Chapter Five - Sexual indifference

Summary

‘Quand j'écris, je ne suis ni homme ni femme ni chien ni chat …’

[‘When I write I am neither man nor woman nor dog nor cat’]

Nathalie Sarraute

Women, Human Beings and Writing

If Sarraute's conception of the body succeeds in eliminating gender from the physiology of writing, it would seem that sexual difference nevertheless returns in the intersubjective relations that are portrayed in her work. However insistently she may assert that sexual differences do not count – either at the level of the tropism or at the level of writing – they repeatedly intrude both in the assumptions that characters make about each other, and in the assumptions that readers make about Sarraute. In short, it is the presence of the other which reintroduces gender onto the agenda of the novel. Sexual difference in Sarraute would seem, then, to be the result of social existence, and above all, of the fact that the subject is seen by her other (I say ‘she’ here, since gender is far more strongly marked in relation to women than to men). Social existence is mediated by the visual as much as it is by convention and stereotype. And when these two factors – the visual and the stereotypical – operate in tandem, the effects can turn out to be deadly for the Sarrautean subject.

In exploring this intrusion of gender as a function of social relations and their visual currency, I shall begin with the example of photography.