Nathalie Sarraute and the Practice of Writing

Abstract

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 coherent 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 RobbeGrillet. 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 publication 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 particular 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