SOURCE: Lee, Mark D. “The Last Word: Deathbed Scenes in the Works of Nathalie Sarraute.” L'Esprit Createur 40, no. 1 (spring 2000): 47-57.

[In the following essay, Lee contends that the deathbed scene is used repeatedly and with consistency across all of Sarraute's work, offering fertile ground for tropismic exploration.]

Je comprends parfaitement que l'on conserve au fond de son portefeuille le récit d'une heure d'agonie, tant d'années durant. Il ne serait même pas nécessaire qu'elle fût particulièrement choisie. Elles ont toutes quelque chose de presque rare.

—R. M. Rilke, Les Cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge¹

With the death of Nathalie Sarraute, it is time to examine a scene whose recurrence and consistency across her literary career demands critical attention. Novels, short texts, even anecdotes recounted in interviews and essays by Sarraute are punctuated by what may best be described as a deathbed scene. A well-visited topos of literature in general and of biography in particular, la scène d'agonie has long attracted authors, undoubtedly because it has the potential to draw together into one focussed moment all the dramatic tensions of a narration. As readers familiar with Sarraute's writing will appreciate, it is unlikely such a scene should play a primarily narrative role in her works. Yet, by repeatedly bringing the reader to the brink of the unknowable and the indicible, the deathbed scene certainly offers fertile ground for tropismic exploration.

AN ENDING AND A BEGINNING: “ICH STERBE”

My approach to reading these scenes extends from the ending of “Ich sterbe,” the first of nine short texts that make up the collection L'Usage de la parole. Published in 1980, “Ich sterbe” presents the most recent and perhaps most developed example of a deathbed scene in Sarraute's works. Here, the last words Chekhov is reported to have uttered before expiring on his deathbed are Sarraute's starting point. Providing but the barest details of plot and character, she writes that Chekhov pronounced these words from his bed in a German town where he had gone knowing he would soon die. We are reminded that he was not only a writer, but also a doctor. A simple yet dramatic sentence sums up all the conventional narrative action. On one side, his Russian wife, on the other, his German doctor:

ayant auprès de son lit sa femme d'un côté et de l'autre un médecin allemand, il s'est dressé, il s'est assis, et il a dit, pas en russe, pas dans sa propre langue, mais dans la langue de l'autre, la langue allemande, il a dit à voix haute et en articulant bien “Ich sterbe”, et il est retombé mort.²

In her introduction to a voice-recording of L'Usage de la parole, Sarraute states that “sans le vouloir, et tout à fait spontanément, dans ces textes je m'adresse au lecteur.”³ As Sheila Bell demonstrates in her insightful study,⁴ this new form of address sets the ground rules for a collaborative game between narrator and narratee that, although initially “involuntary,” continues and develops throughout L'Usage de la parole. Sanda Golopentia, meanwhile, analyses “Ich sterbe” from a speech-act perspective, focussing on Sarraute's “écriture centrée sur le dire.”⁵ Both show the text to be fundamentally about the act of reading and the performance of the spoken word. Their different critical perspectives allow us to appreciate how every text in the collection calls on readers to prolong tropismic possibilities for themselves. Nowhere is this spirit of collaborative play more evident than at the end of “Ich sterbe,” where Sarraute hands over the interpretative and performative reins to the reader, who is invited to pursue the tropisms wherever they may lead:

Ce ne sont là, vous le voyez, que quelques légers remous, quelques brèves ondulations captées parmi toutes celles, sans nombre, que ces mots produisent. Si certains d'entre vous trouvent ce jeu distrayant, ils peuvent—il y faut de la patience et du temps—s'amuser à en déceler d'autres. Ils pourront en tout cas être sûrs de ne pas se tromper, tout ce qu'ils apercevront est bien là, en chacun de nous.

(18)

Over the next few pages, I will take up Sarraute's generous invitation. By reading her deathbed scenes first within their initial context, and then resituating them with respect to previous and future scenes, I will attempt to amplify some of the many “ondulations” that have hitherto gone unremarked, but which silently underscore each textual instance. In according special attention to the performative nature of the deathbed utterance—both as énoncé and énonciation—I will flesh out a necessarily fragmentary and at times contradictory composite scene whose configuration may shift with the different periods of Sarraute's literary career, but whose core remains firmly anchored in this author's imaginaire. The recurring deathbed scene, we shall see, not only maps this author's reaction to important literary issues during her career, but acts as an emblem for the irrepressibly open, intertextual nature of her writing. And, true to the inclusive gesture whereby the reader is explicitly asked to join in the game of tropismic exploration, I will finish my study by relaying how Sarraute recounted her own deathbed scene to me, as she imagined it in July 1997.

DOUCHENKA-DROUJOK: WORDS OF DESTRUCTION, WORDS OF TENDERNESS

In Sarraute's 1948 novel, Portrait d'un inconnu, we find a first scène d'agonie whose principal actors are again Russian⁶ and members of a same family. One third of the way into the novel, the shadowy, nameless narrator evokes a scene between two characters from Tolstoy's War and Peace. Prince Bolkonski lies on his deathbed, with his daughter Marie at his side:

Elle se penchait sur lui pour essayer de saisir les paroles qu'il balbutiait en remuant péniblement sa langue paralysée—c'était peut-être «douchenka», ma petite âme, ou peut-être «droujok», mon amie, elle n'avait pu saisir, c'était si extraordinaire, si inattendu—ce n'est qu'à ce moment qu'elle a vu pour la première fois le masque se détendre, se défaire et devenir un autre visage, un visage nouveau qu'elle n'avait jamais connu, pitoyable, un peu enfantin, timide et tendre.⁷

Though less explicit than “Ich sterbe,” this scene from Portrait d'un inconnu also presents itself as an allegory of reading, performed on the deathbed of an illustrious literary ancestor. Presenting Bolkonski on his “lit de mort” in a sense announces and confirms the death of the realist character, both in Sarraute's work and, as she foresaw, in the New Novel. Bolkonski is in this light a convenient foil to the shapeless, unstable figure of the narrator.⁸ At the very edge of existence, when the limits of his own being disappear, Bolkonski's final utterance pierces the hardened mask of realist representation. And, it is the narrator in the guise of a modern reader who later finds himself briefly freed from the tyranny of realist models by breaking the limits of literary convention.

If on a level of énonciation Bolkonski's difficult to discern words serve an iconoclastic, even destructive purpose, as énoncés they communicate an unbridled tenderness. “Douchenka-droujok” in effect accomplishes a transgressive break but in addition it releases, we are next told, “quelque chose en lui de trop fort, de trop violent (…) un amour, peut-être si violent qu'il lui semblait qu'il s'échapperait de lui comme un taureau furieux, un loup avide, hurlant” (Portrait 63), a hitherto hidden, incomprehensible affection. Given his “langue paralysée” and the violence with which the words escape his lips, it is clear that he, the narrator, and perhaps even Sarraute do not yet master this new language. His pronouncement thus not only breaks with the cumbersome techniques of previous literary tradition but, as words of love, they also offer hope of a new, unfamiliar “literary life” to future readers and writers if, despite its foreignness, they are able to hear the énoncé and to take up the transgressive literary challenge of its énonciation.

COR-RIDOR: PASSAGES

The next deathbed scene, also based on a literary intertext, appears in Entre la vie et la mort—her 1968 novel that follows the trials of a writer figure seeking to find a precarious balance between contact with others and the solitude necessary for artistic creation. Quite sensitive to the spoken word, early on in the novel the writer reacts with the following images when exposed to the drawn out vowels of a Parisian “accent gouape”:

On n'a pas le droit de porter atteinte à cela. Ce sont des choses de la plus haute importance … Il y a des gens qui pour les défendre … Je connais des précédents … Ce poète agonisant … non, pas cela … juste un homme, un homme comme vous et moi … on raconte qu'en entendant la bonne sœur qui le soignait dire: collidor, il s'est dressé sur son lit, et rassemblant ses dernières forces il a articulé très distinctement: cor-ridor. Et puis il est retombé. Mort. Pourtant comment comparer la faute innocente de la bonne sœur avec le crime que vous commettez?⁹

Let us read these scènes d'agonie together to see what sort of questions they ask of each other. In Portrait d'un inconnu a fictional character played the role of “mourant.” Here, as later in “Ich sterbe,” that role is now occupied by the writer himself. Where Bolkonski did violence to himself, sundering his hardened mask with final words of love, here the énonciation of a mispronounced, misaddressed énoncé provokes a retort that kills the writer. Clearly the subtext in this deathbed scene from Entre la vie et la mort tells us that no longer the realist character but the writer, dare we say the new novelist, now feels somehow under attack, on the defensive. Indeed, we are encouraged to ask ourselves whether certain new novelists may also be wearing a mask that must be sundered, corrected.

For clarification we must look to other scenes: first at the intertext alluded to in the comment, “Je connais des précédents.” This passage refers back to virtually the same anecdote related in Les Cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke's narrator introduces and then concludes the anecdote in this fashion:

je comprends parfaitement que l'on conserve au fond de son portefeuille le récit d'une heure d'agonie, tant d'années durant. Il ne serait même pas nécessaire qu'elle fût particulièrement choisie. Elles ont toutes quelque chose de presque rare. Ne peut-on par exemple se représenter quelqu'un qui copierait un récit de la mort de Félix Arvers? […] C'était un poète et il haïssait l'à peu près, ou peut-être la vérité lui importait-elle seule; ou encore il était fâché de devoir remporter comme dernière impression que le monde continuait à vivre si négligemment. Il ne sera sans doute plus possible de trancher ces questions. Mais qu'on ne croie pas surtout qu'il agit ainsi par pédanterie.

(see note 1)

Instead of illustrating the pedantic punctiliousness of a scholar, the writer's supreme correction shows a tenacious concern and affection both for those who live on after him and for words themselves. Indeed, the direct acknowledgement here that it is perfectly understandable someone should copy this scene creates a curious meta-textual illustration of that notion. It acts as a succinct mise-en-abîme not only for the recurrence of deathbed scenes in Sarraute's works, but for the phenomenon of intertextuality itself. It would also seem emblematic of the dramatic passage between texts past and present, texts “dead and alive,” as suggested by the title Entre la vie et la mort. Broken yet joined by a hyphen in Sarraute's copy of this scene, cor-ridor¹⁰ inscribes within its very signifier the action of rupture and continuity performed in this and every other deathbed énonciation. Discontinuous yet linked, bridging the present scène d'agonie with past and future instances in Sarraute's writing, this disjointed word condenses in concise, graphic form the very intertextual relation the utterance performs.

JE NE SUIS PAS MORT: THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

Upon the publication of Entre la vie et la mort, another deathbed scene quickly gets added to these texts, a scene that further reorients our understanding of them. During Spring 1968, Sarraute vents her increasing frustration with current theories of writing and language. Building on the themes of solitude and contact at the root of her recently published novel, she illustrates her displeasure in the following fashion:

Aujourd'hui, il se trouve que les philosophes, les théoriciens se sont emparés de cela et que c'est en train de se recouvrir d'une épaisse couche d'idées convenues. J'ai dû donc me boucher les oreilles, ne me fier qu'à moi-même, à ce que je ressens, en m'efforçant d'être le plus sincère possible, de ne pas céder aux arguments d'autorité, et croyez que ce n'est pas si facile … Bien des écrivains aujourd'hui, quand ils parlent de leur travail, me font penser à cette anecdote: un médecin appelé au chevet d'un malade l'examine et déclare à sa femme: «Votre mari est mort.» Le malade rassemble toute son énergie, soulève une paupière et parvient à articuler: «Mais non, je ne suis pas mort … » Sa femme l'arrête aussitôt: «Tais-toi donc, le docteur le sait mieux que toi.»

Sarraute next spells out what she considers to be the lesson of the anecdote:

Certains écrivains n'osent pas dire sincèrement, librement, comme ils le faisaient autrefois, ce qu'ils sentent en travaillant, comment, en vérité, ça se passe … Ils ont trop peur qu'on les fasse taire: les docteurs le savent mieux qu'eux. Ceux qui sentent de telles choses pourraient bien être soupçonnés de ne pas être de vrais écrivains … D'autres se laissent persuader que ce qu'ils font n'est pas ce qu'ils croient faire: ils préfèrent se ranger à l'avis des docteurs.¹¹

Considering this scene with the preceding ones we see that Sarraute articulates in clear French what was perhaps only a minor “ondulation” in the other utterances. Instead of illustrating the death of the realist character, as we read the scene from Portrait d'un inconnu, here Sarraute's anecdote contests the death of the author. This is made all the more clear a few years later when she repeats the same anecdote at a Cérisy-la-Salle colloquium.¹² Writers, as Sarraute presents the debate, are reduced to mere “scripteurs,” where language, as dictated by theoretician-doctors, is deemed to be both the point of departure and the goal of literature. Like Prince Bolkonski and the poet Arvers, Sarraute's near-dead men perceive that the “truth” is being covered up by “une épaisse couche.” While Bolkonski speaks his word and is able to break through a thick mask of convention, and where in Entre la vie et la mort the poet-writer sets the record straight even if his utterance consumes his last ounce of life, here the enunciation of the writer-figure's “énoncé” no longer carries any illocutionary force. It is as if his words are incomprehensible, pronounced in a foreign tongue. Speaking a truth that no-one, not even his wife wants to hear, he finds himself relegated to the curious state of a mort-vivant. He is told to keep quiet, play dead, submit and “se ranger à l'avis des docteurs.”

ICH STERBE: BURYING ONESELF ALIVE

Obviously Sarraute did not fall silent after 1968. Indeed, at nearly 100 years old, she had gained a certain notoriety for her steady yet indomitable drive to write. In a 1994 interview with Isabelle Huppert she claims that “le grand âge, vous ne le ressentez absolument pas du dedans. Si les facultés diminuent, on ne s'en aperçoit pas, les autres vous le montrent.”¹³ Yet, at the end of the 1970s her writing undergoes modification in response to the issue of aging, not so much in her choice of subject matter as in the new manner she will write her texts. Previously, when working on a new project she would over several years write a book all the way through in draft form, only to painstakingly rework it word by word during the following two or three years.¹⁴ However, as the author states in an English-language interview from the 1980s: “For a while now (…), I've been afraid of waiting two or three years like that before starting over. So, I write gradually, I finish each passage as I go along. I changed my system (…) since The Use of Speech and Childhood.”¹⁵ And, in a more recent interview with Betty Milan, she explains: “Parce que je vieillissais, j'avais peur de ne pas pouvoir finir quand j'écrivais comme ça, trois cents pages qui n'étaient pas travaillées … Je voulais donc m'assurer que quelque chose était fait.”¹⁶

Sarraute cannot bear the idea that someone other than herself should see, let alone publish, her writing before it is brought to a level of perfection she alone can judge. In this fashion, she has always been somewhat like her deathbed poet, correcting each word and comma before passing on her texts to her publisher. However, with L'Usage de la parole, for the first time her writing is marked by a sense of urgency. “Ich sterbe,” a text about speaking before dying, betrays an imperative desire to sew up some unfinished business, and do it well, with precision. Sarraute writes it as if it were her last.

If the writer is not dead at the end of Sarraute's joke-anecdote, neither is this curiously insistent scene. As we saw earlier, in her text “Ich sterbe” it returns with virtually the same configuration—a doctor, a mourant, and his wife. There clearly remains some unfinished business here, something that wishes to be said, perhaps despite Sarraute. Marked from the start by a curious passivity, this deathbed phrase “utters itself” in the form of words once again incomprehensible to the average French speaker:

Ich sterbe. Qu'est-ce que c'est? Ce sont des mots allemands. Ils signifient je meurs. Mais d'où, mais pourquoi tout à coup? Vous allez voir, prenez patience. Ils viennent de loin. Ils reviennent (comme on dit «cela me revient») du début de ce siècle, d'une ville d'eau allemande. Mais en réalité ils viennent de beaucoup plus loin …

(11)

This particular text seems uncannily aware that it may be a reactivation of its previous versions, that it may have been pulled from the “portefeuille” of her memory. In interviews given previous to the writing of “Ich sterbe,” Sarraute shows herself to be, paradoxically, “consciously unaware” of repetition in her works. In conversation with Lucette Finas she explains: “je ne me relis jamais et je ne veux pas aller vérifier si j'ai déjà écrit dans un roman précédent ce que j'ai la sensation de découvrir pour la première fois, même si, en fait, ce n'est pas la première.”¹⁷ And, asked elsewhere about the origin of a work, she replies: “Un livre mûrit en grande partie dans l'inconscient, au cours de toute une vie. Parfois c'est une phrase entendue il y a des années qui, ressurgie soudain, se met à agiter, comme un pavé jeté dans une mare, toute la substance que j'ai peiné à rassembler.”¹⁸

Suddenly, indeed ironically, the phrase “Ich sterbe” revives in a new context from Sarraute's unconscious where it has lain suspended, pregnant with pent up “substance”—an obvious reference to tropisms themselves, elsewhere described as “la substance vivante de tous mes livres.”¹⁹ Constantly reiterated in German, called “la langue de l'autre” (12), “Ich sterbe” retains a fundamental foreignness that, like the other mispronounced or (to the French ear) foreign death-bed words, denies comprehension despite translation. Obviously, the unknowable experience of death itself is what refuses understanding here. “Ce n'est pas Tchekhov lui-même qui m'intéressait,” Sarraute said in an interview on France Culture, “mais cette attitude à l'égard de la mort, sa sensation au moment de la mort” (quoted in Œuvres complètes 1913). However, in light of the previous deathbed anecdote, we may say that Sarraute wants not only to know what it feels like for an author to die, but seeks also to understand why this recurrent scene refuses to die in her own “imaginaire,” why she must finish the business of this scene before her own death.

During the course of the text, Sarraute works through and rejects different possibilities for Chekhov's “Ich sterbe,” before apparently settling on one possibility in particular. She first rules out the idea that Chekhov was simply interested in leaving famous last words for posterity. Nor can “Ich sterbe” be addressed to his wife—the figure who, in the joke-anecdote, tells the husband to be quiet and accept the doctor's diagnosis. Indeed, uttered in German, and not in Russian, the mother tongue shared by the couple, his phrase effectively excludes his wife as interlocutor. “Ich sterbe” would thus seem to be directed towards the German doctor. The question of address supposedly settled, the import of the phrase remains to be explored. Chekhov, Sarraute goes on to suggest, was not crying out for help with these words; he knew full well that he was going to die, and was resigned to the fact. Devoid of affective content then, “Ich sterbe,” as Golopentia has described it from a speech-act perspective, is a “verdictif” (354), a strange professional declaration, a precise statement of reckoning uttered by Chekhov as from one doctor to another.

Do we find here a straight parallel with Sarraute's previous, anti-terrorist anecdote? In 1968 we have a man representing the writer on his supposed deathbed who says to his doctor “non, je ne suis pas mort.” In 1980, a writer says “Ich sterbe,” “je meurs.” How may we reconcile these two, apparently opposed, énoncés? If we look closely at their action as énonciations harbouring multiple “ondulations,” I believe we may find an answer.

The most ingenious, audacious aspect of the scene, in Sarraute's analysis, is that Chekhov-the-patient utters his sharp precise words not just to the German doctor beside him, but to himself as Chekhov-the-doctor. That is, while the énoncé “Ich sterbe” says “je meurs,” its énonciation momentarily communicates just the opposite: “Mais non, je ne suis pas mort.” For Chekhov, by his utterance, attempts in Sarraute's estimation to be both the dying man and the doctor who ever so briefly survives, beside the bed, to witness and pronounce the patient dead. Placing herself pronominally in the body of the dying Chekhov, and addressing the doctor at her side, Sarraute writes:

Je me place où vous êtes, à l'écart de moi-même, et de la même façon que vous le ferez, dans les mêmes termes que les vôtres j'établis le constat. Je rassemble toutes mes forces, je me soulève, je me dresse, je tire à moi, j'abaisse sur moi la dalle, la lourde pierre tombale … et pour qu'elle se place bien exactement, sous elle je m'allonge …

(16-17)

Reading “Ich sterbe” with previous scenes, we can now understand how what would otherwise be a complete contradiction in fact turns out to be utterly compatible. Quite literally Sarraute follows here the lesson given previously by the wife to her husband/writer, since she here has Chekhov physically “se ranger à l'avis des docteurs.” However, the meaning of that movement gets completely undermined, since with “Ich sterbe” Sarraute subverts the supposed authority of the “docteurs-théoriciens” by having the dying writer occupy both sides of the address. The writer, under the cover of an impossibly foreign phrase, “des mots morts de langue morte” (16), takes over and reclaims ever so briefly the discourse and position of those doctors who had previously pronounced the writer dead. The realist character may be dead, but the author lives on just long enough to get in the last word for the future. This final configuration of a multi-layered scene tells us that now the “writer knows best,” instead of the “doctor knows best.”

While Golopentia may be correct in seeing a total lack of emotion in Chekhov's final speech act (352), resituated in a history of other deathbed utterances his final words also carry the violent yet affectionate enunciative force found in the first utterance: “douchenka-droujok.” We need only revisit the true end of the text in order to recognise it, where Sarraute repeats the transgressive movement across the deathbed found in her audacious “je me place où vous êtes, à l'écart de moi-même.” In a final act of generosity, faith, yes even affection,²⁰ Sarraute breaks through the traditional barrier between author and reader when, as we saw earlier, she calls the reader-survivor as witness at the end of “Ich sterbe” to assure the continued life of the death words (“Si certains d'entre vous trouvent ce jeu distrayant …” [18]). Having added her voice to the final utterances of illustrious literary ancestors—Tolstoy, Rilke-Arvers, Chekhov—Sarraute here performs the ultimate intertextual gesture by embracing the freedom of future readers and writers to read and rewrite her as they will.

OVERTURNING THE TOMBSTONE

Once more we can say that, obviously, Sarraute did not die with the writing of “Ich sterbe.” Instead, she went on to write several works of strange intensity, each fragment of them composed according to her new, urgent method of construction. If the deathbed scene does not figure explicitly in these works, on another level Sarraute does manage a similar gesture of transgression and contestation given to few authors. The year 1996 saw the publication of her Œuvres complètes in the prestigious Pléiade collection, an honour ordinarily given only to writers long dead. Explicitly presupposing that the œuvre is finished, this tome effectively serves as a tombstone on one's literary career. Indeed, like Chekhov who with his last ounce of energy neatly pulls a stone over his grave with his final words, Sarraute actively participated in the erection of her symbolic tombstone, the Pléiade edition that was to cap her life's work. However, also like the husband falsely pronounced dead, she unceremoniously overturns her tombstone just one year later, with the publication of a new work, in effect telling the world, “Mais non, je ne suis pas morte.” And, anticipating once again that this work might be her last, that it might in fact be the headstone on her extraordinary literary career, Sarraute had the ingenuity to entitle this book Ouvrez!, no doubt in order to tell us that she is buried there, alive!

POSTSCRIPT

In July 1997, Sarraute recounted to me her own, imagined, deathbed scene. I leave it to future readers of her works to draw out for themselves the many-layered “ondulations” of her last word. There was Sarraute on her divan, with me on one side and my wife on the other, discussing in French. Having told her I was interested in des scènes d'agonie in her work, Sarraute said with great humour that she was sure that on her deathbed one of her daughters would be there at her side. At one point her daughter would say to her in poor English: ‘“ope!”; and Sarraute, the writer-doctor who is never one to leave any business unfinished, would sit up and say, with a crisply aspirated “h,” “Non, Hope!” and fall back, dead.

Notes

1. R. M. Rilke, Les Cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Maurice Betz (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 147-48.

2. Nathalie Sarraute, L'Usage de la parole (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 12. All subsequent references are to this edition and indicated by page number in the text.

3. Cited by Valerie Minogue in the “Notice” for L'Usage de la parole in the Pléiade edition of Sarraute's works. See Nathalie Sarraute, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 1914.

4. See Sheila Bell's fine article “The Figure of the Reader in L'Usage de la parole,” Romance Studies 2 (1983): 53-68.

5. Sanda Golopentia, “L'histoire d'un verdict superlatif,” Romanic Review 82.3 (May 1991): 347.

6. Sarraute, of course, was born in Russia and immigrated to France at an early age. She reads Russian but claims to speak it with a slight French accent.

7. Portrait d'un inconnu (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 62-63.

8. The contrast between traditional and non-traditional characters has been well studied in this novel. See in particular Valerie Minogue's Nathalie Sarraute and The War of the Words (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1981), 55-56 and Sheila Bell's “Portrait d'un inconnu” and “Vous les entendez?” (London: Grant and Cutler, 1988), 56.

9. Entre la vie et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 41.

10. This typographical rendering is maintained in the recent Pléiade edition of Sarraute's Œuvres complètes, 645.

11. Geneviève Serreau, “Entretien: Nathalie Sarraute et les secrets de la création,” La Quinzaine littéraire 50 (1-15 mai 1968): 3.

12. “Ce que je cherche à faire: Nathalie Sarraute,” Le Nouveau roman: Hier, aujourd'hui, eds. Jean Ricardou and Françoise van Rossum-Guyon (Paris: UGE, 1972), 31.

13. Isabelle Huppert, “Rencontre: Nathalie Sarraute,” Cahiers du cinéma, 477 (mars 1994): 12.

14. I examine in greater detail Sarraute's writing practice across her literary career in “L'Écriture et la vie: Nathalie Sarraute,” Dalhousie French Studies, 43 (Summer 1999): 143-54.

15. Jason Weiss, “Nathalie Sarraute: The Art of Fiction,” The Paris Review, 32.14 (Spring 1990): 163.

16. Betty Milan, “Interview: Nathalie Sarraute entre dans la Pléiade,” Pagina Online, Internet: 4.

17. Lucette Finas, “Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres: Nathalie Sarraute,” Études littéraires, 12.3 (décembre 1979): 397.

18. Jean-Louis de Rambures, Comment travaillent les écrivains? (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 150.

19. Nathalie Sarraute, L'Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 9.

20. Speaking of the new form of address inaugurated with “Ich sterbe,” Sarraute says, “j'ai l'impression que j'ai tout de même fini par acquérir quelques lecteurs qui me suivent, qui me sont proches.” See her Œuvres complètes 1914.

A first version of this paper was given at the Second International Conference on the New Novel at Aberdeen, Scotland, in April, 1999.