Nathalie Sarraute's Sub-Conciousversations

Author(s): Ruby Cohn

Source: MLN , May, 1963, Vol. 78, No. 3, French Issue (May, 1963), pp. 261-270
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3042739

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 NATHALIE SARRAUTE'S
SUB-CONCIOUSVERSATIONS

RUBY COHN

Cette realite, je la cherche dans les

mouvements psychologiques a l'etat
naissant, la sous-conversation, ce
que j'ai appele les " Tropismes." 1

Through dialogue and description, sub-conscious and sub-con-

versation, Nathalie Sarraute creates her pronominal characters.
Emphasizing tone rather than line, she spurns the coherent moti-
vation of the traditional novel. In " De Dostoievski a Kafka," a
critical essay on the modern novel, she herself has pin-pointed the
salient feature of that genre: " I1 se produit comme un deplace-
ment, du dehors vers le dedans, du centre de gravite du person-
nage, deplacement que le roman moderne n'a cesse d'accentuer."
Among the so-called New Novelists of France, she is virtually alone
to focus on the inner man.
Nathalie Sarraute's first book, Tropismes, first published in 1939
and reprinted with additions in 1957, is not a novel. A tropism
is the movement of an organism in response to an external stimu-
lus, and in Mme Sarraute's book of that title, nameless people,
more vegetable than human, are moved by mysterious stimuli.
Nathalie Sarraute's concern with the stimulus is minimal, with
the movement maximal. In twenty-four sketches, based on situa-
tions as banal as the hours of the day, we are confronted with the
Lonely Crowd, whose every member knows "cette sensation de
froid, de solitude, d'abandon dans un univers hostile oui quelque
chose d'angoissant se prepare." Masculine or feminine, singular

- TLS (March 13, 1959), p. 145.

261

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 262 M L N

or plural, Mme Sarraute's protagonists-if the il, elle, ius, elles of

these prose poems can be designated as protagonists-are terrified
by vague menacing forces that may or may not be human: " Ils
savaient depuis toujours comment le posseder entierement, sans
lui laisser un coin de fraicheur, sans un instant de repit, comment
le devorer jusqu'a' la derniere miette." As indefinitely pronominal
as their victims, ils arrive, with conventional gestures, pat phrases,
ready-made opinions. Often it is difficult to determine whether ils
are people, objects, or attitudes-an ambivalence that Mme Sar-
raute surely intends. As Bernard Pingaud has remarked, Natha-
lie Sarraute writes not anti-novels but ante-novels, because she
describes what happens before either characters or story are set
in motion in the traditional novel.2 She immerses us in an amor-
phous mass of sensation, nonetheless intense for all the anonymity
of the centers of these sensations, and the deliberate lack of spe-
cificity as to their situations. Here and there, however, appear the
first seeds of tropisms of her later novels: sketch IX suggests the
established woman writer and young raconteur of Le Plane'tarium,
sketch XXI the dutiful daughter of Portrait d'un Inconnu, sketch
XXII the neurotic narrator of Portrait or of Martereau.
In these two novels, Nathalie Sarraute shifts from the objec-
tive third person narration of Tropismes to a first-person narrator,
who is himself a character in his novel. Believing that modern
authors are living in an Era of Suspicion (as she entitled her cri-
tical essay), Nathalie Sarraute seeks to allay the reader's suspicion
by use of the time-honored expedient of a first person eye wit-
ness. " Le recit 'a la premiere personne satisfait la curiosite legi-
time du lecteur et apaise le scrupule non moins legitime de l'au-
teur. En outre, il possede au moins une apparence d'experience
vecue d'authenticit6, qui tient le lecteur en respect et apaise sa
mefiance." (Written in 1950, these sentences would seem to jus-
tify the Portrait of 1947.)
Nameless and vague himself, Nathalie Sarraute's narrator paints
the Portrait d'un Inconnu. Fragile, neurotic, the narrator creates
the novel even while he takes part in it. Of indefinite age, appear-
ance, social class, he slowly unravels the minimal plot, presents
the nameless characters, describes the inaction, and quotes conver-
sation and sub-conversation. Portrait d'un Inconnu develops the

2 Quoted in TLS (Feb. 13, 1959), p. 82; source not given.

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 M L N 263

tendency of Tropismes to treat nameless, pronominal characters

who speak in cliche formulae that cloak their solitude and their
individuality. As Sartre so acutely insisted in his preface to Por-
trait, Nathalie Sarraute's commonplaces are a common place, a
meeting-ground for the human community, but uttered conver-
sation is soon in conflict with unutterable sub-conversation; "la
conversation sacree, echange rituel de lieux communs, dissimule
une 'sous-conversation' oui les ventouses se frolent, se lechent, s'as-
pirent." Relevant, too, is what Nathalie Sarraute wrote about the
novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, "Un jeu serre, subtil, feroce, se
joue entre la conversation et la sous-conversation."
At first on anonymous lips, cliches soon emanate from a name-
less hero and heroine-a latter-day Pere Grandet and his daughter.
The narrator seeks to probe to sub-conversations, to the separate
and authentic selves of father and daughter. Their namelessness,
platitudes, and masks, the narrator treats as symptoms of his own
mental illness. So insistently does he try to understand them that
it occasionally seems to him " que c'est moi que les fait surgir,
qui les provoque."
Since the narrator engages in anxious introspection before allow-
ing us to see the characters directly, the first dramatic scene of
the novel does not take place till midway through the book, al-
though confrontation of father with daughter has several times
been suggested metaphorically in the struggle of two gigantic in-
sects. Once evoked in scenic fulness rather than phrase or gesture,
father and daughter dominate the novel. The narrator's Proustian
taste for introspection gives way to meticulous and sustained exam-
ination of detail. The fragmentary phrases and gestures of the ear-
lier pages are repeated, but in the later pages they trigger an in-
terior monologue or a narrative scene.3
As in the Tropismes, these are scenes of terror arising from
trivia. In Portrait, the daughter's request for money to take a
trip for her health, becomes the climactic incident in a suffocating
world. Early in the novel, we hear a clich6 on anonymous lips:
" Ah! les enfants sont gates aujourd'hui, si nous avions demande de
petits voyages comme ca a nos parents." Repeated, this phrase

3See Leon S. Roudiez, "A Glance at the Vocabulary of Nathalie Sarraute,"

Yale French Studies no. 27, 90-98, for an analysis of Nathalie Sarraute's repeti-
tive imagery.

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 264 M L N

leads, finally, to an exchange of diabolically cruel taunts, to a dia-

logue that terminates only when father pushes daughter away, but
flings money at her, so that she has to grovel on the floor to get it.
Violence does not erupt; murderous impulses fade into habitual
gesture and automatic phrase. The father retires into his study,
and the daughter goes out to an art exhibition. En route she
meets the narrator, and they set off together to view the Manet
collection. Calm and self-possessed, as though she had never raised
her voice to her father, she engages in social chit chat with the
narrator, who stammers about his preference for a Flemish paint-
ing-Portrait of an Unknown, by an unknown painter. The sym-
bolism is patent, for even after the scene of near-violence, our
nameless narrator is haunted by the fact that father and daughter
remain unknown to him.
Early in the novel, the narrator nicknames the daughter " l'Hy-
per-sensible-nourrie-de-cliches," but the name would fit the father
equally well. Clich6s proliferate from the beginning of the book:
" Lui, quand elle arrive, il sait qu'elle ne vient pas seule, Elles
sont toujours la', derriere elle, il le sait, les grandes dispensatrices,
ses protectrices.. . . I1 n'est pas seul, lui non plus, il a, comme elle,
sa cohorte protectrice, sa vieille garde." Hypersensitivity, however,
is only gradually revealed, or discovered until the characters emerge
as "personnages at la Pirandello," their platitude dissolving into
sub-conversations, their conventional attitudes into the timidity of
their sub-conscious. Through the verbal imagination of her nar-
rator, Nathalie Sarraute dips into the streams of consciousness of
father and daughter, in an effort to discover the hidden recesses
of their character. Ironically, the daughter, l'Hypersensible, warns
the narrator against probing too searchingly into psychological
depths: "'Mefiez-vous, c'est tres malsain; ca ne donne jamais rien
de bon, ce,' elle laisse tomber les mots avec une sorte de repug-
nance . . . ' ce contact . . . trop personnel . . . la recherche de ces
sortes d'emotions
By the final scene of Portrait, dialogue returns to the surface.
At a cafe, the narrator meets father, daughter, and her fiance-a
M. Dumontet, the one character who bears a proper name, who
utters predictable platitudes without revealing a man unknown
behind his smug mask. Sub-conversations are buried while the
conversation of the last scene rests solidly on real estate prices.

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 M L N 265

Buried, too, are all the psychological nuances to which the narra-
tor was hypersensitive; in the realm of the commonplace " tout
s'arrangera."
In Martereau, Nathalie Sarraute's second novel, man is not only
unknown but unknowable. Significantly, the title is no longer
drawn from the portrait of a man unknown, painted by an un-
known painter, and hanging in a nameless city. Instead, the title
is the name of a man, suggesting an unlikely combination of Mar-
teau and Martyr.
Again the narrator is a frail, nameless, neurotic young man who
is intimately and desperately involved with the other characters.
This time he is an actual member of the family, living with aunt,
uncle, and their daughter. At least the feminine members of the
household reflect the narrator's own sensitivity to psychological
tone, and even the hard-boiled, self-made uncle soon reveals his
vulnerability. Under relatively feeble attacks, their commonplaces
crumble. The only character with a name, Martereau, seems to
stand firmly on platitudes-a caricature of the insensitive petty
bourgeois.
It is the narrator who introduces Martereau to his family, and
his meaning is generalized even before he appears as a character
in the novel: "J'ai toujours cherche Martereau. (Je l'ai toujours
appele. C'est son image-je le sais maintenant-qui m'a toujours
hante sous des formes diverses. Je la contemplais avec nostalgie.)
I1 etait la patrie lointaine dont pour des raisons mysterieuses j'avais
ete banni." Martereau has existed in a middle-class Flemish town,
or as a more artistocratic Englishman living tidily according to a
dominant pattern. But now he is close at hand.
For all his surface similarity to the narrator of the Portrait, that
of Martereau has opposite inclinations; the first made himself ill
with the effort to see beneath clich6s, whereas the second seeks
the stability of platitude. As Nathalie Sarraute herself wrote, "But
sometimes, too, it so happens that this fascination exerted by plat-
itudes evolves into a strange tenderness." 4
It is a " strange tenderness " that the nameless family feels for
Martereau, to which we are witness first in the conversations, then
in the sub-conversations that center about him. At first there is
little conflict between them; one is a revelation in depth of the

4TLS (June 10, 1960), p. 371.

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 266 M L N

other. Martereau is invited to dinner at the home, and the uncle,

waxing expansive, dwells on the necessity of hammering on the
same nail if one is to get ahead in the world. The emphasis, the
narrator feels, is unsubtle, since Martereau has been a jack of all
trades, and has not prospered like the uncle. But an affable rela-
tionship develops between these two substantial men, and the
uncle asks Martereau, who has experience in the building trade,
to help the family look for a country villa. When a millstone house
is found, prosaic and practical, not too far from Paris, the family
draws its battle lines. The uncle stands four square behind Mar-
tereau, but the aunt and nephew recoil from the house's ugly vul-
garity. Each family reunion is filled with poisonous innuendo. In-
terior monologues puncture the dialogue; sub-conversations twist
the conversation. As in the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, how-
ever, the surface courtesies seem unbroken.
Finally, family harmony is restored by a commonplace financial
transaction: " achetez la maison," the uncle decrees, " pas pour
l'habiter, il ne s'agit pas de ca, ca je m'en fiche, il s'agit d'un sim-
ple placement, je la revendrai probablement bientot, mais pour le
moment c'est un excellent placement. Martereau, vous me com-
prenez, l'acquerra en son nom avec cet argent que tu lui remet-
tras-je lui en ai parle, il est d'accord: pour lui ca ne fait aucune
difficulte; cet argent il pourra en justifier facilement aux yeux du
fisc . . . moi, en ce moment, ca me generait beaucoup d'avoir 'a
le declarer."
Once the event has taken place, once Martereau buys the villa
for the uncle, the hard lines are blurred of the man with a name.
Martereau delivers no receipt for the money, makes expensive pur-
chases for the villa, and moves into it without warning or explan-
ation. The narrator sees Martereau on the street, but there is no
greeting. Does Martereau not see him, or is he deliberately avoid-
ing him? Is Martereau's caricature-image a skillful construct, to
cloak his subtle dishonesty?
Reviewing scenes in which Martereau has figured-dinner with
the family, a walk with the narrator, the uncle at Martereau's
apartment, the actual delivery of the money to Martereau (by the
narrator and his young cousin) -the narrator now imagines inter-
ior monologues and sub-conversations, rising from the old cliche
phrases. These new aspects dissolve Martereau's mask into a flux

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 M L N 267

of possibilities, each with its own reason for theft. "II [Martereau]
avait eu envie de donner une claque sur la main qui lui tenait
plaqu6 sur le visage ce masque grossier, mais il s'etait retenu, il
s'etait prete au jeu."
In Mimesis Erich Auerbach contrasts Virginia Woolf's "multi-
ple representations of consciousness " with the " unipersonal sub-
jectivism" of Proust's narrator. Nathalie Sarraute, however, uses
a Proustian narrator and nevertheless paints multiple represen-
tations of consciousness, for the narrator probes into Martereau's
unspoken thoughts, into his sub-conversations with his wife, with
the uncle, and even with the aunt whom he squires to elegant
tea-rooms.
In another sense, too, Nathalie Sarraute portrays multiple rep-
resentations of consciousness: each event-especially the purchase
of the villa-is seen from several points of view. The narrator sug-
gests two or three different possibilities in each mind, and espe-
cially that of the seemingly impenetrable Martereau. Thus, Mar-
tereau may indeed be a good-natured friend, helping the uncle
out of a difficult tax situation; or he may be a wily thief seizing
upon the uncle's own irregular position with respect to the law;
or he may be a henpecked husband driven to crime by his Lady
Macbeth wife; or he may be an aging philanderer who uses the
villa as a stepping stone to the aunt. The narrator presents us
with the mind of each of these possible people, describing their
alogical flow of thought that erupts into sub-conversations. And it
is these sub-conversations-the tension between these perfectly pos-
sible and mutually impossible dialogues-that constitute Nathalie
Sarraute's distinctive contribution to literary presentation of the
sub-conscious.
At the end of Martereau, as at the end of Portrait d'un In-
connu, commonplaces restore order. Martereau sends the receipt,
leaves the country house, and mouths his dull, petty bourgeois
platitudes. The narrator's portrait of a man unknown and un-
knowable, of a possible monster rising from cliches, is, perhaps,
the work of the narrator's own active imagination: " moi qui sans
cesse eveille ce qui veut dormir, excite, suscite, guette, quete,
appelle; moi l'impur."
In Le Planetarium the possible monster rising from cliches is
combined with a narrative imagination. Esthetic, neurotic, a ra-

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 268 M L N

conteur and a writer, Alain Guimiez resembles the narrators of

Portrait and Martereau. But there is no narrator in Le Plane'ta-
rium, and no character is allowed to possess the first person singu-
lar pronoun in his sub-conscious. Instead, we travel from one
mind to another, with little to guide us, for Nathalie Sarraute rig-
orously expunges herself from the narrative. Usually, a new chap-
ter situates us in a new mind, but this is not so in those scenes
where several chapters are brought face to face, and, for the first
time in Nathalie Sarraute's fiction, name to name. In Le Plane'-
tarium all the characters bear names.
Nathalie Sarraute's progressive works progress in complexity,
and Le Planetarium contains a more coherent plot, more complete
characters, and a more intricate technique than her earlier works.
Nevertheless, in Professor Matthews' felicitous description, this
novel "reads less like a traditional novel than a musical score in
which one follows out themes arranged contrapuntally." 5
A planetarium is a miniature solar system, a model of the uni-
verse. Alain Guimiez is aware that his aunt's preoccupation with
the minutiae of her household is " tout un univers en petit." In
this system of planets, the cohesive force is the commonplace.
Commonplace phrases compose the dialogue, commonplace atti-
tudes figure in the motivation. As in the earlier Sarraute novels,
commonplaces hide the individual. But even more than in the
earlier novels, each sub-conscious mind is viewed in all the sig-
nificance of its insignificant rambling.
Nathalie Sarraute's Planetarium opens with a scene viewed
through a particular consciousness: Aunt Berthe, full of misgiv-
ings, is having a new door installed in her Passy apartment. In
imaginary sub-conversations she cringes at the scorn of the work-
men, at the ridicule of her family and friends. The second scene is
a gathering at the home of Gisele Guimiez' parents, and we learn
from her mother's thoughts that the young couple has disdained
the gift of a pair of leather easy chairs, preferring a Louis XV ber-
gere. During the course of the novel, Alan Guimiez, the adored
and gifted nephew of Aunt Berthe, ruthlessly appropriates her
apartment, and, strengthened in this possession, he and his wife
firmly refuse the leather-covered chairs and the bourgeois vulgar-

5 Nathalie Sarraute: An Approach to the Novel," Modern Fiction Studies

(Winter, 1960-61), p. 344.

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 M L N 269

ity they represent. Theirs will be a home of taste and refinement,

fit to entertain the well-known writer, Germaine Lemaire.
If this planetarium has a sun, it is Germaine Lemaire, who at-
tracts young literati embarking on their careers, and who warms
them with her languid praise. But for all her fame and adula-
tion, she is (as we learn from her sub-conversations) as insecure
as the insecure young men who surround her. " Seule sur un
astre eteint," she views herself.
Similarly, young Alain Guimiez knows that he resembles his
pathetic, hesitant old aunt: " Nous nous ressemblons comme deux
gouttes d'eau." Gisele Guimiez, in her own mind, is a fearful
little girl, clinging to her parents, but her parents are in turn
afraid of her, and each of them resents and intimidates the
other. Alain's successful father remains, in his own eyes, a help-
less younger brother to old Aunt Berthe. And Aunt Berthe is ter-
rified of everyone and everything.
In guiding us through these uncertain waters of the various
streams of consciousness, Nathalie Sarraute uses proper names,
direct address, explicitly designated relationships, attitudes towards
objects. When, however, she provides no signposts to clarify our
way, the platitudes could belong to any of her characters, and
the searching and fearing become generalized. When Alain Gui-
miez admits to the salon gathering that he resembles his aunt, he
challenges them all, " ca ne vous interesserait pas tant, vous non
plus, si vous-meme et nous tous ici, n'avions pas un petit quel-
que chose, quelque part, bien cache, dans un recoin bien ferme."
Mouthing the same commonplaces, Nathalie Sarraute's charac-
ters meet in a common place of loneliness, insecurity, and cruelty.
At once on the defensive and on the offensive, they think tremu-
lously when they stray from the cliche, and they return to clich6s
to protect them against the banality and brutality of the human
situation. The more sensitive among them listen in dismay as
their own pat phrases emanate from other voices. " C'est eux-
memes, ils se reconnaissent parfaitement bien jusque dans les
moindres details, mais bizarrement distendus, deform6s, difformes."
In the very last scene of Le Planetarium when the celebrated
writer, Germaine Lemaire, calls upon the young Guimiez couple,
happily installed in Aunt Berthe's Passy apartment, Alain regales
her with an anecdote about a mutual acquaintance, a writer who

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 270 M L N

spurns salons and objets d'art. This writer is nevertheless anxious,

when informed that an article has been written about him, to
know when and where it appeared. Instead of laughing scornfully
as Alain had expected, Germaine Lemaire muses thoughtfully, to
close the book. " Je crois que nous sommes bien tous un peu
comme ca."
Nathalie Sarraute implies that we are all " un peu comme Ha,"
grounded on platitudes, hungry for the attention of others, inse-
cure in our deepest selves.

San Francisco State College

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