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

Romanic Review, May 2001 by Willging, Jennifer

Despite the particular objections Sarraute may have made to being compared to Sartre, it is of course not as inappropriate a juxtaposition as she seems to suggest in Dupuy-Sullivan's interview. One similarity in the works of these authors is the way in which characters' conception of their identity depends to a large extent upon others' conceptions of them, or more precisely, upon what they imagine to be others' conceptions of them. The imposing gaze of the Other is of course a subject Sartre treats in both his theoretical and fictional writing. In Huis clos (1947), for example, the three characters damned to hell relentlessly alternate between soliciting the others' approval of an image of themselves they have created, and rejecting images the others seek to impose on them. Sarraute's characters are also constantly seeing themselves through the eyes of others and desperately trying to destroy that specular image before it destroys them. In his preface to Portrait d'un inconnu, Sartre also underscores Sarraute's dead-on portrayals of the fundamental inauthenticity of human identity and interaction, which looms large in Sartre's own vision of humanity. But the main point here is not to reopen old debates about whether Sarraute's work can be characterized as "existentialist," or to what extent if any Sartre did have an influence on Sarraute's work.4 Rather it is to call attention to and comment on the recurrence in both authors' work of a particular motif, which is that of the slimy. In comparing Sarraute's and Sartre's obsession with and treatment of this theme, my principal objective will be to point out some of the similarities, and more importantly, many of the differences, between their theories about two issues in particular: the human subject's perception of and interaction with the world, and the nature and function of "good" literature. These are issues with which both repeatedly grapple in their theoretical and literary writing and which, in their work, are not as unrelated as they might at first appear.

It is well known that the slimy is an important concept in Sartre's writing, yet it has often been overlooked or under-appreciated in Sarraute's.5 In his preface to Portrait., Sartre himself notes its presence in Sarraute's first novel: "Nathalie Sarraute," he affirms,

a une vision protoplasmique de notre univers interieur: otez la pierre du lieu commun, vous trouverez des coulees, des baves, des mucus, des mouvements hesitants, amiboides. Son vocabulaire est d'une richesse incomparable pour suggerer les lentes reptations centrifuges de ces elixirs visqueux et vivants. (13 my emphases)

The continuai va-et-vient of human tropismes, those tiny movements of psychological attraction and repulsion that assail each individual in her interaction with others, is figured not only in Portrait but also in many of Sarraute's subsequent texts as being carried upon a slipping, slimy substance that threatens always to escape the boundaries of the individual and to infect those around her. Sarraute uses many different images to represent the concept of tropisms, but a frequent one shows it as a sort of "substance fluide qui circule chez tous, passe des uns aux autres, franchissant des frontieres arbitrairement tracees" (Sarraute,"Ce que je cherche a faire" 35). But before exploring Sarraute's uses of the liquid and the slimy in several of her novels throughout the '40s, '50s, and '60s (where they are most palpable), I will briefly summarize Sartre's conception of these qualities, which is illustrated most explicitly in La Nausee (1938) and L'Etre et le neant (1943).