Partners in slime: The liquid and the viscous in Sarraute and Sartre

Romanic Review, May 2001 by Willging, Jennifer

Nathalie Sarraute would not have appreciated this essay, because in it I propose to compare, as other critics have done in the past, her work with that of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sarraute's testiness about the nature of her intellectual relationship with Sartre simply "oozes" (in keeping with the theme of this essay) from the pages of a 1989 interview with Francoise Dupuy-Sullivan ("Dialogue avec Nathalie Sarraute") in which Sarraute describes her first contact with Sartre. At her publisher's suggestion, she says, she sent him a copy of her first text, Tropismes (1939). He responded to her with "un mot, tres gentil," telling her that the text interested him very much (188). She met him in person through a mutual friend during the war when Sartre was organizing "des groupes de resistance. C'etaient plutot," Sarraute then corrects herself, "des recherches theoriques sur ce qu'on ferait quand les Allemands partiraient" (188). As a Jew, Sarraute herself had had to go into hiding during the latter part of the war, and the irony which fills the pages of her fiction seems also present in this last comment.1 Sartre's interest in her work, she goes on, prompted him to provide a laudatory preface for her second publication, Portrait d'un inconnu (1947) (188). When asked by Dupuy-Sullivan why she thinks Sartre admired Portrait, Sarraute replies: "Dans ce livre, les choses sont en train de se faire. Tout est en perpetuel devenir. Cela lui avait paru tres original [...]" (189). Yet her novel seemed to him, she also believed, "comme une sorte d'experience a part et qui ne pourrait pas etre recommencee. Apres ca, il faudrait ecrire des romans comme tout le monde, comme il en ecrivait lui-meme a ce moment" (189). Because she had only read La Nausee (1938), she says, after having already begun writing Tropismes, and because Sartre, unlike her, wrote novels "comme tout le monde," Sarraute firmly asserts that, "[i]l est donc absolument impossible et aberrant de parler d'une influence quelle qu'elle soit de Sartre sur moi. C'est tout a fait faux. Lui-meme n'y aurait pas cru" (189). Dupuy-Sullivan had herself not yet spoken of such an influence, but Sarraute seems here to have smelled the question in the air and to have thus attempted to arrest its launch.

When Dupuis-Sullivan characterizes as "surprising" the 1947 publication in Les Temps Modernes, the literary review Sartre had created after the war, of two of Sarraute's critical essays "cote a cote" with what would later become chapters of Sartre's Qu'est-ce que la Litterature? (1948), Sarraute's response is unequivocal, even if the implication of the question (that Sarraute and Sartre had worked together on their essays? that Sartre had somehow guided the writing of Sarraute's essays?) is not entirely clear. "Pourquoi [surprenant]?" Sarraute demands. "D'abord ce n'est pas la meme date, ce n'est pas cote a cote. C'est dans un autre volume des Temps modernes. [ ... ] Ce n'etait pas ecrit en meme temps," she insists (189-90). From this point on, Sarraute's answers to Dupuy-Sullivan's questions concerning Sartre become for the most part increasingly terse and increasingly negative, as the following excerpt shows:

F.D.S.: Quel role avez-vous joue en 1962 lors des tentatives de ce que l'on a pu appeler coexistence culturelle entre ecrivains occidentaux et ecrivains sovietiques et quels furent vos rapport dans ce cadre avec Jean-Paul Sartre?

N.S.: Absolument aucun, je ne m'en suis pas occupee.

F.D.S: Pouvez-vous decrire la situation de l'ecrivain telle que vous l'avez ressentie en 1947 [a situation which Sartre outlines in Qu'estce que la litterature?] et comment vous semble-t-elle avoir evolue depuis?

N.S.: Je ne peux absolument pas repondre a cette question, je ne la comprends meme pas ...

F.D.S.: Quelle place accordez-vous au contexte historique dans la creation litteraire?

N.S.: Chez moi, je ne le vois pas.

F.D.S: Y a-t-il certaines expressions picturales qui vous paraissent donner un equivalent des tropismes?

N.S.: Non, je ne crois pas. (190-91)

The reader can surmise the suffering of the interviewer, which does not end here. When asked, then, to describe her relations with Simone de Beauvoir, Sarraute flatly answers that they were "[q]uelconques." "Personnellement," she adds, "je crois qu'il n'y avait pas de sympathie" (191).2

Perhaps worn down by Sarraute's Sartre-inspired surliness, Dupuy-Sullivan changes tack. "Voici une question qui change d'orientation," a seemingly penitent interviewer proposes. "A votre avis, en quoi votre bilinguisme a-t-il pu influencer votre rapport au langage?" (191). What could be more innocuous than asking a writer to comment on her use of language? But Sarraute's mortifying response is, "En rien, parce qu'il n'y a pas eu de bilinguisme. C'est une erreur complete qu'on epete toujours" (191). Shortly thereafter and none too soon, the interview comes to an end.

As an example of an encounter replete with hostile sous-conversation, this interview is unparalleled even in Sarraute's own fiction. Yet speaking of sous conversation here is perhaps imprecise, as the outward conversation is already as explicitly antagonistic as an academic interview is likely to become. While it is true that since the interview was transcribed and not videotaped, the reader cannot gauge for certain the degree to which Sarraute was truly irked by Dupuy-Sullivan's questions, it is nevertheless safe to say that the subject of Jean-Paul Sartre was at least a sensitive one for Sarraute. But being compared to any writer, and not just Sartre, bothered Sarraute, who placed a premium on originality and newness in all intellectual and artistic endeavors. The numerous characters of a literary bent who appear in her fictional works (Alain Guimier and Germaine Lemaire in Le Planetarium [1959], the "writer" in Entre la vie et la mort [1968], the various writers and critics in Les Fruits d'or [1963], to name a few) all seek either to create or to identify an original work of art. It is this implacable desire and the self-doubt that accompanies it that drive them, roller coaster-like, up to the manic heights of creative triumph, down to the depressive depths of poetic bankruptcy, and back again. For Sarraute, what the masters did in the past was all well and good for their time, but new artists have the responsibility of going beyond their masters and discovering through their work new realities, using new artistic forms.3