[In the following essay, Orr uses Sarraute's Le Planétarium to examine the role of satire and its interrogative role in literature.]

French literature abounds with examples of satire as a form of biting social comment and literary lampooning—the works of Voltaire, Diderot and Flaubert spring to mind. As a genre, satire has irked literary critics for its hybrid form—satire means a mixture—and, in its permissive contents, evaded censors who husband the “bienséant” and edifying against such assaults on public taste. Why satire nonetheless always overrides moral and literary boundaries and their regulatory machinery is less easy to explain. Is satire a derivative, conservative, retrospective species say, of comedy, or a genus in its own right which stimulates, empowers and generates new forms? In its quality (tone) and procedure (a sub-category of comedy), satire visibly has elements of both, yet also expresses a “more”. Again how that “more” finds definition is not readily obvious. Herein lies the challenge of this study. My method will be neither the enumeration of satirical moments in my chosen text, Le Planétarium, although they abound,¹ nor a classification or categorisation of this text as satire in a tradition as elucidated in George Test's excellent study of the genre.² Instead, I propose to use Sarraute's text to ask uncomfortable questions and to unsettle previous norms, for it is this interrogative role which is among satire's functions.

The “more” that satire verbalises is, first, strictly related to mores, both social and textual. More properly, satire does violence to fixed forms of behaviour by pointing up their man-made [sic] boundaries and pointing to the territory outside them. Satire asks the question, “Does the inside control the outside, or does the exclusion zone surround and besiege the sanctum?” Satire then always already questions the boundaries of context (both social and literary), including its own. Test's study, for all its comprehensiveness in plotting political satire and its generic forms, fails to take account of two important spaces of satire. The first is the space where satire critiques its own form, the self-referentiality of satire of traditional satire. The second, possibly related space, is resoundingly absent from Test's compendium: the barely mentioned reference to works by women satirists. Is this previously unacknowledged zone precisely the outsider country of satire itself? By pressing Sarraute's text into this space, I want to put this and a related question centre stage. Is satire in its treatment of the political a specifically “male” genre, or has such often rumbustious, even grotesque, satire of a Swift or Rabelais occluded the light and equally cruel, “domestic” sphere which Austen's and Eliot's, as well as Sarraute's, epitomises? Satire delights in disturbing genre bias. It is pertinent to ask whether satire's mainly male critics have fashioned their normative criteria for the genre according to gender bias, which may then be satirised by a writer and literary critic of Sarraute's calibre.³ By being multi-contextual, satire's realm then reveals itself as centrifugally intertextual, which allows it slippery defiance of set meaning and censorship. In Bakhtin's terms, satire's nature is supremely polyphonic and dialogic.⁴ It intersects multiple contextual spaces.

By pointing out boundaries and the “out of bounds”, satire is thus about definitions and claims of space and territory. Historico-political contexts, public and domestic spaces feed into satire, to provoke comments and uncover social and political ills. Satire, however, has the further ability to portray readers' foibles, yet still prevents losing their interest, or worse, provoking offence. Unlike the roman à thèse, which may incorporate satirical comments, satire's space is overtly self-conscious. It is “about” and “about itself”. Thinking of satire essentially as a spatial form accounts for its relational and (pro)positional field of operations. “Postmodern” novels such as Diderot's Jacques le fataliste and Sarraute's contribution to the nouveau roman disorientate traditional novelistic criteria and highlight new space from within “fixed” formal boundaries and confines so that they in turn become unstable and destabilised. This space of internal criticism—social and generic—is crucial to satire. It turns the outside in and the inside out, often both processes happening simultaneously. Because satire doubles the normally polarised spaces of alienation and familiarity through exaggeration, clash of registers and caricature, the more subtle, close-up, contexts have not had sufficient attention. It is this more intimate, but no less threatening space, relying on proximity and personal body space, that will be the focus of the remainder of this study.

Le Planétarium, metonymically speaking, mirrors the whole extent of satire's figurative field. Sarraute's novel maps the constellation of family relationships—Alain Guimier seeks to dispossess his aunt Berthe of her grand, Passy flat, over whose decor she agonises at the outset of the novel—and the galaxy of the Passy “set”, with its literary star, Germaine Lemaire, around whom Alain revolves.⁵ Berthe and Alain exchange home space in the orbit of the novel: Germaine suffers a meteoric fall in Alain's estimation when he invites her to inspect his flat and antiques. Her “superior” appreciation of art objects, her aesthetic taste, are eclipsed by her ecstatic response to the modern, and utilitarian, built-in dirty laundry cupboard. Sarraute plays with the public and private demarcations of space by intersecting and interchanging them constantly, as does satire more generally. Satire's “washing of dirty laundry in public” and the politics of the salon are compounded, wrenched out of the so-called female, domestic, zone of satire so that no space or social position in the text remains sacrosanct. Indeed, it can be argued that Sarraute so concentrates the social that its constructs are all the more demasked, discountenanced and disconcerted. Surviving in the social jungle, keeping one's position, finding a place are at stake in satires. In Le Planétarium, this is literalised, for the individual protagonists move house, change place/space as they jostle in society according to the laws of social advancement and the revelation of their petty snobberies. Each is the star requiring an orbit, each has a solar system or wants to have satellites round itself, or imagines its social world revolving round certain fixed objects, criteria, tastes, judgements, refinements. These prove not to be touchstones, centres of certitude, talismans for new territories and colonisations, but contradictory black holes to trap the unwary. Aunt Berthe's fixation with the “right” tone of velvet curtains, the Guimiers' rejection of the idea of having English Club chairs in the flat, present object-receptacles of shifting value judgement.⁶ These “props” trigger social responses and redefine, satirically, the public vestibule confessional space of classical tragedy and its private space of soliloquy, where the body and the body politic are the two sides of the same coin.

However, to voice its own body language, satire must first borrow the space of the reader, colonise it and then make visible its simultaneous alterity beyond specific, cultural and temporal limitations. Reader complicity, alertness and gullibility make satire a littérature engagée. Satire is artifice, setting up artificial “models” which the reader as armchair critic first judges before realising that he/she has moved to the position of the criticised. This is the point where satire names itself. The very title of Le Planétarium, seemingly so ad hoc, pretentious and so falsely grandiose for a novel about the snobbery of Paris's Passy society, a microcosm within the macrocosm, epitomises this satiric space. First, a planetarium is a false and artificial representation of space itself to show the position of the planets, their orbits and movements. These operate and are governed by gravity, those fields of magnetism and repulsion, which are precisely Sarraute's “tropismes” on a cosmic scale. “Tropismes” name the zone of stimulus and response and

are caused in us by other people or by the outer world and resemble the movements called tropisms by which living organisms expand or contract under certain influences such as light, heat and so on. These movements glide quickly round the border of our consciousness, they compose the small, rapid, and sometimes very complex dramas concealed beneath our actions, our gestures, the words we speak, our avowed and clear feelings.⁷

In the intimate, artificially controlled and “safe” milieu of the planetarium, the outer space chaos, the unknown, can be surveyed, regulated and “understood”. Exactly analogous is the reader in the artificial space of a novelistic world of vraisemblance. In satire, that familiar safety is undermined as the demarcating boundaries of the fictional space are demolished and the outside invades. The distance between the reader and the subject of writing is relentlessly reduced by narrative pacing. When subject and reader spaces overlap or collide, satire hits bull's eye and achieves its ends: no one evades its censure. In Sarraute, this constant shifting and defining of stance, “right” attitudes in society's quicksands of moral, aesthetic or political judgement, is intrinsic to the movement of the text. Stances, those positions which determine one's personal and social body space, have always to be defended, (re)established, bolstered up by self in relation to the other. Satiric stance takes on the position of ultimate survivor, pour soi. Satire is then the genre of oneupmanship, where camaraderie, intimacy, complicitous superiorities are prerequisites between the reader and narrator. The space of false intimacy, the surreptitious invasion of the reader's body space, is where the satirist can most cruelly call the reader's bluff. Such dependence on the positional and hence suppositional frame of familiarity which is satire's territory requires a further twist: wrong proportions, and space for false magnification. Swift uses this with his giants and pygmies, as does Voltaire in Micromégas. Sarraute reduces their grotesque, hyperreal embodiments to a concentrate of “real-life” perspective, slightly imbalanced, exaggerated, overdone or underplayed. Reader and telescope feel the cosmos brought closer, so that the observer in turn feels bigger and in control, erroneously. The satirist forces the gazer in the telescope to be viewed from the other end and therefore reduced. In Le Planétarium, telescopes are themselves deflated by the insistent emphasis on microscopic details and nuances of dialogue. Deflation of the self-opinionated reader, the magnitude of the subject matter, false grandeur, airs and graces, are always punctured, not by bombast, but by deft, indirect association, the bridge between the two lenses, the very nosepiece to lead the reader by the nose. Complicities of mutually superior viewpoint set up between the author-narrator and the reader on the protagonists are shown up to be two separate lenses. The satirist's eye gauges with 20-20 vision, whereas the reader's astigmatisms and myopias make him/her no clearer-sighted than are the puny protagonists. Sarraute's appropriation of the zoom and pan techniques of her precursors is honed down to a precision instrument for fine and accurate observation. She demonstrates what is properly protean and innovative in the satiric “mixture”; the art of changing the shape of even minimal space.

Like satirists before her, Sarraute unfolds her texts through satiric dialogue, where the eavesdropper-reader is alongside the text's internal speakers. This more limited verbal and body space requires greater proximity of the reader to the protagonists as a dialogue is intimate, relying on the whisper, the look as well as the voice. This is Sarraute's particular forte as satirist and exponent of “sous-conversations”, those shared, tacit, often non-verbal rules and codes of social behaviour: “Les sous-conversations ne sont pas les paroles sous les paroles ni même des pensées secrètes: c'est sous forme d'image que le sujet prend conscience de ses désirs et de ses craintes”.⁸ For satire, these take the form of a curl of the lip, a sneer, the sardonic laugh, lightly mocking irony: all tropes which “waver”, elements which teeter, causing the double possibilities of interpretation (straight and cutting), rendering the victim uncertain, insecure. Through constant punctuation of the dialogue, Sarraute voices the contradictory body language accompanying each exchange. Hence, unsettling discomforture, the shaking of previously secure boundaries, come with the doubts sown by a mix of approval and disapproval. The sly dig, the mordant observation, the witty, uncombattable word, the piquant comment then also operate against the reader because they exist within the reader's own value/verbal system. Such moves make the satirist a double agent, the insider-outsider/outsider-insider shifting the boundaries, arbitrating the fine dividing line between us and them, and them in us. As eavesdropper, that is, hidden in a space invisible to, but alongside, the protagonists, the reader is a party to the satirist's superior knowledge, often evoked through the unsettling intrusion of dramatic irony, or privilege of knowledge. However, this privilege as eavesdropper is double-edged, because the satirist will always ultimately uncover the eavesdropper, removing the narrow dividing partition.⁹ The “immorality” of the situation is the uncovering moment whereby the reader is put in the space of those overheard and is found out by the satirist.

In Le Planétarium eavesdropping and the use of confidential information are the webs linking the banal intercourse of the protagonists. The other undermining strategy is the surreptitious displacement of control through shifting, disorienting, narrative viewpoint. Sarraute, like her forebears Flaubert and Proust, makes style indirect libre a strategic missile in her satiric armoury. It thrives on overlapping discourses so that disjunctions and disfunctions of narrative accord and unity of viewpoint become visible. Style indirect libre only exists if there are standard shifts of first person to third person perseptive, normally via direct speech from the protagonists or from the authorial intruder masked often by the impersonal viewpoint. Aphorisms, disembodied verbal presence, create a new “planet” which the reader's scanner has to plot. This new linguistic body has then to be incorporated into the reading system. The reader mends the defences caused by such intrusions and remarks the boundary between the insider and outsider positions of knowledge.

Linguistic mobility and range are also essential to satire's art and artifice. Characters who can bandy about the “right” vocabulary have also an unfortunate penchant for the cliché, especially where effect-creating vocabularies and formulaic phrases are concerned. Such verbal social conventions as introductions, the thanking of the giver for a gift, the discussion of mutual friends are the breeding ground for the wrong intonation, gesture, register of familiarity, or for the “right” one taken to the extremes of gushing or insincerity. No one is exempt, and virtuoso passages in Sarraute's work often operate round the space of totalised cliché—situation, type characterisation, language usage, and the use of clichés themselves as a hypocritical satiric mockery of “common language”.¹⁰ Cliché is then the ultimate space of linguistic self-limitation out of which Sarraute creates her satire from the inside, her type is characters who are social constructs, assemblages of common images.

If the quintessentially spatial is satire's arena of operations, the question still to be addressed is how satire defines that shifting, uneasy, yet consensual, middle ground where reader and textual inmates share positions with omnipresent narrative control. A related question is why does satire as a genre emerge at certain points in time, even across cultures simultaneously as happened in England and France in the eighteenth century? The partial answer to both questions is that satire voices the self-conscious space of the middle itself: the space of the emerging middle-class seeking to establish a value system which included codes of authority, behaviour and form to imitate previous aristocratic virtues, without their barring status, birth. Adoption, then, an uneasy relationship of false parentage, serves as the model of the satirical position which is never totally “in”. There is always the embarrassing possibility of being found out. Satire's critical space is the established middle-class, not the nouveau riche, whose inabilities are all too obvious—he/she is the stuff of farce and comedies. It is the nouveau riche appropriating lateral space, the upwardly mobile squirearchy. As Sarraute's novels testify, satire breeds on ideologies, prejudices which valorise individuality, individualism and social and intellectual superiority. Satire is then the comedy of the mind (esprit) where the reader is always outwitted and his or her deepest convictions pierced. This comedy has as its modes betrayal and mis-reading.¹¹ Sarraute describes it thus:

L'humour a un pourvoir de contestation, de destruction. […] Dans l'univers où je suis, on n'ose pas se rendre au tragique, ni d'ailleurs tomber dans le comique pur: tout reste discontinu, indécis, tremblant, à mi-chemin, comme me paraît être la réalité.¹²

Sarraute's contribution to satire, then, is that she carves out a space for the “female” line, dealing specifically with awareness of body space and context boundaries. Sarraute rejects utopias, Eastern settings of satirists à la Montesquieu, and science fictional worlds. The more difficult option is her choice: the world criticised is the very world closest to home, and also closest to the reader's experience.¹³ She also writes within the home of a further, literary, “convention” and “consensus”: that women writers are seemly in the public and private spheres, almost the arbiters of good taste, moderating, modulating and defending public taste from the more violent attacks and the bullfights of political satire. Thus, the very tools of what renders more blunt satire anodyne—manners and verbal rhetorical diplomacies—are to be themselves the tools of the female satirist's trade, which is no less violent and cruel. Sarraute's Le Planétarium is a model of such tactics. It is a salon novel by a nouvelle précieuse, overturning the very consensus of the domestic as a female form, and locus of female satire.¹⁴ Deft, light, modulated, but intensely cruel observations and deflationary malice imbue the work with relentless precision in the attack on snobbery and pretentiousness. Apposition is intrinsic to Sarraute's style as too is the metonymic relationship which is designed to harbour discords. The image of the planetarium operates on all levels to map and mismatch social and body spaces, the dialogical relationships between characters, objects, language units and, more important, body language. By reducing elements of satire to their bare bones, from within, female satire shows up the self-consciousness of the genre. If one is self-conscious, one is infinitely aware of the shifts of positive and negative relational response to oneself. Sarraute's “tropisme” and “sous-conversation” need to be recognised as strategic in female satire: they need also to be incorporated into wider discussion of the genre out with gender distinctions. Satire is a kind of epitome, the paradox of “perfection” where the unique tips back into the ubiquitous. The limited space of Sarraute's satirical enterprise opens up the space of satire's illusive bounds, a planetarium cosmology. Instead of using Micromégas' rocket, Sarraute has unmanned her spacecraft to capitalise on the ultimately “female” art of guile by remote control.

From our study of the spatial in satire and Sarraute, is it then possible to reposition the status of satire itself? Its mode seems to be neither to entertain nor to instruct, neither to provide a social emetic nor tragicomic release. Satire's home territory is the “drame bourgeois”, the body politic where the audience is mirror. Leaning to the caricatural in periods of transition, revolution and radical change, opting for the parodic and self-reflexive to feed on when social order is more stable, satire thus exists best in the space where people take themselves too seriously. Then it displaces truism with unfamiliarity to dislodge the ridicule of conformist response. Satire is then the genre of para-site: just out of bounds for the censorious, it is a new outpost. It points up the boundaries of codes, conventions and consensus, including its own, by highlighting the arbitrariness of these codes themselves. In this it draws margins and the alien into a plenitude of new space, new satiric embodiment.¹⁵ Satire encloses sacred cows and papal bulls with the same pen to produce a genre of the Irish Bull.

Notes

1. For example, Ruth Z. Temple sums up the scenarios and character sketches as “material for satire” and Le Planétarium as a “satire of the middle-class family and of literary cliques. By the last it anticipates the subject of Les Fruits d'or”. Nathalie Sarraute (New York and London, Columbia UP, 1968), pp. 30 & 32 respectively. She and other critics cite examples without properly investigating how this satire operates.

2. Test, George, A., Satire: Spirit and Art (Tampa Uni. S. Florida Press, 1991).

3. Sarraute's Les Fruits d'or (Paris, Gallimard, 1963), provides just such transgressive gender and genre grapeshot out with canonical definitions. Space does not permit deeper discussion here of the literary/critical boundaries this text highlights.

4. See Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981). The essay Discourse in the Novel outlines these distinctions. In brief, Bakhtin contrasts authoritative, closed, generic and speech forms (monologic discourse), with open, diverse forms (dialogic discourse), made up of social heteroglossia (the multiplicity of speech forms introduced by narrators, inserted genres, speech of characters etc.). He therefore valorises the novel which embodies the latter variety.

5. Such spatialisation has been theorised recently by Shirley Ardener: “Individuals (and things) belong, then, to many pairs, groups or sets, each of which may be thought of as occupying its own ‘space’, or as sharing a particular ‘universe’. Members of one group may be ‘dominant’ relative to members of another group in one ‘universe’, while in turn being ‘muted’ in relation to members of a third group sharing with them a universe differently defined”. Ardener, Shirley, ed., Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps. (Oxford, Berg, 1993), p. 3.

6. Quoting Goffmann, Ardener remarks, “Objects are thought to structure the environment immediately around themselves: they cast a shadow, heat up the surroundings, strew indications, leave an imprint, they impress a part of themselves, a portrait that is unintended and not dependent on being attended, yet, of course, informing nonetheless to whomsoever is properly placed, trained and inclined.” ibid.

7. The Listener, 9 March 1961, p. 428.

8. Tisson-Braun, Micheline, Nathalie Sarraute ou la recherche de l'authenticité (Paris, Gallimar, 1971), p. 22. Dialogism here is not so much words behind words, but social engagement itself prior to language. See also Bakhtin, op. cit. p. 298, and the surprising similarity of imagery to Le Planétarium. “[The prose writer] does not purge words of intentions and tones […] the seeds of social heteroglossia embedded in words, he does not eliminate those language characterizations and speech mannerisms (potential narrator-personalities) glimmering behind the words and forms, each at a different distance from the ultimate semantic nucleus of his work.”

9. “The ‘dangers’ of ‘the outside’ arise from encounters which impinge on all social life, and which may be a threat to prestige and comfort, as represented by a range of social resources. Among these is that important social capital: information—exclusive knowledge—the secret—whether positive or negative—needs to be safeguarded. […] Aida Hawile once tellingly remarked that the boundary between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ may, in some contexts and under some conditions, be measured primarily by earshot […] a map of significant spaces identified by gaze might not coincide with a map of significant sound zones.” Ardener, op. cit. p. 12.

10. See Bakhtin, op. cit p. 302 “a primary source of language usage in the comic novel is a highly specific treatment of ‘common language’. This ‘common language’—usually the average norm of spoken and written language for a given social group—is taken by the author precisely as the common view, as the verbal approach to people and things normal for a given sphere of society, as the going point of view and the going value. To one degree or another, the author distances himself from this common language, he steps back and objectifies it, forcing his own intentions to refract and diffuse themselves through the medium of this common view […] The relationship of the author to a language conceived as the common view is not static.”

11. See J-F Lyotard, Rudiments païens (Paris, UGE 10/18, 1977), pp. 50-1: “L'humour dit: il n'y a pas de point de bonne vue, ni les choses du monde ni les discours ne forment un tableau, ou s'ils le forment, c'est par décision arbitraire du regardeur, prince ou savant. Exhibons cet arbitraire non pour tourner en dérision, mais pour le saisir infiltré d'une logique, d'un espace, d'un temps qui ne sont pas ceux du tableau représentatif, logique des singularités, espace des voisinages (des infinis), temps des moments. L'humour n'invoque pas une vérité plus universelle que celle des maîtres, il ne lutte même pas au nom de la majorité, en incriminant les maîres d'être minoritaires, il veut plutôt faire reconnaître ceci: qu'il n'y a que des minoritaires.”

12. Nouveau Roman, hier, aujourd'hui. vol. ii. p. 37.

13. Bachelard, in La Poétique de l'espace (Paris, PUF, 1957), has argued that the space of the house is the first place of self-identification, from which we name the other, the foreign, the outside. It is interesting to note that Sarraute's Le Planétarium, a novel so concerned with how to live space, was published in 1959.

14. See Minogue, V., Nathalie Sarraute and the War of the Words. (Edinburgh, Edinburgh U.P., 1981), p. 175 “it is not the specificity of her images which is important, but their universality as examples of instructions encoded in a tribal language, reinforced by precept, approbation and contumely. What is important is the power they obtain from, and exercise on, context and consensus. Nathalie Sarraute's texts significantly undermine that consensus.” I have taken this further to apply it to Sarraute supremely as satirist.

15. Although it lies outside my discussion, “female” satire also has a role in breaking/reshaping modern authority, by mapping the female body of works back into the atlas of satire. Here I go beyond what Thomas Docherty has suggested: “Thus the semantic conflict of authority as self-or other-directed is engaged most intimately in the sphere of the human body itself. Rather than being experienced as pure space, the body becomes understood as some kind of element which actually serves to demarcate the other spaces of nature, the space of nature which is ‘interrupted’ by the presence of the body itself. It is experienced, in other words, primarily as a boundary between inside and outside, as a tissue between an outside ‘other’ and an inside or ‘self’: it thus constitutes or creates the very notion of a ‘self’ which is not itself identified with the materiality of the body […] The family or ‘house’, together with this more intimate notion of the human body as proto-Heideggerian ‘dwelling-place’, will be of importance in a theory of authority.” On Modern Authority (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1987), p. 52.