SOURCE: Miller, Judith G. “Nathalie Sarraute: How to Do Mean Things With Words.” Modern Drama 34, no. 1 (March 1991): 118-27.

[In the following essay, Miller analyses Sarraute's plays in the context of her other prose writing, calling attention to the relationship she creates between language and imaginative construction in works that are vastly different from traditional theater.]

“How could we live if we took umbrage at every little phrase, if we didn't quite reasonably allow words, after all insignificant and anodyne, just to pass on by, if we created a huge story out of so little, out of less than nothing?”¹ This question, posed by the chatty narrator in one of Nathalie Sarraute's meditations in L'Usage de la parole (1980), ironically underscores the focus of all of Sarraute's work, for she has spent a fifty-year writing career creating “stories” (or better, “dramas”) out of what would appear to be very little indeed. At eighty-nine, with eight novels, six theater pieces, a volume of critical essays, two volumes of short prose pieces—of which her 1939 Tropismes is the best known—and an astonishing recent autobiography (1983), she can lay claim to being one of the great writers of twentieth-century France. Her works display a degree of intertextuality which is extraordinary, even in a century in which intertextuality is both an artistic and critical norm.² This obsessional return especially to the same images and rhythms is meant to come to grips with the “real” drama underlying surface existence.

Sarraute maddens critics: if at first they did not understand her almost messianic insistence on doing away with behavioral explanations in her novels, they now wonder why she refuses to be reclaimed as a self-conscious woman writer.³ She has been grouped with the “new novelists” and, theatrically, within the minimalist tradition of Beckett and Duras. The first concept has proven bankrupt, given the stunning divergencies among the individual postwar writers associated with this “anti-novel” movement; the second is at best reductive. While she shares some techniques with Beckett and Duras (a penchant for linguistic games, a sense of spatial and temporal imprisonment, an intensity of character interaction), Sarraute eliminates any possibility of Beckett's metaphysical laughter or Duras's painful eroticism.

She continues to intrigue the scholar who would attempt to understand the state of prose narrative and theater at the close of the century and who would, further, try to maintain a difference between the two, for she comes as close as any writer to demonstrating that genre does not count. She does so in works which could be argued as among the most violent of the modern period. Yet this is neither an easily graspable nor conventional violence. It is barely thematized, and it is “felt” more than stated. In fact, after some reflection, Sarraute's violence—particularly in her theater pieces—might just be a function of collapsing differences between novel and theater, of “creating huge stories (dramas) out of less than nothing.”

“Nothing” already implies something—for without something, “nothing” does not exist. Sarraute's texts, prose and theater, function to make palpable this something which is not “nothing,” but which, instead, has no name, a “something” which escapes discursiveness altogether. In an early and insightful study of Sarraute's work, René Micha insists on the inherent drama of the fundamental figure in all her work which attempts to give form to this absence: the tropism.⁴ Sarraute herself explains in a pointed essay the overwhelming goal of her writing life: “The dramas constituted by those unarticulated (subconscious) actions interest […] me in and of themselves. Nothing [can] distract me from them. Nothing should distract the reader's attention, either: neither the psychological make-up of the characters, nor the kind of novelistic plot which ordinarily depends on the characters' development, nor familiar and categorized emotions.”⁵ The result of this preoccupation is the creation of texts which could all be subsumed under the concept of a “theater of the mind.” Sarraute's work, then, prompts a reading which, at least in the first instance, does not distinguish between forms of expression.

Tropisms, as botanists would demonstrate, are movements in response to a stimulus. In Sarraute's oeuvre this stimulus can be material goods, like the white sale items in tropism no. 1 (Tropismes), or ambiguous characters, like the father-daughter couple in the novel Portrait d'un inconnu (1948), or more frequently, especially in the later works, a cliché or commonplace, like the phrase “C'est beau” [It's beautiful] in the play of the same name (1975). “Characters,” in so far as this term is operable, mentally dance around the compelling thing, person, or phrase—the latter two reified by this very process. For example, in the play Le Silence (1967) the silent character Jean-Pierre, by dint of the other characters' fascination with his muteness, is made to seem a monstrous modern sphinx.

Sarraute's coinage of the word “tropism” for a literary structuring device speaks both to her desire to approach human behavior “scientifically”—that is, as an observer—and, paradoxically, to her tendency to jumble scientific realms of inquiry by vegetalizing human beings: “They [which the reader finally discovers to be window-shoppers] seemed to spring up from nowhere, blossoming out in the slightly moist tepidity of the air, they flowed gently along as though they were seeping from the walls” (tropism no. 1, p. 1). Her third-person narrators, as in, for example, tropisms nos. 10 and 11, take on the contours of ornithologists or more frequently entomologists, helping metamorphose the characters being observed from plant-like creatures into birds or insects: “They, they, they, they, always they, voracious, chirping, dainty” (p. 26); “There were a great many like her, hungry, pitiless parasites, leeches, firmly settled on the articles that appeared, slugs stuck everywhere, spreading their mucus on corners of Rimbaud, sucking on Mallarmé” (p. 29).

In L'Usage de la parole—a virtuoso set of parodies of traditional story-telling techniques—stories turn in one themselves to dissect the uncanny and the uncomfortable, or, to use a Sarrautean-like analogy, to expose the slugs under the wet, molding leaves themselves squashed under the solid rocks of words. Images of slime, mucus, viscosity, reptilian oozings, and unhealthy fungal growths abound in all her works: “it would be like some horrible contact, like touching a jellyfish with the end of a stick and then waiting with loathing for it suddenly to shudder, rise up and fall back down again” (tropism no. 5, p. 12); The Son “In a minute [as if about to emit terrible mocking laughter] like an octopus, I'm going to secrete … going to spread out my black sticky ink … “(C'est beau, p. 59); She “Something oozes out of them, insinuates itself … it gets at you … makes you feel sick … it's part of everything about them … it seems like nothing, but …” (Isma, pp. 80-81). This overflow of appalling images encourages the reader or spectator to experience involuntary shivery sensations analogous to tropisms.

Not just in Isma (1970), but in all six theater pieces, the missing or unsettling character around whom the dialogue revolves can be and usually is described as though a laboratory subject, skewered to a display board or subjected to meticulous examination. Such is the case of H1 in Pour un oui ou pour un non (1982), who has the immutable impression of being held in the hand of H2 and “turned, prodded, and probed” (pp. 19, 29). Trussed as the “specimen” might be, the secret of his or her interest or repulsiveness can never really be uncovered: “He” and “She” will never be sure that it is the way the Dubuits pronounce “ism” that provokes their own homicidal urges (Isma); the six participants in Le Mensonge (1967) will never know whether it is Pierre or Simone who is lying and, moreover, they may never again know how to tell the true from the false.

In Sarraute's work, approach-avoidance patterns that have no anchor in any convenient cause-and-effect schema foreground a pervasive emptiness, a slipperiness of meaning, an insecurity of origins. In tropism no. 3 images “forever banished” from the imagination of the central characters, neighbors who look like ivory eggs, and a freedom which amounts to disenfranchisement sketch the nothingness which adds up to the characters' lives. In the play Elle est là (1978) the character H1, after coercing his associate into (perhaps) agreeing with his unarticulated opinion, gives up on any attempt at argumentation and accepts silence as the only location of “the truth.” In C'est beau a nuclear family disintegrates because the source of authority slips continuously back and forth from the parents to the child.

Such patterns of unstoppable advancing and retreating communicate a generalized state of panic or, worse, what might be termed an automated paralysis: in tropism no. 4, for example, a group of women pirouette around a man/maestro, responding to his invisible baton in order to keep him interested and thus safely palliated: “Heavens, how exhausting! How exhausting is all this effort, this perpetual hopping and skipping about in his presence: backward, forward, forward, forward, and backward again, now circling about him, then again on one's toes with eyes glued to him, and sidewise and forward and backward […]” (p. 10). In tropism no. 21 a woman keeps up a running clichéd conversation with her family, unable to retreat from the side of their dying grandmother: “[…] no, no, it was too soon, she must not stand up already, not leave, she was not going to separate from them, she was going to stay there, near them, quite near, as near as possible, of course she understood, [it was] so nice to have an older brother, she shook her head, smiled, oh, not her, first, oh! no […]” (p. 51).

In the cited tropisms, as in all Sarraute's fiction and theater, there is no thesis, no conclusion, no ethical perception, but simply a recognition of the effect of a psychological state. In her latest prose piece, Tu ne t'aimes pas (1989), both self-love and self-doubt appear pathological. In fact, throughout her novels, Tropismes, and the theater pieces incessant intimations of the world as an insane asylum with its occupants in straitjackets reinforce this perception of lived life as sickness.

She creates a feeling of claustrophobia because there is no release from vacillation and no concept of ending, but rather an ongoing suffocation of what has traditionally been thought of as “life” (willpower, choice, definition). Unnamed or unformed beings, such as the characters in her novel Le Planétarium (1959), are unselfconsciously caught up in completely irresistible responses. They are as if remotely controlled by forces outside of their ken that will never allow them to settle. Her works themselves will not come to a close. The final exchanges of her plays, for example, are inconclusive. Arguments such as the focal question of Pour un oui ou pour un non are primed to start up again.

Sarraute thus draws out in excruciatingly long sequences what passes in experiential terms as merely a “moment’ of uneasiness. Time in her works manifests itself as a hugely amplified present. Sometimes an entire novel, such as Tu ne t'aimes pas, can be based on a passing reflection or an interaction which becomes obsessional. In Le Silence an ending which contradicts all the prior performance makes the entire piece feel like an elongation of a split second of doubt stretched into an eternity.

Especially, but far from exclusively, in the more conventional early novels (Portrait d'un inconnu; Martereau [1953]), characters attempt to find a certain rigidity with which to align themselves, a stable notion about “how things work.” This attempt usually highlights the ungraspability of the “real.” In the theater texts and in Tropismes, the characters who are seen by the others as the most solid, for example Jean-Pierre in Le Silence or H2 in Pour un oui ou pour un non, end up sapping everyone else's energy while remaining as enigmatic as their more blob-like fellows. In Tu ne t'aimes pas, which she continues to call obstinately a “novel” but which is entirely in dialogue from between two nameless characters, the characters arrive by accident at a desired state of fixity, anger giving them momentary authority. Consequently their insecurity—their “not liking themselves”—does not seep out and does not, like their self-doubts, contaminate their entourage. Nonetheless, they finish by putting the worth of this new-found potency into question: “We couldn't ask for better …” / “We couldn't ask for better?” / “Nothing better? Really?” (p. 216).

In Sarraute's fictional world nothing can be known beyond banalities. But the banalities themselves are fraught with complexities and conflicts in meaning. As in the prose pieces in L'Usage de la parole, the most cherished concepts (“friendship,” “love”) are undermined, while an apparently simple phrase (“And why not?”) or profound one (“I'm dying”) means both more and less than what conventional wisdom would ascribe. The plays all parody a quest for the answer to why something is “off” by turning the search into a nightmare of commonplaces: “Everybody's like that now”; “All kids are like that”; “We're like everybody else” (p. 52), spews forth the Father in C'est beau to conjure away the specter of his son's difference. Words can never quite arrive at what it is that characters are trying to express. And the frequent ellipses in Sarraute's theater texts indicate how often language fails, how repeatedly characters are stymied in their search for something to say. They ultimately fall back on platitudes as a way of simultaneously masking and revealing the fact that there are no other words to set forth what it is that they really want to formulate. Theater characters especially appear as only the sum of their utterances.

Sarraute's texts, then, prose fiction or drama, excel in the expression of hidden tensions through a similar economy of means. She primarily shows rather than tells. Indeed, there is less and less description in her novels as time goes by, her most recent works relying principally on interior monologue or dialogue which could in fact be that of a schizophrenic talking between “selves.” In both her novels and theater, emotional impact depends on formal properties rather than on anything which might be construed as a story. This “theater of the mind” situates itself in the midst of what critic Ross Chambers posits as modern culture: a culture in which alienation is a primary mode of being and in which storytellers can no longer communicate knowledge but are condemned to demonstrate the fragmentation of existence through the controlling properties of language.⁶

For Sarraute, words are so fascinating and dangerous that there is enough drama in them to fuel all her fictional pursuits. For her characters, this amounts to a stagnant exercise of attempting to think themselves one of truisms on the one hand and, on the other, to the performance of a self-image which reveals the variety of the concept of “self.” All that can be represented are clichés of humanity. Characters, sitting somewhere between a desired image and an imposed one, have no subjectivity; the notion of “subject” is lost in language.

Rather than illustrating the power of narrative to change relationships, Sarraute thus asks if narrative can do anything at all. Indeed, in all the instances where characters themselves try to tell someone else's story, their own narration is foiled or interrupted. In the critical terms of poststructuralism, Sarraute would seem to place on her stage of the mind the postmodern condition in which representation and narrative authority are in doubt and where language constitutes a prison rather than offering a liberation.

To stop at this rather facile positioning of Sarraute among postmoderns is, nonetheless, to deny again what is specific to her work—its peculiar violence. It is not merely that her characters feel like “gassing, setting fire to, strangulating, stabbing, or axing” each other (Elle est là, p. 29). Nor is the violence simply connected to the fact they are so grotesquely afraid that they approach implosion. It does not result, either, exclusively from the world vision that emerges from this process of victimizer/victimization and Sarraute's elimination of representations of all other emotional attachments—such as tenderness, generosity, compassion, or integrity. Finally, the rage that takes hold in reading or seeing her pieces cannot be explained, as Jean-Paul Sartre optimistically would have it, through the detection of the “authentic” hidden in the midst of the “inauthenticity” which, according to him, propels and makes up most lives.⁷

On the contrary, Sarraute's “authentic” takes the shape of the muck and slime which Sartre habitually designates as the inverse of his hard and tough existential “real.” Her ooze is her real, and it has the same sick seductive power of a bloody accident site, a dead dog, or a drunk's vomit. She sets up her readers or spectators—by attracting them through these figures of repulsion, through the rage the characters themselves feel, and through other techniques of destabilization—to experience the violence of their alienation from language, from community, and from an unquestioned concept of self. In other words, she enrages her public by manipulating it into the same impotent situation as her characters.⁸

In the prose pieces, she particularly destabilizes readers by her transgressive treatment of point of view and narratorial positioning. Who is seeing and who is speaking are frequently unclear. Her narrators slip from inside to outside the characters, a technique which pulls readers into the character's anxiety and then ejects them to a place of no possible contact with the character at all. In a novel such as Portrait d'un inconnu, the first-person narrator—who originally attracts the empathy of the reader—becomes so engrossed in the couple on which he spies that he disappears into his attempts to analyze them. His move from an objective stance to personal confession to, finally, complete symbiosis with the objects of his study correspondingly changes the position of the reader. If the spied-on couple remains “unknown” for the observer, it is the latter who becomes for the reader the real “unknown” and unknowable man of the novel's title. Readers thus move from the comfort of rational control to psychological chaos.

In his previously cited analysis of 19th-century art-stories, Ross Chambers shows how the seductive tactics of the individual narrative are also “figured” in each story. This embedded model of how the receptor of the text is involved is similarly patent in Sarraute's work, most notably in her theater. In Isma, He and She, in their effort to wound with words the absent Dubuits, draw all of the others into their self-conscious game until they metaphorically cannibalize the objects of their play, smacking their lips over the Dubuits's odd pronunciation of “ism.” Yet, they cannot derive full satisfaction from their linguistic anthropophagy, because they know too well that they are condemned to “give shape to silence” (p. 73). In Le Mensonge, Pierre functions like a social lie detector, not only turning up other people's fibs, but also insinuating the impossibility of ever doing anything except fibbing. Performing in a psychodrama that they themselves set up, the characters of Le Mensonge attempt to exorcise their need to permit lies to live. They end up, however, confused about who is lying. They have no choice but to hop, skip, and jump around “the truth.” There is, then, no rest, no exorcism, and no catharsis at the end of Sarraute's theater-in-the-theater movements. This replicates the absence of catharsis for the flesh-and-blood receptors of Sarraute's work.

Even in plays which do not so obviously have a theater-in-the-theater component, such as Pour un oui ou pour un non, the characters recognize that their only possible rapport with each other consists in pushing the other to the limits of the bearable and then slightly retreating—in order to start attacking again. “Communication,” including the communication Sarraute's art affords, consists, then, of linguistic sparring matches which cannot be won but which must be played out to the depths of abjection.

Furthermore, Sarraute's horrible or pitiful characters, completely lacking in charm, would seem to project nothing which would capture the spectator's desire to identify. Nonetheless, like the two neighbors called in to watch the debate between H1 and H2 in Pour un oui ou pour un non, or like the character Lucie in Le Mensonge, identification on some level is inevitable. Lucie, for example, “sticks” (p. 111) to Edgar, the object of conversation, as though they were glued together. Witnesses and thus participants, “spectators” within the play as well as spectators of the play are positioned to become involved. Sarraute even resorts to direct address techniques in Elle est là to solicit the audience's opinion. Moreover, in the same play she adds a “stiff bourgeois man” who steps out of and stands in for the public in seconding H2's hysterical intolerance.

Identification is further complicated by Sarraute's scrambling of the scapegoating mechanism. All her plays include a scapegoat and would seem to function as though to banish him or her from the society of the other characters in order to solidify and reinvigorate the community. Yet the scapegoating process itself is shown to be bereft of any real meaning. Either the effects of rejection explode the community and all the characters are isolated, or the so-called community remaining at the end of the play is dangerously at odds, existing only in furious verbal melees. Wherever the spectators position themselves, they can thus find neither solace nor empowerment.

The seduction model posited by Sarraute is one in which there is no catharsis yet a great desire for it, no empowerment through identification yet no way to avoid it, and no viable communication yet the recognition that “communication” is taking place. What this amounts to is that the principal ways in which drama normally functions are undercut. Sarraute has chosen to make her “dramas” as undramatic as possible, and it is this refusal of “drama” which makes them so painful to experience.

When her texts are moved from the stage of the mind to the material world of theater this violation of convention forecloses on the audience's pleasure. Words become daggers for all concerned. Sarraute's largely successful attempt to control the possibilities of theatrical “excess,” including forgoing the necessity of elaborate sets, make-up, costumes, and sound, does violence to the bodies of the actors and the spectators.

If directed according to what the texts suggest, there would be almost no movement in a Sarrautean production, or there would be the paradoxical movement of beasts trapped in a cage who do not really wish to get out.⁹ Characters would be stuck in fixed positions in vaguely indicated bourgeois salons. They would not shake hands, kiss, dance, walk, eat, or touch in any manner. They would only enter and exit a total of thirteen times for all six plays—six times alone for Elle est là. This lack of noticeable choreography and proxemics would thus focus all the attention on voice.

Voices would hold all her theatrical world together and perform the violence which gives to life, as she represents it, its only emotional punch. Indeed, in C'est beau characters would even double or triple their own voices, artificially peopling their argument in order to keep it going. In other plays (Le Silence, Isma), snatches of conversation, which would be incomprehensible to the public, would help create the ongoing tension of moments in which nothing happens. The few didascalia which exist in her plays—for example, “anguished,” “self-satisfied,” “sighing” (C'est beau) or “in a cold rage” (Le Silence)—suggest a level of stress which would both contain and make felt an intense hostility, all the more intense because operating in a relentless present. The only “movement” would thus occur in the rhythms of language production, silences possessing a density which would have the potential for greater psychological weight than all the frantic talking.

Thus Sarraute's theater promises no sensual pleasure, no kinesthetic release, and no transcendance through ritual. Actors and spectators cannot hold onto anything except the relationship which is created between them. And this relationship is catastrophic in its insistence on nothingness: “We look through a microscope, we see something enormous that takes over the stage for an hour. After it all closes up again, nothing has happened.”¹⁰

It is tempting to return to biographical criticism to understand why violence is both the result and the basis for Sarraute's entire imaginative construction. In her autobiography Enfance, she portrays her apprenticeship to language as a structuring device which allows her to hide the devastation of her mother's desertion. Words, however, never quite cover up completely the maternal betrayal. Her mother, like the texts Sarraute produces, is palimpsestic: the wicked stepmother and “the fairest of them all” rolled into one.

The informing image of Enfance shows Sarraute as a very little child enjoined “not to do that!” She, nevertheless, tears into an armchair with a pair of scissors. Fascinated and shocked by the soft grey stuffing which comes pouring out, she can at last control it by giving it form through writing. Scissors (and pen) allow her to attack an otherwise uncontrollable realm and, consequently, give shape to her own emotional vulnerability which threatens to engulf her in its sickening—because sentimental—meaning.

The result of this control in theatrical terms is to freeze her audience in the complete violent stasis of anger. Through opposition and oppositional categorizations, all her characters condemn each other and the audience to “non-life.” Sarraute is not in the business of helping create a new response to the world; her theater is a lab for the limits of human possibilities. She may test the boundaries of what theater and the novel can be, but she gets stalled at a certain phase of this questioning. The dominance of the linguistic does, indeed, end up positing rationalism's limits, but not necessarily with the results Sarraute intends. The theatrical event suggests that there is something more than just muck beyond words, or perhaps that muck, rather than negative, is exactly the location for a new and constructive playfulness.

Notes

1. Nathalie Sarraute, “Mon petit,” L'Usage de la parole (Paris, 1980), p. 112. All translations, with the exception of citations from Tropismes, are my own. The following editions of Sarraute's work have been used and will be cited in this essay: Martereau (Paris, 1953); Le Planétarium (Paris, 1959); Portrait d'un inconnu (Paris, 1956); Pour un oui ou pour un non (Paris, 1982); Théâtre: Elle est là, C'est beau, Isma, Le Mensonge, Le Silence (Paris, 1978); Tropisms, tr. Maria Jolas (New York, 1963); Tu ne t'aimes pas (Paris, 1989).

2. See the excellent work of Ann Jefferson, especially her essay “Autobiography as Intertext: Barthes, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet,” Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, edd. Michael Worton and Judith Still (Manchester, 1990), pp. 108-129.

3. Janice Berkowitz Gross, “Women Writing Across Purposes: The Theater of Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute,” Modern Drama, 32 (March 1989), 39-47.

4. René Micha, Nathalie Sarraute (Paris, 1966), p. 9.

5. Nathalie Sarraute, L'Ere du soupçon (Paris, 1956), p. 9.

6. Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and The Power of Fiction (Minneapolis, 1984).

7. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Préface,” Portrait d'un inconnu (Paris, 1956 [1947]), p. 14.

8. This conclusion somewhat oversimplifies the impact of Sarraute's work, for there is a strong and unblurred satirical component in certain of her prose pieces, especially those tropisms narrated by an unintrusive third-person narrator.

9. Simone Benmussa, who has directed many of Sarraute's plays, describes her attempts to achieve this tension in her preface to a series of interviews with Nathalie Sarraute, Nathalie Sarraute: Qui êtes-vous? (Lyon, 1987).

10. Sarraute, cited in Benmussa, p. 16.