Nathalie Sarraute and the Practice of Writing

Author(s): Stephen Heath

Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction , Winter, 1970, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter, 1970), pp.
101-118
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345293

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 Nathalie Sarraute and the Practice of Writing

STEPHEN HEATH

The publication in 1968 of Nathalie Sarraute's new novel, Entre la vie et la

mort, confirmed the continuity of work which extends along a clearly defined
central line of pursuit. Her five novels to date, together with an initial collection
of prose pieces, the critical essays and studies and the radio plays, have a coher-
ent relationship that it would not be easy to find surpassed in the writings of
any other novelist. This tightly integrated body of work has been produced over
a considerable period of time (some thirty-five years), but it is difficult as yet
to point to any really adequate critical assessment of its achievement. The reasons
for this are complex, and to a great extent the complexity stems from the work
itself; from a certain ambiguity of approach suggested by it that, in writing
which can be so readily characterized in terms of its coherence, inevitably seems
paradoxical. The problem posed by the novels, and here lies the difficulty of
adequate assessment, is largely one of reading, and what might relevantly be
attempted in the present essay is in some sort the disengagement of the premises
for the reading of Nathalie Sarraute's work, an attempt that will not perhaps be
without some general interest with regard to a certain history of the novel form.
The habitual approach to Nathalie Sarraute's novels is made in the vital
context of discussion of the "nouveau roman." Such an approach, however, can
also be misleading, as misleading as the concept of the "nouveau roman" itself,
which is popularly defined with reference to certain theories of Alain Robbe-
Grillet. This is a procedure that has led to the consequent creation by critics of
literary "schools" into which the most unlikely novelists, Nathalie Sarraute
among them, are then grouped. Simply to call to mind a few important publica-
tion dates is to place Nathalie Sarraute at this level in a rather different history:
1938, La Nausee; 1939, Tropismes; 1942, L'Etranger; 1945-49, Les Chemins de
la liberte; 1948, Portrait d'un inconnu (with a preface by Sartre); 1951, Malone
meurt, Molloy; 1953, Martereau, Les Gommes. The habitual approach via the
context of the "nouveau roman" thus tends to involve a focus on purely negative
elements in her novels, on the terms of the rejection of certain assumptions basic
to the traditional, "Balzacian" novel common to a group of contemporary French
novelists (but common equally to more or less the whole range of "modern"
novelists, to Virginia Woolf, for instance), and so fails to distinguish the par-
ticular quality of Nathalie Sarraute's work. If there are significant connections
to be made between this work and that of, say, Robbe-Grillet, they can only be
made by considering the meaning of the two quite separate bodies of work for
the novel form, and not by discussing the one in terms of the other. Indeed

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102
NOVELIWINTER 1970

Nathalie Sarraute's novels can seem in many respects to demand rather the work
of Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce and, precisely, Virginia Woolf as the proper context
for their understanding.
Nathalie Sarraute's work stands, in fact, at the opposite end of the spectrum
to that of Robbe-Grillet, and she has herself defined their differing emphases:
both of them attempt to seize a basic reality, but, "Cette realite je la cherche
dans les mouvements psychologiques a l'etat naissant, ce que j'ai appele les
'Tropismes'. Robbe-Grillet la poursuit dans l'apprehension directe, sans recours
aux moyens de la description traditionelle de l'objet."' It is open to doubt
whether or not this is an adequate account of the tentative of Robbe-Grillet,
who seems to hold not merely to the idea ascribed to him here by Nathalie
Sarraute of the novel as the medium for cleansing, anti-anthropomorphic de-
scription, but also to the idea of the novel as the medium of extreme subjectivism
and, finally (the impetus of the writings of Raymond Roussel will be recognized
here), of the novel as linguistic fiction, its realism, as Roland Barthes has insisted,
lying essentially in its demonstration of the "realite irreelle" of language.2 Be
this as it may, Nathalie Sarraute's own theory of the novel is fundamentally
concerned with the novel as a representational, mimetic medium, a medium
suitable in this respect for the psychological realism that she defines as the aim
of her writings. She can speak of the novel in an almost Zolaesque manner as a
laboratory for scientific research, and she has specifically rejected the conception
of the novel in terms of a self-reflective linguistic structuration, what Robbe-
Grillet has called "le roman lui-meme qui se pense" 3:

Je pense que toute exploration du langage qui ne comporterait pas, mieux, qui
ne se justifierait pas par la creation d'une substance inconnue, qui perdrait
contact avec un ordre de sensations neuf, qui se contenterait de n'importe quel
contenu, meme naivement banal, indifferente a ce contenu et enfermee dans
le miroitement du langage, ne pourrait pas echapper a l'esthetisme, a l'acad-
emisme.

Her idea of the novel is set out in the series of essays, written "pour me
justifier ou me rassurer ou m'encourager," collected in L'?re du soup9on. Th
context of her work, as she there defines it, is less a recognized tradition than
the creation of a new one depending on the conjunction of Dostoevsky and
Kafka, of the "roman psychologique" and the "roman de situation." Dostoevsky
commands respect by virtue of the insights he gives the reader through hi
characters into the subconscious world that exists beyond the boundaries of th
individual, into the realm of instinctive, impersonal movement rendered, for
example, through the spasms and tortured antics of Fyodor Karamazov in Father

1 Times Literary Supplement, 13 March 1959, p. 145. Robbe-Grillet has indicated the degree to which he can
assent sympathetically to the project of Nathalie Sarraute's work in "Le realisme, la psychologie, et l'avenir
du roman," Critique (August/September, 1956), pp. 695-701.
2 Essais critiques (Paris, 1964), p. 164.
3."Pourquoi la mort du roman?" L'Express, 8 November 1955, p. 8.
4 Tel Quel, No. 9 (Spring, 1962), p. 49.

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 STEPHEN HEATHINATHALIE SARRAUTE 103

Zossima's cell; and Kafka because of his portrayal of the violence in the seem-
ingly ordinary and everyday and his concomitant emphasis on the impossibility
of sustaining any longer the belief in the "moi substantiel," the aggressive in-
dividuality of the Romantic hero gives way to the empty anonymity of K., the
name shrivels to an initial letter. The conjunction of Dostoevsky and Kafka in
these terms brings us to the very heart of Nathalie Sarraute's work as she
conceives it and so, necessarily, to the question of her attitude to psychology in
the novel. In a now notorious passage of L'?re du soupqon (Paris, 1956, p. 83)
she remarked that, "Le mot 'psychologie' est un de ceux qu'aucun auteur
aujourd'hui ne peut entendre prononcer a son sujet sans baisser les yeux et
rougir." The remark was made, however, in an essay the initial development of
which, despite a certain complexity, is evidently ironical and indeed some few
pages later the interest of the modern novel is described as its "mise au jour
d'une matiere psychologique nouvelle" (p. 94). The stress falls on the "nouvelle";
what Nathalie Sarraute is keen to reject is a traditional approach of the "psycho-
logical novel":

Qu'entendez-vous par psychologie? Si vous entendez par la l'analyse des

sentiments, la recherche des mobiles de nos actes, l'etude des caracteres, alors
je crois qu'aujourd'hui une oeuvre romanesque non seulement peut ne pas
etre psychologique, mais encore qu'elle ne doit pas l'etre.5

If she clearly separates her work from that of Proust, it is in terms of the close-
ness of her focus on the inner dramas of the present moment and her endeavor
to "les faire revivre au lecteur dans le present" (L'Tre, p. 98), in contrast to what
she sees as the distance in Proust from such moments which are observed "au
repos, et comme figes dans le souvenir" (p. 97), and it is thus that she can regard
Dostoevsky as a healthier influence. She fully acknowledges her debt to the
achievement of the novelists who have preceded her; her work must be "un
petit pas plus avant dans l'exploration psychologique: la ou de grands ecrivains
comme Dostoevski, Proust et Joyce ont fait des pas de geant."6
The nature of the "matiere psychologique nouvelle" that Nathalie Sarraute
intends to render in her novels is explicit in the title of her first published work,
Tropismes, for the concept of tropisms is at the center of all her writings: "Les
tropismes ont continue a etre la substance vivante de tous mes livres."7 Tropism
is a term from plant physiology, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as
meaning, "the turning of an organism, or a part of one, in a particular direction
(either in the way of growth, bending, or locomotion) in response to some
external stimulus, as that of light." In the world of Nathalie Sarraute's novels
the external stimuli are found in the ordinary everyday encounters between

B Tel Quel, No. 9, p. 50.

6 Letter to Ren6 Micha; cit. Nathalie Sarraute, by Rene Micha (Paris, 1966), p. 66.
7 Preface to the Paris, 1964, edition of L'?re du soupcon, p. 9. (The term "tropism" is also used, in a different
way, by the Austrian novelist Heimito von Doderer. Cf. the discussion of Doderer in Michael Hamburger's
From Prophecy to Exorcism (London, 1965), pp. 131-139.)

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104 NOVELIWINTER 1970

people, and take the form of the outwardly innocuous phrases of casual con-
versation. Man's external life, the public reality of these conversational encoun-
ters, is an inauthentic surface that masks a kind of Sartrean drama of conflict
(the Preface to Portrait d'un inconnu belongs to the same period as L'Jtre et le
neant), a continual attack on and flight from the other. This conflict is neutralized
in a recognized middle ground of banality, of Heideggerian Gerede, a "Grenzland
zwischen Einsamkeit und Gemeinschaft," in Kafka's phrase. Beneath this neu-
tralization of the surface world, however, lies the violent world of tropistic
movement-"une matiere etrange anonyme, comme la lymphe" (Portrait d'un
inconnu, Paris, 1956, p. 72)-which Nathalie Sarraute calls the world of sous-
conversation. Under every phrase of a banal conversation a drama of reception
and response is taking place. Phrases from the surface world of conversation
act as stimuli, setting in motion a swirl of tropistic movements in which people
struggle back into the protective shelter of the next neutralized cliche, thus re-
furbishing the fabric of the conversational Grenzland or "zone mitoyenne." This
drama is the immediate focus of Nathalie Sarraute's novels:

diese kleinen Regungen-sie sind nie unmittelbar gezeigt, sie sind immer
innen, verborgen, man kann sie nur erraten durch die Oberfliche, aus der
Konversation oder unseren Handlungen, ganz banalen Handlungen. Und was
mich interessierte, war zu zeigen, was sich hinter diesen ganz banalen Worten
oder Handlungen verbirgt.8
She seeks not to create individual "characters," but to render "un meme fond
commun," or, as Gide put it in Paludes, "l'histoire du terrain neutre, celui qui est
a tout le monde."9 The feel of her work and the vision it embodies is summed
up by this passage from Hugo von Hofmannsthal's dramatic prologue to Brecht's
Baal:

Our time is unredeemed; and do you know what it wants to be redeemed

from? ... The individual. . . Our age groans too heavily under the weight of
this child of the sixteenth century that the nineteenth fed to monstrous size . . .
We are anonymous forces . . . Individuality is an arabesque we have dis-
carded.?1

If individuality is an arabesque to be discarded, then it is clear that similar

treatment must be accorded to the conventional structural patterns of the novel.
The consequences of Nathalie Sarraute's vision for her development of the novel
form are of crucial importance here. The traditional concept of "character," the
Balzacian urge to "camper un heros de roman," is seen by her as totally false to
the psychological realism she is seeking to achieve. "Les personnages . . . ne
parviennent plus a contenir la realite psychologique actuelle" (L'?re, pp. 70-71).
To construct a novel in terms of characters is at once to push the focus exclu-

8 Der Monat, December, 1963, p. 27.

9 Paludes (Paris, 1920), p. 62.
10 Cit. Martin Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils (London, 1959), p. 29.

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 STEPHEN HEATH NATHALIE SARRAUTE 105

sively toward the individual. Balzac gives the people in

tions, houses, sets of personal possessions, a full com
intended to fix for the reader their individuality. In
this individuality is seen as no more than a flimsy en
matic flow of impersonal, anonymous tropistic move
The age of innocent belief in the firm, hard outlines o
given way to the age of suspicion; the well defined co
Grandet to the shifting nonentity of the old man in P
by virtue of its "undoing" of the novel form, Sartre
"anti-roman." As few people as possible are given nam
novels, and there is an absolute minimum of particul
is to be firmly dissuaded from reading them as tradit
pecher le lecteur de courir deux lievres a la fois, et p
nages gagnent en vitalite facile et en vraisemblance,
auxquels ils servent de support le perdent en verite p
disperse son attention et la laisse accaparer par les
71). Realism lies not in the slavish representation of
the rendition of the deeper world beneath it which gi
Sarraute is fond of quoting Paul Klee's statement to t
reproduce what can be seen, it makes things visible.
These are the terms of her rejection of the tradition
how then can the novelist proceed? She acknowled
and Henry Green as pioneers 1 in the handling of th
the main difficulty lies inevitably in the rendering o
this difficulty has remained unresolved so far in the d

On n'a pas encore decouvert ce langage qui pourrait

ce qu'on perqoit en un clin d'oeil: tout un etre et ses
ments surgis dans quelques mots, un rire, un ges
1959, p. 39)
Her answer is precisely the creation of such a language, depending on a set of
images and imagistic expressions that can contain the movement of the sous-
conversation. Any page from her novels is immediately recognizable because
of this language with its series of recurring key terms. The people wear shells
("coquille," "carapace") like the shells of turtles or snails, protection for the
deadly struggle that takes place in the arena of conversation-"ils luttent front
contre front, engonces dans leurs carapaces, leurs lourdes armures" (Portrait,
p. 48). Like serpents they twist, turn, writhe ("se tortillent"), spitting venom
at one another, or else like octopuses attempt to grapple one another with
tentacles. When some chance phrase shatters their defenses, a repugnant sticky
matter spurts out ("jaillit") from them and they flow into the anonymous current
of tropistic movement, frantically attempting to clamber back into the security

11Though not necessarily as influences. She first read Ivy Compton-Burnett in 1950. (Cf. "Virginia Woolf,
ou la visionnaire du 'maintenant,' " [interview] Les lettres franfaises, No. 882, 29 June 1961, p. 3).

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106 NOVEL|WINTER 1970

of banality, to escape from the darkness that has engulf

Nuit noire. Ou etes-vous? Repondez. Nous sommes la to
J'appelle, repondez-moi. Juste pour que je sache que vous e
vers vous de toutes mes forces." (Les Fruits d'or, Paris, 19
central image of this world is that of the planetarium; pe
planetarium, protected by the reassuringly smooth sham s
of the real one beyond it.12 The basic urge is to huddle (
sham sky, under the shelter of cliche, out of reach for the m
that is the dominant reality of this world: "On vivait en
one remarks in Les Fruits d'or (p. 172). It is a world not w
that of Ionesco's theater where again everyday unthin
latent and essential violence capable of manifesting itself
Martereau (Paris, 1953) is typical of Nathalie Sarraute's
liberately explicit and subversive use of a named characte
a very clear insight into the recasting of the novel form
The narrator of the novel is a hyper-sensitive young man
ated grasp on his reality as an individual. He feels himself
livre a la foule" (p. 27), and this passive malleability m
effective catalyst in the process of the revelation of
conversation. It is the movements of this subterranean w
cinate him, and he takes a luxurious pleasure in obser
veritable volupte que j'eprouve a les contempler" (p. 39
sets up experimental situations in order to study the m
aspects, and watches the results with "l'excitation du s
pothese hative confirmee par l'experience" (p. 69). His
also the field in which he is himself a participant-his im
consisting of his uncle, his aunt, and their daughter. Toge
play a violent game of endlessly changing liaisons; now un
against the daughter, now aunt and narrator against the

12 This image is explicit only in the title of Le Planetarium, but it is a key ima
from the very beginning of her work. In 1939 she collected a group of pros
Planetarium," but the volume was never published.
13 It might be noted here that the idea of the inauthentic level of conversation is also central in Proust. Earlier
I used the expression "zone mitoyenne," an expression that occurs in a crucial passage in which Bergson
comments on what he sees as the inadequacy of language, its generalization, hence its banality: "Nous nous
mouvons parmi des generalites et des symboles . . . Nous vivons dans une zone mitoyenne entre les choses
et nous, exterieurement aux choses, ext6rieurement aussi A nous-memes" (Le rire, Paris, 1958, p. 118). The
same distrust of language at this level is manifested and elaborated by the narrator of A la recherche du
temps perdu, and both the similarity and the difference of the emphasis from that in Nathalie Sarraute's work
can readily be grasped. For both novelists the level of conversation (in Proust "causerie," the realm of
"parole") is superficial and the task of the novelist is the rendering of a deeper level which involves a work
on language (Proust's theory of metaphor, Nathalie Sarraute's creation of tropistic imagery), but of which
the object, the nature of this deeper level, is essentially different in the two novelists. Where Nathalie Sar-
raute seeks the anonymous, Proust, as the quotation from Bergson will have already suggested, seeks the
individual (and it is this that conversation masks); "ce residu reel que nous sommes obliges de
garder pour nous-mames, que la causerie ne peut transmettre . . ." (III, 258). "On a entre soi et chaque
personne le mur d'une langue etrangere" (II, 522). Nathalie Sarraute's 'characters' are equally alone, but
alone in their anonymity, and in a common language that stimulates the tropistic movements that unite
them in separation. (References to A la recherche du temps perdu are to the three volume Pleiade edition,
Paris, 1954).

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 STEPHEN HEATH INATHALIE SARRAUTE 107

weapons they use in this internecine warfare are, of course, words, the seemingly
harmless phrases of everyday speech that serve both as defense and as attack,
as shield or as shot fired against the enemy. ("Ces mots, anodins en apparence-
mais seuls les non-inities pouvaient s'y tromper." Le Planetarium, pp. 50-51.)
The action of the novel is the unceasing repetitive movement of the sous-
conversation and the minimal "plot" of the novel-the buying of a country
house and the strategy employed in order to avoid embarrassing questions from
the tax authorities with regard to the money used for its purchase-is unim-
portant except as the context of this action, as indeed the members of the family
are important only as the terrain for a study of the anonymous world of tropistic
undulation, for "les etats psychologiques auxquels ils servent de support." Into
the family circle comes Martereau, the only named "character" in the book. The
fact of the name is significant, for in Martereau the narrator discovers precisely
a character, an individual contained within a firmly defined outline, "un seul
bloc" (p. 101), apparently master of the turbulent subterranean world into which
the others ceaselessly dissolve, able to mold it into a hard and durable personal
reality. "Martereau ne 'tique' pas. Ce n'est pas son genre: il n'a pas de ces
mouvements rapides, caches, un peu honteux, aussit6t reprimes . . . Pas une
ombre ne le traversa" (p. 133). The narrator is filled with wonder at the
sight of such a spectacle and he derives a voluptuous contentment from the con-
templation of Martereau's family photo album, which seems to epitomize his
fixed solidity.14 Martereau becomes for the narrator an island of certainty in
the sea of fluid anonymity that surrounds him; "la certitude, la securite se
trouvent la" (p. 96). It is the uncle who introduces Martereau into the narrator's
world, since he needs him for the purposes of his attempt at tax evasion:
Martereau is to buy the country house in his name (note the importance even in
the surface action of Martereau as a name), thus shielding the uncle. Little by
little, however, Martereau's solidity begins to be called into question. Suspicion
encircles him. Does he or does he not mean to acknowledge the uncle's owner-
ship of the house, or will he try to keep it for himself? He becomes a function
of the guerilla warfare in the family whose members group themselves into
factions for or against him. The firm outline of his character begins to blur until
he too flows into the same sea of anonymity as the others. As the narrator rue-
fully remarks at the end of the novel, "cela fremit en lui, se souleve, bouillonne,
tourbillonne, myriades de particules infimes, mondes qui gravitent, cela deferle
de lui sur moi, ce que je redoutais" (p. 285). The dissolution of Martereau is the
essence of the novel: the arabesque of individuality is discarded before the very
eyes of the reader to make way for, on Nathalie Sarraute's terms, the more
profoundly realistic study of the impersonal life.
The formal problem that Nathalie Sarraute faces in Martereau lies in the
structure of the narrative. In L'lre du soupqon she argues in favor of the first
person singular narrative form, since with such a form "le lecteur est d'un coup

14 Photographs have, of course, a quite opposite effect for Proust's narrator or for Virginia Woolf's characters
for whom they evoke not solidity but, on the contrary, the passage of time.

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io8 NOVELJWINTER 1970

a l'interieur, a la place meme oiu l'auteur se trouve, a une profondeur oiu rien
ne subsiste de ces points de repere commodes a l'aide desquels il construit les
personnages. II est plonge et maintenu jusqu'au bout dans une matiere anonyme
comme le sang, dans un magma sans nom, sans contours" (p. 74). The "je"
functions, as it were, as a midway stage between the author's voice and that of
a Balzacian "personnage," floating responsively on the swirling sea of tropistic
movement. There is some falling away from this conception in Martereau: the
narrator is at once a seismographic register of the sous-conversation, a role akin
to that of the novelist herself and that involves him in the same problems of
rendition that beset her ("je ne peux que retrouver par bribes et traduire
gauchement par des mots ce que ces signes representent" p. 34), and also situ-
ated within the world recorded to some extent as a definite individual, as the
nephew caught in a particular action, minimal though it may be. There is con-
siderable awkwardness about the status of the narrator and this awkwardness
is felt especially in the context of a central device of Nathalie Sarraute's tech-
nique, the repetition of the same conversational scene over and over again in
order to capture the movements of the sous-conversation underlying the outward
responses of all the participants. It is not surprising that in Le Planetarium and,
above all, in Les Fruits d'or Nathalie Sarraute modified this narrative form to a
considerable extent, moving away especially from a central narrator figure. In
Les Fruits d'or there are no named characters and no action; the book simply
records the cocktail party small-talk that greets the appearance of a novel called
"Les Fruits d'or" and the myriad tropistic movements that eddy beneath it.
The "je" here becomes truly disengaged, passing from present speaker to present
speaker in the conversations, and while it may well be possible to identify one
or two groups of speakers with some small degree of continuity, this is of
negative importance: what is important is the sous-conversation which is here
rendered completely within its own right. Anonymity has become the scope of
the novel.
This definition of the scope of the novel in terms of the representation of
autonomous impersonal experience poses crucial problems that have to be faced
in any critical assessment of Nathalie Sarraute's work in connection with its
relationship to the novel form, and certain obvious criticisms can be indicated
readily enough from within the context of the novel form's history, a context
which Nathalie Sarraute's theory can seem to justify. One can, then, question
the value of her achievement. The exclusive focus on the impersonal intention-
ally works against the individual, denying the possibility of the creation of
distinguishing patterns and perspectives. Furthermore, it involves a concomitant
denial of time, and hence of narrative. Time is "une eau dormante au fond de
laquelle s'elaborent de lentes et subtiles decompositions" (L'?re, p. 65). The
novels are structured to portray an endless series of present moments ("was
ich versuche-es sind Augenblicke"15), the motionless movements in the stag-
nant pool of time: thus the repetition of conversational scenes from every angle

15 Der Monat, p. 28.

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 STEPHEN HEATH NATHALIE SARRAUTE o109

in order to render all the underlying movements, "the

an expression of Virginia Woolf's.'6 The idea of mean
time, the continuity of narrative, is necessarily missing
all moments are the same at the level of sous-conversation. The sameness is
contained in the language with its sets of recurring images and its sliding pro-
nouns. It is worth calling to mind here a famous passage in a letter from Lawrence
to Edward Garnett, concerning Lawrence's intentions in the writing of The
Rainbow:

You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of character. There
is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable,
and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense
than any we've been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single
radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure
single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the
diamond-but I say, "Diamond, what! This is carbon." And my diamond
might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.)17
Though Lawrence is evidently a very different novelist from Nathalie Sarraute
(one might note in passing that sexual themes as such are almost totally absent
from her novels), there is nothing in this passage taken at its face value with
which she would disagree. Lawrence too is opposing "character" with a deeper
impersonal world, "to whose action the individual is unrecognisable"; his "car-
bon" parallels her "matiere etrange, anonyme, comme la lymphe." Note also
the dependence on terms drawn from biology common to both of them-
Lawrence's "allotropic states" matches Nathalie Sarraute's "tropismes."'8 Yet
it is clear that Lawrence's novels narrate an exploration of the relationships
that structure human reality, between conscious and unconscious, male and
female, individual and society, and so on. The intended theme may be carbon,
but in the actual novels it is rather this set of relationships. It is this narrative
significance that Nathalie Sarraute has deliberately abandoned in her novels
and it has to be asked where lies the relevance or indeed the originality of what
she has gained thereby with regard to the development of the novel form.
There is a moment in Daniel Deronda when the simple Rex Gascoigne, who
is infatuated with Gwendolen, asks her how she would feel were he to leave
Pennicote:

"Should you mind about my going away, Gwendolen?"

"Of course. Every one is of consequence in this dreary country," said
Gwendolen, curtly. The perception that poor Rex wanted to be tender made
her curl up and harden like a sea-anemone at the touch of a finger. (I, VII)

1 A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London, 1953), p. 139.

1i Collected Letters, ed. H. T. Moore (London, 1962), I, 282.
"The status of the term "tropisme" in Nathalie Sarraute's theory can only be strictly metaphorical. The ex-
tension of the concept of tropisms from plant physiology to sessile animals even has been strongly con-
tested, and the comparative psychologist F. J. J. Buytendijk has declared the concept to be totally lacking
in interest for a consideration of man and the higher animals. (L'homme et l'animal, Paris, 1965, p. 88.)

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110 NOVELJWINTER 1970

The image in that passage, an example of what F. R. Leavis has w

George Eliot's "psychological notation,"19 might have come from the
a Nathalie Sarraute novel. It renders a tropistic movement, the inner
against the other, the automatic response on Gwendolen's part as she
the perception, derived from the stimulus of his conversational phras
wishes to be tender; it renders, in short, the sous-conversation b
dolen's "Of course." But the brief passage does a great deal more t
It distinguishes Rex and Gwendolen. Gwendolen's character, her n
individual, emerges in the subtly positioned "curtly" (note the caref
comma), and in the cruelly slighting answer to Rex. At the sam
"dreary country" commands a measure of assent, her England is
deadening, she inhabits the same world that Esther Lyons rejects in
because of its "moral mediocrity" (Ch. XLIII). "Dreary" gives the bore
inactive life of Gwendolen, but relates also to the whole movement of
to the theme of the need for a firm moral tradition, the need for the reg
that is Daniel's quest. Similarly, "poor" is both a fact about Gwendole
acter-this is her characteristic condescending dismissal of those she
weaker than herself-and about Rex, who is "poor" in his pathetic att
get Gwendolen to respond to his infatuation. The important point
passage is its complexity of reference, a complexity that is properly
and that demands to be read in this way. George Eliot has the movem
sous-conversation rendered, but in terms of its interaction with the
reality of the surface world, with individual and with social realities
of these interactions being the significant form of the novel. It is t
narrative realism which, historically, has been a central distinction of
and that is absent from Nathalie Sarraute's work. Has she not taken rather
than, as she claims, one step forward, one step backward, since the rendition
of sous-conversation can be read equally in the work of those novelists she
acknowledges as the impetus for her advance; in that of Joyce ("Stephen,
shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very
coldly: 'I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.'"20), and in that of
Virginia Woolf whose novels indeed offer in many ways close parallels with
Nathalie Sarraute's writings. Phillip Walsh's insight with regard to the self in
Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, is very Sarrautian, down to the very imagery, and
even to the concept of Gerede ("gossiping"):
For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, or self, who fish-like inhabits
deep sea and plies between obscurities, threading her way between the boles
of giant weeds over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold,
deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-
wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself
gossiping.2'

19 The Great Tradition (London, 1948), p. 102.

20 Ulysses (London, 1960), p. 8.
21 Nathalie Sarraute has always rejected the parallel between her work and that of Virginia Woolf. "Je crois
que nos sensibilites sont vraiment a l'oppose l'une de l'autre" ("Virginia Woolf, ou la visionnaire du 'mainte-

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 STEPHEN HEATHINATHALIE SARRAUTE Ill

Raymond Williams has remarked, in a discussion of what has here been called
narrative realism, that in The Waves "all the furniture, and even the physical
bodies, have gone out of the window, and we are left with voices and feelings,
voices in the air,"22 and this description fits even more accurately Les Fruits d'or,
where the "extension" of Virginia Woolf in the narrowing of the focus to the
impersonal movements of the present moment leaves the reader totally deprived
of narrative contours.
Williams helps to define a further element of the problem posed by Nathalie
Sarraute's work when he comments on "the strange case of the Virginia Woolf
'charwoman' or 'village woman' "whose entrance is accompanied by "the sudden
icy drop in the normally warm sensibility,"23 for something of the spirit of this
can also be applied to Nathalie Sarraute. It is not, as Williams suggests of
Virginia Woolf, that the world of the novelist herself is socially closed in this
way, but that this kind of closure is to be found in the range of her novels. The
narrator in A la recherche du temps perdu sees the works of any novelist as one
total work, communicating one central insight, one special knowledge, and he
takes Dostoevsky as his example (III, 379). "Cette beaute nouvelle et terrible
d'une maison, cette beaute nouvelle et mixte d'un visage de femme, voila ce que
Dostoevsky a apporte d'unique au monde . . ." Were one thus to seek to char-
acterize the unique contribution of Nathalie Sarraute's novels, it would have
to be in terms of her portrayal of the rarefied, narcissistic world of a particular
section of the post-war Parisian haute bourgeoisie, the world and language of
Passy and Auteuil. Le Planetarium, its characters maniacally coveting socially
and aesthetically unimpeachable furniture and dreaming obsessively of possess-
ing the perfect apartment, epitomizes this. The term "character," it will be
noted, has crept back into the picture, for the fact that her work can be seen in
this way is to say of it, as Nathalie Sarraute herself has said of Proust's, that
"toutes ces particules se collent les unes aux autres, s'amalgament en un tout
coherent . . . ofu l'oeil exerce du lecteur reconnalt aussitot un riche homme du
monde amoureux d'une femme entretenue, un medecin arrive .. . une bourgeoise
parvenue" (LW're, p. 84). The portrayal of the totally impersonal co-exists with
the portrayal of the particular social reality.24 This points to a fundamental

nant/,' " p. 3). And it is clear that the theme of time, crucial in Virginia Woolf (and which is finally behind
Phillip Walsh's insight), is absent from her work where the focus on the present moment involves her
"characters" in a state of hyper-activity very different from the "stream of consciousness" of, say, Mrs.
Dalloway or Mrs. Ramsey. (The differences are stressed in Ruby Cohn's "Nathalie Sarraute et Virginia
Woolf," Revue des lettres modernes, 1964, Nos. 94-99). Nevertheless a close parallel between the work of the
two novelists could be demonstrated, and the essential difference finally might well be found to lie in a reduc-
tion of narrative complexity in the novels of the later writer inherent in her minute study of the impersonal.
The difference may then pose more relevantly a problem of reading, felt already with regard to Virginia
Woolf as Williams' comment suggests.
22 The Long Revolution (London, 1961), p. 279.
23 The Long Revolution, p. 283.
24 This insight is the foundation of the revaluation of her work by Sartre: "elle croit atteindre par les echanges
protoplasmiques qu'elle decrit, des relations interindividuelles et elementaires, alors qu'elle ne fait que
montrer les effets abstraits et inflnitesimaux d'un milieu social tres defini . . . ni l'individu n'est vraiment
replace dans le milieu qui le conditionne, ni le milieu dans l'individu: nous restons sur le plan indifferencie
et illusoire de l'immediat." (Les ecrivains en personne, ed. M. Chapsal, Paris, 1960, pp. 213-214.)

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112 NOVELJWINTER 1970

weakness in the theoretical writings, of which the dubious concept of tropism

is a symptom. That Le Planetarium, in addition to the representation of fluid
anonymity, also achieves the study of a specific social milieu is inevitable, for
whatever the status of the sous-conversation, the very fact of the level of con-
versation immediately involves a surface particularity, no matter how banal
this may be kept: banality is not some unchanging absolute, but socially and
hence historically defined. It is this lack of historical awareness that is so weak-
ening in Nathalie Sarraute's theory: man is there seen as a fixed and absolute
entity, not as relevantly situated in a particular social reality. This is the basis
of the curious way in which she speaks in L'Ere du soupgon of the traditional
psychological novel as having exhausted one aspect of man and of its therefore
being necessary for the novel to turn to the study of another aspect, with the
implication that one day all the aspects will have been covered and the novel
will become redundant, and of the lack of interest shown in the theoretical
writings in the relationship between conversation and sous-conversation, in the
construction of the latter as opposed to its description. In this respect there is
one vital area that is all the achievement of the novels, with regard to which,
in an age of suspicion, the theoretical writings show a strange innocence-the
area of language.
It is here that I want to return to the occasion mentioned at the beginning of
the present essay, the recent publication of Nathalie Sarraute's latest novel, Entre
la vie et la mort. This novel, while clearly continuous with those that precede it,
manifestly achieves a kind of narrative realism and, simultaneously, in the very
evidence of this achievement, suggests the shift of emphasis it entails from the
traditional idea of this realism, thus offering, so to speak, a means of recasting
the whole approach to Nathalie Sarraute's work, of recasting, that is, the reading
of the novels.
Where Les Fruits d'or was the record, at the level of conversation, of the
career of a finished novel in the world of literary gossip, Entre la vie et la mort
relates, as it were, the preceding stage, the life and death struggle that is the
creation of a novel. This theme gives the novel an immediate narrative coherence.
By putting the creation, the writing, of a novel at the center of her book, Nathalie
Sarraute meaningfully narrates the interconnections of conversation and sous-
conversation, of individual and collective, of conscious and unconscious. The
same focus on tropistic movement and the same recurring modes of description
are carried through from the earlier works, but they are now distinctly ordered
round a central figure, the writer (whom Nathalie Sarraute warns the reader in
a note on the cover not to try to build up into a "hero"), and the eddying move-
ments of the sous-conversation beneath the conversational world in which this
central figure moves are given significance in their connection to the whole
process that is his struggle to create. The opening page of the novel puts before
us the writer and the activity of writing ("J'arrache la page ... Je jette. Je prends
une autre feuille."), and the novel closes in the middle of his dialogue with "la
seule grande forme" to which he is giving life. The stuff of the novel is his
creation, both in the sense of the book he is creating and in the sense of the

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 STEPHEN HEATHjNATHALIE SARRAUTE 115

creation of the writer himself, and the two senses are fused in the connections
that the novel narrates. The writer's childhood sensations and memories-his
first train journey, a teacher, the reactions of his mother and father to the accept-
ance for publication of his first book-interconnect with scenes of conversation
in the style of those in Les Fruits d'or-a party given over to literary chit-chat,
a visit the writer receives from a group of curious admirers. The changing
liaisons in the violent world of conversation, such as were described above in
the discussion of Martereau, are present here, but generally and essentially from
the standpoint of the writer. It is he who is ranged against "ils" throughout the
book, flitting and reflitting rapidly from confrontation ("ils") to conversation
("vous") to alliance ("nous"), always to fall back into the isolation of confronta-
tion ("je suis seul dans le camp ennemi," pp. 44-45), and always sustaining the
dialogue with the form that is within him between life and death ("elle"). The
coherence of the novel can thus be indicated in these terms in a manner reminis-
cent of that in which the coherence of Daniel Deronda could be indicated, but
such terms are precariously inadequate; they stop short of the novel's reality,
of which nevertheless the image is centrally present-the practice of writing.
That the theme of the novel has increasingly been the writing of the novel
is often a subject of critical comment, and that such a theme is sterile-there
is talk of the "narcissism" of the novel-is easily and quickly said. Huxley's
Philip Quarles in Point Counter Point toys with the idea of the novel within a
novel within a novel within . . ., and there is a kind of clever gratuitousness in
the display. Entre la vie et la mort is not, however, to be understood in this
context, for what is here in question is, finally, less a novel about a novel, than
the act of writing that is the novel and such a "theme" (the term is properly
impossible) is not sterile, but, on the contrary, of the most crucial importance:
it is, in the definition of its focus at the level of the organization of language
itself, the idea of the construction of the real, "le 'reel' (image fabuleuse sans
laquelle nous ne pourrions pas lire)."25 This context is the shift that in the
history of the novel form is represented especially by the names of Joyce and
Proust, a shift which we are far from understanding and of which the "nouveau
roman," readable in these terms alone, is a part. The situation of this shift is not
to be grasped in traditional accounts of a change from Balzacian realism to
psychological realism or whatever, but at the level of writing, the practice of
which is now the experience of that practice; "l'ecriture (l'experience radicale
du langage) est une question de vie ou de mort."26 Philippe Sollers's phrase,
the radical experience of language, expresses the essence of the realism of the
novels representative of this shift, and the image of life and death follows with
a lucid necessity. It is an image that is evident in differing forms in Roussel,
Proust, Joyce, Robbe-Grillet (Dans le labyrinthe), Sollers himself (Drame,
Nombres), and, of course, in the very title even of Entre la vie et la mort; an
image of limits, the reality of which is structured and grasped precisely at the

25 Roland Barthes, Introduction to Verdure (A. Gallien, Paris, 1967), p. 12.

26 Philippe Sollers, Logiques (Paris, 1968), p. 73.

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114 NOVELlWINTER 1970

level of this radical experience of language, whether in, as for Roussel, an ex-
perience of writing mining what has been characterized as an "espace tropo-
logique,"27 in the research of Proust's novel that establishes, across a play of
presence/absence, "grand jour"/"obscurite," "causerie"/"silence," and so on,
that is its foundation, the text as the sole possible mode of presence, milieu of
"la seule vie par consequent reellement vecue," 28 in the attempt at totality in
Finnegans Wake,29 in work on what might be called the syntax of the novel
form as in Dans le labyrinthe, or in the activity of writing as here in Nathalie
Sarraute's novel.
"Herault, heraut, heros, aire haut, erre haut, R.0" (p. 28), the rhythm of the
progression of words themselves. "Des mots suintent en une fine trainee de
gouttelettes tremblantes . . . se deposent sur le papier" (p. 242). But someone
speaks, "Heraut . . . -Mais qu'est-ce que tu marmonnes depuis une heure?"
(p. 30); someone writes, "Je reprends une nouvelle feuille . . . Sur la page
blanche les mots, les phrases se forment. Miracle. Comment peut-on?" (p. 8).
Words and their articulation, all the activity of the text, the principal movement
of which lies in the pronouns. Entre la vie et la mort is a play of pronouns; play
as game, their regulated and active exchange; play as the full range of pronouns,
je, tu, il, elle, nous, vous, ils, elles; play as theatrical representation, their mise
en scene in the space of the writing that is in itself all the drama.
In a now famous essay on verbal categories and the Russian verb30 Roman
Jakobson characterizes various ways in which code and message in language
can take themselves as objects of reference or "overlap" one another. To sum-
marize very schematically: 1) A message can send back to a message, as, for
example, in reported speech, simultaneously a message within a message and a
message about a message ("He told me he would come to tea"); 2) A code can
run back in a circle into the code. Jakobson's example is the proper noun, "la
signification generale d'un nom propre ne peut se definir en dehors d'un renvoi
au code. Dans le code d'anglais, 'Jerry' signifie une personne nommee Jerry."31;
3) A message can refer to the code, overlapping with it, as, for example, in
explanations of words or phrases, ("The word leveret means a young hare");
4) Every linguistic code contains a special class of grammatical unities which
Jakobson proposes to call shifters and the peculiar characteristic of which is
that they cannot be defined other than with reference to a message.
It is this last category that is of interest here since it is as a shifter that Jakob-
son defines the pronoun "Je." On the one hand, the sign "Je" is, as such, a
conventional part of a particular code, the French language, and it changes
following a change of code, becoming "I," "ego," "ich" and so on, while on the

27 Cf. Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel (Paris, 1963), ("II ne veut plus doubler le reel d'un autre monde,
mais dans les redoublements spontanes du langage, decouvrir un espace insoupronne et le recouvrir de
choses encore jamais dites," p. 25).
28 III, 895.
29 Cf. Umberto Eco, Opera Aperta (Milan, 1962).
so Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb: Russian Language Project, Dept. of Slavic Languages &
Literatures (Harvard, 1957), pp. 14. My references are of necessity to the more easily accessible version in
Jakobson, Essais de linguistique generale (Paris, 1963), pp. 176-196.
31 p. 177.

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 STEPHEN HEATH NATHALIE SARRAUTE 115

other hand, "je" cannot be defined other than with refer

situation of its enunciation; code and message overlap:

. .. Je ne peut etre defini qu'en termes de "locution," no

comme l'est un signe nominal. Je signifie "la personne q
instance de discours contenant je." Instance unique par d
seulement dans son unicite.32

The first person singular pronoun, far from belonging to the most elementary
and primitive stratum of language, is described by Jakobson as one of the most
complex and difficult to handle verbal signs, one of the latest and most trouble-
some acquisitions of the child and one of the first losses in aphasia.33 Considering
the other pronouns, it is evident that "tu" is similarly a shifter, necessarily
linked, as the French authority Emile Benveniste has stressed in his extension
of Jakobson's work, on an existential axis with "je," (" 'tu' est necessairement
designe par 'je' et ne peut etre pense hors d'une situation posee a partir de
'je' ")34 although on this axis "tu" opposes "je," "comme la personne non-
subjective en face de la personne subjective que 'je' represente." 35 The axis
je/tu excludes the third person, which is, as it were, "outside," so much so indeed
that Benveniste questions the very idea of "person" used in its respect. "Nous"
is "je" plus "non-je," whether "toi," "lui," "elle," "vous" or "eux"; as such,
it is a "false" plural, a fact rendered by the change in sign found in most
languages, je/nous, as opposed to a normal pluralization, je/jes: "'nous' est,
non pas une multiplication d'objets identiques, mais une jonction entre 'je' et
le 'non-je,' quelque soit le contenu de ce 'non-je.'" 36
In the light of these distinctions from linguistics it is perhaps easier to read
a page of Entre la vie et la mort:

"Moi je n'ai rien a dire. Moi qa ne presente aucun interet . .. Non, je vous en
prie, ne vous moquez pas de moi . . ." Tout ebouriffe, echauffe, je me
degage, je cours me refugier parmi eux.
Me voici de nouveau l'un d'eux, un chatnon anonyme. Nos yeux sont fixes
sur lui. Nos regards appuient sur lui . . . "Continuez. Dites-nous. Vous aviez
deja commence . . . Si on ne vous avait pas interrompu . . . mais on a perdu
assez de temps . . . nous vous supplions . . . Ne nous faites pas languir . . ."
Il se tait. Sous la pression de nos regards il rentre en lui-meme, s'en-
fonce . .." (p. 11)
All the action here depends on the pronouns and the shifting series of axes
moi/vous, je/eux, nous (je+eux)/lui, nous/vous, nous/lui. The problem, the

32 Emile Benveniste, Probl4mes de linguistique ggndrale (Paris, 1966), p. 252.

S3 Cf. Jakobson, op. cit., p. 180, and also "Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances," in
Fundamentals of Language (with M. Halle) (The Hague, 1956), pp. 53-82, Essais de linguistique generate,
pp. 43-67.
34 Benveniste, op. cit., p. 228.
S5 Ibid., p. 232.
38 Ibid., p. 233. (This summary is inevitably sketchy and the reader is asked to refer to Benveniste's essay
"Structure des relations de personne le verbe," pp. 225-236).

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 NOVEL|WINTER 1970

danger, lies in the "je"; "je"' in Nathalie Sarraute is always a risk from which
"nous" is the escape ("je cours me refugier parmi eux"). "Vous" (polite singular)
is the moment of the slide into the problematic "je," here under the fire of the
phrase "Dites-nous," and as such, in the face of "nous," is the passage into
solitude and otherness, the exclusion of "il," "II se tait. Sous la pression de nos
regards il rentre en lui-meme, s'enfonce . . ."
This is the play of Nathalie Sarraute's writing: where then is the unity of its
action? The answer lies in the "je," in the construction of the "subject." As a
shifter "je" is a moment at which the code of which it is a part overlaps with
the message in which it is articulated, convention overlaps with existential
relation. Within the given language, the milieu in which man constitutes himself
as subject, "je" is thus, as it were, the crucial and difficult point in that dialectic
of langue and parole, code and message, defined by Saussure in the Cours de
linguistique generale;37 a dialectic described by Merleau-Ponty from the point
of view of the individual subject as follows:

La parole est donc cette operation paradoxale ou nous tentons de rejoindre,

au moyen de mots dont le sens est donne, et de significations deja disponibles,
une intention qui par principe va au-dela et modifie, fixe elle-meme en derniere
analyse le sens des mots par lesquels elle se traduit.38

This dialectic has a reality, though the status of this reality is not one of direct
equivalence, at the level of the traditional distinction with regard to the novel
between discourse and narrative, discours and histoire. Each term of this distinc-
tion has a set of grammatical categories appropriate to itself, notably verbal tenses
and pronouns, "je" and "tu," for example, for the reasons indicated above in
their description as shifters, evidently belonging to the realm of discours. In
Entre la vie et la mort, however, the distinction is subverted: there is neither
discours nor histoire, or, more exactly, the latter overlaps completely with the
former in a practice of writing which sets its own image at the center of the
text, "Je reprends une nouvelle feuille . . . Sur la page blanche les mots, les
phrases se forment." "Je" sends back always to the present of the text before
the reader; as "je" of the conversation defined in the unique moment of its
enunciation, textually held in the play of its limits, "tu," "il," "elle," "nous,"
"vous," "ils," "elles," (attempts to construct a hero, comments Nathalie Sarraute
in the cover note, will find "un heros, fait de pieces disparates, qui peut difficile-
ment tenir debout"); as "je" of the writing the practice of which is the narrative,
a narrative that is thus never "finished" but ever present as the moment of its
articulation, grasped "entre la vie et la mort," "C'est mort. C'est vivant. Et c'est
mort" (p. 99). Writing that is the narrative is doubled by the narrative of the
writing, the doubling fused in the pronouns:

87 For a discussion of the legitimacy of the identification of langue/parole with code/message, cf. Roland
Barthes, "llements de s6miologie," Communications, No. 4, p. 95. Barthes regards it as certainly acceptable
in the context of Saussurian linguistics.
38 La Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris, 1945), pp. 445-446.

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 117

II a pris pied de ce co6te. Ici des mots poste's partout montent la garde . . . ius
s'approchent ... Qu'y a-t-il? . .. Je la cherche, agit6, anxieux, partout o , il
est possible qu'elle se montre., qu'elle me fasse signe . . . de ces petits signes
entre nous ...
Et tout a' coup je les vois . ..Sur eux je me jette, je fouille, la' je m'enf on
tournant pour la suivre ...
Q uand par moments je m'arre'te, quand je cherche a m'orienter ...
suis-ie? oi' m'a-t-elle amene6? . . . il m'arrive de percevoir venant de loin
chuchotements . . . Je reconnais des mots de la'-bas . . . leurs mots . . . (p
242,f 252-253) 39

The doubling there helps to define the central quality of Nathalie Sarraute
text., its hesitation. Such a hesitation is not in the individual words thems
(there is no work on language in the sense that there is in Finnegans Wak
but, precisely, in the writing, "les mots he'sitants" (p. 242). The meaning is
always direct, "des mots de Ila-bas . .. leurs mots," but always, if the expression
may be allowed, hovered, and it is the overlapping of discours and histoire that
founds this hovering. Everything refers back to the context of its enunciation,
to its representation in the space of the writing and is to be read, as the image
of writing indicates, in this space, present as the moment of its mise en sc'ene in
a practice of writing.
It is here that Roland Barthes's definition of realism, briefly mentioned at the
beginning of the present essay, is important. Barthes more than any other critic,
as Le degre' ze6ro de 1'e&riture bears witness, has been concerned to understand
the shift in the history of the novel form referred to above, which in his terms
is a part of the growth of the consciousness of a "'proble'matique de 1'e6criture,"'0
and his remarks with regard to realism are to be understood in this context:

Le re'alisme, ici, ce ne peut donc e'tre la co pie des choses, mais la connaissance
du lan gage; l'oeuvre la plus "re6aliste" ne sera pas celle qui "peint" la re'alite',
mais qui, se servant du monde comme contenu (ce contenu eu-mme est
d'ailleurs e6tranger a'i sa structure, c'est-a'-dire a' son etre), explorera le plus
pro fonde6ment possible la re'alite' irre6elle du lan gage.4

This is not some call for "irresponsible verbal pyrotechnics," but, on the con-
trary, a recognition of the reality of language and of the writer's responsibility
with respect to that reality, responsibility the consciousness of which is the basis
of the work of Lautre6amont, Mallarme, Roussel, Proust, and Joyce, 2 and which
is the situation of the "nouveau roman." Barthes's definition is at the level of
writing itself, what has here been characterized as the practice of writing, not
at the level of a general rhetoric which serves as an instrument for representing

39 Cf. Philippe Sollers's reading of Marcelin Pleynet's Comme; "pour approcher ce texte nous devons donc
entendre par "nous" ou "eux": les mots; par "ii": le langage; celui qui 1'incarne fictivement; par "elle":
la pense'e, la page" (Logiques, p. 220).
40 Le degre z6ro de l'ecriture (Paris, 19.53), p. 12.5.
41 Essais critiques, p. :164.
42 The remarkable work effected in the pages of the review Tel Quel has demonstrated the fundamental im-
portance of these authors in this connection.

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18 NOVELIWINTER 1970

an exterior reality. These novels that practice writing propose their own
rhetoric,43 which is not the servant of expression but the activity of the novel,
a grasping of limits within language itself, its mise en scene as writing. The
activity of writing, practiced as such, transcends dialectically the limits it defines
in that definition in which it is included, as Nathalie Sarraute's text is a play of
pronouns in all the senses of that word. Here evidently is the problem of reading,
for what a text such as Entre la vie et la mort demands is not the decipherment
and recognition of a code or series of codes, as in Balzac where everything is a
code that the writing is to read to the reader ("la table est le plus sur thermometre
de la fortune dans les menages parisiens. Une soupe aux herbes et a l'eau de
haricots, un morceau de veau aux pommes de terre . . . Enfin tout trahissait
une misere sans dignite"44), but the grasping of the code of the writing itself
(language) as an area of activity (transformation) in the demonstration of its
play (limits). There is the radical experience of language, in the reading, "le
lecteur est... a la place meme ou l'auteur se trouve" (L're, p. 74), what Valery
meant perhaps when he described the ideal of literature as "finir par savoir ne
plus mettre sur sa page que du 'lecteur.' "45
Lucien Goldmann (writing before the publication of Entre la vie et la mort)
has stressed Nathalie Sarraute's position at the close of an established tradition
rather than at the start of a new one,46 and an attempt was made in the first part
of the present essay to demonstrate the possibility of such an assessment. Her
work can be sighted as an extension of that of Proust, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf,
in so far as the work of these novelists itself is sighted in traditional terms, and
the extension which her work represents will then be seen as a discarding of
the varied elements, the interconnection of which gave the narrative structure
of the novels of her predecessors, in favor of a narrow, and theoretically dubious,
focus on an area of impersonal and anonymous experience, from which narrative
significance is inevitably absent. Yet such an assessment, in the light of Entre
la vie et la mort, is deeply problematic; perhaps literally a misreading of the
novels, misreading which is a refusal to understand a fundamental change in the
novel form, fundamental in a way that is not grasped by the idea of a change
to "psychological realism," and which the continuity of the large majority of
novels published has masked. The continuity of these novels, whether "social,"
"psychological," "documentary," or whatever, their innocence is indeed a direct
target of the "nouveau roman" in the reactivation of its research in the novel
form. The practice of writing is the definition of Nathalie Sarraute's age of
suspicion of the novel.

43 Cf. Gerard Genette, "Enseignement et rhetorique au XXe siecle," Annales (March, 1966), pp. 292-305.
44 La Com6die humaine (Pleiade edition), VI, 183.
45 Oeuvres (Pleiade edition), II, 587.
46 "Nouveau roman et realite," Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris, 1964).

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