Nathalie Sarraute: How To Do Mean Things With Words

Abstract

"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 twentieth-century France. Her works display a degree of intertexuality which is extraordinary, even in a century in which intertextuality is both an artistic and critical norm. This obsessional return especially to the same images and rhythms is meant to come to grips with the "real" drama underlying surface