Nathalie Sarraute

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Nathalie Sarraute (born 1900) was one of the seminal figures in the emergence of France's "Nouveau Roman" ("New Novel") in the 1950s. Her work included not only novels but also plays and influential essays on literary theory.

Nathalie Tcherniak was born in Ivanovo-Voznessensk, Russia, the daughter of a chemist father and a writer mother. The date of her birth was July 18, 1900, but at one point in her career, evidently wishing to cut some years from her age, she gave the year of her birth as 1902, a figure still found in some reference works.

In 1902 her parents were divorced. She left Russia and lived with her mother in Paris, visiting her father for two months each year. In 1906 she and her mother returned to St. Petersburg; for the next two years she spent each summer with her father in France and Switzerland. In 1908 went to live with him and his second wife in Paris.

In 1920 she received a licence (equivalent to a degree) in English from the Sorbonne and began work toward a B.A. in history at Oxford, a project she abandoned. In 1922 she enrolled in the law school of the University of Paris, where the following year she met fellow student Raymond Sarraute. In 1925 she received her licence in law, was admitted to the Paris bar, and married. She practiced law from 1925 to 1939.

In 1932 and 1933 Sarraute composed two sketches described by some as prose poems, by others as experimental fiction. She titled these pieces Tropismes (Tropisms), and they were subsequently incorporated into her first book, which bore the same title and was published in 1939, receiving only one review.

Tropisms

The word tropism was taken from biology and was defined as the movement which, in response to an external stimulus, caused an organism or part of an organism to turn in a determined direction. As to her technique in applying this concept to literature, Sarraute wrote, "What I tried to do was to show certain inner 'movements' by which I had long been attracted… ."

She continued,

These movements, of which we are hardly cognizant, slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak and the feeling we manifest, all of which we are aware of experiencing, and are able to define. They seemed, and still seem to me to constitute the secret source of our existence, in what might be called its nascent state.

"Anti-Novels"

Her next two works were novels in which she put theories into practice: Portrait d'un inconnu (1948, published in the United States in 1958 as Portrait of a Man Unknown) and Martereau (1953, published in the United States in 1959 under the same title). The former novel received great attention because it was preceded by an introduction contributed by Jean-Paul Sartre, the foremost philosopher in France at the time and the father of the existentialist school.

Characterizing the work as an "anti-novel," Sartre observed, "She takes her characters neither from within nor from without, for the reason that we are, both for ourselves and for others, entirely within and without at the same time." He continued, " … for her the human being is not a character, not first and foremost a story, nor even a network of habits, but a continual coming and going between the particular and the general." Sartre concluded that by " … tenaciously depicting the reassuring, dreary world of the inauthentic, she has achieved a technique which makes it possible to attain human reality in its very existence."

Viewed from the standpoint of the conventional novel, little happened in these books. In Portrait of a Man Unknown we watched the alienation of the participants from their own family, while in Martereau an orphan observed an unexceptional family as Martereau, who may or may not be the wife's lover, swindled them.

With these two works and the essay collection L'e‧re du soupç on (1956, published in the United States in 1963 as The Age of Suspicion), Sarraute took her place in the forefront of the practitioners of the so-called "Nouveau Roman" ("New Novel"). This literary school also included Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget and was strongly influenced by Dostoevski, Kafka, Joyce (particularly the stream-of-consciousness technique in Ulysses), and American novelists Dos Passos and Faulkner (especially The Sound and the Fury). As critic Henri Peyre wrote in The Contemporary French Novel, they were interested in the "more dramatic models of interior monologue provided by Faulkner." He added that the " … novelists of 1940-50 who have resorted to it … have avoided taking it overseriously and using it, as it were, pure and unadulterated."

Sarraute's next novel was Le planétarium (1959, published in the United States in 1960 as The Planetarium). Although hailed as a classic example of the New Novel, this work had more plot than most of her fiction as Alain, a vague, weak intellectual, and Gisele, his wife, were allowed to occupy an apartment by their Aunt Berthe.

This was followed by her most successful work, Les fruits d'or (1963, published in the United States in 1964 as The Golden Fruits). This novel concerned an author who has published a novel titled Les fruits d'or, which was both acclaimed and attacked by some rather superficial critics. Such action as there was involved a man holding a shawl for a lady and the forgetting of an umbrella. The Golden Fruits won the International Prize for Literature in 1964.

Sarraute turned to drama in 1964 with her radio play Le silence (The Silence), which was broadcast in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. Two years later her second radio play, Le mensonge (The Lie), was broadcast simultaneously in French and German. In 1967 France's most famous actor-director, Jean-Louis Barrault, selected these two plays to open his new theater, the Petit Odéon. Other plays followed: Isma in 1970, C'est beau (It's Beautiful) in 1973, and Elle est la‧ (She Is There) in 1975. All these dramatic works were collected in Le théâtre de Nathalie Sarraute (1978, published in the United States in 1981 as Collected Plays). Another play, Pour un oui ou pour un non (For a Yes or for a No), was written in 1982.

Sarraute did not abandon fiction, however, releasing Entre la vie et la mort in 1968 (published in the United States in 1969 as Between Life and Death); Vous les entendez? in 1972 (published in the United States in 1973 as Do You Hear Them?); " disent les imbéciles" in 1976 (published in the United States in 1977 as " fools say" ); and L'usage de la parole in 1980 (published in the United States in 1983 as The Use of Speech), a collection of short pieces around a unifying theme.

Later Works

Sarraute's literary output continued into ripe old age, as Enfance was published in 1983 and Ici followed in 1995. Interviewing her for the New Yorker (June 27, 1983), Jane Kramer wrote, "Old age seems to have distilled her, leaving only the radiant, essential qualities that small children and great beauties have. Speaking about Enfance in a radio interview recorded in the late 1980s while she completed Tu ne t'aimes pas, Sarraute said, "It's the first time that I am speaking in my own name, so that makes it much easier for the reader. I didn't want to write an autobiography to say 'This is all my life.' I just tried to show certain moments separated from each other; it was just that I tried to show certain feelings, inward movements that I found interesting, because they gave birth to a certain way of writing."

Elsewhere, Sarraute likened her work to poetry rather than prose. "For me, the poetry in a work is that which makes visible the invisible," she wrote. "You ask me whether I think my own works are poetic. Given what my view of poetry is, how could I possibly be expected not to think so?" [Valerie Minogue's Nathalie Sarraute and the War of the Words: A Study of Five Novels (1981].

Critical opinion on Sarraute, as on all of the New Novelists, varied considerably. Among her supporters the most enthusiastic was Claude Mauriac, who declared in The New Literature that she was "the only living author who has created anything new after Proust." In Nathalie Sarraute René Micha observed, "She descends into the depths of the psyche, strives to seize something of it, especially the movement, to designate it, to retain it for an instant, when already it is half escaping her, transforming itself, disguising itself, to bring it to the light of day and to share it." Gretchen Besser commented, "It is because she has used the medium of tropisms as a lens through which to view fundamental issues of human concern that Sarraute's work has attained a panoramic dimension. It is the recapitulation of certain universal themes…."

Peyre, however, dissented, calling Portrait of a Man Unknown" a failure, though an interesting one … an honest, pedestrian, and fumbling search for authenticity." He added, "But good intentions count scantly in literature." He adjudged Martereau" not a much better performance" and labeled The Age of Suspicion" overpraised." His summary: "She is a serious but hardly an inventive or revolutionary novelist …," although he conceded that she had a "fine intellect."

Further Reading

The best biography in English was Nathalie Sarraute by Gretchen R. Besser (1979). There were mentions and/or analyses in The Contemporary French Novel by Henri Peyre (1955), French Novelists of Today by Peyre (1955), and The New Literature by Claude Mauriac (1959). Excerpts from her writing can be found in The French New Novel by Laurent LeSage (1962).

Other works of critical analysis included Nathalie Sarraute (Collection Monographique Rodopi: En Literature Francaise Contemporaine Sous La Direction De Michael Biship, No 24 by Bettina Knapp (1994); Nathalie Sarraute: Metaphor, Fairy-Tale and the Feminine of the Text (Writing About Women Feminist Literary Studies, Vol 13 by John Phillips (1994); and Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader: Identities in Process by Sarah Barbour (1993).

Sarraute, Nathalie (1902-99). Russian-born French writer, author of eight novels, six plays, and an autobiography. Her reputation derives mainly from her being a founding member of the Nouveau Roman group in the mid-1950s—although she started writing much earlier, and since the 1970s has pursued an increasingly independent, if still very consistent, course.

Her first publication, a collection of short texts, is entitled Tropismes (1939), and the ‘tropism’ has remained her central concern. The term, taken from biology, is adapted to denote a level of psychological activity that Sarraute sees as fundamental to our subjective existence: the movements of attraction and repulsion, attack and defence, approach and retreat that constitute our relations with others in a pre-verbal arena which normally escapes our full conscious attention. Individual differences between people cease to exist here; subjects merge in a generalized, amorphous psychical ‘material’, continuously engaged in tropistic interaction. This essentially non-verbal process is conveyed in the texts through a repertoire of distinctive imagery ranging from the nauseous (bursting abcesses, coiling tentacles, oozing fluids) to the paranoid (secret police, espionage, religious fanaticism). Speech, conversely, is dominated by the cliché; conversation, in all Sarraute's fiction, is the inauthentic, conventional surface which, treacherously, both conceals and acts out the psychological warfare of the tropisms.

This vision of inter-subjective conflict is not dissimilar to Sartre's; and he provided a laudatory preface for Sarraute's first novel, Portrait d'un inconnu (though later revising his opinion of her). Portrait's anxious excavation of the bland surfaces of social discourse is continued in Martereau (1953), where another first-person narrator explores, through a mixture of analysis and imaginary reconstruction, a nexus of relationships. He, however, is more substantially involved in it than was the narrator of Portrait; and this move away from a ‘spectator’ position reaches its logical conclusion in Le Planétarium (1959) where there is no narrator at all. All Sarraute's subsequent novels are characterized by a disconcertingly mobile narrative point of view: the reader has to shift constantly and rapidly from one centre of consciousness to another. Also, the theme of literature itself, already introduced in Le Planétarium, becomes central to Les Fruits d'or (1963) which, satirically undermining the platitudes and the one-upmanship of literary critics, poses the whole question of aesthetic values. Entre la vie et la mort (1968) focuses on the creative process itself, as the writer struggles to find words that will sustain rather than destroy the ‘living’, nameless sensation or impulse that brings the text into being. Vous les entendez? marks another new development, in that the boundary between conversation and the ‘subconversation’ of the tropisms has been erased; it is now impossible to distinguish between real and imaginary, literal and figurative dialogues. The title itself, however, illustrates the permanence of another of Sarraute's techniques: a fragment of speech acts as a recurrent leitmotif and a focus of investigation for the whole text—as is also the case in ‘disent les imbéciles’ (1976), in L'Usage de la parole (1980), where Sarraute reverts to the structure of her first book by producing a collection of short separate pieces, and in Tu ne t'aimes pas (1989).

Her dramatic writing has attracted less critical attention but is closely connected to the novels; the same anonymous psychological movements are conveyed here solely through the medium of a directly verbalized sub-conversation. She started writing plays—at first for the radio and then the theatre—in the 1960s, and published a collected edition of them in 1978: Le Silence, Le Mensonge, Isma ou Ce qui s'appelle rien, C'est beau, and Elle est là. These were followed by Pour un oui ou pour un non in 1982.

Equally, Sarraute has produced a considerable body of theoretical and critical writing. Early articles appeared in Sartre's journal Les Temps modernes, but with the publication in 1956 of L'Ère du soupçon, seen with some justification as the first manifesto of the Nouveau Roman, her ideas reached a wider audience. She traces the evolution of the modern novel away from the traditional fictional character—a deceptively solid agglomerate of oversimplified emotions—towards a new psychological realism in which the reader is immersed in a swirling mass of indefinable tropistic interactions. (The Nouveau Roman as a whole, however, was less committed to the psychological.) Sarraute's most popular recent text is the autobiographical Enfance (1983), which consists of fragmentary memories of her childhood whose authenticity is constantly scrutinized by a sceptical alter ego. Here, as always, the struggle against the distorting power of clichés and the determination to express the true quality of individual experience are of paramount importance.

[Celia Britton]

Bibliography

• A. S. Newman, Une poésie du discours: essai sur les romans de Nathalie Sarraute (1976)
• V. Minogue, Nathalie Sarraute and the War of the Words (1981)

Quotes:

"Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps."

"Suspicion is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium."

"Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry."

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Nathalie Sarraute (French pronunciation: [natali saˈʁot]) (July 18, 1900 in Ivanovo, Russia – October 19, 1999 in Paris, France) was a lawyer and a Francophone writer of Russian Jewish origin.

Contents 1 Life 2 Career 3 Bibliography 4 External links

Life

Enfance (Childhood). The cover of Sarraute's autobiography, published in 1983.

Sarraute was born Natalia/Natacha Tcherniak in Ivanovo (then known as Ivanovo-Voznesensk), 300 km north-east of Moscow in 1900 (although she frequently referred to the year of her birth as 1902, a date still cited in select reference works), and, following the divorce of her parents, spent her childhood shuttled between France and Russia. In 1909 she moved to Paris with her father. Sarraute studied law and literature at the prestigious Sorbonne, having a particular fondness for 20th century literature and the works of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, who greatly affected her conception of the novel, then later studied history at Oxford and sociology in Berlin, before passing the French bar exam (1926-1941) and becoming a lawyer.

Le planétarium (The Planetarium). The cover of Sarraute's 1959 novel.

In 1925, she married Raymond Sarraute, a fellow lawyer, with whom she would have three daughters. In 1932 she wrote her first book, Tropismes, a series of brief sketches and memories that set the tone for her entire oeuvre. The novel was first published in 1939, although the impact of World War II stunted its popularity. In 1941, Sarraute, who was Jewish, was released from her work as a lawyer as a result of Nazi law. During this time, she went into hiding and made arrangements to divorce her husband in an effort to protect him (although they would eventually stay together).

Nathalie Sarraute died when she was 99 years old. Her daughter, the journalist Claude Sarraute, was married to French Academician Jean-François Revel.

Career

Sarraute dedicated herself to literature, with her most prominent work being Portrait of a Man Unknown (1948), a work applauded by Jean-Paul Sartre, who famously referred to it as an "anti-novel" and who also contributed a foreword. Despite such high critical praise, however, the work only drew notice from literary insiders, as did her follow-up, Martereau.

Sarraute's essay The Age of Suspicion (L'Ère du soupçon, 1956) served as a prime manifesto for the nouveau roman literary movement, alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet's For a New Novel. Sarraute became, along with Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, and Michel Butor, one of the figures most associated with the rise of this new trend in writing, which sought to radically transform traditional narrative models of character and plot. Sarraute was awarded the Prix international de littérature for her novel The Golden Fruits in 1963, which led to greater popularity and exposure for the author. That same year, Sarraute also began working as a dramatist, authoring a total of seven plays, including Le Silence (1963), Le Mensonge (1965) and Elle est là (1993). As a result of Sarraute's growing popularity and public profile, she was invited to speak at a number of literary events both in her native country of France and abroad.

Nathalia Sarraute pictured centre.

Sarraute's work, including the novels Between Life and Death (1968), The Use of Speech (1980) and You Don't Love Yourself (1989), have been translated into more than 30 languages. Her work has often been referred to as "difficult," as a result of her experimental style and abandonment of traditional literary conventions. Sarraute celebrated the death of the literary "character" and placed her primary emphasis on the creation of a faithful depiction of psychological phenomena, as in her novella The Golden Fruits, consisting entirely of interior monologues, and the novel The Planetarium (1959), which focuses on a young man's obsession with inheriting his aunt's apartment. The constantly shifting perspectives and points of view in Sarraute's work serves to undermine the author's hand, while at the same time embracing the incoherence of lived experience.

In contrast to the relative difficulty of Sarraute's novels, her memoir Childhood is considered an easier read. Penned when she was over eighty years old, Sarraute's autobiography is hardly a straight-forward memoir, as she challenges her own capacity to accurately recall her past throughout the work. In the 1980s, the autobiography was adapted into a one-act Broadway play starring Glenn Close. The issues with memory which Sarraute highlighted in her autobiography carried through to her last novel, Here, published in 1995, in which the author explores a range of existential issues relating to the formlessness of both individual and social reality.

Bibliography

• Tropismes, 1939 (tr. Tropisms)
• Portrait d’un inconnu, 1948 (tr. Portrait of a Man Unknown)
• Martereau 1953 (novel)
• L'Ère du soupçon, 1956 (tr. The Age of Suspicion) (essay)
• Le Planetarium, 1959 (tr. The Planetarium) (novel)
• Les Fruits d'or, 1963 (tr. The Golden Fruits ) (novel)
• Le Silence 1964 (theatre)
• Le Mensonge, 1966 (novel)
• Entre la vie et la mort 1968 (novel)
• Isma, ou ce qui s’appelle rien 1970 (theatre)
• Vous les entendez ? 1972 (novel)
• C’est beau 1975 (theatre)
• « disent les imbéciles », 1976 (novel)
• L’Usage de la parole 1980 (tr. The Use of Speech) (novel)
• Enfance 1983 (tr. Childhood) (autobiography)
• Tu ne t’aimes pas 1989 (novel)
• Elle est là 1993 (tr. It is There) (theatre)
• Pour un oui ou pour un non 1993 (theatre)
• Ici 1995 (novel)
• Ouvrez 1997 (novel)
• Lecture 1998

External links

• Brief biography (French)
• Critical bibliography (Auteurs.contemporain.info) (French)
• Spotlight on ... Nathalie Sarraute's 'The Planetarium'

References

"The Painful Sources of 'Impersonality' (Nathalie Sarraute)", 'Paths to Contemporary French Literature', volume 1, by John Taylor, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2004, pp. 90-94.

"Remembering Nathalie Sarraute", 'Paths to Contemporary French Literature', volume 2, by John Taylor, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2007, pp. 3-11.

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