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

Romanic Review, May 2001 by Willging, Jennifer

Here others' tropismic movements are carried along by a liquid drug that penetrates the writer, nauseating him but at the same time filling him with rather perverse feelings of pleasure. Doped up by random words he hears others pronounce ("[de] simple[s] mot[s] sans importance"), pen rather than hypodermic needle in hand, the writer exploits the delirium provoked by this linguistic liquid in order to produce more freely his own words, those of the literary text he is struggling to write. That others' words can pierce him like needles and infect him as they do attests, in fact, to his privileged status as a writer, as a "terre propice" (58) in which language can take root and thrive. So while the potentially positive outcome of the writer's infection (the production of a text) is attenuated by the dubious nature of the (sexually suggestive) metaphor (the drug induces a "strange" and "painful" joy), the liquid Sarraute describes here is not entirely nefarious. There are other examples of more positive liquids in Sarraute, but here I will continue to explore the "Sartrean" passages where lurk more lugubrious liquids.

In several of Sarraute's texts, metaphors of liquid are accompanied by another image that Sartre also often associates with his own noxious liquids, and this is the image of the bestiole. Both writers display a certain fascination with various creeping, crawling, sucking, and stinging creatures of both land and sea, most of which share the characteristic of sliminess. In Entre la Vie et la mort, during the writer's rather pretentious lecture on the sources of his creative inspiration, an anonymous female auditor who stares skeptically back at him appears to the insecure writer as a ventouse-covered bloodsucker (une sangsue) that empties him of his vital fluids as well as of his hot air (152). In Les Fruits d'or, a critic argues that the eponymous novel around which Sarraute's novel centers is a great work of art because in it, "on n'y trouve pas . . . de grouillements de larves, de pataugeages dans je ne sais quels fonds bourbeux qui degagent des miasmes asphyxiants, dans je ne sais quelles vases putrides ou l'on s'enlise" (42 my emphases). Here the slimy creatures evoked are inextricably associated with oozing depths, from which they emerge like the first prototypes of life crawling out of the cosmic soup. In Portrait d'un inconnu, the narrator-a great detector of tropisms and a would-be writer-describes the hostile tropismic exchanges between the father and daughter he studies as "[des] deroulements de serpents" (35), creatures whose slithery movement and shiny skin are both affectively associated with the slimy. For the father, moreover, the daughter is "toujours plus insatiable, plus avide, sur lui comme une sangsue, elle draine toutes ses forces, elle le vide . . ." (118 my emphases). In this sexually suggestive metaphor, in a body of work perfectly devoid of direct references to sex, the daughter takes on the shape of a vampire-like blood sucker and incestuously drains her father of both his liquid "forces" and his fortune. In yet another passage in Portrait, the narrator remarks that certain people seem to emit "un suc poisseux comme la soie que secrete la chenille; quelque chose d'indefinissable, de mysterieux, qui . . . se repand sur lui comme un enduit gluant sous lequel il se petrifie" (60 my emphases). Rather than emerging from slime, the creature evoked here (the caterpillar who represents imperious personalities such as the father) produces it, using it to entrap and immobilize its prey (the timid, irresolute people upon whom the dominators attempt to impose their viewpoints).