[In the following essay, Minogue discusses the challenges associated with staging Sarraute's theatrical works, which, the critic notes, although recognizable as human experience, are clearly not centered around any recognizable representation of reality.]

Nathalie Sarraute's reputation as a novelist was already established when she began work on her first play in 1963. She had never thought of herself as a playwright. Her material is, and always has been, not action, plot and character—the stuff that plays are normally made of—but what she has termed ‘tropisms’, currents of feeling on the underside of spoken words. There are no startling revelations, no murderous or amorous goings-on in her novels, and, most damaging perhaps in stage-terms, Sarraute's resolute refusal of characterization forbids the creation of personnages. When invited to write a play for Radio Stuttgart, Sarraute at first rejected the idea as impossible, but after some persuasion (and the assurance that she could be as ‘difficult’ and ‘avant-garde’ as she liked!) she wrote Le Silence.¹ This has since been followed by five other plays, the last to date being Pour un oui ou pour un non (1982),² but the problems of presenting Sarraute's volatile, infra-psychological material on stage remain considerable.

Even when intended for radio rather than the stage, the plays needed a technique very different from that of the novels, for the tropismic movements preceding speech had to be displayed in the spoken dialogue: ‘Ce qui dans mes romans aurait constitué l'action dramatique de la sous-conversation, du pré-dialogue, où les sensations, les impressions, le “ressenti” sont communiqués au lecteur à l'aide d'images et de rythmes, ici se déployait dans le dialogue lui-même’.³ ‘The inside became the outside’, as Sarraute put it: the effect was of a ‘gant retourné’.

In the novels, and in the poetic sketches of Tropismes and L'Usage de la parole,⁴ the writer is able, as it were, to slow down and enlarge the area of the extremely rapid sub-surface tropismic movements, to communicate their content to the reader. The effect for the reader, however, is not one of spacious slow motion, but of a dense and rapid unfolding of the manifold virtualities of a situation, word or gesture. On stage, deprived of the temporal and spatial fluidity of the narrative context, this expansion of matters seemingly trivial, these highly charged bubbles of virtualities, have to be realized within the linear progression of the spoken dialogue.

Sarraute has described how a transitory feeling, no more than a ‘léger malaise’ becomes the subject of a play: ‘On regarde au microscope, on découvre que c'est énorme et occupe la scène pendant une heure. Après tout se referme, rien n'a existé’.⁵ It is tempting to rewrite Sarraute's comment as ‘Rien a existé’; the basic ‘nothing’ (in conventional social terms) has visibly existed, in a dramatic expansion of its latent content. There is of course a danger that in occupying the stage, visibly and physically, the virtual may become contaminated by the inherent realism of theatrical performance. There are, after all, in Sarraute's plays, no clear and obvious pointers to non-realism: no talking horses, no magical or supernatural events, no other-worldly Ionesco-style lighting-effects, no characters sunk in Beckettian earth or imprisoned in urns. There is nothing but the dialogue itself to suggest that we are anywhere other than the ordinary, everyday world. And here lies the problem, for that is indeed where we are, and yet are not. For we have left the surface for the hidden interior. Sarraute's articulations of the virtual, while recognizable as human experience, are not to be confused with representations of everyday reality.

This is a kind of realism; but in conventionally realist terms, the material of Pour un oui ou pour un non would offer no more, perhaps, than a flicker of the eyes or a tensing of the facial muscles, provoked by a ‘nothing’. Sarraute's inside-out realism makes a gift of time and space to the instant of the flicker, giving it a past, present and future in a dramatic dialogue which articulates what normally would remain unvoiced. That dialogue has to carry the whole weight and action of the play, and must carry the audience from the surface to the interior—away from individual characters to interpersonal movements, to what Monique Wittig has aptly termed ‘l'interlocution’.⁶ The fixed stage and the presence of visible actors with individual characteristics can interfere with that process.

Nathalie Sarraute commented in an interview with Arnaud Rykner that she had little interest in the visual side of theatrical productions. Rykner, however, reminded her that she could be very concerned about what should not be seen on stage—as when she remonstrated with a producer who wanted the actors to be holding glasses in their hands—‘Oui, c'est vrai’, she acknowledged. ‘Parce qu'il faut que l'on se concentre sur la parole et non sur les gestes des personnages, leur côté mondain et réaliste.’⁷ The plays carry no directions about décor, furniture, costumes and so on, since any kind of superficial realism would be a pointless and potentially damaging distraction.

In Sarraute's novels, the narrative draws on images, metaphors and successions of imaginary scenes, in which minute strands of tension become vivid, often melodramatic, scenes of accusation and confrontation. In such scenes, individual characterization is refused, actions are replayable and roles reversible. Villains become heroes, persecutors become victims and vice versa. Further, the polyphonic narrative moves freely from voice to voice, from present to past and into an anticipated, desired or dreaded future, and spatially, from one location to another.

In the theatre, things are very different. Temporal movements into the past of memory and the future of anticipation have all to be made in the immediate present of the dialogue, and not only is the scene there before us, immovably, but the actors are there in dress and flesh. Claude Régy, whom Mathieu Galey terms ‘le grand révélateur de ce théâtre’,⁸ acknowledges this as a problem for Sarraute's plays: ‘Je peux même dire que […] la présence des acteurs est pour moi une gêne, parce que je n'ai pas trouvé comment supprimer cette équivoque qui fait qu'ils sont pris pour des personnages, assimilés à des personnages’.⁹ The creation of ‘characters’ is indeed a problem, with the physical presence of the actors constantly threatening to transform the voices that explore and express tropistic movements into solid ‘personnages’.

The problems (and powers) of Sarraute's very distinctive theatre are well exemplified in Pour un oui ou pour un non which incorporates many themes central to Sarraute's work: the chasms that may lie behind apparent trivialities (‘un oui ou un non’), the terrible eloquence of tone or expression (‘C'est biiien … ça’), the operation of linguistic tyrannies, the paralysing power of the ‘truths’ enshrined in commonplaces (‘Chacun sa vie’) or monumentalized in categories or abstract nouns (like ‘le Bonheur’ or ‘l'Amitié’).

The phrase ‘pour un oui ou pour un non’ previously occurs in the ‘Mon petit’ section of L'Usage de la parole where it underlines the seeming absurdity of the huge disturbances provoked by the incursion of ‘mon petit’ (‘ces mots somme toute insignifiants et anodins’) into a conversation—‘Comment vivrait-on si on prenait la mouche pour un oui ou pour un non … ?’ (my emphasis).¹⁰ This earlier use of a phrase in common use can hardly be viewed as source material, but it does of course testify to Sarraute's continuing preoccupation with apparent trivialities as a cause of large disturbances.¹¹ The central phrase of the play, the much-repeated ‘C'est biiien … ça’ makes a previous appearance in the novel, Entre la vie et la mort, where it is a body-blow aimed at the writer-figure, who receives it ‘en plein ventre’.¹² To see the play as a development of this earlier passage would be misleading; Sarraute has explained that the play and the novel (written some fourteen years earlier) are quite unconnected:

‘C'est bien, ça’ était une expression qui m'avait frappée, et […] je désirais voir ce qu'elle cachait. Je l'ai fait pour le livre, puis je l'ai oublié, et j'ai cherché de nouveau pour la pièce. Mais je n'ai rien repris du roman. Ce sont des choses tout à fait séparées.¹³

The treatment is indeed quite different, but a common factor is the impulse, constant in all of Sarraute's work, to explore the underside, to discover the movements of feeling the words carry and the reactions they can provoke.

The falsifying power of naming and categorization is a constant Sarrautean theme, from Tropismes in 1939 through to Tu ne t'aimes pas in 1989, and a passage in L'Usage de la parole already presents ‘friendship’ in the role it plays in Pour un oui ou pour un non, as an imposing, but imprisoning monument: ‘Amitié. C'est, vous le savez, une institution d'où l'on ne peut sortir sans un laissez-passer délivré uniquement pour de solides raisons …’.¹⁴ Remarks like this one, addressed directly to the reader in the dialogic mode of L'Usage de la parole, have to be transferred, in the play, to the spoken dialogue of visible actors. And it is that spoken dialogue that has now to carry the audience into the interiority of the struggle with, and for, words.

As in other Sarraute plays, external action in Pour un oui ou pour un non is minimal. Two men, H1 and H2, talk; a couple of neighbours, H3 and F, are called in briefly to act as jury. By way of setting, the play needs only a door and a window. Stage directions are few and short. H2 is given a shrug (p. 9), is directed to utter one of his responses ‘dans un élan’ (p. 9), and another, ‘piteusement’ (p. 11). He is to sigh (pp. 12, 13); we are to see him ‘prenant courage’ (p. 13), and to hear him groan (p. 27): he is considerably more ‘stage-directed’ than H1. After the departure of the jury-couple, H1 asks ‘doucement’ whether H2 really thought he was setting a trap when he suggested the lecture tour. And it is H1 who moves towards the door, and then stops at the window, looking out. H2, who has the pacifying role here, ‘l'observe un instant. S'approche de lui, lui met la main sur l'épaule’ (p. 38). Towards the end of the play, there are three further important and characteristic stage-directions: ‘Un silence’ (p. 55), ‘un silence’ (p. 56), and ‘un silence’ (p. 58).

In addition to the evident sparseness of décor and action, the dramatis personae are few and nameless. We learn incidentally that H1 is married, has a son, and is successful in worldly terms; that H2 is less so, and that they have been friends for a long time. For most of the play, only these two anonymous and ill-defined characters are present, but these voices become those of any and everybody in a dialogue that emerges from the roots of human feeling. Language here is a means of survival, a garment snatched up to hide a nakedness it fails to conceal.

The dialogue is initiated by H1 who has come to see H2 to find out the cause of H2's recent coolness towards him. H2 at first produces only the all-purpose ‘rien’, the blocking defence used when the matter at issue is too intangible, too volatile, for public language. Any attempt to explain would be futile, and probably humiliating: ‘C'est plutôt que ce n'est rien … ce qui s'appelle rien … ce qu'on appelle ainsi … en parler seulement, évoquer ça … ça peut vous entraîner … de quoi on aurait l'air? Personne, du reste … personne ne l'ose … on n'en entend jamais parler’ (p. 10). And later: ‘C'est juste des mots’ (p. 11). H2 knows in advance that explanations will serve no purpose: ‘Tu ne comprendras jamais … Personne, du reste, ne pourra comprendre …’ (p. 12). Externalized, presented in public language, the ‘case’ remains insubstantial, and this is the challenge faced by the play itself: it is only by carrying the audience to the inside, by the movements and rhythms of its language, that it can make itself understood.

H2 rehearses his grievances in a telling ‘play within a play’ before the jury-audience of H3 and F, who remain comically baffled, dismissive and uncomprehending—an object lesson in how not to respond. The miracle is that the actual audience in the theatre does, in the course of the play, come to understand. The audience is drawn away from surface realism into the movement of withdrawal and attraction, the tremors of threat and longing that circulate in the subtext.

The language of the dialogue is the language of everyday, enlivened by images mainly drawn from familiar areas. And yet, in terms of ordinary behaviour, the dialogue is extravagant: too searching, too brutal, too disproportionate. When H2 declares that H1's seemingly anodine and indeed, approving, words, ‘C'est bien, ça’, are the cause of the offence, H1's disbelief: ‘Répète-le, je t'en prie …, j'ai dû mal entendre’ provokes immediate sympathetic laughter. But of course it is not just the words; it is what the words carry, in tone, inflection and the telling pause between ‘bien’ and ‘ça’. The play gives us a slow-motion expansion of what in ordinary reality might be no more than a momentary, scarcely visible rankling. The tiny disturbance is dramatized and amplified in a fully articulated confrontation that goes well beyond the level of realism into the virtualities of the real. Sarraute's aim is to uncover ‘sous la carapace de l'apparence rassurante, tout un monde d'actions cachées, une agitation qui est pour moi la trame invisible de notre vie’.¹⁵ Imagery plays an essential role in the achievement of this aim.¹⁶

Sarraute draws on metaphors relating to legal authority to communicate the authoritarian rule of normalcy—a normalcy which suppresses that ‘trame invisible’ and even denies its existence. The law, with its necessarily inflexible vocabulary and definitions, aptly conveys the totalitarian aspect of conformism.¹⁷ In this metaphorical structure, the neighbours become a jury, and, as in Vous les entendez?,¹⁸ the appeal to Law for a definitive verdict is symptomatic of a constant but futile pursuit of authoritative, unquestionable judgement. Public language is shown to be hopelessly inadequate as a vehicle for communicating or evaluating private feelings.

The gap of understanding between the two men is expressed in images of physical distance, stereotypes from the world of fairy-tale, and animal imagery—the latter generating metaphors of snares, traps and cages. H2 describes himself (ironically of course) as having dared to scale the heights up to the lofty realms of H1. There, H1, like the giant with Tom Thumb, picks him up by the scruff of the neck, turns him round in his hand, and drops him again (p. 18). The fairy-tale figure of Tom Thumb recurs frequently in Nathalie Sarraute's work¹⁹—along with the image of the insect picked up by a human hand then put down again, often upside down, with its little legs thrashing about in the air. These are simple, morally unambiguous images which effectively communicate the felt experience of the victim, the helplessness and the sense of massive inequality.

When presenting his case before the couple, H2 stresses the separateness of the different worlds of H1 and H2: ‘Il est chez lui. Moi je suis chez moi’ (p. 24). F declares approvingly: ‘C'est bien normal. Chacun sa vie, n'est-ce pas?’ (p. 25). All goes well so long as H2 speaks the language of ‘normality’. But when he goes on to claim that H1 tries to force him into his world, and that H1 set a trap for him, the clash between public language and ‘le ressenti’ looms large and ludicrous as H1 and the couple together repeat in amazement: ‘Une souricière?’ (p. 26). H2 has lost his case already, but he goes on to tell how, to his shame, he ‘played the game’ of H1's world, and was caught in a cage. He repeats the image of being picked up and held in the palm of the giant, but this figurative language has no currency in the ‘normal’ world of the couple—in their world, H2 must be mad.

The giant (here H1) lives in the clear world of authoritative language that names, classifies and categorizes. Tom Thumb, or the insect (here H2), inhabits a murky and unstable world of uncertain and hesitant language, language that gropes a tremulous way via images, approximations and metaphors. I stress ‘here’ in order to limit the identification of H1 as the wicked giant and H2 as his victim, and thus to avoid making a more stable allocation of roles than the play authorizes.

Other fairy-tale figures come in later to illustrate the clash between the opposing linguistic modes. H2 likens H1, dissatisfied with H2's response to his display of ‘Bonheur’, to the queen in Snow White, who asks ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?’ and gets an unsatisfactory answer (p. 35). H1's fear is not, says H2, of the possible existence of a greater bonheur, but of something simply other, something not listed in his categories. H1 responds by pinning a classifying label on H2's reaction: ‘tu étais jaloux’ (p. 34), a label which H2 of course emphatically refuses. H2 claims that H1's ‘bonheur’ is meaningless for him—he lives in another world: ‘On est ailleurs … en dehors … loin de tout ça … on ne sait pas où l'on est, mais en tout cas on n'est pas sur vos listes … Et c'est ce que vous ne supportez pas’ (p. 37). Here, as on various other occasions, H2 moves from ‘tu’ to ‘vous’ and H1 asks: ‘Qui “vous”? Pourquoi veux-tu absolument me mêler?’ (p. 37). H2 is himself using a form of categorization, pluralizing H1 into a generalized otherness.

Contrasting images of solidity and fluidity, stability and disruption or imprisonment and freedom, underline the opposition of H1 and H2. H1 generally uses the abstract nouns and categories of public language with some confidence—understandably, when public language in this case vindicates and protects him. H2, defending a position not covered by accepted categories, is, equally understandably, suspicious of abstract nouns, definitions and classifications, preferring the greater fluidity of images and metaphors. In this preference, he seems to reflect the views of his author, and it is tempting to associate him with Sarraute's own denunciations of classificatory language—‘ce langage si puissant et si bien armé’.²⁰ However, to see H2 as a sort of porte-parole for the author falsifies the relation between H1 and H2, and distorts the play.

In so far as H2 seems the relatively helpless butt of the language of power, it is tempting to see him as the victim/hero and H1 as the bully/villain. This moral polarization leads, however, to an oversimplification of the contrast between H1 and H2. It risks making them ‘personnages’ of a kind not compatible with Sarraute's rejection of characterization.²¹ It is important to remember that if, from the opening scene, H2 is the victim of H1's interrogation, H1 is already the victim of H2's estrangement, and where imagery is concerned, it is H1 who initiates the images of physical distance to express estrangement. H1 is not always in confident control of language; his self-expression also falters (‘je ne sais pas comment dire …’, p. 54); he frequently leaves his sentences unfinished, and he too reaches for metaphor to convey his experience of H2's world: shifting sands, in which, he confesses, ‘je perds pied’, and he longs to get back to his own world—‘où tout est stable’.

For H2, H1's ‘stable’ world is imprisoning; it is an ‘édifice fermé de tous côtés’ (p. 55). H2 feels like a mole undermining H1's carefully tended lawns—a metaphor that pits H2's mobility and disruptiveness against H1's stability and order. On the other hand, when H1 produces the word ‘condescension’ to describe what H2 had perceived in the tone of ‘C'est biiien ça’, H2 accepts it gladly. It is also H2 who categorizes elements of H1's behaviour as ‘étalages’ (p. 32), and finds a name—‘paternité comblée’—for what H1 was displaying. He also classifies himself as ‘un gros balourd’ (p. 31) and characterizes H1 as ‘bien plus subtil que moi’ (p. 32); and if H1 tries to pin a label of jealousy on H2 (‘Tu étais jaloux’, p. 34), H2 pins fear on H1: (‘On dirait que tu as peur … […] Oui, peur. Ça te fait peur’, p. 50). Nevertheless, H2 regards naming as if it were exclusively H1's vice: ‘Ah, les noms, ça c'est pour toi. C'est toi, c'est vous qui mettez des noms sur tout’ (p. 48). H1 does indeed take issue with the vagueness of H2's imprecise metaphoric style: ‘Quoi ça?’ he asks at one point, adding ‘Assez de métaphores’ (p. 32). If H1 classifies and characterizes principally by naming, H2 does so principally by imposing stereotypes and metaphors.

The two men belong, fundamentally, to ‘enemy camps’, says H2. H1 sets about naming them. His own camp, says H1, is for those who contribute to real life, while the other one … Here H1 hesitates, and H2 steps in to finish the sentence for him, using the language of H1. If H1's camp is the camp of the ‘doers’, of those who know what's what, and call things by their proper names, then H2's is the camp of ‘les ratés’ (p. 51), the failures, the dreamers, the confused. The contrast between H1 and H2 is thus starkly outlined—but by whom? The ‘raté’ epithet is not applied by H1, but by H2, interpreting H1. According to H2, the suggestion that H2 is a ‘raté’ is H1's way of provoking an indignant reply—which H2 refuses to make, although he outlines what it would have been in H1's scenario: ‘“Un raté? Moi? Qu'est-ce que j'entends? […] … vous allez voir, je vous donnerai des preuves …” Non, n'y compte pas’ (p. 51). The voice here is multiple: H2 stands in for H1, and H1 who speaks for H2 until, in his own voice, H2 wipes out this spurious version of himself attributed to H1, but which he has himself contrived. This is one of many instances when one of the two speaks in the voice of the other, blurring the division between them, and creating an effect of ventriloquism that multiplies and intermingles the voices of the play.²²

As a result of such ‘ventriloquism’, the dialogue becomes multilayered, allowing temporal and spatial shifts, as voice is superimposed on voice. The two men speak now, in the immediate situation, but they also speak their own words, each other's words, and the words of other people, from the past, or from an imagined or hypothetical future. This ventriloquism starts right at the beginning of the play, when H2 does not merely recall what his mother thought, but speaks her part:

‘Oui, pauvre maman … Elle t'aimait bien … elle me disait: “Ah lui, au moins, c'est un vrai copain, tu pourras toujours compter sur lui.” C'est ce que j'ai fait, d'ailleurs’.

(p. 8)

It is instructive to observe how much of the dialogue in this play is in quotation marks, indicating that the words spoken are the words of somebody else.

We first hear the words at the centre of the dispute—H1's ‘C'est biiien, ça’ when they are pronounced not by H1, but by H2—with H1's intonation, and accentuation. In an extended rehearsal, H1 learns from H2 how to pronounce his own words in the way that H2 heard them. He learns to imitate H2's imitation of him. Later, when H2 remarks that he (H2) is already known to the authorities as ‘celui qui rompt pour un oui ou pour un non’, H1 recalls having been told something of the sort. ‘On m'avait dit’, he begins, and then swings into the voice of that accusing ‘on’: ‘“Vous savez, c'est quelqu'un dont il faut se méfier. Il paraît très amical, affectueux … et oui, paf! pour un oui ou pour un non … on ne le revoit plus”’ (p. 17). Coming back to his own voice, H1 offers H2 the useful classifying word, ‘condescendant’. The authorities, he suggests, may take a more lenient view if H2 uses clearer language—and H1 takes on the voice of the authorities: ‘“C'est entendu, il a voulu rompre avec un pareil ami … mais enfin, on peut invoquer cette impression qu'il a eue d'une certaine condescendance …”’ (p. 20). This ‘dialogue’ becomes a conversation for a great many more than two voices.

The scene with the jury-couple demonstrates the techniques and procedures used throughout the play. The meeting is a purposeful verdict-seeking rehearsal of events, but the gap between the actor-presenter and the jury-audience looms large—and comic. H2's metaphoric expressions are taken literally—‘jamais je n'ai accepté d'aller chez lui’ says H2. ‘Vous n'allez jamais chez lui?’ (p. 24) asks F, astonished, and the meaning has to be clarified (as ‘jamais je ne cherchais à m'installer sur ses domaines’) for the very literal-minded couple, whose responses exhibit the comic aspects of the communication-problems that beset all the discourse of the play. At least H1 has understood: ‘Oui, c'est vrai, tu t'es toujours tenu en marge …’ he says. But the mere mention of the word ‘marge’ provokes from H3 the question: ‘Un marginal?’ (p. 25).

When H2 relates the incident of H1's lecture-tour offer, F immediately commends H1's kindness, provoking a groan from H2 who wonders if it's worth going on. H1 encourages him, and H2 presents versions of what he might have said in response to H1's offer—here mimicking himself. But he flinches from saying what he actually did say. It is H1 who intervenes to supply what H2 said, ‘tu as dit que si tu voulais, tu pourrais … qu'on t'avait proposé, dans d'excellentes conditions …’ (p. 28). H2 admits that his response was that of one who fully belonged to the H1 world: ‘Je jouais leur jeu à fond. On aurait dit que je n'avais jamais fait que ça’ (p. 29). This left him utterly at H1's mercy: ‘il n'a eu qu'à me prendre’. H2 now takes on the voice of H1, in that moment in the past, contemptuously holding up H2 for inspection: ‘Voyez-vous ça, regardez-moi ce bonhomme’, and, dizzyingly, H2 goes on to give his version of H1's version of what H2 himself had said and meant: ‘il dit qu'il a été, lui aussi, invité … et même dans de flatteuses conditions … et comme il en est fier … voyez comme il se redresse … ah mais c'est qu'il n'est pas si petit qu'on le croit … il a su mériter comme un grand … c'est biiien … ça … C'est biiiien … ça …’ (p. 29). H2 at last returns to his own voice and the present moment, with a despairing ‘Oh mais qu'est-ce que vous pouvez bien comprendre … ?’.

The despair is justified. After the departure of the couple, a long silence measures the full extent of the impasse. But the two men continue to borrow each other's voices. H2 gives his version of H1's reaction to his failure (in the past) to salute H1's display of ‘Bonheur’ (p. 35), relating it to the queen with her magic mirror, and Snow White, the princess in the forest. When H1 accuses him of rambling—‘Quelle forêt? Quelle princesse?’ (p. 35), H2 suggests H1 should call the jury-couple back … the opportunity is too good to miss, he says. In H1's voice, H2 addresses the (absent) couple—‘“Écoutez-le, il est en plein délire … quelle forêt?”’ then uses the voice of the queen consulting the mirror (‘“Suis-je la plus belle, dis-moi …”’) to simulate the feelings of H1, takes on the voice of the mirror for the reply, and comes back to his own voice to tell H1: ‘Tu es comme cette reine’ (pp. 35-36). The multi-voiced H2 addresses here a multiple audience, for he speaks not merely to H1 but to what he calls ‘mes bonnes gens’—H1 and the absent couple whose presence he has invoked. These ‘bonnes gens’, called upon to arbitrate in the dispute, may of course be further extended to include the audience in the theatre, for they, by implication, play a similar role, and indeed will shortly be called upon to witness, and make a judgement on, a re-enactment of the original ‘C'est bi-i-en ça’ scene.²³

About half-way through the play, H1 decides to leave, but stops at the window and looks out, whereupon H2 tries to make peace. H2 is touched, he says, by the way H1 sometimes looks at things as if he had merged into them: this closes the gap, brings them together. But H2 gives a hostage to Fortune when he confesses his attachment to this place where he lives—the lane, the wall, the roof—‘la vie est là’ (p. 39). H1 picks up an echo of Verlaine: H2 denies any thought of Verlaine. H1 now accuses H2 of setting a trap, putting out a bait, and putting on a display—a display of ‘la vie simple et tranquille’ in a ‘poetic’ domain. He recalls an earlier instance of H2's flaunting of ‘poetic sensibility’ during a climbing trip, long ago. He takes on H2's voice, tone and style. H2's imagery of traps and cages now seems more plausible to H1: ‘ça paraissait très fou, mais tu n'avais peut-être pas si tort que ça … Mais cette fois, c'est toi qui m'as attiré..’ (pp. 41-42). It is H2's turn now to make literal-minded and disingenuous protestations: ‘Quel bout de lard?’ (p. 41) ‘Attiré où?’ (p. 42).

But H1 turns the tables even more thoroughly on H2 when he recalls and ‘rewrites’ what has just happened on stage when H2 joined him at the window: ‘quand tu m'as tapoté l'épaule: “C'est bien, ça …”’ (p. 47). He admits that H2 did not actually speak these words, but it amounted to the same thing: ‘Mais oui, tu sais le dire aussi … en tout cas l'insinuer … C'est biiien … ça …’ (p. 47). Then in a passage which parallels H2's version of H1 presenting H2 (the ‘Voyez-vous ça, regardez-moi ce bonhomme …’ speech), H1 gives his version of H2 presenting him to an imaginary public: ‘… voilà un bon petit qui sent le prix de ces choses-là … on ne le croirait pas, mais vous savez, tout béotien qu'il est, il en est tout à fait capable …’ (pp. 47-48). This time the theatre audience is the ‘jury’. Unlike the jury-couple, who were dependent on a retrospective account of the disputed incident, the members of the audience not only have H1's account, but have seen and heard for themselves what took place at the window.

The criminal phrase ‘C'est biiien, ça’, has now been used by and against both men. Will the audience find H2 guilty of ‘condescendance’? Or, following the example of the jury-couple, will they find H2 innocent and H1 mad? Will the audience be sympathetic to their ‘application’, or condemn them to remain friends?

If ‘Amitié’ here becomes ‘un édifice fermé de tous côtés’, it does so for both men—the ‘vrai copain’ and the ‘ami sûr’ (as they describe themselves in their first exchanges). At the end of the play, recognizing ‘comment nous sommes’ (p. 50), they contemplate their situation as friends divided by a gulf of hostility, who, however, have no ‘real’ reason for ceasing to be friends. H1 wonders whether it is worth making a new joint application—‘à nous deux, cette fois’—for release from the bonds of friendship (an application such as they seem to have just made to the theatre-audience), but H2 rejects the idea. He mimics the voice of the ‘authorities’ (the audience?), rejecting the pleas of H1 and H2 along with their metaphors—from H2's moles and lawns to H1's shifting sands:

‘Je vois leur air … “Eh bien, de quoi s'agit-il encore? De quoi? Qu'est-ce qu'ils racontent? Quelles taupes? Quelles pelouses? Quels sables mouvants? Quels camps ennemis? Voyons un peu leurs dossiers … Rien … on a beau chercher … examiner les points d'ordinaire les plus chauds … rien d'autre nulle part que les signes d'une amitié parfaite …”’

(pp. 56-57)

H1 agrees. The ‘authorities’ will regard any break-up of the friendship as shameful, says H2, and again H1 agrees: ‘Oui, aucun doute possible, aucune hésitation: déboutés tous les deux’ (p. 57). The two are united in the recognition that any rift would cause them to be condemned by ‘normal’ people (again, the audience?) as fickle and light-minded: ‘ils peuvent rompre pour un oui ou pour un non’.

The phrase becomes a question and is turned about, progressively emptied of meaning until it peters out at last in the banality of:

H2:
Oui ou non? …
H1:
Ce n'est pourtant pas la même chose …
H2:
En effet: Oui. Ou non.

and ends with the final exchange:

H1:
Oui.
H2:
Non!

In the everyday world of common-sense reality, to which we are here returned, that is all there is—a final vision of two people divided by a ‘nothing’. As Gerda Zeltner eloquently puts it: ‘Si finalement, l'un dit “oui” et l'autre “non”, ce ne sont ici […] que catégories vides. La vie serpente entre les deux, fluctuant entre le oui et le non …’.²⁴

There is a fundamental opposition in the play, but it is not a simple conflict of characters. H1 and H2 are not allowed to harden into characters: they speak each other's words and play each other's parts: each contains each. The opposition here is between, on the one hand, acceptance of the language of classification and conformism, and on the other, rejection of categorization and a battle with and for language, the battle that keeps language alive. But even if H2 is more on the side of the angels than H1, he is far from impeccable. To see H2 as the unqualified hero of this opposition, and H1 as the villain, is to oversimplify the play and to reinstate the ‘personnages’ which Sarraute has consistently expelled from her work, and which in this play she persistently destabilizes by a sustained ventriloquism. Both men are (or to put it another way, everyone is) capable of similar tergiversations, rejecting categorization when applied to themselves, but finding it useful when applied to others.

If it is H2's ‘Non’ that has the last word in the play, this cannot be taken as a simple endorsement of all the moral simplifications and categorizations implied in H2's scenario, in which H1 plays the bully and H2 the innocent victim. Not only the matter of this play, but the whole of Sarraute's writing gives the lie to such a view. Sarraute's own patient and persistent ‘Non’, throughout her work, constantly rejects categorization, denounces the general propensity to make ‘personnages’ of oneself and other people, and maintains the fluidity of lived experience.

Claude Régy comments that Sarraute ‘joue tout le temps sur la destruction, mais toujours avec une ironie et un humour grandioses’.²⁵ The irony and humour are out in force in Pour un oui ou pour un non—tripping up first one then the other ‘character’, defeating their efforts to establish a fixed stance, and showing up, in their reactions each to each, the often comic disproportion between slightness of cause and magnitude of effect. And the ultimate irony is the close resemblance of these implacable foes, who have exchanged roles and voices to such an extent that, at the end, their ‘oui’ and ‘non’ have been left naked of meaning under the transparent drapery of the assurance that ‘Ce n'est pourtant pas la même chose’.

Humour always played a vital role in Sarraute's work, as she acknowledged in an interview of 1968: through humour and irony, she is able to explore potentially tragic themes without falling into the tragic mode. ‘L'humour’, she told Geneviève Serreau, ‘a un pouvoir de contestation, de destruction. Il perturbe le tragique sitôt que celui-ci tendrait à se former. Il empêche le mouvement de se figer. Dans l'univers où je suis, on n'ose pas se prendre au tragique, ni d'ailleurs tomber dans le comique pur, tout reste discontinu, indécis, tremblant, à mi-chemin, comme me paraît être la réalité’.²⁶Pour un oui ou pour un non maintains that precariously balanced position, though some critics have seen the play as tragic, and even cruel.

Arnaud Rykner, for instance, sees it as incorporating ‘une fatalité tragique’ and ‘une poétique de la cruauté’.²⁷ Such a view seems to take Sarraute's probing elaborations of the virtual for representations of the irreversible and irreparable. When Rykner, in an interview with Sarraute, applied the word ‘cruauté’ to her work, he got the response: ‘Je trouve très étonnant qu'on emploie ce mot!’ In real life, said Nathalie Sarraute, ‘les gens s'entre-tuent’. The happenings of Pour un oui ou pour un non are as ‘eau de rose’ in comparison. ‘Où est la cruauté?’ she asks. ‘Il n'y a pas de cruauté: ces deux êtres n'appartiennent pas au même univers, mais cela ne les empêchera jamais d'être toujours prêts à se rendre service et à s'aider mutuellement. […] Ce n'est qu'à l'intérieur que chacun est destructeur de l'autre’.²⁸ It is a vital distinction,²⁹ and one that the play fully upholds. Even if H1 says ‘oui’ and H2 says ‘non’, there is no tragic consequence here. What Sarraute shows is the complex, tragic-comic and often dizzying exchanges that take place beneath the surface of civilized conversation. In Sarraute's novels, voices proliferate, characterization is volatilized, people move in and out of places and times, in and out of each other's minds—the theatre would not seem to allow such flexibility, such motility. But in the ventriloquial dialogue of H1 and H2, Sarraute has effectively and poetically dramatized the perpetual sub-surface motion of voice and viewpoint.

Notes

1. Le Silence, first published in Mercure de France, February 1964, produced by Jean-Louis Barrault, 1967 and published, with Le Mensonge, by Gallimard, 1967. Included in N. Sarraute, Théâtre (Paris, Gallimard, 1978), republished with introduction and notes by Arnaud Rykner in Gallimard's ‘Folio-Théâtre’, 1993. Sarraute tells of her initial resistance to writing for the theatre in ‘Le Gant retourné’, first published in Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, 89 (1975), reprinted in Aujourd'hui Nathalie Sarraute, Digraphe, 32 (March 1984), 52-57. (Also published in English translation as ‘The Inside of the Glove’ in Romance Studies, 4 (Summer 1984), 1-7). In a conversation in English with Frances Donnelly, recorded for the BBC in 1983, Nathalie Sarraute commented: ‘I would never have written plays if they hadn't come to me from Germany, from Stuttgart, saying: “Make it as modern and difficult as you like. We don't mind—on the contrary!” No-one else said that. And that's how I started writing plays.’ (‘Nathalie Sarraute talks about her life and works’, Romance Studies, 4 (Summer 1984), 8-16 (p. 14).

2. Pour un oui ou pour un non (Paris, Gallimard, 1982).

3. Nathalie Sarraute, ‘Le Gant retourné’, Digraphe, 32 (March 1984), 51-62 (p. 52).

4. Nathalie Sarraute, Tropismes, first published by Denoël, 1939 (Paris, Minuit, 1957), republished with introduction and notes by Sheila M. Bell (London, Methuen Educational, 1972); L'Usage de la parole (Paris, Gallimard, 1980).

5. Nathalie Sarraute, quoted by Simone Benmussa in ‘Quand les mots installent le danger sur la scène’, Magazine littéraire, 196 (June 1983), 28-31 (p. 29).

6. Monique Wittig, ‘Le lieu de l'action’, in Digraphe, 32 (March 1984), 69-75 (p. 69).

7. Arnaud Rykner, Nathalie Sarraute (Paris, Seuil, 1991), ‘Entretien avec Nathalie Sarraute (propos recueillis en avril 1990)’, pp. 153-83 (p. 182).

8. Mathieu Galey, ‘Solitaire dans sa recherche’, Digraphe, 32, 98-101 (p. 100).

9. ‘Entretien avec Claude Régy (propos recueillis en décembre 1989)’, in Rykner, Nathalie Sarraute, pp. 137-51 (p. 138). Sarraute herself stresses the importance of avoiding ‘l'aspect social qui s'attache à l'acteur lui-même, à son physique, à sa manière d'être vêtu’ in theatrical production of her works: ‘A tous moments; comme il y a des personnages, le social s'introduit, s'engouffre … alors tout est perdu’. In Nathaalie Sarraute, Qui êtes-vous? Conversations avec Simone Benmussa (Paris, La Manufacture, 1987), p. 143.

10. L'Usage de la parole, p. 112.

11. John Rothenberg cites this passage as ‘clearly a source for this play’, in ‘Imagery in Sarraute's Pour un oui ou pour un non’, French Studies Bulletin, 41 (Winter 1991/92), 15-17 (p. 16).

12. Nathalie Sarraute, Entre la vie et la mort (Paris, Gallimard, 1968), pp. 196-201 (p. 197). Responding to Rothenberg, ‘Imagery’, John Phillips traces the central idea of the play back to the Entre la vie et la mort episode (‘Sarraute's Pour un oui ou pour un non: “Un gaz hilarant dans un gant retourné”’, French Studies Bulletin, 43 (Summer 1992), 16-17 (p. 16).

13. ‘Entretien avec Nathalie Sarraute’, Rykner, p. 181. In a broadcast interview with Danièle Sallenave, recorded in June 1991, Sarraute comments on the reappearance of the phrase ‘C'est bien, ça’: ‘pendant tout le temps qu'on a joué Pour un oui ou pour un non—et longtemps après—je ne me rendais pas compte que c'est une expression dont je m'étais déjà servie des années avant’.

14. ‘A très bientôt’, L'Usage de la parole, p. 23.

15. Nathalie Sarraute, ‘Le Gant retourné’, p. 55.

16. Rothenberg, (‘Imagery’, p. 15), stresses the importance of imagery in the play. He identifies three types of imagery—images of physical distance, of (military) conflict and of legal authority—and argues that ‘the development of imagery around these themes creates a powerful structural effect in a play where there is no plot’.

17. The use of legal terminology is not surprising in one herself qualified as a barrister, and whose husband was a practising barrister.

18. Nathalie Sarraute, Vous les entendez? (Paris, Gallimard, 1972), pp. 117-25.

19. See for instance, Portrait d'un inconnu, p. 114.

20. Nathalie Sarraute, ‘Ce que je cherche à faire’, in Nouveau roman: Hier, aujourd'hui, vol. 2, Pratiques (Paris, U.E.G., 10.18., 1972), pp. 25-40 (pp. 36, 37).

21. As for instance in Rothenberg's presentation of H1 as one ‘who endorses the judgement of society’ and ‘feels no need of imagery’, while H2 ‘represents all hunted victims’ (‘Imagery’, p. 16).

22. In her perceptive discussion of Sarraute's plays (Preface to Nathalie Sarraute, Qui êtes-vous? p. 22), Simone Benmussa stresses the way that H1 and H2 create themselves—and each other—on stage, in the dialogue: ‘Ils se constituent, là, dans cet échange. On ne connaît l'Homme 1 que par la façon dont il est perçu par l'Homme 2 et par ses réactions, il en va de même pour l'Homme 2.’

23. In the sensitive and sharply comic production of Elisabeth Chailloux and Heinke Wagner at the Théâtre d'Ivry in Spring 1993 (with Olivier Bouana and Luc Clémentin as the two principals), the ‘neighbours’ were called up from the auditorium, thus underlining their role as ‘test-audience’ for what is, after all, the substance of the play on stage—for which the audience will ultimately be the ‘jury’.

24. Gerda Zeltner, ‘Quelques remarques sur “l'art dramatique” de Nathalie Sarraute’, Digraphe, 32, 102-07 (p. 106).

25. ‘Entretien avec Claude Régy’, in Rykner, Nathalie Sarraute, p. 144.

26. Geneviève Serreau, ‘Nathalie Sarraute et les secrets de la création’, La Quinzaine Littéraire, 1-15 May 1968.

27. Arnaud Rykner, Théâtres du nouveau roman: Sarraute—Pinget—Duras (Paris, Corti, 1988), pp. 78 and 80. John Rothenberg, in ‘More on Sarraute's Theatre’, French Studies Bulletin, 44 (Autumn 1992), p. 20, describes the play as ‘a cruel comedy’.

28. ‘Entretien avec Nathalie Sarraute’ in Rykner, Nathalie Sarraute, p. 177.

29. In conversation with Simone Benmussa, Sarraute underlines this point: ‘Ce n'est pas de la réalité consciemment vécue’ […] … ‘mes rapports ne changeront pas avec qui que ce soit parce qu'il m'aura dit: “C'est bien … ça”. Il n'y aura pas d'explication, tout cela est entièrement du domaine de la fiction, de la construction … et du grossissement. Sinon la vie serait intenable.’ Nathalie Sarraute, Qui êtes-vous?, p. 74.