, the revelation of the slimy is indispensable to the characters' ultimate understanding of reality, for Sartre, the poursoi (the individual) always maintains the capacity, and indeed has the duty, to transcend or to separate itself from the en-soi. While the en-soi's sliminess makes it difficult for the pour-soi to carry out this separation (“[c]ette succion du visqueux que je sens sur mes mains ébauche comme une continuité de la substance visqueuse à moi-même” [L'Etre 656, author's emphasis]), it can do so, by reflecting on it (for Sartrean consciousness is never identical to that on which it reflects)⁹ and by choosing to do what the en-soi cannot: to exercise its liberty and to do and, through its acts, be whatever it chooses. That the human being can and must assume this radical liberty (within certain limits, he would admit in his later work) is of course the central message of Sartre's writings.

A not very subtle but still accurate summary of the differences between Sartre and Sarraute's view of subjectivity might run as follows: Sartre suggests that while most people think they are not free (i.e., are living in bad faith), they really are. Sarraute, on the other hand, proposes that while most people think they are free, they really are not. Paradoxically, Sartre uses a relatively classic literary form to convey his message of liberty, while Sarraute creates a highly unconventional and original form to convey her missive of human uniformity! A brief comparison of two of the authors' texts not previously mentioned here may help to illustrate this point. While Enfance (1983), Sarraute's account of her childhood, is in fact one of her most narratively conservative texts, its form is still much more innovative than is that of Sartre's corresponding autobiographical text, Les Mots (1964). As for content, there are many striking similarities between the two works. Both authors chose to write what I would call a “demi”-autobiography, as both texts end at the authors' adolescence, and they seem to have had (and chose to write about) many similar experiences. Both grew up in bourgeois families, for the most part in Paris, and with only five years' difference in their ages, it is even likely they crossed paths while promenading with their bonne in the Luxembourg Garden, a lieu de mémoire for both of them. They both examine their loss of a parent,¹⁰ their unnerving realization of their own ugliness, and their precocious obsession with words. Indeed the titles of the two works could easily be switched and still be appropriate. While both authors lucidly debunk the myth of the predestined writer and expose the bad faith of their childhood selves, Sarraute's narration leaves much more room for doubt as to the accuracy of the “story” being constructed; Enfance is a hesitating, equivocal dialogue between one narrator who attempts to remember and to find the appropriate words to express her memories, and another (a skeptical alter-ego) who continually challenges the truth of the first narrator's narration. The single, enlightened narrator of Les Mots is a rigorous thinker who thoroughly psychoanalyzes his subject (his younger self) and who is able at the end of the narrative to pronounce a diagnosis (delusions of grandeur) as well as a cure (acceptance of ordinariness and engagement). Sarraute's narrator(s) hesitates, wonders, tries, and errs, and finally ends the narrative not because she has solved any mystery, but rather because “cette couche protectrice … ces épaisseurs blanchâtres, molles, ouatées” from which she has been attempting to extract memories “disparaissent avec l'enfance,” along with the challenge of the writing project (Enfance 277). What came after childhood is “bien éclairé,” too well lit to interest her in her ongoing search for hidden realities (277).

In conclusion, it is evident enough in the interview cited at the beginning of this essay that Nathalie Sarraute as a writer resisted the radical indifferentiation she found and revealed through her literary work. As I have said, she almost always met comparisons between other writers and herself with either skepticism or, in the case of Sartre, hostility. “On dit que mes textes font penser à ceux de Virginia Woolf,” she once said, for example, “mais je pourrais presque dire que son travail est à l'opposé du mien” (“Entretiens avec Nathalie Sarraute” 11).¹¹ Even when asked in another interview if she thought that Beauvoir's Les belles Images “avait été influencé par la sous-conversation de Nathalie Sarraute,” and therefore that she had influenced Beauvoir, Sarraute replied, “il m'est impossible de voir le moindre rapport entre son livre et les miens. Il n'y a pas un trait de commun! Ni dans la forme, ni dans le fond!” (“Nathalie Sarraute ne veut rien avoir de commun”). She proves herself so fiercely individualist here that she resists not only the idea that she was influenced by anyone before her, but also the idea that anyone after her could have been influenced by (or could have been capable of imitating?) her. She particularly hated being compared to women writers,¹² and in this she was more like Simone de Beauvoir than she realized. Sartre, whose admiration of Sarraute's work had cooled after Portrait (and after Sarraute had published essays condemning as archaic the kind of traditional narrative he and Beauvoir were producing),¹³ laid upon Le Planétarium perhaps the worst criticism imaginable to Sarraute, calling the novel “un ouvrage de femme” (Interview with Madeleine Chapsal 214).¹⁴ Sarraute disliked intensely the étiquette “woman writer”, but in fact she detested, like her characters, any kind of labeling at all (nouveau roman was another sticker she worked hard to try to remove from her texts). So although in Sarraute's texts, differences between individuals are diminished to the point where “characters” are reduced to nothing more than anonymous personal pronouns, Sarraute herself fiercely clung to her own sense of individuality and originality. In this she is not unlike, yet again, Jean-Paul Sartre, who resisted the ever-present existentialist tag (Beauvoir 50), and who in his life and work championed nothing if not individual liberty and freedom from conformism. Bad faith on the part of Sarraute? She was most probably aware of this contradiction within herself, of her own resistance to the indifferent slime that makes up the human reality her writing reveals. Her own struggle for difference and individuality was nothing, she might have surmised, but a manifestation of the subconscious, ever-present, fluid tropisms that she could not, any more than her characters, control.

Notes

1. For an account of Sarraute's activities and of her contact with Sartre during the war, see the chronology of the author's life in the Œuvres complètes (xxxvi-ix). For two very different assessments of Sartre's activities during the war, see Dominique Desanti and Bianca Lamblin in La Naissance du phénomène Sartre.

2. In her recent book, Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory (2000), Ann Jefferson notes that while Sarraute shared many of Beauvoir's “first-generation” feminist views, each woman criticized the other's work at least once in print, Beauvoir in La Force des choses (291) and Sarraute in an interview aptly entitled “Nathalie Sarraute ne veut rien avoir de commun avec Simone de Beauvoir” (Jefferson 114-15).

3. See especially Sarraute's critical essay “Flaubert le précurseur” for an understanding of her contention that the writer's first preoccupation, first responsibility even, should be to create new forms of writing that will reveal to readers the new realities of their world.

4. In her excellent overview of Sarraute criticism, Sheila Bell mentions Jean-Luc Jaccard, Christine B. Wunderli-Müller, and Elisabeth Eliez-Rüegg as critics who have produced what Bell calls “phenomenological readings” of the author's work, readings which, Bell says, “taking their cue from Sartre's preface to the 1948 edition of Portrait, focused increasingly on ‘l'être sarrautien’ and paid little attention to formal matters” (86). Criticism since these early monographs tends to focus much less on Sartre's presumed influence and much more on Sarraute's formal originality.

5. In her book on Sarraute, Ann Jefferson does give the slimy some of the attention it deserves in the author's work. I will outline some of Jefferson's arguments below.

6. All suspension points without spaces between them are Sarraute's own.

7. Bayles refers here to Kristeva's Pouvoirs de l'horreur.

8. For a summary of Sarraute's views on gender differences, see chapter 5, “Sexual Indifference,” in Jefferson's book (96-115). Jefferson quotes Sarraute on the topic from interviews with Michèle Gazier and Sonia Rykiel, for example.

9. In L'Etre et le néant, Sartre argues that while consciousness is always a knowledge of something outside of itself, it is never reducible to the thing of which it is aware. While it can never be separated from phenomena in the world, it itself is not just another phenomenon. Rather it is a “nothingness” and is therefore, as I conclude above, different if not totally separate from phenomena. See especially “Le cogito préréflexif et l'être du percipere” in L'Etre, 16-22.

10. Sartre's father died before he was born, and Sarraute's mother essentially abandoned her to the girl's father.

11. Jefferson reproduces this quote on page 187 of her book, note 14.

12. “[T]outes les comparaisons,” Sarraute tells another interviewer, “me paraissent … insupportables. Surtout cette manie qu'on a de comparer les femmes entre elles” (“Interview: Nathalie Sarraute” 92). And in yet another interview, she claims, “Quand j'écris, je ne suis ni homme ni femme ni chien ni chat. … Jamais je ne me pense en tant que femme, je me mélange, je refuse de parler d'écriture féminine, de participer à des mouvements qui séparent les hommes, les femmes, c'est contraire à mes opinions” (Interview with Sonia Rykiel 40).

13. Anne Jefferson, one of the editors of Sarraute's Œuvres complètes, points out there in her notes to “Conversation et sous-conversation” that the essay was refused by Sartre's journal, Les Temps modernes, and that in La Force des choses (291) Beauvoir seems to see the essay as a direct attack on the narrative mode of Les Mandarins (Œuvres complètes 2078).

14. When Sartre's interviewer, Madeleine Chapsal, challenges this comment, asking him if he thought that women could only produce “des livres de femme,” Sartre protests, “Pas du tout. Un livre de femme, c'est un livre qui refuse de prendre à son compte ce que font les hommes” (214). Readers today might be prompted to wonder what Sartre thought about books that take into account what women do. “Beaucoup d'hommes,” Sartre continues, “n'ont jamais écrit que des livres féminins. Et par femme,” he hastens to add, “je veux dire ici ‘femme sociale’” (214). We might also wonder if there were any “femmes non-sociales” for Sartre, and if so, whether at least they were capable of writing “des livres d'homme.”

Works Cited

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———. “Conversation et sous-conversation.” 1956. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. 1587-1607.

———. “Dialogue avec Nathalie Sarraute.” Interview with Françoise Dupuy-Sullivan. Romance Quarterly 37 (1990): 188-92.

———. Enfance. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.

———. Entre la Vie et la mort. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.

———. “Entretiens avec Nathalie Sarraute.” Interview with Carmen Licari. Francofonia 9 (1985): 3-16.

———. Les Fruits d'or. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

———. “Interview: Nathalie Sarraute.” Interview with Pierre Boncenne. Lire Jun. 1983: 92.

———. Interview with Sonia Rykiel. Les Nouvelles 9-15 Feb. 1984: 40-1.

———. Martereau. Paris: Gallimard, 1953.

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