[In the following essay, Barbour acknowledges that although many critics have attempted to read Sarraute's Tropismes as a feminist text, the work is ultimately a non-gender-specific text that is to be experienced through the semi-participation of the reader within the narrative.]

My “discovery” in 1979 of Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes resonated within current discussions among feminists about a woman writer's relationship to literary tradition and the difference between writing by women and men.¹ Some feminist literary critics in this country were analyzing the stereotypical roles assigned to female characters in men's writing and others were engaged in (re)discovering writings by women. The “revolutionary” qualities of Sarraute's work seemed to embody the challenge to patriarchal “norms” that these critics found in writings by women.

In critical studies about her work Sarraute was called a “founder/member” of the nouveau roman, but critics also noted that her mimetic intentions isolated her within that group.² All the other writers designated as nouveaux romanciers were men, and I attributed Sarraute's isolation to the fact that she was a woman. When I came upon the preface to L'Ere du soupçon, I read Sarraute's personal statements about writing through my own desire to identify her as a rebel against patriarchy:

Les textes qui composaient ce premier ouvrage [Tropismes] étaient l'expression spontanée d'impressions très vives, et leur forme était aussi spontanée et naturelle que les impressions auxquelles elle donnait vie.

Je me suis aperçue en travaillant que ces impressions étaient produites par certains mouvements, certaines actions intérieures sur lesquelles mon attention s'était fixée depuis longtemps. En fait, me semble-t-il, depuis mon enfance.³

[The texts that composed this first work were the spontaneous expression of very vivid impressions, and their form was as spontaneous and natural as the impressions re-created.

I perceived while working that these impressions were produced by certain interior actions which had attracted my attention for a long time. In fact, it seemed to me, since my childhood.]

The line between lived and literary reality appeared to collapse with the last sentence of this passage. I read Sarraute's insistence on the spontaneous and natural quality of her work as not simply an answer to critics who called the nouveaux romanciers “des froids experimenteurs” [cold experimenters], but also as a reflection of her desire as a woman writer to present her specific view of reality.

In addition, here was a French woman whose writing broke apart patriarchal conventions: her works decentered the narrative voice, they disrupted narrative and syntactical order, their images were corporeal, and their language poetic. These were the qualities of writing which Hélène Cixous was making polemics in the 1970s, as noted by Toril Moi: “For Cixous, feminine texts are texts that ‘work on the difference,’ as she once put it, strive in the direction of difference, struggle to undermine phallogocentric logic, split open the closure of binary opposition and revel in the pleasures of open-ended textuality.”⁴ When Cixous further specified that the term l'écriture féminine was “a dangerous and stylish expression full of traps,” because such naming simply reinforced the binary logic which imprisons us, I agreed intellectually, but my body did not listen.⁵ Sarraute was a woman, I was a woman, so I set about to characterize her writing within my own definition of l'écriture féminine: writing by a woman which in its form disrupts patriarchal logic and language, and in its content addresses the “other side” of the established order. I realize now that I was reading Sarraute from a position that Julia Kristeva describes as “second generation feminism” emerging after 1968: “Essentially interested in the specificity of female psychology and its symbolic realizations, these women seek to give a language to the intrasubjective and corporeal experiences left mute by culture in the past.”⁶

As yet unresponsive to Kristeva's theory, which also complicates the elision of “feminine” and “female,” I was still responding personally to Nathalie Sarraute, the French woman writer. I was reading her work as what Patrocinio Schweickart would later call “a manifestation of the subjectivity of the absent author—the ‘voice’ of another woman.”⁷ Reading more about this woman writer, however, I soon discovered a troubling remark she made in an interview: “Any good writer is androgynous, he or she has to be, so as to be able to write equally about men and women.”⁸ Simone de Beauvoir had accused Sarraute of ignoring the social, historical context in her work, and I knew that I could read her refusal to be labeled a woman writer as an extension of that accusation: this woman writer was denying what I felt to be her feminine specificity. That reading would unfortunately lead me to the same end as de Beauvoir, that is, to dismiss Sarraute for polemical reasons. Sarraute's work was too significant and too poignant to be dismissed, but I needed a paradigm with which to explain my growing suspicion that the impersonal voice narrating Tropismes was Sarraute's means of hiding her specificity.

In the same year that I found Sarraute, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Their study addressed precisely the specificity I wanted to investigate, and in a vocabulary both theoretically and personally accessible to me at the time: “Since his is the chief voice she hears, does the Queen try to sound like the King, imitating his tone, his inflections, his phrasing, his point of view? Or does she ‘talk back’ to him in her own vocabulary, her own timbre, insisting on her own viewpoint? We believe these are basic questions feminist literary criticism—both theoretical and practical—must answer […].”⁹ In an effort to establish a theory of women's literary creativity, Gilbert and Gubar alter Harold Bloom's formulation about male poets who are pushed to creativity by an “anxiety of influence.” These critics proposed instead that the nineteenth-century woman writer suffered an “anxiety of authorship,” “a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor’ the act of writing will isolate or destroy her.”¹⁰

In her critical writings Sarraute refers frequently to her “precursors,” especially Flaubert, Joyce, Proust, and Woolf, and to the notion of “le psychologique” that she feels links the works of Dostoyevsky to those of Kafka and her own. I thus understood Sarraute's re-reading (and re-writing) of the novel's tradition to be nothing less than a woman writer's effort to redefine masculine tradition in order to make a place for her (specifically feminine) view of reality. The extremely ironic style she adopts in these essays also appeared to exemplify the woman writer's subversion as Gilbert and Gubar describe it: “Thus these authors managed the difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards.”¹¹ An application of this theory to my French woman writer, however, suppressed both Sarraute's desire not to be named a “woman writer” and Cixous's refusal to limit her concept of the “feminine” to writers who are women.

Adding an ironic twist to the dilemma, what do I do with this woman writer Nathalie Sarraute, were the opening words of the first book-length critical work on Sarraute's novels, “L'Homme et l'oeuvre?” [The man and the work?]. The practice of using the term homme to refer to the (male or female) individual was criticized by feminists in the 1970s,¹² but in 1965, Mimica Cranaki and Yvon Belaval were offering a variation on the current critical approach as a way of introducing their own dilemma: “L'homme vrai, ce n'est pas pour elle, l'enveloppe sociale, ce que nous voyons à distance […]. Le ‘personnage’ ou ‘caractère’ individue cette substance (anonyme comparable au sang) à laquelle on attribue alors un nom: par exemple, Nathalie Sarraute” [The real man is not for her, the social envelope, what we see at a distance (…). The “personnage” or “character” individuates that substance, (anonymous as blood) to which we then attribute a name: Nathalie Sarraute, for example].¹³ With the Death of the Novel well under way, the Death of the Author and the Death of the Subject were soon at hand; Cranaki and Belaval were writing at the height of a critical self-consciousness that was in part provoked by the innovations found in the works of Sarraute and the other nouveaux romanciers.

In time I would come to realize that my own dilemma was similarly part of a larger debate, the one between American and French feminist literary and cultural critics which could be schematized by a transformation of Cranaki and Belaval's question, “la femme ou l'oeuvre?” If both groups have at some point asked the same question—“What is the difference of women's writing?”¹⁴ and “Existe-t-il une écriture féminine?”¹⁵—each has dealt with the question differently. Critics in the United States tended toward what has been called “a woman-centered approach,” that is, concentrating on studies of “Images of Women in (Male) Fiction” or compiling anthologies of women writers in order to formulate a theory of their creativity; in France, critics were investigating “theories of the feminine” and “Woman” as a cultural construct, that is, the product (“l'oeuvre”) of male desire.¹⁶ This difference in approach sometimes created division between feminists in the United States and France, but in the last ten years the relationship has become more of a dialogue which has been articulated by, among others, Alice Jardine, Toril Moi, and Rita Felski.

The disruption of linguistic and narrative conventions that led me at first to identify Sarraute's writing as “l'écriture féminine” opens onto another aspect of her work that I had experienced personally but had not yet adequately analyzed critically, and that is the practice of reading. Cranaki and Belaval's question, “Que faire avec Nathalie Sarraute,” resonated within my more North American oriented search for “la femme” and A. S. Newman's later question, “Comment lire Nathalie Sarraute,” directed my attention back to “l'oeuvre.”¹⁷ More importantly, Newman's question took me away from defining Nathalie Sarraute as a particular kind of writer and toward an investigation of myself as a reader. My first reading of Sarraute had been made as a desire to be liberated from silence. I had thus inflected her texts with my own sex(uality) and mistaken her work as primarily an expression of female experience.¹⁸

In an effort to explore more theoretically the ways in which the apparently impersonal narration of Tropismes solicited such a personal involvement, I began a close textual analysis of Sarraute's first work. This investigation revealed that the use of language in these prose pieces invites the reader into both a complicitous relationship with an outside (objective) observing narrator and a more intimate (subjective) relationship to the psychological reality of those observed. These two positions can also represent two ways of knowing as they are discussed by Lynn Sukenick in her article “Women and Fiction.” Analytical knowing is characterized as “moving around the object,” while intuitive knowing is similar to Henri Bergson's “intellectual sympathy,” “entering into the object,” and to Helen Deutsch's explanation that in intuitive knowing “the other person's mental state [is …] emotionally and unconsciously ‘re-experienced.’”¹⁹

The dichotomy analytical-intuitive has traditionally been a gendered one and inspired feminist critiques on both sides of the Atlantic, from Susan Griffin to Hélène Cixous.²⁰ The anonymity of the narrator in Tropismes, however, leaves these two ways of knowing conspicuously ungendered, which serves to bracket the gender of this woman writer. The shifting position of the reader in relation to the narration of these prose pieces also enacts a breakdown of that dichotomy because the reader is moved between these two ways of knowing.

Although none of the pieces is presented in a first-person narration, a relationship between the first two persons (I, you) of the verb is established on an imaginary level by the use of the singular or plural third-person pronoun: I-narrator tell you-reader about her, him or them. The singular or plural third person is excluded from the narrator/reader relationship and occupies instead the position of the one talked about.²¹ The majority of the pieces begin with Ils, Elles, Il, or Elle, and the distance by which the narrator describes “them” invites the reader into the narrator's position as observer, seen in the following examples: “Ils semblaient sourdre de partout, éclos dans la tiédeur un peu moite de l'air, ils s'écoulaient doucement comme s'ils suintaient des murs, des arbres grillagés, des bancs, des trottoirs sales, des squares” [They seemed to spring up from everywhere, hatched in the slightly damp warmth of the air, they were pouring out softly as if oozing from the walls, the fenced in trees, the benches, the dirty sidewalks, the town squares] (“Tropisme I”); “Elles baragouinaient des choses à demi exprimées, le regard perdu et comme suivant intérieurement un sentiment subtil et délicat qu'elles semblaient ne pouvoir traduire” [They were jabbering about half-expressed things, their look lost and as if following internally a subtle and delicate feeling that they seemed unable to translate] (“Tropisme IV”); “Le matin elle sautait de son lit très tôt, courait dans l'appartement, âcre, serrée, toute chargée de cris, de gestes, de halètements de colère, de ‘scènes’” [In the morning she would jump out of bed very early, run through the apartment, acrid, tight, all full of cries, of gestures, of gasps of anger, of “scenes”] (“Tropisme VI”).

The I-you dyad initially assures the reader a secure position and announces a communicative, descriptive function, but as the reader seeks to “comprehend” the text, the narration sets up a network of deferred referentiality and takes on a creative power of its own. By means of this and other textual stimuli, the communicative description merges with a performative one. As following chapters discuss, however, the deferral of meaning which has come to be one of the identifying features of a modernist text, in that it plays with the reader's desire for meaning, will be more liberating in Sarraute's novels than in the prose pieces of this first work. Here, the reader's invitation to experience the problematic nature of making meaning is in the service of a representation of tropisms, that is, of (the woman writer) Nathalie Sarraute's perception of reality. Rather than announcing the (feminine) specificity of that perception with the use of a narration in the first person, Sarraute inscribes her specific view of reality in the activity of the narration itself, in the manipulation of the reader in and out of an I-you dyad, between an implied narrator and the reader, and back and forth between being a semi-active participant in a (descriptive) dialogic situation to being a passive-active participant in a creative (performative) one. Tropistic movement is thus represented in Tropismes not as an (gender specific) activity to be observed (judged, analyzed, appropriated or dismissed as such), but as a (nongender specific) phenomenon to be experienced. Once Sarraute establishes tropisms as a reality by means of the manipulative narrative authority in this first work, she goes on to investigate that very authority in the novels that follow.

A textual reading of “Tropisme III” offers a more specific example of this movement and manipulation.

Ils étaient venus se loger dans des petites rues tranquilles, derrière le Panthéon, du côté de la rue Gay-Lussac ou de la rue Saint-Jacques, dans des appartements donnant sur des cours sombres, mais tout à fait décents et munis de confort.

On leur offrait cela ici, cela, et la liberté de faire ce qu'ils voulaient, de marcher comme ils voulaient, dans n'importe quel accoutrement, avec n'importe quel visage, dans les modestes petites rues.

Aucune tenue n'était exigée d'eux ici, aucune activité en commun avec d'autres, aucun sentiment, aucun souvenir. On leur offrait une existence à la fois dépouillée et protégée, une existence semblable à une salle d'attente dans une gare de banlieue déserte, une salle nue, grise et tiède, avec un poêle noir au milieu et des banquettes en bois le long des murs.

Et ils étaient contents, ils se plaisaient ici, ils se sentaient presque chez eux, ils étaient en bons termes avec Mme la concierge, avec la crémière, ils portaient leurs vêtements à nettoyer à la plus consciencieuse et la moins chère teinturière du quartier.

Ils ne cherchaient jamais à se souvenir de la campagne où ils avaient grandi, ils ne voyaient jamais surgir en eux, quand ils marchaient dans les rues de leur quartier, quand ils regardaient les devantures des magasins, quand ils passaient devant la loge de la concierge et la saluaient très poliment, ils ne voyaient jamais se lever dans leur souvenir un pan de mur inondé de vie, ou les pavés d'une cour, intenses et caressants, ou les marches douces d'un perron sur lequel ils s'étaient assis dans leur enfance.

Dans l'escalier de leur maison, ils rencontraient parfois ‘le locataire du dessous,’ professeur au lycée, qui revenait de classe avec ses deux enfants, à quatre heures. Ils avaient tous les trois de longues têtes aux yeux pales, luisantes et lisses comme de grands oeufs d'ivoire. La porte de leur appartement s'entr'ouvrait un instant pour les laisser passer. On les voyait poser leurs pieds sur des petits carrés de feutre placés sur le parquet de l'entrée—et s'éloigner silencieusement, glissant vers le fond sombre du couloir.²²

[They had come to live in the little, quiet streets, behind the Pantheon, next to rue Gay-Lussac or rue Saint-Jacques, in apartments opening onto dark courtyards, but completely decent and equipped with modern conveniences.

They were offered that here, that, and the freedom to do what they wanted, to walk as they wanted, in any get-up, with any expression, in the modest, little streets.

No behavior was demanded of them here, no group activities with the others, no feeling, no memory. They were offered an existence at once stripped and protected, an existence like that in a waiting room at a station in a deserted suburb, a bare room, gray and tepid, with a black stove in the middle and wooden benches along the wall.

And they were content, they enjoyed themselves here, they almost felt at home, they were on good terms with Madame the concierge, with the dairywoman, they took their clothes to be cleaned at the most conscientious and the least expensive cleaners in the neighborhood.

They never tried to remember the countryside where they grew up, they never saw suddenly surging up in their minds, when they walked in the streets of their neighborhood, when they looked at the shop windows, when they passed by the concierge's room and spoke very politely to her, they never saw rise up in their memory a part of a wall inundated with life, or the paving stones of a courtyard, intense and tender, or the soft steps of a stoop where they used to sit in their childhood.

In the stairway of their house, they would sometimes meet “the tenant from downstairs,” a high school teacher, who was returning from class with his two children, at four o'clock. They all three had long heads with pale eyes, shiny and smooth like big, ivory eggs. The door of their apartment would open for an instant to let them pass. One saw them put their feet on the little felt squares found on the floor of the entranceway—and silently withdraw, slipping toward the dark end of the hallway.]

Like the little quiet streets located in the shadow of the Pantheon, the figure of ils is shadowed by progressively qualifying indicators of place which limit the volition suggested by the opening clause, “Ils étaient venus se loger. …” Ils come to live “dans des petites rue tranquilles”; these streets are then positioned “derrière le Panthéon,” which are vaguely “du côté de la rue Gay-Lussac ou de la rue Saint-Jacques.” By the middle of the sentence, ils have been deposited “dans des appartements,” but the qualification continues. These are apartments “donnant sur des cours sombres, mais tout à fait décents et munis de confort.” The qualifying spatial indicators central to this paragraph (“dans,” “derrière,” “du côté de,” “donnant sur”) operate as deictic indicators do, that is, like demonstrative adverbs or adjectives they organize the spatial and temporal relations in the passage and announce some subject as “point de repère” [orientation point].²³ The reader is at first invited to perceive this scene with an implied subject outside the textual space, but by the end of the sentence, the reader has been dislocated conceptually by these indicators within that space.

The first paragraph also dislocates the reader semantically, in the sense that an effort to locate the meaning of the words “tranquilles” and “sombres” by means of a referentiality to some “objective real” outside the text is problematized. Ils (and the reader) are at first moved from place to place by the spatial indicators, and now the reader experiences a further manipulation as the significance of these modifiers is dislocated, or relocated, to have a qualified meaning in this text. The adjective “tranquilles” modifying “rues,” when it is read on a denotative level signifies “immobiles, silencieux.” Its connotation implies “une idée de paix et de sécurité.”²⁴ Given the mobility within the paragraph which the reader has experienced conceptually, however, the word's semantic meaning is destabilized. The concept of tranquility is again destabilized when the word “sombres” is not left to lie in its semantic state out of which the reader may derive meanings ranging from the quality of light to the disposition of the soul. The reader is immediately told that although the courtyards are “sombres,” the apartments are “tout à fait décents et munis de confort,” thus qualifying the qualifier.

The loss of volition on the part of ils enacted by the narration in the first paragraph is now represented syntactically in the opening clause of the second in which this subject is now an indirect object: “On leur offrait cela ici. …” Another dislocation of signification begins with the use of the word “cela” [that], indefinite in its antecedent, and continues through the use of repetition. Extending the tension created in the first paragraph between the semantic function of “tranquilles” and the conceptual mobility of the indicators surrounding it, the semantic presence of the word “ici” [here] in the phonetic repetition, “cela, ici, cela et la …,” is surrounded by the homonymic equivalence of its opposite, “là” [there]. This repetition creates a tension between these two spaces which will enter the text more explicitly in the penultimate paragraph. The repetition of words and syntax as the sentence continues joins two pairs—“de faire ce qu'ils voulaient, de marcher comme ils voulaient, dans n'importe quel accoutrement, avec n'importe quel visage”—while the images themselves compound the vagueness introduced at the beginning of the sentence by “cela.” The paragraph offers a description of “la liberté [qu'on] leur offrait,” and indeed the phrase, “la liberté de faire ce qu'ils voulaient,” suggests a freedom which the reader might desire or recognize. The singsong repetition of the sound “la” that precedes this phrase does not feel like mockery until the appearance of the paired pairs in the following phrases. The repetition of sounds, words, and phrases combines with the indefinite “cela” to create the sense of an empty, circular freedom. The one-sentence paragraph ends with the phrase “dans les modestes et petites rues,” but the literal meaning for this phrase that might find its referent in one that is similar in the first paragraph, “dans des petites rues tranquilles,” is no longer functional.

Repetition again structures the opening sentence of the next paragraph, again in reference to “la liberté,” and the word comes to signify a negative freedom: “Aucune tenue … aucune activité … aucun sentiment … aucun souvenir.” The phonetic, semantic and syntactic repetitions of the preceding paragraph join with this repetition of negatives to circle in on the meaning of “liberté.” Without the explicit mediation of a narrator who defines the constraint of this freedom, the narration itself becomes constraining for the reader, like “la liberté [qu'on] leur offrait.”

This negative freedom might best be described by the word that ends the preceding paragraph, “modeste”—“ce qui est simple, sans faste ou sans éclat”—but the text offers its own description, “une existence à la fois dépouillée et protégée.”²⁵ This description is then given an analogy which displaces the space so detailed in the first paragraph and replaces it within a metaphorical space: “une existence semblable à une salle d'attente dans une gare de banlieue déserte, une salle nue, grise et tiède, avec un poêle noir au milieu et des banquettes en bois le long des murs.” The mobility of spatial indicators found in the first paragraph is similarly replaced by a proliferation of adjectives that undermine any signification the reader might have applied to the adjectives found in the beginning of the piece—“déserte,” “nue, grise et tiède,” “un poêle noir,” “des banquettes en bois,” bear no resemblance to “tranquilles” or “tout à fait décents et munis de confort.” At this point in the text, the “poêle noir” and the “banquettes en bois” seem to have more substance than either ils or “la liberté.”

The reader can only be skeptical of the meaning of the words beginning the fourth paragraph (“Et ils étaient contents, ils se plaisaient ici. …”) because a tension has been created in the reading experience between making meaning by referentiality outside the text and making meaning by means of a referentiality within the text. The textual strategies thus far—that is, the accumulation of spatial indicators in the first paragraph; the phonetic tension between “ici” and “la/là,” which conveys a metaphorical tension between places in the second; and finally, perhaps the center around which these tensions turn, “la liberté de faire ce qu'ils voulaient”—all combine to create an unnamed anxiety for the reader because of the possibility of a troubling interior reality beneath the surface of this “existence à la fois dépouillée et protégée.” The following phrase, “ils se sentaient presque chez eux,” extends that anxiety, which is only aggravated by the neat, modest daily life described in the rest of the sentence here. The tension between “ici” and “là” represents a surface-depth dichotomy in the second paragraph, and in the one that follows, it becomes a more dialectical movement between the present (surface “ici”) and the past (depth “là”).

The figure of ils begins this paragraph in the position of subject as it did in the preceding paragraph, but the reader's suspicion aroused about the meaning of “ils se sentaient presque chez eux,” that is, about the unified nature of this subject, is here compounded by the use of negation and repetition: “Ils ne cherchaient jamais à se souvenir, […] ils ne cherchaient jamais à retrouver, […] ils ne voyaient jamais se lever […].” The repeated negative terms diminish the presence of the objects of the negation (“se souvenir,” and so on). The earlier tension created between “ici” and “là” now enters the text more fully: a temporal and spatial ailleurs, that is, an other place, là, is represented by the objects of negation, whereas a sense for ici is contained by the negation itself, and the figure of ils is split between them. As the sentence continues, “ici” is further composed of the images introduced by “quand” which interrupt the series of negations: “quand ils marchaient dans les rues de leur quartier, quand ils regardaient les devantures des magasins, quand ils passaient devant la loge de la concierge. …” Just as the repetitions and negations circled in on the signification of the word “liberté” in the preceding paragraphs, the present situation of ils “ici” circles and constrains a past “là” which nevertheless surges up to finish the sentence. This tension between “ici” and “là” can serve as a model not only for the reader's position, never allowed to remain one of unified subjectivity “là” outside the text, but also for that of the figures who people Sarraute's subsequent novels to be discussed later.

One way the reader has been replaced in the I-you dyad throughout the piece has been by the use of the possessive adjective “leur” [their]. As we have seen, however, the deferral of meaning and the textual strategies in this piece have served at the same time to create a textual tension for the reader and to disrupt that dyad. In the opening phrase of the final paragraph, “Dans l'escalier de leur maison, ils rencontraient …,” the metaphorical tension between “ici” and “là” identified with ils is given a concrete image (the figure of ils positioned on the stairway between two floors), and the reader's textual tension is brought to a halt by the (concrete) literalness of the language. The I-you dyad seems to be reestablished, but the dislocation which has characterized this text throughout operates in the last paragraph to dislocate that dyad one last time.

The dislocation begins with the object of the verb phrase “ils rencontraient parfois” set off by quotation marks, “‘le locataire du dessous,’” which designates “le locataire” as the one talked about. “‘Le locataire’” is joined by “ses deux enfants” as “ils” in the next sentence, “Ils avaient tous les trois … oeufs d'ivoire,” and in the following sentence the referent to leur is established. The subject on which begins the following sentence is the only personal pronoun in French which theoretically can refer to any of the three persons, singular or plural, of the verb. The presence of this pronoun earlier in the text, “on leur offrait,” established the authority of the observing narrative voice and invited the reader into that position. Given the positions established in the final paragraph, however, on could represent any of the following: tu, the reader addressed by the narrating voice; nous, the reader and the narrating voice; or, moving ils into a position with the reader and the narrating voice, nous could refer to all three observing this new group “ils”; or vous, which thereby effects a shift by the narrating voice to move the reader and ils into position together. It is even conceivable that on could represent the implied narrative je. This indefinite personal pronoun which effectively eludes any definite referentiality figures all dislocating gestures within this piece.

In contrast to the unspecific nature of on is the very specific composition of the group now represented by “ils”: “professeur au lycée, qui revenait de classe avec ses deux enfants, à quatre heures.” The presence of this group gives the pronoun ils another position: ils, the ones talked about now talk about “ils,” and the reader is left looking for another point of orientation in the final image: “On les voyait poser leurs pieds sur des petits carrés de feutre placés sur le parquet de l'entrée—et s'éloigner silencieusement, glissant vers le fond sombre du couloir.” A new spatial indicator is introduced in this image, “sur,” and is then repeated in such a way that the reader is neither dislocated spatially in the paragraph nor allowed to remain as an observer outside the text, but is instead moved more and more directly into the space described.

That movement is represented by the phrase which precedes this indicator (“On les voyait poser leurs pieds”) and contains three elements counteracting the mobility and tension introduced at the beginning of “Tropisme III” and sustained throughout. With the verb “voyait” the narrating voice directs the reader's point of view to a specific scene; the reader's view is “posée,” like the feet of the professor and his children; and finally, the object of this gaze is “leurs pieds,” feet placed solidly “sur des petits carrés de feutre.” The hard sounds of the vowel and consonants of sur further substantiate this feeling of solidity or immobility. This image and the language by which it is represented free the reader from the tension between “ici” and “là” that has been felt textually. Similarly, the word “sombre” at the end of the sentence is not marked by any qualifications as it was in the first paragraph of the piece, leaving the reader free to return to a referentiality outside the text where “sombre” denotes “peu éclairé.”

The reader has thus been aligned with the observing narrator in an I-you dyad established by the position of ils as the ones talked about, and because of certain textual strategies has shared with ils the anxiety of dislocation and tension between “ici” and “là.” The I-you dyad splits at a certain point, is reestablished in the last paragraph, but is finally deposited in the indefinite (plural, singular?) on. Similarly, the reader now diverges from identification with the psychological reality of ils. While in the final image the figure of ils is left imprisoned in the text, on the stairway between floors, the other figure of “ils,” described as having “de longues têtes aux yeux pâles, luissantes et lisses comme de grands oeufs d'ivoire,” escapes (“s'éloigner silencieusement, glissant vers le fond sombre du couloir”).

The reader is thus left with another surface-depth dichotomy from which there is no escape, its image corresponding to the one Sarraute gives to her concept of “tropismes”: “des mouvements indéfinissables qui glissent très rapidement aux limites de notre conscience.”²⁶ Unlike ils, “ils” is given both an antecedent, “[le] professeur et ses deux enfants,” and a physical description, which allows this group to function very schematically as a character. In “Tropisme III,” Sarraute has thus not only exercised her narrative authority in such a way as to give the reader an experience of her (specific) perception of reality, she also has introduced the question of surface-depth dichotomy into her own larger discussion of the nature of conventional character, which serves as the focal point of her first two novels.

Like Tropismes, however, Sarraute's fourth novel, Les Fruits d'Or, concentrates less on character and more on an investigation of tropistic reality. Narrative language is manipulated in Tropismes to give the reader an experience of tropistic depth beneath the surface of description. In Les Fruits d'Or, the reader is thrown immediately into a surface of discourse that originates not in characters as individuals but in voices as centers of different states of being also represented in sous-conversation. Whereas Sarraute's first two novels, Portrait d'un inconnu and Martereau, introduce masculine figures who by virtue of their first-person narration tempt the reader to succumb to the tendency to create characters, the fourth novel, Les Fruits d'Or, undercuts that temptation at every turn. Interlocutors speak, but phrases and words which might serve to character-ize a voice appear to be used by other voices from one chapter to another. This novel resists the creation of characters, just as Cranaki and Belaval strive to do in their study of Sarraute, and creates instead a mirror which reflects the reader's desire, much like my reading of “Tropismes III.” Because the narrative figures in Les Fruits d'Or are divested of any characterization except gender, a discussion of the qualities that the different gendered figures come to represent in this novel will precede the investigation of the role gender plays in the identity quests found in Sarraute's first two novels.

Notes

1. See Elaine Showalter, The New Feminist Criticism, esp. the Introduction.

2. One of the many instances in which Sarraute has emphasized the personal intention motivating her renovation of the novel form is found in an interview cited by Valerie Minogue: “As far as the rejection of tradition and the necessity to escape from the conventions of the novel are concerned, I had felt the need for that long before the nouveau roman. As for the latter's emphasis on objective description of the external and on formalistic language experimentation, I do not agree with it at all.” The War of the Words, p. 16.

3. Sarraute, L'Ere du soupçon, p. 8.

4. Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 108.

5. Verena A. Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), p. 129.

6. Kristeva, “Women's Time,” in The Kristeva Reader, p. 194. See Moi.

7. Patrocinio Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves,” in Speaking of Gender, p. 31. See Showalter.

8. Minogue, The War of the Words, p. 216, note 10.

9. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 46.

10. Ibid., p. 49.

11. Ibid., p. 73.

12. One of the earlier versions of this criticism is found in Annie LeClerc, Parole de femme (Paris: Grasset, 1974).

13. Cranaki and Belaval, Sarraute, p. 1.

14. Elaine Showalter, “Feminism in the Wilderness,” in The New Feminist Criticism, p. 248. See Showalter.

15. Gauthier, “Is There Such a Thing as Women's Writing?” in New French Feminisms, p. 95. See Marks and Courtivron.

16. These categories have been somewhat simplified for this discussion. For a more indepth study, see Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, esp. part 1; and Jardine, Gynesis, esp. “The Woman-in-Effect.”

17. Newman, Une Poésie des discours, p. 2.

18. I am able to formulate my response in this way because of an essay by Nelly Furman, “Textual Feminism,” in Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, eds., Women and Language in Literature and Society (New York: Praeger, 1980), pp. 45-55.

19. Lynn Sukenick, “Women in Fiction,” in A. Diamond and L. Edwards, eds., The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 34-36.

20. Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La Jeune Née (Paris: Union Général d'Editions, 1975); translated under the title The Newly Born Woman by Betsy Wing, introduction by Sandra M. Gilbert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

21. Emil Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 197-98. Also see pp. 200-201. Originally published in French as Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

22. Nathalie Sarraute, Tropismes (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1957), pp. 21-23. “Tropismes III” has been reproduced with the permission of Les Editions de Minuit.

23. Benveniste, Problems of General Linguistics, pp. 218-19.

24. Le Petit Robert, s.v. “sombre.”

25. Le Petit Robert, s.v. “modeste.”

26. Sarraute, L'Ere du soupçon, p. 8.

A version of this chapter was given as a paper at a conference entitled “Feminism and/in French Literature” at the University of South Carolina. The proceedings for the conference were published in French Literature Series, 16, 1989.

Works Consulted

Benveniste, Emil. Problems of General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971. Originally published in French, Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1966.

Conley, Verena A. Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Cranaki, Mimica and Yvon Belaval. Nathalie Sarraute. Paris: Gallimard, 1965.

Furman, Nelly. “Textual Feminism.” In Women and Language in Literature and Society, edited by McConnell-Ginet, Borker, and Furman.

Gauthier, Xavière. “Is There Such a Thing as Women's Writing?” Translated by Marilyn A. August. In New French Feminisms, edited by Marks and de Courtivron. Originally published in French, “Existe-t-elle une écriture féminine?” Tel Quel, no. 58 (Summer 1974): 95-104.

———. Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.

Kristeva, Julia. “Women's Time.” Translated by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Minogue, Valerie. “Childhood Imagery in Nathalie Sarraute's Portrait d'un inconnu.” French Studies 27, no. 2 (April 1972): 177-86.

———. Nathalie Sarraute and the War of the Words: A Study of Five Novels. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1981.

Moi, Toril, ed. The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

———. Sexual/Textual Politics. London: Methuen, 1985.

———. L'Ere du soupçon. Paris: Gallimard, 1956.

———. Tropismes. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1957.

Schweickart, Patrocinio. “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading.” In Speaking of Gender, edited by Elaine Showalter. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989.

Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” In The New Feminist Criticism. Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

———, ed. The New Feminist Criticism. Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Sukenick, Lynn. “Women in Fiction.” In The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by Diamond and Edwards. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977.