Context

When I returned from the Saturday fruit market a message was blinking on my answering machine. I pushed the stiff button and almost as soon heard an elderly feminine voice slowly but firmly pronounce the words: "C’est Nathalie Sarraute." She explained that she had read my review of the recent Gallimard "Pleiade" edition of her Oeuvres complètes (an essay published in the Times Literary Supplement on April 25, 1997), and that she was wondering whether I ever came to Paris. (I live in central-western France, about two hundred miles from the capital—an hour-and-a-half train ride.) "I would be happy to meet you," she added. "Perhaps you could come for a visit some afternoon." Before leaving her telephone number and hanging up, she remarked mischievously: "Of course, I don’t agree with everything you wrote. We can talk about that!"

After hesitating several minutes, all the while examining my datebook and recalling the concluding arguments of my article (in which I had suggested that personal sources might underlie her notoriously indeterminate "characters," often designated by mere "he’s" and "she’s," and especially that her fiction might represent a paradoxical quest for selfhood), I called back and was greeted by a charming almost-97-year-old. (Sarraute was born, as Natalia Tcherniak, on July 18, 1900, in Ivanova, Russia.) She was always delighted, she confessed, to be read by the British. When I pointed out that I was actually an American, in fact originally from l’Amerique profonde—Iowa—she laughed and claimed not to be disappointed. She had traveled often in the States, having been invited by various universities, and had met with students at New York University as late as 1995. "My lifelong goal has been to speak English like the Queen," she chuckled, perhaps ironically, and she recalled how she had studied chemistry and history at Oxford in 1920-1921, just after obtaining from the Sorbonne the equivalent of a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. "Just now, in the new book I am working on," she continued, "there is a French expression that, I am sure, will give my English translator fits. I’ll show it to you when you come."

• * *
  

Ten days later, at four in the afternoon, I rang the doorbell at her first-floor apartment in a large building located at No. 12, avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie, a busy avenue taking off from the place de l’Iena—one of the wealthiest, most stolid residential districts of the city. The Guimet Museum, devoted to Oriental art, stands on the place de l’Iena; and not far away lies the Goethe Institute, the German cultural center. In Paris these days, one usually hears several sturdy locks turning before a door is opened; and often there is a chain blocking the door until the inhabitant can peek out and see who is knocking. No such protective devices for Nathalie Sarraute. The wooden door swung open forthrightly, and there she was, the just-slightly-bent-over author of The Age of Suspicion, standing in the hallway, smiling, and holding out a friendly hand for me to shake.

She ushered me into a book-lined parlor, had me sit down in an armchair facing a backless single-bed-like banquette covered with cushions, and asked me what I would like to drink. It was a hot day. I had taken a long metro ride from the Montparnasse station, changing trains once, which obliged me to make my way through the crowds filling the stuffy corridors of the Trocadero station. "Anything will be fine," I replied, "a glass of water would be perfect." "Oh no," she grinned, looking up at me through the thick lenses of her glasses. "You need one of my Bloody Marys. I hope you won’t mind if I have the glass of water—because of my age."

As I was opening, at her request, a new bottle of some special Russian vodka that she had managed to procure, she invoked our common "immigrant" status. This surprised me, all the more so since she insisted on her "un-Frenchness." I had been living in France since 1977, a long Gallicizing stretch of time, but Sarraute had first come to France at the age of two, some ninety-five years beforehand. She was thereafter raised bilingually, in French and Russian, while living principally, but not exclusively, in Paris. A few months now and then were spent in Saint Petersburg or Ivanovo, as well as in Switzerland, where she was tutored in German, a language that she perfected while studying history and sociology at the University of Berlin in 1921-1922.

It struck me firmly that afternoon, as it still strikes me today (some four months since her death in October, 1999), that Sarraute’s bilingualism and biculturalism represent something fundamental that we should keep in mind when we are reading her fiction, so dependant—especially in her final long period of creativity, which began in the mid-1960s and during which she also wrote six plays—on minute analyses of everyday conversation. Her Russian origins are too often neglected by critics, despite several scenes devoted to her perpetual uprootedness in Childhood (1983), an unusually structured "autobiography" significantly often arranged into a dialogue between the octogenarian author and "herself" as a child—though the "identity" of her true conversation partner remains debatable, as do of course the fluctuating "identities" of all her, as the years go by, increasingly disembodied fictional voices. In any event, as well as (uncharacteristically) relating enigmatic childhood anecdotes, Sarraute typically conveys the ways in which certain words and phrases "hurt her." Or perhaps, following her lead, we should dispense with the direct object and say, intransitively: "the ways in which certain words and phrases hurt." Yet is hurting possible without a definite agent and a clear-cut victim or "patient" (taking this latter term in its etymological sense)? Sarraute’s phenomenology presupposes this unsettling intransitivity, at least partly, in any case to an extent far exceeding our traditional understanding of interrelational emotional causality.

Opening the pages of the "Pleiade" edition to the detailed biographical summary, one is immediately impressed by a tragic familial fact also related to biculturalism: Sarraute’s father, the ingenious chemist Ilya Tcherniak, and her mother, the popular Russian writer "N. Vikhrovski" (the pen name of Pauline Chatounowski), divorced when Natalia was only two years old. This event immediately brought the girl to Paris, where her mother remarried. By the next year, Natalia—become Nathalie—was attending pre-school on the rue des Feuillantines, at the edge of the Latin Quarter, not far from Luxembourg Gardens.

It should therefore not be surprising, at least to readers who have learned a few foreign languages, that many memorable pages of Childhood, and elsewhere, turn an extremely meticulous ear to pronunciation, such as to Sarraute’s father’s Russian r (audible when he was speaking French, a language that he had otherwise mastered) or to the way the girl’s tongue, lips and teeth move differently when she says the French word soleil as opposed to its Russian cognate, solntze. Certain foreign phrases, for example the German "Nein, das tust du nicht" ("No, that you won’t do"), likewise puzzle the child. In Ouvrez (about which more below), an entire dialogue is devoted to the essentially school-learned, grammatically correct, yet occasionally unrespected phonetic liaison between a word ending in a consonant and a subsequent word beginning with a vowel. Sarraute bases her gently sarcastic sketch on the simplest French phrase, "c’est" ("it’s"), juxtaposing it with a first-name, "Antonin." Comic variants result from the different pronunciations of the two words together: "Ce Antonin," "Ce Tantonin." Another sketch investigates the hidden implications involved in strictly pronouncing "tu n’as qu’à . . ." ("you only need to . . ."), or, on the contrary, in appealing to colloquial sloppiness: "t’as qu’à," "taka," "taa . . . ka. . . ." In The Use of Speech (1980), Sarraute devotes a compelling, implicitly candid essay to Chekhov’s dying words, spoken not in his mother tongue but rather in German: "Ich sterbe," literally "I am dying."

All languages, and thus notably French, are inherently depicted as "foreign" for Sarraute, by which I mean that the author of the unambiguously-entitled Do You Hear Them? (1972) and "Fools Say" (1976) concentrates on every syllable, every phoneme, of an expression, testing and retesting it from all angles until those rapid, precise, "invisible actions" that we sense inside us—those "pre-linguistic movements" that Sarraute calls "tropisms"—become perceptible, palpable. (In the life sciences, a tropism is an involuntary orientation in an organism, induced by an independent stimulus.) For Sarraute, this "tropismic substance" founds our existence and constitutes its genuine source. The term "foreign," as applied to language, hence has an arresting extension. Language seems to be, for Sarraute, an all-too-human means of communication to which we only partly, imperfectly, impurely, accede; what interests her is that which remains ensconced beneath the linguistic surface: the not-yet-verbalized sensation or feeling. These underlying actions (or "movements") initially engage spontaneous inner attraction or repulsion (a sort of primitive, pre-verbal "sympathy" or "antipathy") and only at a much later stage, conscious intention, let alone intellection. Sarraute came to term these pre-verbal interpersonal "exchanges" the "sub-conversation" of her plays and dialogic prose. Her penetrating comprehension of phonetic nuance is surely something for which her precocious bi-, even quasi-tri-, and later almost-quadri-, lingualism accustomed her. And we spoke that afternoon of how she had adored learning Latin in French schools. . . .

Whence the following hypothesis: Because of Sarraute’s polyglotism, frequent moves, and broken childhood home, she very quickly learned to listen far beyond or—to use her favorite spatial preposition—"beneath" the social surface of discourse and to grasp what was really going on in the minds of her interlocutors. And this arduous task, for which she mustered all the resources of her body and exceptionally keen, analytical mind, is re-staged minutely (even if fictionally transposed) in her prose and plays. She situates this "re-in-actment," via writing, "beneath" the ebb and flow of the superficial daily reality that she, and we, normally observe. Interestingly, Sarraute admitted that every word in her writing is the "result" of a dramatic act. The nameless narrator of her work—the "writer," in the final reckoning—indeed implicitly incarnates an initial incomprehension, as well as a stubborn willingness to survive in unstable, often secretly hostile, social surroundings. Intense analysis assures one’s self-defense.

Yet because of her radical skepticism with respect to the concept of a "personal identity," Sarraute always dismissed—graciously in her conversation, vigorously in her essays—the interest of biography as a critical tool for comprehending her writing. It is nevertheless obvious that certain outstanding facts about her early life cast her relentlessly maniacal analyses of interpersonal relationships—based, after all, on material taken from the most banal deeds and common parlance of the quotidian—into a much different light. The renowned "impersonality" of her work can henceforth seem a courageous "objectification" of her own experiences of linguistic, emotional, familial, geographical, social, even racial uncertainty. Sarraute was Jewish and her father frequently suffered, professionally, from racial prejudice. Her intellectually challenging books become extremely moving, and unquestionably "down-to-earth," when this autobiographical backdrop is recalled. Like a scientist (and she provocatively called herself a "realist" who seeks to measure "amorphous elements" lost, dissolved, imprisoned or smothered in the "magma" of everyday banality), Sarraute’s narrators aim for ever greater comprehension, both in detail and in scope. Could not this "objective," "scientific" goal also represent an attempt to gain control over their constantly fragmented, dispersed, threatened lives? In Childhood in particular, but basically in all of her books, a social nexus of character-perturbing relationships is imaginable beneath the dialogues.

Be this as it may, Nathalie Sarraute was also steeped in the literature of her native Russia, a bond that she described several times to me that afternoon. The Age of Suspicion (1970), a volume of essays which was soon perceived, by critics, as laying the theoretical foundation for the French "New Novel" (a grouping of writers and a collective appelation about which Sarraute was nonetheless extremely dubious), opens with a characteristically trenchant homage to Dostoyevsky’s psychological method, which she viewed as innovative. She had of course read The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground in the original, even as she was able to read James Joyce, Henry Green, Joyce Cary, Ivy Compton-Burnett and especially Virginia Woolf in English. (The genealogy of her own ideas about literature and "psychology"—a term she replaced by psychisme, an unsatisfactory substitute since theoretically, in her view, there is no coherent "psyche" to isolate and study rationally—includes the psycho-epistemological approaches implicit in certain, but not all, of the novels of Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Joyce and Woolf. Sarraute notably eschews Freudian psychoanalysis.) This key essay, "From Dostoyevksy to Kafka," was originally written in 1947, not long after she had finished writing her first novel (and second book), Portrait of a Man Unknown. Prefaced generously but also rather misleadingly by Jean-Paul Sartre, who called the book an "anti-novel," Portrait of a Man Unknown had been drafted between 1940 and 1946, a period during much of which Sarraute—who refused to wear the yellow star—spent in hiding. "By the time the book finally appeared, in 1948," she commented, "I had already long gone on to new projects."

That afternoon, Nathalie Sarraute spoke at length of the publishing history of Portrait of a Man Unknown—first refused by Gallimard, the company that would, however, publish all her subsequent books, beginning with her third, Martereau (1953)—only because she wanted to express her sympathy with my own long wait between my American publisher’s original acceptance of my second collection of short stories and the book’s scheduled appearance. That we ventured at all onto this topic highlights her hospitality, disinterested curiosity and spontaneous empathy—personal qualities which touched many others besides myself yet which, strikingly, are much less present in her prose. As a writer, Sarraute focuses sharply, even grimly, on a fictional interlocutor’s concealed intentions. I had no desire to mention anything about myself to Sarraute, but she had read the brief bio appended to my article; and as she was pouring tomato juice, from a small bottle, into my glass, she was already inquiring about my own writing. Throughout our conversation, moreover, Sarraute proved to be much more interested in learning about my own life—and notably about my five-year-old bilingual son—than in expatiating on her career. She repeated three or four times an extraordinary phrase: "Oh, ça ne m’a jamais interesse d’être ‘quelqu’un’, d’avoir un ‘moi.’" ("Oh, I have never been interested in being ‘someone,’ in having an ‘ego.’")

After her death, reminiscences printed in French newspapers and magazines reiterated Sarraute’s affectionate inquisitiveness toward her afternoon visitors. Several admirers admitted their initial apprehension about meeting the author of such meticulous dissections of everyday social intercourse; often invited alone, as I had been, her visitors had imagined that their every utterance would be cut apart with the same razor-sharp scalpel that Sarraute wields in You Don’t Love Yourself (1989) or in her other books. Such is the somber, relentless drive structuring many of her novels. This is not to say that they lack humor, a quality shining forth whenever difficult or dense passages are read aloud with theatrical finesse.

Yes, Sarraute knew how to make her guests feel at home in that book-lined parlor, serving them up an excellent Bloody Mary or the equivalent. Reclining slightly onto the cushions of the banquette, she would laugh, even tease a bit, and affectionately interrogate visitors who were inevitably much younger than herself. She was as inclined to debate (with me, for example) the differences between her interpersonal "tropisms" and my subject-oriented "apperceptions," between her emphasis on "sensation" and mine on "emotion," as she was to discuss (also with me) bilingual first names (a great-grandson had just been born), Anjou sweet white wines, and the practical problems of shopping and traveling. (She had recently returned from what must have been the last of her countless trips abroad, this time to London, where she had been invited to discuss her work at the French Cultural Institute.) At one point, someone called on the phone; she picked up the receiver, listened, said "yes," laughing, and hung up without saying good-bye, explaining to me immediately afterwards that it was "an old and dear friend" inquiring if she were "busy," and that with such a close friend you could have a perfectly frank relationship. She also spoke admiringly of the novels of Patrick Modiano, a writer from whom Sarraute might at first seem very distant; distant, that is, if one forgets that Modiano also obsessively explores the German Occupation, existential anguish, and uncertain identities in fictions which are invariably set before his own birth yet which, paradoxically, are unmistakably personal in tone. The play-director Simone Benmussa, in her remarkably deep-probing, intimately well-informed, yet no less rigorous and exacting Entretiens avec Nathalie Sarraute, questions the author time and again about these apparent contradictions. What indeed is the connection between the intellectually vivacious old woman, who while conversing exudes such personal warmth and wholeness, and the author of novels devoted to exploring the "emptiness," "incoherence" and "indeterminacy" of human beings? Asking Sarraute about her "feeling" or "sensation" of the "je," the "I," Benmussa receives these answers: "I have no feeling of having an identity. . . . Looking at myself from the outside, I know [what the ‘je’ is]. I am ‘me,’ ‘je’. . . whatever you want to call it. . . . But on the inside . . . there is no more ‘je.’ . . . I cannot see myself. . . . I cannot imagine for a single instant what you see of me. It’s simply impossible. . . . We see something compact inside ourselves—something with qualities and defects, with character traits that form a ‘personality.’ Looking at ourselves from the outside, we usually find this ‘something’ to be likeable, pleasant. Yet if we place ourselves where I do [in my writings] . . . , we are in fact such immensities, and there are so many things going on, that—seen from the inside—there is no identity whatsoever."

Sarraute considered herself to be, not a "person," but rather a "vessel of psychic states."

During our initial phone conversation, Sarraute had mentioned a new book. "I’m almost finished with Ouvrez," she explained that afternoon, "a series of short play-like sketches in which the protagonists are words. I work on the manuscript every morning, and I’m still making corrections."

That morning, Sarraute had been rewriting the fourteenth of the fifteen numbered sketches, and the troubling expression that she had promised to try out on me occurred in the first line: "Il Me fait une pneumonie." The emphatic capitalization of the "Me" illustrates the dativus ethicus, the so-called "ethical dative." In other words, not only "he" has pneumonia but the illness concerns me; I am associated with the pneumonia. (The ethicus of the grammatical term derives from the broadest sense of the Greek ethikós, "expressing intimate participation," and this grammatical possibility naturally fascinated a writer so sensitive to the subtlest aspects of human interaction.) Sarraute kept repeating the phrase, so often that it became odd and unsettling, as well as a variant: "Il me fait une tuberculose." (Sarraute almost died from tuberculosis in 1957.) Her amazement was childlike. "Can you believe that we can actually say such a thing?" she exclaimed. I could find no satisfactory English equivalent for the expression, and she, too, raised her hands in defeat.

The fifteen dialogic sketches of Ouvrez offer an initially obscure, disarming, yet ultimately vivid mise-en-scène of her ideas. It is never clear where these sketches are "set," which is to say that we never know in "whom" exactly—in whose minds—these energetic, even irritable, "word-protagonists" are active. Nor do we know with whom, if anyone, the implied central speaker—or speakers?—might be conversing. Can we even evoke the narrative "centrality" of an implied speaker in this case?

Yet these odd, oblique, often amusing conversations between words presumably take place inside a "mind," or shift between a few "minds." Should we consider the implied speakers to be totally cognizant of the contents of the strange discourse that they are housing? Are the speakers perhaps cognizant of only parts of the discourse? Is language here depicted as emerging into consciousness? And in this case, from what or where is it emerging exactly? Are the words accompanied by, or departing from, sensations or feelings? As in all her work, beginning with the twenty-four short texts composing Tropisms (1939), these are essential questions that probe the frontiers of little-understood phenomena. Ever a pioneer, Sarraute touches upon problems wholly engaging the cognitive sciences.

In each of these sketches, moreover, words stand on either side of a transparent barrier. Sometimes they stand alone, sometimes in groups. The "drama" results when certain words (such as "au revoir" / "good-bye"), certain phrases (for instance, the expression "c’est une cata" / "it’s a cata(strophe)"), or even shifts between rhetorical levels of language (the passing from the polite "vous" to the "tu," or the use of a first name as opposed to more respectful forms of address) move from one side of the barrier to the other. These trespassings provoke or reveal "tropisms," the single profound idea which has ever guided Sarraute in her creative and critical work and which distinguishes her fully—as she herself often insisted, including to me that afternoon—from all the other writers associated with the "New Novel": Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Ollier, Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Samuel Beckett. Sarraute agreed with me that the time has long come to abandon a thoroughly misguiding academic and journalistic category, which invites readers to accept or reject such writers as a group, and not to discern the pointedly disparate sensibilities they actually possess.

Yet as we broached this topic, about which Sarraute had several ironic comments to make, it was getting time for me to leave. She told me that she would be turning in the manuscript of Ouvrez by the end of spring and that it would probably be her last. (It was published the next autumn; no English version has appeared.) Finally we stood up and she led me to the front door. "Do come back and see me," she remarked as I stepped outside the apartment. Incongruously, rock music was audible from behind her neighbor’s door, across the landing. We paused. Then we shook hands and she added softly: "But don’t wait too long."

Selected Works by Nathalie Sarraute in Translation
FICTION
Between Life and Death. Out of Print.
Do You Hear Them? Dalkey Archive Press, $12.95
Fools Say. Out of Print.
The Golden Fruits. Out of Print.
Here. George Braziller, $22.50.
Martereau. Dalkey Archive Press, $12.95.
Portrait of a Man Unknown. George Braziller, $9.95.
The Planetarium. Out of Print.
Tropisms. George Braziller, $5.95.
The Use of Speech. George Braziller, $15.95.
You Dont Love Yourself. George Braziller, $17.95.
NONFICTION
Childhood. George Braziller, $10.95.
The Age of Suspicion. George Braziller, $7.95.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

CONTEXT is available at bookstores nationwide.