[In the following essay, David analyses two of Sarraute's texts using Melanie Klein's psychoanalytical theories regarding the role of aggression and envy in the behavior of children to demonstrate that violence is an integral part of Sarraute's language and text.]

The world of savagery inhabited by Nathalie Sarraute seems to invite a Kleinian reading. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1880-1960) developed a body of theory out of her empirical observations of children's behaviour, in which she highlighted the role of aggression and the pivotal role of envy in constituting object relations.¹ In focusing upon Sarraute's status as a pioneer of the nouveau roman, principally engaged with exposing the processes involved in writing, critics have failed to address the violence inflicted upon the body in her fictions.² Even the critic Valerie Minogue, who does highlight the violence of Sarraute's writing, does so by foregrounding the petrifying power of language.³ John Phillips's Nathalie Sarraute: Metaphor, Fairy-Tale and the Feminine of the Text represents an interesting exception. Phillips uses Freudian, Kleinian, Jungian and Lacanian models in order to demonstrate that ‘the erotic is to be located in her [Sarraute's] writing, above all, at metaphorical levels’, but his primary interest does not lie in addressing the violence that is inherent to the fabric of Sarraute's writing.⁴ It is Klein who enables us to illuminate the reader's phantasmatic investment in Sarraute's texts, to trace the patterns of phantasy⁵ which they embody.

Why does a Kleinian model present itself as the most appropriate for an illumination of Sarraute's writing? For Klein, the desire to attack and destroy the mother's body predominates during the first few months of the child's life, and leads to the paranoid phantasy of retaliation. This lacerating aggressivity and its consequent fear of persecution is mitigated when the ‘depressive position’ sets in, a phase which heralds a more mature love for the whole object, a concern for the object that has been damaged in phantasy.⁶ According to Klein, both child and adult will in some form oscillate between the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’ and the ‘depressive position’ throughout life, but this persecutory, negative strain remains the dark soil from which her theorizations/fictions grow.

Klein can offer powerful insights into the way Sarraute's texts function and are experienced by the reader, insights which may in turn illuminate Klein's model. First, Sarraute problematizes identification through the use of a constantly shifting fluidity of subjective positions (‘il’, ‘elle’, ‘ils’, ‘elles’, ‘nous’, ‘vous’). The process of becoming a subject is enacted on the page through the fluctuating slipperiness of identifications. This is heightened by a sharp exposure of the way desires are projected into the other, and how this takes place through language. A reading of Sarraute through the writings of Klein can reveal the position of the reader to him/herself by redramatizing the layers of phantasy which permeate her textual fictions.

Secondly, in both Klein and Sarraute, phantasy is experienced in terms of the body. In Sarraute, aggressive phantasies are expressed through imagery of attacking and being physically attacked, biting, scratching with claws, being poisoned, and swallowing, which is frequently transfigured into imagery of wild beasts with sharp teeth. In Klein, intense physical experience is transformed into phantasy: the phantasy of being attacked by persecutors is rooted in the infant's sense of hunger and deprivation, while the weapons of primary sadism, such as biting and tearing, may be transfigured into other weapons of sadism.⁷ It is this visceral, corporeal dimension, the way it is transmuted into phantasy, which a re-viewing of Sarraute in the light of Klein opens up for exploration. In Les Fruits d'or, there is a recurrent figuration of the dynamics of attack and defence in terms of animal imagery: fur bristles, hackles rise, claws are bared. This serves to expose the very rawness of this primitive dance of social and psychic survival, enacted just beneath and through the shimmering, socialized texture of the language:

Mais lui, jamais. II n'est pas une de ces brutes, une de ces bêtes mues par un obscur instinct, qui ne se laissent jamais capturer, qui, à la moindre sensation de danger, au bruissement, au froissement le plus léger, tous leurs muscles bandés, leurs yeux soudain féroces aux aguets. leurs crocs en avant, font un de leurs terribles bonds. Non, il n'est pas cela.

(Les fruits d'or, p. 110)⁸

The immediacy of this kind of description takes us directly inside the phantasy world of the primitive beast. In the ambiguous sensuality of the imagery, it re-creates the highly-charged infantile world of Klein: we are plunged into the savage world of the predator, dominated by oral sadism, where there is no ‘depressive’ concern for the object, only the sharpness of teeth and the anticipated pleasure of biting, the essential difference lying in whether you are on the attacking or receiving end of them. There is a pleasure in being both the hunter and the hunted, those who sniff and seek out (‘Fouillons, flairons’ (FO [Les fruits d'or], p. 140)) in order to tear with claws; this pleasure can be seen to fuse with the primitive sadism of Klein's child patients, who cut and break the objects with which they play.

Thirdly, the sharp-edged materiality of language is at the centre of Sarraute's exposure of the processes of objectification. Klein enables us to articulate the complex ways in which the text reflects upon itself. Language as object becomes the focus of a linguistic game; the notion of the text as object of consumption is played with in Sarraute's writing. The text highlights itself as gratifying or failing to gratify in several ways, which serve to reflect the reader's pleasures and complicity back at him/her: repetition of sounds to the point of deadening reiteration, violence enacted through language, and the pleasure derived from the sense of mastery of the intellectual game. The desire to obtain gratification through consumption, interwoven with the desire to objectify and possess, to inflict violence, is represented within Klein's theoretical framework: in Sarraute's signifying space, these desires are filtered and transformed into words, which cut open their own desiring processes. However, while Sarraute is actively concerned with criticizing the power of language to petrify, to objectify, Klein seems to work in an opposing direction. She can be seen to reproduce the phantasy of the object as that which can be possessed, which means that the pattern of objectification is not overcome. Nonetheless, Klein's insights could be said to demonstrate an awareness of the processes involved in objectification, without actually pointing beyond it. Throughout Klein's theoretical writings she conveys a nostalgic longing for an object that was once possessed in phantasy, and is therefore imagined as something that could be possessed again. She dramatizes with vigour the way the infant projects his/her feelings into the object.

Violence explicitly permeates many of the linguistic exchanges between interlocutors in the writing of Sarraute. Klein enables us to open up the fabric of Sarraute's texts, in order to explore how they are permeated by sadism. What is of particular interest to us, however, is to examine how Klein invites us to examine the more subtle ways in which violence informs the fabric of her texts. The dynamics of textual sadism are revealed through the self-conscious comment of the text upon its own violence, even as it is enacted. This power of language to commit sadism at a distance, at one remove, is unveiled and stripped bare with discomforting eloquence in Disent les imbéciles.

Disent les imbéciles opens with a traditional family grouping around the figure of the grandmother. Sarraute initiates a disturbing exploration of the destructive forces at work beneath this idealized family tableau: she highlights the way language is implicated in this process, through highlighting not only its power to objectify, but also its status as object itself.

The action of the fingers that caress the grandmother is described as follows: ‘leurs doigts caressent la peau soyeuse un peu fripée de la joue … la chair moelleuse cède docilement à la pression des doigts’ (DI [Disent les imbéciles], p. 9). The words re-enact the sadistic action of the ‘doigts’; they are represented as alienated, severed from the characters whose desires they seek to fulfil. On one level, this could be seen to divorce the subject from guilt or anxiety for the object of phantasied aggression.

The reader participates imaginatively in the tactile experience of caressing the silky skin, rendered ‘fripée’, wrinkled, worn and vulnerable in the destructive phantasy of the writer: we are invited to knead the soft flesh through the sensuous seductions of the text. Yet, while the caressing fingers generate pleasure, they slip insidiously from stroking to applying pressure, as though seeking to penetrate through ‘la peau soyeuse’. Sarraute's presentation of the grandmother's vulnerability and her yielding softness could be seen as suggestive tendrils of Sarraute's destructive wishes.

Sarraute's imaginative curiosity reveals itself in a preoccupation with bodily surfaces, exteriors which enclose a mystery constructed through language and sought by the fingers:

Elle est mignonne … la peau si douce, fragile, de sa joue amollie vous donne quand on l'effleure avec la pulpe des doigts une sensation … on a envie de retenir son souffle … les doigts glissent, suivent le contour du crâne qui garde toute sa rondeur sous la mince couche de ses cheveux … elle est mignonne … si frêle, docile … leurs doigts enserrent docilement l'épaule.

(DI, pp. 9-10)

Sarraute's imagination slips over soft surfaces, illuminating itself in its desire to excavate points of vulnerability. An interest in exteriors is revealed through a vocabulary of soft matter that yields to the touch. These fingers do not merely caress, they ‘enserrent’. In this shaping of a fictional moment, Sarraute's style, which Minogue characterizes as essentially ‘poetic in its concern to recreate rather than describe’, comes to life.⁹

It is through this desire to recreate that the dynamics of textual sadism could be said to be effected. Sarraute dwells with loving and sadistic detail on the minute, tactile sensations aroused in those who touch the grandmother: she weaves a seductive web of repeated sound patterns through vocabulary that emphasizes her apparent vulnerability and status as object: ‘la peau si douce’, ‘fragile’, ‘sa joue amollie’ conjure her up metonymically as an object of desire.

Sarraute exploits the effects of repetition to maximum effect, reiterating certain motifs in a hypnotic manner. ‘Elle est mignonne’ occurs twice, ‘doigts’ is repeated three times, ‘docile’ in ‘docilement’. Indeed, this paragraph, only the second of the novel, is already reiterating certain key motifs from its predecessor, which began with ‘Elle est mignonne’, and contained almost identical imagery of soft hair, soft, fragile skin, caressing fingers couched in vocabulary possessing very similar semantic and phonetic properties (‘leurs doigts caressent la peau soyeuse un peu fripée de la joue … la chair moelleuse cède docilement à la pression des doigts’ (DI, p. 9 quoted above)). The circularity of this repetition functions both as a narrative strategy in its own right, and as a deadening device, which undermines meaning through magnifying and repeating it, so that the action is represented in an alienating manner.

In the first paragraph, therefore, Sarraute builds up a pattern of phonemes and associations that are echoed in the second. Through alliterative repetition, frequently to softening effect, intensely enmeshed in assonance and internal rhyme, Sarraute conjures up the circular repetition of sounds through which the protagonists' desire for the grandmother-object is shaped. These phonetic kinships seem to murmur away in the background as the reader engages with them, creating murmurs of pleasure. At the same time, they serve to structure and echo the compulsive repetition of the same desire, the desire to possess through touch, being reiterated and phantasmatically re-enacted over and over again. The syntactic movement of the lines, with its lingering pauses, serves to trace the action of desirous fingers and eyes as they roam over the body's surfaces. It is by thus re-enacting the sensuous yield obtained by the linguistic fingers in the explorative invasion of the grandmother's body that Sarraute foregrounds the role of language and the reader's complicity in the mechanics of textual sadism.

Sarraute advances a powerful attack upon objectification and the sinister forces involved in the linguistic act of trying to pin down the subjectivity of an other. In what appears to be its least violent manifestation, this takes the form of ‘Elle est mignonne’. At surface level, these three words may appear relatively harmless, but Sarraute exposes, in a gradual crescendo, the layers of phantasy bound up with these few words and which inevitably colour any attempt to represent the grandmother through language: ‘Il ne s'agit pas de son patronyme, pas de son prénom, il s'agit de ce qu'elle est pour nous, tu le sais. Oui, de ce qu'elle représente pour chacun de nous.—C'est … c'est notre grand'mère’ (DI, p. 12). What is of significance here is ‘ce qu'elle représente pour chacun de nous’; the symbol ‘grand'mère’ triggers off phantasies of expectation and gratification in those subjects to whom she bears that relation. They expect a certain kind of gratification from the grandmother, and seek to possess her through their caresses. The text parallels this dynamics of appropriation, through appearing to create an object that can be phantasied in terms of possession, and through tracing the violence of that desire.

Failure to obtain exclusive possession of the grandmother can be seen to unleash the subject's destructive phantasies in relation to the object. The object is tranformed into a ‘bad’ object, not unlike Klein's powerful image of the bad breast.¹⁰ Objectification could thus be seen to represent a way of mitigating the threat posed by the object in terms of phantasied retaliatory attacks.¹¹

Can the threat be kept under control? A very sharp ambivalence in relation to the figure of the grandmother is suddenly hinted at in a shift of the text. Something stirs in the depths of the reader's unconscious, as the cute, loveable, fairy-tale grandmother begins to reveal a glimmer of secret menace lurking beneath the surface of her face: ‘Cette vieille au visage d'un rose suspect, légèrement bleuté, où seuls les yeux ont conservé … ou peut-être acquis … ils ne l'avaient pas … cet éclat … ce luisant comme une lueur … Donnez-moi le mot, passez-le-moi … oui, c'est bien celui-là … lubrique … une lueur lubrique’ (DI, pp. 21-22). Suddenly the grandmother is dismissively referred to as ‘cette vieille’; her complexion, previously so cloyingly sweet, is tinged with menace: ‘suspect’, ‘bleuté’. Her eyes were earlier described as a hard enamel surface, which merely reflect the paranoid subject back at him/herself, revealing nothing of what is going on behind them: ‘l'émail miroitant de ses yeux’ (DI, p. 18). They have acquired a libidinous glow (‘lubrique’) which is felt to be highly threatening. That the object should possess and seek to fulfil its own selfish and savage desire poses an unacceptable threat to the subject who seeks his/her own gratification from her, projecting his/her own phantasies upon it. The writing struggles with the painful acknowledgement of her otherness. Its representation seems to precipitate a searing, traumatic shift:

Regarde les replis mous de cette chair faisandée où les désirs inavouables se lovent … ces lèvres amincies et rentrées … ces mèches grises en désordre de vieille mégère, de vieille sorcière … c'est qu'elle peut être féroce, on l'avait oublié, notre bonne grand'mère … Regarde ses doigts crochus, vous vous en souvenez? Ça me revient maintenant, ces petits coups de griffe que tout à coup, quand on s'y attendait le moins, elle savait donner.

(DI, p. 22)

In the imagination of the narrator at that point the grandmother turns into a hateful and sadistic witch. Here Klein can join forces with a feminist critique in unravelling the projections upon the figure of the grandmother which, as Sarraute reveals, imprison her in cliché. In the phantasied relation to the grandmother, the drama of separation depicted by Klein is re-kindled and re-elaborated.¹² The violence felt to emanate from her, which turns her into a savage witch who threatens the subject, could be seen as the subject's own aggression returning to haunt him. In Kleinian terms, it could be traced to the re-introjection of the bad object, re-projected outwards.¹³

The ‘désirs inavouables’ attributed to the grandmother are represented as lurking, ‘se lovent’, behind the flesh which has become hideously soft, ‘les replis mous’. The lips ‘amincies et rentrées’ reveal the sadistic, potentially biting mouth of a witch, a ‘vieille sorcière’, fierce and savage, the darker side of the benevolent fairy-tale grandmother. Phillips reads this representation of the grandmother as a metaphor of the false, counterfeit grandmother; beneath the disguise lurks the wolf from ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.¹⁴ This figure reclaims her savagery: she is the possessor of talons, ‘ses doigts crochus’, which have the power to scratch and cut, to attack with ‘ces petits coups de griffe’; this not only strongly resembles the action of the invasive fingers that caressed her earlier, but could also represent a re-casting of Klein's cutting and tearing infants. In Sarraute, no-one can be trusted: from one moment to the next, an apparently benevolent other may mutate into a persecutory figure.

One of the speaking voices reacts violently, screaming against the violent appropriation of the grandmother by others. The accusation of jealousy that is levelled against him in itself functions as a deadly weapon, since it cuts right through to the phantasy of exclusive possession of the object, and threatens the subject directly in his awareness of the fragile reaches of his omnipotence. Each speaking voice is, however, revealed to be suspect, implicated in the struggle for possession: ‘Mais nous, quand nous avons osé toucher à son bien, à sa propriété exclusive’ (DI, p. 17).

Sarraute's final, scathing attack on objectification takes the form of an analysis of its mechanics:

—‘Oui, sa chose’ …—Oui, ta chose … Ah merci de me le donner … chose … Chose est bien le mot. Un mot qui dit tout.

Une chose, vous avez vu cela. Un objet, posé là devant nous, étalé, offert … Ses doux cheveux, sa joue soyeuse.

(DI, p. 18)

The power of language to categorize and to appropriate in phantasmatic possession is explicitly highlighted through play with cliché—‘Chose est bien le mot’—and through exploring the implications of trying to transform the experience of contact with otherness into language. The object of phantasied investigation, ‘posé là devant nous’, is ‘placed’ by the text and in phantasy, as though available for consumption and exploration: ‘étalé’, ‘offert’. Caught in the act of attempting to create linguistically an object that can be possessed, Sarraute's language catches the reader participating in the desire to do so.

The attempt to figure the other linguistically emerges as fraught with the dynamics of the violence of appropriation: they are inseparably fused. Sarraute re-enacts through language the violence effected in the act of uttering the words, ‘Elle est mignonne’: ‘“Elle” d'abord, anonyme, elle qui peut designer n'importe qui, elle, un moi qui la place à distance, un peu plus bas. “Elle”’ (DI, p. 19). The use of the pronoun ‘elle’ is impersonal, thus divorced from any feeling of love or concern that might be associated with an object personal to the speaker. It places the object referred to at a distance, rendering the phantasied sadistic attacks upon it more tolerable to the attacker, subjecting it in terms of power politics, ‘un peu plus bas’. Above all, language in Sarraute's text effects a sadistic pinning down and a fixing of identity: it objectifies, in order to permit possession.

Next, Sarraute moves on to an analysis of the effects of the third person singular form of être: ‘C'est au tour de ‘est’ à présent. “Est” qui invente, pétrifie … “est” qui bloque toutes les issues. Impossible de s'en évader … “Est” … mais vous le savez’ (DI, p. 19). She explores vividly the terrifying implications of stating that one thing is another: to do so is to cement and freeze, to pin down definitively and for ever.

Finally, Sarraute attacks ‘mignonne’, so harmless on the surface, laying bare the threat it harbours: ‘Et maintenant la perle, maintenant le bouquet: “mignonne’ … Petite porcelaine de saxe posée sur la cheminée, statuette de Tanagra, ravissante poupée … Mais à quoi bon? Chacun le sent vous l'avez senti … “Elle est mignonne. N'est-elle pas à croquer?” À croquer. À croquer. Alors ça a craqué’ (DI, p. 19). The way cliché objectifies, petrifies and appropriates sadistically is exposed and mimetically re-enacted. By participating in the reading process, the reader is implicated in this form of textual sadism. Through the manic manipulation of cliché, a psychic pattern of obsessive repetition surrounding the cannibalistic phantasy of biting emerges.¹⁵ The by now familiar leitmotiv, ‘N'est-elle pas à croquer?’ is whittled down to its phantasmatically titillating kernel, ‘À croquer’; uttered obsessively, its sadism reinforced through pushing its harsh sounds to the brink of senselessness.

Vocabulary of sadistic mouths and teeth coalesce around the wish to ‘croquer’. Indeed, the obsessive repetition of ‘croquer’ suggests the yield of pleasure derived from endlessly re-enacting the scene of biting. This in turn precipitates a linguistic rupture, a panic that seems to break things apart, and which could be seen to hint at concern for the object, victim of the phantasied biting action: ‘Alors ça a craqué’.

The dangers and delights of orality surface explicitly through the language used to represent the grandmother. Desire and its linguistic expression are fused:

Ses lèvres d'enfant gourmand s'avancent, s'arrondissent: ‘Comme elle est mignonne’ …

‘Elle est mignonne.’ Un bonbon fondant. Un caramel au goût de sucre fruité, de miel, délicieux à sucer, à amollir dans sa bouche, à étirer … elle est mignonne … une pâte onctueuse … De quoi est-ce fait?

(DI, p. 27)

The greedy lips of the child requiring oral satisfaction are the same lips that form the words, ‘Comme elle est mignonne’: the articulation of the oral desire and the sensuality of its imagined satisfaction are inseparably intertwined. The longing to suck is transformed into language through which the child/adult can simultaneously create a linguistic object and an ‘o’ shape, thus enabling the desire to be fulfilled in sublimated form.

The ‘elle’ is poetically transmuted into a linguistic sweet, ‘un bonbon fondant’, ‘un caramel au goût de sucre fruité’, in which the phantasy tastebuds luxuriate. The sensual imagery of taste is dwelt upon lingeringly, couched in vocabulary denoting the actual sensation of chewing and sucking inside the mouth—‘fondant’, ‘délicieux à sucer’, ‘à amollir dans sa bouche, à étirer’. Through the delight conjured up by the language of taste, the reader participates actively in the sensuous experience of eating the metaphorical sweet, and is thus rendered complicitous in the oral sadism inflicted upon the grandmother. In this manner, Sarraute plays the ultimate trick of mastery upon the reader: she forces him/her to savour the pleasures of tasting the object, and, in the very same moment, unmasks the violent underbelly of the delectation that he described.

In the second section of Disent les imbéciles, a male character is spoken of by several others as having ‘un menton à galoche’ (DI, p. 32). Sarraute plays with language, with word association, allowing the words to explode with an almost anarchic force:

Un menton auquel le mot ‘galoche’ est venu se coller … galoche, valoche, oche … la terminaison répugnante, molle, vautrée, adhère, leste, pèse, gonfle, étire, tire toujours plus bas, et à l'aide du g … galoche … relève hideusement le bout enflé … Impossible de l'arrêter, de le comprimer, ça pousse, ça va grossir toujours plus fort.

(DI, p. 33)

The reader is submerged in a kind of linguistic nightmare as language disintegrates into word play and excessive, uncontrolled repetition; the fear of being physically and phonetically engulfed is re-created mimetically. Fused indistinguishably with the hideous, persecutory chin, it is the word ‘galoche’ that actually acquires the intense concentration of threat projected upon the chin, whose ending sticks to the chin like a grotesque parasite, then spills out of linguistic control, swelling inexorably and irresistibly like a monstrous growth. The mounting rhythm of the language possesses a sexual resonance. As Phillips points out, this eroticism is reinforced not only by the references to phallic erection, but by the layering of fairy-tale metaphors, from the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (a phallic figure) to Tom Thumb.¹⁶

The fear of being flooded by a powerful force is experienced as highly threatening by the speaking voice. A manic need to enforce linguistic control gives voice to an urgent desire to contain the swelling of that other which comes to life and transforms into a persecutor.¹⁷ Here, the language used to keep fear at bay is that of short, clipped syllables. Control is phantasmatically achieved through linguistic tightness. The texture of the three syllables invoked to contain the dread of the chin, ‘ré-gu-liers’ both expresses the need for and enacts that control.

Sarraute dramatizes the moment with intensity: it is, as it were, played and displayed in slow motion, scrutinized from every angle, subjected to the ironic gaze of the writer and reader. No catharsis emerges through this writing, redemption is not won: it re-creates in order to expose, remaining locked into the scenarios which it is compelled to re-enact vividly.

What, therefore, is the pay-off for the reader engaged with this kind of writing? In order to remain true to a Kleinian dynamics of reading, we must consider Sarraute's writing in the light of two concepts, the ‘containing function’ and ‘reparation’. The containing function derives from Klein's original description of projective identification in which one person in some sense contains a part of another. This has given rise to a theory amongst Kleinian analysts whereby the infant deals with an intolerable anxiety by projecting it into the mother, and the mother responds by ‘containing’ the anxiety, in other words, by acknowledging and relieving the child's distress, and by handing it back to the child in a form that the child can accept.¹⁸ For Kleinians, or for critics such as Kristeva who have been strongly influenced by Klein, art possesses a ‘containing function’.¹⁹ In Sarraute, however, the destabilization of identification and the use of repetition would seem to work against the grain of the containing function of art. Identification is rendered so slippery that her writing balances uneasily between, on the one hand, the containment of its violence in the fabric of the text and, on the other, the danger of becoming a nightmare of its own making.

Due to the continual shift in perspective, the reader's position is one of flux, of being sucked from the desiring mental space of one speaking subject into that of another. Thus he/she is momentarily placed in the position of first experiencing the effects of sadism from the perspective of the victim, then from that of the attacker; most uncomfortably, he/she is placed in the uneasy position of witness to the act of inflicted violence, which slips surreptitiously into complicity with that phantasied sadism. Through her sharp words, Sarraute reflects the reader's own desires back at him/her in a textual game in which she acts as puppet-master. She draws the reader's attention to the artful linguistic manipulations whose energetics are illuminated by the Kleinian network of desires.

The concept of reparation is equally problematic for the critic engaged in a Kleinian reading of Sarraute. For Klein, all creativity stems from the desire to repair the object that has been damaged in phantasy, the wish to make reparation.²⁰ Laplanche and Pontalis theorize reparation in the following manner:

La notion de réparation s'inscrit dans la conception kleinienne du sadisme infantile précoce, celui-ci se traduisant par des fantasmes de destruction (Zerstörung), de mise en pièces (Ausschneiden; Zerschneiden), de dévoration (Fressen), etc. La réparation est liée essentiellement à la position dépressive […] contemporaine de l'avènement d'une relation à l'objet total. C'est en réponse à l'angoisse et à la culpabilité inhérentes à cette position que l'enfant tente de maintenir ou de rétablir l'intégrité du corps maternel. Différents fantasmes actualisent cette tendance à réparer ‘le désastre créé par son sadisme’ (…): préserver le corps maternel des attaques des ‘mauvais’ objets, en rassembler les fragments épars, redonner vie à ce qui a été tué, etc. En rendant ainsi à l'objet d'amour son intégrité et en supprimant tout le mal qui lui a été fait, l'enfant s'assurait la possession d'un objet pleinement ‘bon’ et stable dont l'introjection renforce son moi. Les fantasmes de réparation ont ainsi un rôle structurant dans le développement du moi.²¹

For Klein, the attempt to repair the object damaged in phantasy and to ‘make good again’ is the root of all artistic creativity. The unravelling of the relations between reparation and the self-reflexive text can potentially offer a way of reformulating reparation in the light of the avant-garde. Whereas a traditionally ‘redemptive’ text, such as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, can more readily be read as ‘reparative’, the question of how to theorize ‘reparation’ becomes more problematic in relation to a self-reflexive text such as Sarraute's Disent les imbéciles, which explicitly contradicts any such reparative trajectory or narrative closure. A Kleinian reading of a literary text would, however, be incomplete without addressing and attempting to locate the question of reparation, which is central to Kleinian theory.

Klein theorizes reparation as the happy end to her narratives of psychic chaos and destruction.²² Out of the psychic storm grows the desire to rebuild, concern for the damaged object. Klein's narrative of reparation reaches beyond its redemptive appeal and touches what is fundamental about narrative in general: a patterning through which desire takes shape, bound up with time, a structure through which feelings and experiences, real or imagined, are organized. Sarraute's moments get under the skin, and interact strangely with a narrative movement that progresses through an endless repetition of circular movements. These movements in themselves bind the textual energies of her longer texts through ‘the recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it’.²³ Sarraute's writings could thus be said to form a highly complex patterning of narrative progression, enacted through the compulsive repetition of highly aggressive moments. These moments in themselves seem to embody the oscillations of attack and defence, eternal reduplications of the brittle dance of survival.

Reparation, according to Klein's literal definition of it, is markedly absent from Sarraute's phantasied fictional encounters with others. True concern for the object of violence cannot be said to surface: instead we are pulled back into the mechanism of defence, as the subject fears retaliation. As a structural component of narrative, reparation appears excluded. At this point, Kristeva's formulation of forgiveness in relation to Dostoevsky may be illuminating. Kristeva writes:

Ce pardon dostoïevskien semble dire:

Par mon amour, je vous exclus un temps de l'histoire, je vous prends pour un enfant, ce qui signifie que je reconnais les ressorts inconscients de votre crime et vous permets de vous transformer. Pour que l'inconscient s'inscrive dans une nouvelle histoire qui ne soit pas l'éternel retour de la pulsion de la mort dans le cycle crime/châtiment, il lui faut transiter par l'amour du pardon, se transférer à l'amour du pardon.²⁴

Clearly, forgiveness and reparation are distinct from one another, although they share a common trajectory, a desire to make good again. It could be argued that reparation, like Kristeva's theorization of forgiveness, breaks the chain of sadism and fear, and inaugurates narrative, making new stories possible. For Kristeva, forgiveness is outside time and history, but it is possible to see reparation as a structuring component of a narrative logic that breaks out of the repetition of the same moment, heralding a new time. This does not happen in Sarraute, where the same arid moment—sameness with a difference—seems to repeat itself to the point of exhaustion, sterility. Ineluctably, the compulsion to repeat enacts itself over and over again. This is clearly deliberate, and functions as highly successful satire, but it is problematic from the point of view of reparation. Poised between capturing the reader's imagination and pushing the reader to the brink of boredom with an unbearable, monotonous repetition, devoid of tenderness, the language executes a subtle pas de deux, which simultaneously captivates him/her, and seems to laugh at the nostalgic desire for reparation.

Deprived of reparation, in the Kleinian sense, the critic must re-cast the search for reparation in Sarraute's texts, framing the question differently. In his critique of the redemptive power given to art, Leo Bersani argues for a sexual investment of cultural forms whereby symbols signify merely the excess of sexual energy with which they are invested, rather than serving as symbols through which the subject seeks to flee his/her own anxiety: ‘No longer a corrective replay of anxious fantasy, such an art may even reinstate a curiously disinterested mode of desire for objects, a mode of excitement that, far from investing objects with symbolic significance, would enhance their specificity and thereby fortify their resistance to the violence of symbolic intent’.²⁵

Through deliberately choosing to explore the ‘violence of symbolic intent’, the way in which language seeks to squeeze a meaning out of what it encounters and constructs, Sarraute could be said to move towards Bersani's model. For if we are to locate reparation anywhere in Sarraute's writing, surely it does not function as ‘a corrective replay of anxious fantasy’? Instead, it could be said to have broken free of its redemptive moorings, revealing itself in the delight of Sarraute's wit, her linguistic play, the excessive, often exuberant creative energy that draws the imagination along her concatenations of words. Through her carefully controlled play with language, Sarraute opens up a space in which the subject's desires, implicated in the violence of writing, are returned to him/her. It is in this space that an alternative mode of reparation is allowed to form.

Notes

1. For a Kleinian account of aggression, see Klein, ‘Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse’ (1929), The Writings of Melanie Klein, 4 vols (London, Hogarth and Institute of Psychoanalysis), II, 210-19. All subsequent references to Klein's writings will be to this edition, abbreviated WMK, I-IV. See also, ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ (1935), WMK, I, 262-89. For Klein's theorization of envy, see Klein, ‘Envy and Gratitude’ (1957), WMK, IV, p. 183. For an account of the object, see R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Press, 1991), pp. 362-67.

2. For instance, see Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman: a Study in the Practice of Writing (London, Elek, 1972); and Ann Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1980). Sarraute's own theoretical writings are actively hostile towards psychoanalytic readings. See Celia Britton, The Nouveau Roman: Fiction, Theory and Politics (Basingstoke and London, Macmillan, 1992), pp. 139-41.

3. Nathalie Sarraute and the War of the Words: A Study of Five Novels (Edinburgh University Press, 1981), pp. 121-4.

4. Nathalie Sarraute: Metaphor, Fairy-Tale and the Feminine of the Text (New York, Peter Lang, 1994), p. 1.

5. This is the Kleinian spelling of ‘phantasy’, beginning with a ‘ph’ instead of an ‘f’; for Klein, phantasy is all-pervasive. We always view ‘external’ reality through the filter of phantasy.

6. See Klein, ‘The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ (1935). See also Deleuze and Guattari: ‘En termes kleiniens, on dirait que la position dépressive n'est qu'une couverture pour une position schizoïde plus profonde’ (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L'Anti-Œdipe: capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris, Minuit, 1972), p. 51).

7. See Klein, ‘Infantile Anxiety Situations’ (1929), pp. 211-12.

8. References will be to the following editions: Nathalie Sarraute, Les Fruits d'or (Paris, Gallimard, 1963), abbreviated FO in the article; Nathalie Sarraute, Disent les imbéciles (Paris, Gallimard, 1976), abbreviated DI in the article.

9. See Nathalie Sarraute and the War of the Words, p. 136.

10. For Klein, the infant splits the phantasy of the mother's breast into the good breast and the bad breast. The good breast is the breast that gratifies the infant's desires and the bad breast is that which fails to do so and consequently has feelings of hatred projected upon it.

11. See Klein, ‘The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ (1935), pp. 277-78.

12. See Klein, ‘Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant’ (1952), WMK, IV, 63.

13. For Klein, introjection is the phantasy of taking something into the self, while projection involves projecting it into the other in phantasy.

14. Nathalie Sarraute, p. 176.

15. In ‘The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’, Klein figures the cannibalistic desire to bite or eat the object in terms of the depressive desire to test that the object still exists and has survived phantasied attacks upon it. This is clearly inseparably intertwined with the oral-sadistic pleasure of biting. See Klein, ‘The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’, p. 264.

16. See Nathalie Sarraute, pp. 174-75.

17. See Klein, ‘The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’.

18. For an account of ‘containing’, see Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, pp. 246-52.

19. See Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination (London, Weidenfeld, 1993 (1967)), and Adrian Stokes, ‘Form in Art’, in New Directions in Psychoanalysis, ed. by Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann and R. E. Money-Kyrle (London, Tavistock and Maresfield, 1977 (1955)), pp. 406-20.

20. See Klein, ‘Infantile anxiety-situations’(1929); see also Hinshelwood, 1991, pp. 412-16.

21. Jean Laplanche et J.-B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris, PUF, 1967), p. 409.

22. In ‘Negativity in the Work of Melanie Klein’, Jacqueline Rose seeks to give a place to the negativity within Klein, arguing for an aporetic reading of Klein which would operate as an interruption of her normative narratives of development. Rose views the whole Kleinian corpus as an attempt to ‘get itself under control’, to contain the violence of its internal passions. See Rose, Why War?—Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford, Blackwell, 1993), pp. 137-90.

23. For an account of repetition in literary texts, see Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 99-100.

24. Soleil noir: dépression et mélancolie (Paris, Gallimard, 1987), p. 206.

25. Leo Bersani, ‘Death and Literary Authority: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein’, in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 7-28.