Reading Nathalie Sarraute: Dialogue and Distance (review)

The tropism, Nathalie Sarraute's original contribution to the fictional representation of intersubjective relations, refers to the pre-rational, pre-articulated expression of human behavior from which all our gestures, words, and feelings originate. These instinctive reactions to others, the essence of human behavior for Sarraute, are motivated by the "terrible desire to establish contact"(Katherine Mansfield, quoted in L'Ere du soupçon, 1956). Over a lifetime which literally spans the twentieth century (1902-1999), Nathalie Sarraute has consistently sought to dramatize humans' efforts to relate to one another.

Emer O'Beirne has recognized the inherently dialogic nature of the Sarrautean enterprise. Her meticulous, insightful study of the role of dialogue in Sarraute's prose fiction explores thoroughly and step by step the various forms of dialogue, understood here in its broadest sense. Whether between characters, or between author, text, and reader, contact can be established only through communication. Far more than a verbal exchange between individuals, dialogue has a creative dimension that allows us to exceed the inadequacy of human expression.

O'Beirne begins with an analysis of the dialogic nature of irony, drawing a distinction between verbal and epistemological irony, and, following Schlegel, shows how irony both reveals the limitations of individual expression and transcends it. In the latter case, meaning is constituted through interactions of speaker and addressee. The ironic dimension of Lacan's theories of the relation between subjectivity, language, and the other extend this notion.

Consequently the monologic authorial narrative voice is destabilized. In her reading of Enfance (1983) and Tu ne t'aimes pas (1989) O'Beirne shows how Sarraute's use of dialogue fragments the single authorial voice. Yet, at the same time, a desire to control the reader's response becomes increasingly evident. The effort to ensure the "correct" reception of the intended meaning is a reaction to the alienation—the separation in time and space—of author and reader. O'Beirne suspects that an important feature of dialogue in general is the way in which each speaker attempts to control the reception of the message. The desire to establish contact is effectively the desire to get one's message across.

The relation of author, text, and reader that these issues call into question is the subject of the second half of the book. First O'Beirne examines the text-reader relation in Les Fruits d'or (1963), Entre la vie et la mort (1968), and L'Usage de la parole (1980). Sarraute's desire for an ideal reader who will perfectly understand the author's "truth" is undermined by the fact that it is impossible to escape conventional, public language in the author-reader interaction. O'Beirne then reviews various theories of reader-response criticism to ask what happens when real, not ideal, readers confront the text with their "irreducibly other" perspectives. The nature and importance of the reader's contribution to the texts helps explain Sarraute's progressive abandonment of the ideal reader. Although the text's temporal priority might seem to privilege it over the complex process of the reader's interpretation, in the struggle for the control of meaning, O'Beirne concludes that it would be foolish to declare a winner.

Throughout her study, O'Beirne again and again makes the point that all human existence is inherently dialogical: author, reader, and text are created by and interact through language. Inscribed in the Symbolic Order, none can escape the conventions of public language. Yet even though failure is thus inevitable, Sarraute refuses to abandon her Sisyphean task of attempting to find an authentic language to express the truth of the self. In Ici (1995), the internal self has completely withdrawn from intersubjective dialogue, even to the point of abandoning the tropism. O'Beirne's concluding chapter shows how the unremitting battle for authenticity in the struggle between living and dead language that is the subject of Nathalie Sarraute's previous works...