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Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) - born Nathalie Ilyinincha Tcherniak |
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Russian born French novelist and literary critic, whose works have been published in some 24 languages. Nathalie Sarraute became one of the pioneers and leading theorists of the nouveau roman with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, and Michel Butor, who declared "the death of the character". She discarded conventional ideas about plot, chronology, characterization, and the narrative point of view. In Tropismes (1939, Tropisms) she used a series of brief passages, "tropisms," which, according to Sarraute, govern behaviour. They become the unifying thread throughout her novels. [Tropisms] "These movements, of which we are hardly cognizant, slip through us on the frontiers of consciousnes in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak, the feelings we manifest, are aware of experiencing, and able to define. . . . And since, while we are performing them, no words express them, not even those of the interior monologue—for they develop and pass through us very rapidly in the form of frequently very sharp, brief sensations, without our perceiving clearly what they are . . ." (Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute, translated from the French by Maria Jolas, New York: George Braziller, 1967, p. vi; originally published in France in 1939) Tropisms Nathalie Sarraute was born Natalia Ilyincha Tchderniak in the town
of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Russia, into an
assimilated Jewish family. Her father, Ilya Evseevich Tcherniak, a
chemical engineer, ran a small dye-manufacturing business. Polina
Osipovna, her mother, became a writer. She published under the
pseudonym of Vikhrovsky two novels, Ikh Zhizn (Their Life) and Vremya
(Time), and some short stories. Sarraute had a sister, Elena, who died
very young. Her parents separated when Natacha (as she was known)
was two. Her mother took her to Paris. From the
age of eight, she lived with her father, who had settled in France. Sarraute studied literature and law at the Sorbonne, spent one year at Oxford in 1921, and continued her studies of legal science in Berlin, before becoming a member of the French bar (1926-41). In 1925 she married a fellow law student, Raymond Sarraute; they had three daughters. Sarraute read everything she wrote to her husband; his encouragement was essential although he rarely gave any commentes. When Raymond Sarraute died in 1985, she found herself for the first time without someone, whose reactions he could count on. Until about 1940, Sarraute practised law, and then became a
full-time
writer. During the Nazi occupation of France, Sarraute, being Jewish,
was forced to go into hiding – she posed as the governess of her
own three daughters. When Samuel Beckett, who was involved in the Paris
Resistance and was afraid of being arrested, asked her to hide him in
her attic she said: "My father is hiding there." So Beckett spent for
about a year in the attic with Sarraute's father. (The Playwright's Workbook by Jean-Claude van Italie, New York; London; Applause, 1997, p. 63) Tropismes, a collection of
twenty-four brief sketches, which
presented nameless people caught up in the web of their feelings and perceptions, went
practically unnoticed when the book came out, but it gained more
understanding when it was republished in 1957. She had started to work
on the first tropisms already in 1932. Sarraute indicated that
the words are the
verbal translation of a non-verbal communication. With "tropisms" she referred to inner movements of the
mind, which are barely perceptible, but which guide our behavior –
their importance is on the dramatic effect. André Gide and Paul Valéry had used the word before, Gide in Le Caves du Vatican
(1914): "Tropisms! The word was no sooner invented than nothing else
was to be heard of; an entire category of psychologists would admit
nothing in the world but tropisms. Tropisms! A sudden flood of light
emanuated from these syllabes! Organic matter was obviously governed by
the same involuntary impulses as those which turn the flower of the
heliotrope to face the sun (a fact which is easily to be explained by a
few simple laws of physics and thermochemistry). The order of the
universe could at last be hailed as reassuringly benign. In all the
motions of life, however surprising, a perfect obedience to the agent
could be universally recognized." (The Vatican Cellars by André Gide, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973, p. 11) L'Ère du soupçon (1956, The Age of Suspicion) is a collection of Sarraute's critical essays, in which she attempted to analyze what she as an author tried to achieve in her work. Psychologizing is rejected; the emphasis is on speech and gestures, the "dramatic actions". Moreover, Sarraute dismissed the need for a cohesive narrative and wanted place the reader "exactly where the author is, at a depth where nothing remains of the convenient landmarks with which he constructs the characters. He is immersed and held under the surface until the end, in a substance as anonymous as blood, a magma without name or contours." (The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel, New York: George Braziller, 1990, p. 71)
In the 1950s and '60s Sarraute developed the ideas of the new novel in such works as Portrait d'un Inconnu (1947, Portrait of a Man Unknown), an "anti-novel" according to Jean-Paul Sartre, in which she took from Balzac's Eugénie Grandet
the central theme – the relationship of a miserly father and his
daughter. The characters have no fixed personalities and undermine the
reliability of the narrator's observations. Sarraute, like other
theorists of the nouveau roman,
at the same time welcomed the messiness of the world as it is, and
recognized the decline of the traditional elements of the novel. This view was articulated by Alain Robbe-Grillet in Pour un Nouveau Roman (1963, For a New Novel): "How could style have remained motionless, fixed, when
everything around it was in evolution – even revolution – during the last hundred and fifty years? Flaubert wrote the new novel
of 1860, Proust the new novel of 1910. The writer must proudly consent
to bear his own date, knowing that there are no masterpieces in
eternity, but only works in history; and that they survive only to the
degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the
future." (For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated by Richard Howard, New York: Grove Press, 1965, p. 10) Unlike Robbe-Grillet, who described things and surfaces, Sarraute examined what lies beneath the banal appearances. Martereau (1953) was a story about the internal tensions of a
family. The family friend Martereau is a solid, calm man, whom Sarraute
uses as the focus of the inner monologue, and whose character she
gradually disintegrates, along with other members of the family, a
stone-hearted uncle, the silent mother, the unpredictable daughter and
the insecure young man living at his uncle's house. Finally there is
nothing much left of Martereau's character than a bundle of
possibilities. Claude Mauriac
described the work as "ce livre étonnant," and one
of the most original novels that he had read for a long time. Le planétarium (1959, The Planetarium) eliminated the ever-present narrator for a more suggesting representation of the inner world – the novel can also be read as a parable of the creative process and an ironic comedy of manners. The aspiring writer becomes only one among a number of voices. Many pages are devoted to the contrast between the bergère and leather armchairs as manifestations of different cultural values. Sarraute deliberately made it difficult for the reader to determine from whose perspective her stories are told. Noteworthy, though her central characters rarely had names, they were often male, the masculine was for her the "unmarked" gender. L'Enfance (1983,
Childhood) came out when Sarraute
was over eighty. It is a story of the
childhood of a young girl who divides her time between her divorced
parents in Russia and France. Denying that the book is an
autobiography, she argued: "People who write their adult
autobiographies claim to write their whole lives. First of all they
deform it completely, we always see ourselves in a certain light [ . .
. ] it is as if Landru wrote his memoirs. [ . . . ] He would tell us
how much he loved his wife and child [ . . . ] this would be correct. [
. . . ] He would simply leave out the seven women in the oven. And this
is how autobiographies are made." (From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person by Rachel Gabara, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2006, p. 27) Again Sarraute uses short flashes (tropisms) from
her past, and torn lines from discussions, the colors of her memories
are faded like in an old photograph. Sarraute is constantly questioning
herself: "Try to remember... something must have happened..." "Be
careful, now you are exaggeration..." The book was adapted for the
stage in Broadway, starring Glenn Close. "Sarraute's voice casts its
own spell – a cross between a French hypnotist and a Russian bear's –
and Mlle Benmussa has squeezed as much action out of, or into, stasis
as is humanly possible. . . . Still, when after an hour and a half of
exquisitely intelligent torture, the author informed us that she had
reached the age of 11, I sighed, "Funny, I would have sworn 85."" ('Not Quite Close-shavian' by John Simon, in New York Magazine, June 10, 1985) Mary McCarthy promoted Sarraute for the Prix International de Littérature, which she won in 1964. Although Sarraute's early works were precursors of the New Novel, some critics have placed her in the great tradition of Proust and Henry James as a theoretician of a psychological novel. She was also interested in Paul Valéry and Gustave Flaubert; her essays on these writers were republished in book form in 1986. Sarraute defended in the essays the novelist's need for formal experimentation. She wrote radio and stage plays, in which she integrated undercurrents of half conversation into a commonplace banal conversation. Often the actors speak words which would normally remain unspoken. Nathalie Sarraute
died on October 19, 1999, in Paris. Her last novel, Here (1995), examined the nature of memory. Ouvrez (1997),
written in dialogue, was her last book. Sarraute had an apartment on
the 12 Avenue Pierre 1e de Serbie. Her favorite café was on the Avenue
Marceau. Sarraute sat there always at the same table. For further reading: Nathalie Sarraute by Mimica Cranaki and Yvon Belaval (1965); Nathalie Sarraute by Ruth Z. Temple (1968); Nathalie Sarraute; ou. La recherce de l'authenticité by Micheline Tison Braun (1971); French Fiction Today: A New Direction by Leon Samuel Roudiez (1972); Nathalie Sarraute by Gretchen Ross Besser (1979); Nathalie Sarraute: The War of the Words: A Study of Five Novels by Valerie Minogue (1981); The Novels of Nathalie Sarraute: Towards an Aesthetic by Helen Watson-Williams (1981); Sarraute Romanciere: Espaces intimes by Sabine Raffy (1988); Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader: Identities in Process by Sarah Barbour (1993); Nathalie Sarraute: Metaphor, Fairy-Tale and the Feminine of the Text by John Phillips (1994); Nathalie Sarraute by Bettina Knapp (1994); Reading Nathalie Sarraute: Dialogue and Distance by Emer O'Beirne (1999); Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference by Ann Jefferson (2000); Psyche of Feminism: Sand, Colette, Sarraute by Catherine M. Peebles (2003); Telling Anxiety: Anxious Narration in the Work of Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hébert by Jennifer Willging (2007); Echo's Voice: the Theatres of Sarraute, Duras, Cixous and Renaude by Mary Noonan (2014); Le roman moderne: le monologue intérieur, le point de vue et le discours indirect libre: Marcel Proust, Claude Simon et Nathalie Sarraute by Houcine Bouslahi (2018); Unbecoming Language: Anti-identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim (2018); Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between by Ann Jefferson (2020); Dialogues interrompus: Louis Aragon, Lili Brik, Charles de Noailles, Nathalie Sarraute by François-Marie Banier (2024) Selected bibliography:
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