Territoriality Disputes, Pollution and Abjection in Nathalie Sarraute and Hélène Lenoir

Abstract

Despite the number of surveys of contemporary French fiction that have appeared in the last decade or so, (1) the emergence of journal series such as Ecritures contemporaines (2) and the publication of journal special numbers devoted to contemporary fiction, (3) the question of Nathalie Sarraute's literary legacy remains largely uncharted territory. In some respects this is not surprising. Notwithstanding the valiant efforts and intelligent readings of critics such as Sarah Barbour and John Philips, (4) Sarraute does not fit comfortably within the category of ecriture feminine, (5) Moreover, the concept of tropismes that is so central to her work and her extension of its application to include human behaviour have perhaps been perceived as too idiosyncratically sarrautian for it to have been taken up by subsequent generations of writers. Of the very few contemporary writers whose names have figured alongside that of Sarraute, Helene Lenoir is one of the more frequently mentioned. In their reviews of Lenoir's Le Repit and Bourrasque, both Celine Geoffroy and Pierre Lepape cite Sarraute as the principal comparator, (6) while Dominique Viart's very useful survey chapter on the contemporary French literary scene identifies Lenoir, Laurent Mauvignier and Gisele Fournier as the most obvious heirs of Sarraute. (7) Lenoir, in one of her infrequent public statements--a short article entitled La Litterature contre la betise--quotes an anecdote told by Sarraute concerning the sense of the title of disent les imbeciles (8). However, these references remain very brief and to date there has been no substantial comparative analysis of the work of the two authors. This article aims to open up a potentially rewarding topic of enquiry through the comparative study of two texts--Sarraute's Vous les entendez? (9) and Lenoir's Bourrasque (10)--which, on detailed analysis, reveal a quite remarkable pattern of thematic and structural correspondences. Here, the application of concepts derived from anthropological and psychoanalytical theory will provide the conceptual framework for the reading of a novel (Bourrasque) that has hitherto received only scant critical attention, and the rereading of another (Vous les entendez?) that has tended to be somewhat eclipsed by the novels that preceded and followed it (Entre la vie et la mort, 1968, and disent les imbeciles, 1976). Thus, in addition to itemising the main similarities between the fictional situations and forms of the two texts, the first part of the article will also examine the ways in which the apparently trivial quarrels over domestic space and privacy and the minor infractions of codes relating, for example, to hospitality, commensality, aggregation, separation, and the crossing of boundaries between public and personal spaces act as pretexts for the exploration of much more serious territorial battles and taboo violations. The second part will focus more precisely on the presence in both texts of a dynamic centred on the relationship between purity anal pollution, between the act of abjecting and the abject state. This section of the article will take its cue from Ann Jefferson's ground-breaking analysis of difference and the denial of difference in Sarraute's work. Here, in two incisive chapters that draw, albeit briefly, on the theory of Mary Douglas and, rather more fully, on that of Julia Kristeva, Jefferson traces the recurrence, across Sarraute's work, of motifs relating to pollution, contamination and abjection in order to demonstrate Sarraute's commitment [...] to [...] indistinction (11) in her depiction of intersubjectivity and to illustrate her conception of the work of art as a means of transcending intersubjective relations through the transformation of difference into sameness. (12) The present study accepts Jefferson's conclusions and will build upon this foundation, but--in addition to extending the models to the study of Lenoir's text--will also argue that the motifs of pollution and abjection are part of a more generalised fascination in Vous les entendez? …