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  • L'Écriture vive: Woolf, Sarraute, une autre phénoménologie de la perception Par Naomi Toth
  • Thomas Pavel
L'Écriture vive: Woolf, Sarraute, une autre phénoménologie du personnage. Par Naomi Toth. Perspectives comparatistes, 47; Modernités et avant-gardes, 5.) Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016. 355 pp.

According to Naomi Toth's well-argued essay, Virginia Woolf and Nathalie Sarraute's innovative modernist approach to fiction aims at capturing the truth of living experience by exploring less obvious aspects of human perception. Woolf, eighteen years Sarraute's senior, didn't exactly influence her; it is rather that Sarraute, who shared Woolf's rejection of established realist literary approaches, continued and deepened her predecessor's innovations. The literary practices they disapproved of were comparable: Woolf condemned the 'materialist' (her own adjective) writers of the Edwardian period, in particular Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells—both excellent practitioners of realism, and whose novels focused on contemporary social and political issues—, while Sarraute disliked traditional novelists who built their works around characters. Both invited their readers to look at literature and at the world by paying attention to the ephemeral multiplicity of unexpected impressions rather than remaining stuck with larger, more stable, ready-made images. Life, for these two writers, hides beneath the visible, defies perception, turns will-o'-the-wisp, while literature, far from relying on a pre-existent, stable reality, summons its unstable, imperceptible aspects to existence. In Toth's view, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—for the latter, especially his later works—offers a philosophical equivalent of Woolf and Sarraute's enquiry into the enigmatic, undefinable 'life'. Indeed, phenomenology examines the mental activity of perceiving, rather than the world's actual being. Similarly, in Woolf's novels, the movements of narrative voices prevail over the situations they evoke, often in an indirect, disconcerting manner. Different from Husserl's I-centred phenomenology and closer to that of Merleau-Ponty, Woolf's prose attempts to avoid a tight relationship to a narrative self. Conversely, Sarraute is less interested in the concrete unity of her characters than in a mysterious, impossible-to-define flow that guarantees their existence. Life, invisible for Woolf, is sensed in her novels as a hesitation between presence and absence. In Sarraute's works, the writer delves beyond the visible, searching for a hidden area where the boundaries between humans have dissolved. The enigma of death—a gap in the heart of the matter—haunts this search, breeding the deep anxiety that is part and parcel of Woolf and Sarraute's message. Equally close to phenomenology, the two writers' poetics of corporeal sensation and the present moment offers Toth the opportunity to reflect on the place of the living body according to Husserl, on the impossibility of capturing the present in Merleau-Ponty, and on Jacques Derrida's notion of perpetual deferral, each having a significant correspondent in the writings of Woolf and Sarraute. Beautifully written, Toth's essay decisively contributes to the understanding of these two representatives of the twentieth century's literary avant-garde. A major issue, however, is never raised: why is human action absent from both phenomenology and the novels of these writers? Can literary fiction durably turn its gaze away from human beings, their projects, their deeds, and their values? [End Page 604]

Thomas Pavel
University of Chicago
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