Nathalie Sarraute: How To Do Mean Things With Words

Nathalie Sarraute: How To Do Mean Things With Words JUDITH G. MILLER "How could we live if we took umbrage at every little phrase, if we didn't quite reasonably allow words, after all insignificant and anodyne, just to pass on by, if we created a huge story out of so little, out of less than nothing?" , This question, posed by the chatty narrator in one of Nathalie Sarraute's meditations in L'Usage de la parole (1980), ironically underscores the focus of all of Sarraute's work, for she has spent a fifty-year writing career creating "stories" (or better, "dramas" ) out of what would appear to be very little indeed. At eighty-nine, with eight novels, six theater pieces, a volume of critical essays, two volumes of short prose pieces - of which her 1939 Tropismes is the best known - and an astonishing recent autobiography (1983), she can lay claim to being one of the great writers of twentiethcentury France. Her works display a degree of intertexuality which is extraordinary, even in acentury in which intertextl,lality is both an artistic and critical norm.2 This obsessional return especially to the same images and rhythms is meant to come to grips with the " real" drama underlying surface existence. Sarraute maddens critics: if at first they did not understand her almost messianic insistence on doing away with behavioral explanations in her novels, they now wonder why she refuses to be reclaimed as a self-conscious woman writer.' She has been grouped with the "new novelists" and, theatrically, within the minimalist tradition of Beckett and Duras. The first concept has proven bankrupt, given the stunning divergencies among tbe individual postwar writers associated with this "anti-novel" movement; the second is at best reductive. While she shares some techniques with Beckett and Duras (a penchant for linguistic games, a sense of spatial and temporal imprisonment, an intensity of character interaction), Sarraute eliminates any possibility of Beckett's metaphysical laughter or Duras's painful eroticism. She continues to intrigue the scholar who would attempt to understand the Nathalie Sarraute 1I9 state of prose narrative and theater at the close of the century and who would, further, try to maintain a difference between the two, for she comes as close as any writer to demonstrating that genre does not count. She does so in works which could be argued as among the most violent of the modern period. Yet this is neither an easily graspable nor conventional violence. It is barely thematized, and it is " felt" more than stated. In fact, after some reflection , Sarraute's violence - particularly in her theater pieces - might just be a function of collapsing differences between novel and theater, of "creating huge stories (dramas) out of less than nothing. " "Nothing" already implies something - for without something, "nothing" does not exist. Sarraute's texts, prose and theater, function to make palpable this something which is not "nothing," but which, instead, has no name, a "something" which escapes discursiveness altogether. In an early and insightful.study of Sarraute's work, Rene Micha insists on the inherent drama of the fundamental figure in all her work which attempts to give form to this absence: the tropism' Sarraute herself explains in a pointed essay the overwhelming goal of her writing life: " The dramas constituted by those unarticulated (subconscious) actions interest [ ... ] me in and of themselves. Nothing [can] distract me from them. Nothing should distract the reader's attention, either: neither the psychological make-up of the characters, nor the kind of novelistic plot which ordinarily depends on the characters' development , nor familiar and categorized emotions." S The result of this preoccupation is the creation of texts which could all be subsumed under the concept of a " theater of the mind." Sarraute's work, then, prompts a reading which, at least in the first instance, does not distinguish between fonns of expression. Tropisms. as botanists would demonstrate, are movements in response to astimulus. In Sarraute's oeuvre this stimulus can be material goods, like the white sale items in tropism no. I (Tropismes), or ambiguous characters, like the father-daughter couple in the novel Portraitd'lIn inconnu (1948), or more frequently, especially in the...