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The Repressed Feminine: Nathalie Sarraute's Elle est là
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
Nathalie Sarraute has written six plays over a period of some fifteen years (1967–82). Her latest play, Pour un oui ou pour un non, was first performed in 1982. Given their relative success, however, one is forced to wonder why she has not continued to write for the theatre (though, since 1982, she has published four major works of narrative, Enfance, Tu ne t'aimes pas, Ici and Ouvrez). When I put this question to Nathalie Sarraute in October 1996, at the Institut Français in London, she replied that she had ‘found more amusing things to do’. Her failure to answer the question directly perhaps suggests an unawareness of the real answer, at least at conscious levels. The theatre, an inescapably physical medium, which requires the bodily presence of men and women as gendered beings, was, in fact, never really suited to a writer who continually takes refuge from the physical and even the sexual, hi words. It seems plausible, then, to conjecture that Sarraute gave up writing for the theatre, because her radio plays had, by reason of their success, been translated onto the stage, and the author did not know how to deal with a medium that privileged the physical as opposed to the emotional and psychological dimensions of human relationships which had been her territory since Tropismes. The frequently impersonal voices of her fiction work well on radio, but less so on a live stage, upon which the actors are physically as well as audibly present: ‘Le person-nage de théâtre’, says Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘est en scène, c'est sa première qualité: il est là.’ In Sarraute's theatre, however, this physical presence is no more than a kind of contingency, wholly superfluous to the action. The characters find themselves together for no particular reason and they hardly ever interact physically. The very lack of stage directions, which the author justifies on the grounds of textual purity, is itself indicative of an absence of movement, the main signifier of physical presence. Textual purity depends for Sarraute on words alone.
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References
Notes
1. Nathalie Sarraute's initial reluctance to accept Radio Stuttgart's commission to write her first radio play in the 1960s explicitly acknowledged the difficulties involved in translating a ‘stream of consciousness’ narrative into a play: ‘How could I possibly write plays—in which there is nothing but dialogue?—dialogue that on its own must convey everything? External action, which is so important in the theatre, is almost entirely absent from my books: it is usually the dialogue that constitutes such action.’ (‘The Inside of the Glove: Nathalie Sarraute talks about her plays’, Romance Studies, No. 4, Summer 1984, pp. 1–7 (p. 2).
2. ‘The dramatic character is on stage, this is his/her most important quality: (s)he is present.’ Robbe-Grillet, Alain, ‘Samuel Beckett ou la présence sur la scène’, in Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Minuit, 1963), pp. 95–107 (p. 95).Google Scholar
3. ‘Mettre des indications scéniques détruit la pureté du texte.’ (‘Stage directions destroy the purity of the text.’): Nathalie Sarraute interviewed at Birkbeck College, London, 16 January 1987.
4. See ‘Nathalie Sarraute, Le gant retourné’, Digraphe, No. 32, March 1984, pp. 52–8 (‘Aujourd'hui Nathalie Sarraute’), in which Sarraute discusses her work for the theatre: ‘la sous-conversation devenait la conversation. Ainsi le dedans devenait le dehors et un critique … a pu, à juste titre, pour qualifier ce passage du roman à la pièce, parler de “gant retourné”’ (p. 52–3). (‘the sub-conversation became conversation. Thus, the inside became the outside and a critic … rightly described this shift from novel to play as a kind of ‘glove turned inside out’)
5. In Le Silence, for example, Sarraute felt that the main role had to be played by a man, because a woman's silence would have been interpreted as due to a ‘passion amoureuse’ or sexual frustration. (Nathalie Sarraute at Birkbeck, 16 January 1987).
6. See my Nathalie Sarraute: Metaphor, Fairy-Tale and the Feminine of the Text (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), Chapter 8.
7. Sarraute, Nathalie, Theatre. Elle est là. —C'est beau. —Isma. —Le mensonge. —Le silence (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), pp. 11–37.Google Scholar All references to the play will be to this edition and pages will be indicated immediately following quotation. All translations of quotations from Sarraute's work and from other sources are my own.
8. Rykner, Arnaud, Théâtres du nouveau roman (Paris: Corti, 1988), pp. 73 & 76.Google Scholar Rykner also quotes Lucette Finas (p. 73) as recommending Elle est là as the best possible introduction to Sarraute's writing as a whole.
9. ‘H2. she's not here any more. HI. Who? H2. Nothing … I would have liked to … But she's already left … Yes, the person who …’
10. ‘H2. She's got her own little idea in there … There's an idea there. Hiding. And just now, ours, our own idea … was snapped up as it went by … shut up in there, a defenceless prisoner, strangled in silence, in secret …’
11. See, for instance, Lacan, Jacques, ‘La direction de la cure’, in Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 622Google Scholar; and my own more detail ed discussion of the links between metaphor and the unconscious of Sarraute's text in Nathalie Sarraute.
12. Lacan, Jacques, ‘Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir’, in Écrits, p. 801.Google Scholar
13. Donald Davidson compares the operation of metaphor with what Heraclitus said of the Delphic oracle: ‘It does not say and it does not hide, it intimates.’ (‘What metaphors mean’, in On Metaphor, ed. Sacks, Sheldon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 44).Google Scholar We are reminded of the way in which, for psychoanalysis, the process of concealing and revealing produces an erotic effect, as Roland Barthes points out: ‘L'endroit le plus érotique d'un corps n'est-il pas là où le vêtement bâilie? Dans la perversion (qui est le régime du plaisir textuel) … c'est l'intermittence, comme l'a bien dit la psychanalyse, qui est érotique … c'est ce scintillement même qui séduit, ou encore: la mise en scène d'une apparition-disparition.’ (Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 19. (‘Is not the most erotic site of the body to be found where the clothes gape open? In all perversion (which dictates textual pleasure) … it is intermittency that is erotic, as psychoanalysis has shown … what is seductive is precisely this flickering, this enactment of appearance and disappearance.’) For Lacan, language and, in particular, metaphor functions in precisely this way, ‘covering up’ the absent signified of the mother's body.
14. Rykner, , Théâtres du nouveau roman, p. 73.Google Scholar
15. ‘turn on the taps of the gas-cooker in her office … or start a fire … Fake a burglary … Creep up behind her with a piece of rope or a scarf … Or else a dagger or an axe …’
16. ‘You know, that's all we're asking for, free, frank discussion. Freedom. Equality. Fraternity. Fraternally, in all equality, without reference to even the slightest difference between us, in complete and utter freedom; we want to have a discussion, a contest of ideas …’
17. Harrison, Nicholas, Circles of Censorship. Censorship and its Metaphors in French History, Literature, and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18. ‘her idea is threatening by the very fact it exists … yes, let's be frank about it: the truth is … it's unbearable, it must be brought out, eradicated, destroyed … it can't be left there … it's a dangerous virus … we must disinfect … cleanse …’
19. ‘They might say that what we want to obtain is quite simply a ‘recantation’ followed by a ‘conversion’. We're not the first …’
20. ‘H2. If she were my wife, there'd still be some hope on that score … where ideas are concerned, it's just like being married, you know; up till now, usually women follow … What's more, you know, it appears that there are some countries … take America, for example … over there, behaviour like hers could be grounds for divorce. Oh, yes, for mental cruelty. The law makes provision for that.’
21. ‘H2. I can't help it … just the sight of her … sometimes, I find the way she looks or smiles disarming … there's something nice about her, something …’
22. ‘The vast majority of words that designate women are violently pejorative and have hateful connotations. Women are inherently ugly, both physically and morally, which is paradoxical, to say the least, in a society that requires them, above all, to be beautiful.’ (Yaguello, Marina, Les Mots et les ferames (Paris: Payot, 1978), p. 153).Google Scholar
23. ‘Oh, because I don't think … Ever? I swallow everything like a goose. Not like you … you ‘thinky2 … You ‘know’. Your ‘truths’ are not ‘swallowed’, they force themselves upon you …’
24. ‘I agree. Let her keep her idea. Let her incubate it. Let her nurse it. Let her fatten it up … I don't mind …’
25. ‘H2. No, you haven't got it at all. You'd do better to give up. H3. All right, I give up.’
26. See Phillips, , Nathalie Sanaute, pp. 116–24Google Scholar, where I argue that the cliché itself is closely associated in Sarraute's writing with the feminine-maternal.
27. Ibid, p. 124 & Chapter 5, note 30.
28. See ibid, Part 2: ‘The Fairy-Tale Metaphor’, for further evidence of a castrating mother in Sarraute's texts.
29. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Infantile Genital Organization’, in Freud on Sexuality, The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 311, note 1.Google Scholar
30. ‘H2. So there it is. And I'll have to live with that near me, hiding in there, crouching in there … knowing that it's there, there all the time, in a comer … like the idea of death, present every single moment, following you around, whatever you do …’
31. See Bataille, Georges, L'Érotisme (Paris: Minuit, 1957).Google Scholar
32. ‘H3. I saw you pushing. Battering away hard … And then, it seemed to me, just at that moment, that she began to give way. I was certain that she was opening up wide to let the truth in … To let it penetrate everywhere … H2. Everywhere? But not into that safe corner where her little idea was hiding … I'm sure that, by now, it's already come out of its hiding place … that it's attacking the big, fine truths that we've accumulated and left behind us … it's covering them with slime, coiling itself around them, squeezing them … (Groans.)’
33. Ob-scena: ‘Off the scene’.
34. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J-B., The Language of Psychoanalysis, translated by Smith, Donald (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1985), p. 298.Google Scholar See, also, Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude (London: Virago Press, 1988).Google Scholar
35. I have argued this at greater length in relation to all of Sarraute's writing in Nathalie Sanaute, especially in Chapters 7 & 8.
36. See Laplanche, & Pontalis, , The Language of Psychoanalysis, pp. 298–9Google Scholar and Melanie Klein, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, ‘On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt’ and ‘Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant’, in Envy and Gratitude, pp. 1–24, 25–42 and 61–93 respectively.