‘Sarraute’s fourth novel takes us back to the no plot, unnamed characters of her earlier novels. In this novel, there is not even a central narrator. Various people talk. The plot, such as it is, concerns a novel called, of course, Les Fruits d’or (The Golden Fruits). We know little about this book, as regards its author and contents, except that it is a novel by someone called Bréhier. What we do know is how it is received and this changing reception over a period of time. Sarraute takes a group of unnamed people, who comment on the novel. Not only does she satirise their attitudes, they have different views of what the work is, so that we are unable to determine what it really is about. At one point eighteen different people, who are not named and impossible to identify, give their differing views on the novel but their views tend to the vague – it’s funny, it’s a great work of fiction – without actually why it is great or, indeed, what it is about. Of course, there is little basis for their views, except to show how smart they are. When the novel becomes popular, these same critics turn on the author who clearly stole his ideas and that his work is certainly not ground-breaking. And then it is forgotten. Despite the disembodied voices it works well both as a satire on critics as well as a fascinating approach with a book as the hero.’ — The Modern Novel
‘When Nathalie Sarraute published her first novel, Portrait of a Man Unknown, in 1948, Sartre, in an Introduction, placed her with such authors of “entirely negative works” as Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, and the Gide of Les Faux-Monnayeurs, and called the whole genre “anti-novel.” In the Fifties, the anti-novel became the New Novel and Sarraute its originator. All these classifications are somewhat artificial and, if applied to Mme. Sarraute, difficult to account for. She has herself pointed out her ancestors, Dostoevsky (especially the Notes from Underground) and Kafka in whom she sees Dostoevsky’s legitimate heir. But this much is true: She wrote at least her first pair of novels, the Portrait and Martereau (1953), against the assumptions of the classical novel of the nineteenth century, where author and reader move in a common world of well-known entities and where easily identifiable characters can be understood through the qualities and possessions bestowed upon them. “Since then,” she writes in her book of essays, The Age of Suspicion, “[this character] has lost everything; his ancestors, his carefully built house, filled from cellar to garret with a variety of objects, down to the tiniest gewgaw, his sources of income and his estates, his clothes, his body, his face…his personality and, frequently, even his name.” Man as such is or has become unknown so that it matters little to the novelist whom he chooses as his “hero” and less into what kind of surrounding he puts him. And since “the character occupied the place of honor between reader and novelist,” since he was “the object of their common devotion,” this arbitrariness of choice indicates a serious break-down in communication.
‘In order to recover some of this lost common ground, Nathalie Sarraute very ingeniously took the nineteenth-century novel, supposedly the common cultural heritage of author and reader, as her point of departure and began by choosing her “characters” from this richly populated world. She fished them right out of Balzac and Stendhal, stripped them of all those secondary qualities—customs, morals, possessions—by which they could be dated, and retained only those bare essentials by which we remember them: avarice—the stingy father living with his homely, penny-pinching spinster daughter, the plot turning about her numerous illnesses, fancied or real, as in Portrait; hatred and boredom—the closely-knit family unit which still survives in France, the “dark entirely closed world” of mother, father, daughter, and nephew in Martereau, where the plot turns about the “stranger” who swindles the father out of the money he had wanted to save from the income tax collector; even the hero of the later work, The Planetarium, personified ambition (the plot is a familiar one describing his ruthless “rise in social space”).
‘Sarraute has cracked open the “smooth and hard” surface of these traditional characters (“nothing but well-made dolls”) in order to discover the endless vibrations of moods and sentiments which, though hardly perceptible in the macrocosm of the outward world, are like the tremors of a never-ending series of earthquakes in the microcosm of the self. This inner life—what she calls “the psychological”—is no less hidden from “the surface world” of appearances than the physiological life process that goes on in the inner organs beneath the skin of bodily appearance. Neither shows itself of its own accord. And just as the physiological process announces itself naturally only through the symptoms of a disease (the tiny pimple, to use her own image, which is the sign of the plague), but needs a special instrument—the surgical knife or X rays—to become visible, so these psychological movements cause the outbreak of symptoms only in case of great disaster and need the novelist’s magnifying lenses of suspicion to be explored. To choose the intimacy of family life, this “semidarkness” behind closed curtains with its Strindbergian overtones, as a laboratory for this kind of psychological vivi-section, instead of the couch, was a sheer stroke of genius, for here “the fluctuating frontier that [ordinarily] separates conversation from sub-conversation” breaks down most frequently so that the inner life of the self can explode onto the surface in what is commonly called “scenes.” No doubt these scenes are the only distraction in the infinite boredom of a world entirely bent upon itself, and yet they also constitute the life-beat of a hell in which we are condemned to going “eternally round and round,” where all appearances are penetrated but no firm ground is ever reached. Behind the lies and the pretenses, there is nothing but the vibrations of an ever-present irritation—a “chaos in which a thousand possibilities clash,” a morass where every step makes you sink deeper into perdition.’ — Hannah Arendt
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Further
Nathalie Sarraute @ Wikipedia
Novel and Reality: A Lecture by Nathalie Sarraute
‘The Golden Fruits’ @ goodreads
Books: Mayhem & Manners
Being Beside One’s Self
Drawing on the Work of Nathalie Sarraute
Sarraute, Nathalie (Vol. 4)
The relationship between Artistic Time and Space in Natalie Sarraute’s “Golden Fruits”
A Conversation With Nathalie Sarraute
LES FRUITS D’OR EST UN ROMAN EMBLÉMATIQUE ET FASCINANT
‘The Golden Fruits’ @ Internet Archive
‘The Golden Fruits’ @ Anna’s Archive
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Extras
Nathalie Sarraute “The text is always between life and death”
Nathalie Sarraute et le Nouveau roman en 1969
Un siècle d’écrivains N.SARRAUTE
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Interview
from Exquisite Corpse
Do you see any sort of difference between women’s writing and that of men?
No, I don’t see any. I don’t feel that Emily Brontë is a woman’s writing, among women who truly wrote well. I don’t see the difference. One says first of all, “That’s what it is to be a woman,” and then after one decides that is feminine. Henry James was always working in the minute details, in his lacework; or Proust, much more still than most women. I think that if women like Emily Brontë wanted to keep a pseudonym, they were entirely right. One cannot find a manner of writing upon which it would be possible to stick the label of feminine or masculine; it’s writing pure and simple, an admirable writing, that’s all. There are subjects in writing that are very feminine, which are lived, the women who write on feminine subjects like maternity, that’s completely different.
Let’s talk about cigarettes. Have you always been a smoker?
Alas! I shouldn’t smoke, but I don’t smoke a lot. Six or seven cigarettes a day. That’s still too much. I have a very bad habit. So, in order not to smoke, I’ve taken to holding the cigarette in my mouth while I work. I don’t light it. That gives me the same effect. Because I forget. I feel something and I forget if it’s lit. Since I smoke very weak cigarettes, and I don’t swallow the smoke, I have just as much the impression of smoking even if it’s not for real.
As if it enters into the game, in effect.
That’s right. It’s a gesture, something one feels.
Could we speak about the conception of some of your books? The Golden Fruits (1963), for example, did that come out of an experience with the literary world?
Not at all. I take no part in the literary world, I’ve never gone to the literary cocktail parties. It has to do with an inner experience. It has to do with a kind of terrorism around a work of art that is lauded to the skies and which we cannot approach. Where there is a sort of curtain of stipulated opinions that separates you from that work. Either we adore it or else we detest it, it’s impossible to approach it; above all in the Parisian milieu, even without going to the cocktail parties, even in the press, there reigns a kind of terrorism of general adulation, and you don’t have the right to approach it and have a contrary opinion. And then it falls; at that moment you no longer have the right to say that it’s good. That’s what I wanted to show, this life of a work of art. And this work of art, what is it? I’d have to approach it, but that’s impossible. And then all that we find there, all that we look for in a book, and which has nothing to do with its literary value.
There is often a multitude of voices in that book.
It’s like that in most of my books that come later. There are all these voices, without our needing to take an interest in the characters that speak them. It doesn’t much matter.
Have there been processes that repeat themselves, either in the conception or in the elaboration of the novels?
Each time it didn’t interest me to continue doing the same thing. So, I would try to extend my domain to areas that were always at the same level of these interior movements, to go into regions where I hadn’t yet gone.
Have you ever been surprised by the fate of one of your books?
No. I was more pessimistic at the start. I really thought that it would not be at all understood.
You’ve said that the nouveau roman movement helped you as a means to get read. But did the idea of belonging to a movement, so-called, constrain you as well?
No. And none of those who belonged, who were classed in this movement, have written things that resemble each other, whatever it may be. They’ve remained completely different from each other, and have continued each one in his own path.
Your essays were among the first to speak of concerns common to the group. Have you ever felt any sort of responsibility to this movement?
Not at all. I had reflected upon these questions about the novel before the others, because the others were twenty years younger than me. I haven’t changed my way of thinking since my first books, I haven’t budged. I could repeat exactly the same things I said when I wrote The Age of Suspicion. It is a deep conviction that the forms of the novel must change, that it’s necessary there be a continual transformation of the forms, in all the arts—in painting, in music, in poetry, and in the novel. That we cannot return to the forms of the nineteenth century and set another society in them, it doesn’t matter which. So, that interested Alain Robbe-Grillet; he’s the one who did a lot to launch the nouveau roman. He was working at Les Editions de Minuit, he wanted to republish Tropisms, which had been out of print. It came out at the same time as Jealousy, and at that moment in Le Monde a critic had written, “That is what we can call the nouveau roman,” though he detested it. It was a name that suited Robbe-Grillet quite well. He said, “That’s magnificent, it’s what we needed.” He wanted to launch a movement. Me, I’m incapable of launching a movement; I’ve always been very solitary.
Were there ever any meetings of the group?
Never. Nor discussions. It had nothing in common with the surrealists, where there was a group, a leader, André Breton, nothing of the kind. We never saw each other.
How did he find all the writers to bring them together as a movement?
It was Les Editions de Minuit. Robbe-Grillet found Michel Butor, who had written Passage de Milan, which they published. He found Claude Simon. Robert Pinget as well. Robbe-Grillet and Jérôme Lindon, who is the director of Les Editions de Minuit, they worked together. Like that they formed a sort of group.
Have there been other experimental literary movements that have interested you?
No, I passed them by entirely. The surrealist movement, for example, that might have interested me, but it didn’t at all.
What about the Oulipo movement in the 1960s, which included Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino?
I liked what Queneau was doing a lot. My first book, Tropisms, appeared in the same collection as his book, The Bark Tree, with the publisher Robert Denoël. I quite liked The Bark Tree.
In Between Life and Death (1968), your novel on literary creation, you say that no work is useless, that sooner or later it must give fruit, that it suffices to pick it up again later at the right moment. Have you had that experience, of reworking a text you’d written?
No. I meant that every effort we make always serves for something, all the same. There are certain texts that were projected for Tropisms that I brought out later in Portrait of a Man Unknown.
Which of your books do you prefer?
That’s very difficult to say. I don’t reread them. And sometimes I tell myself, “But it seems to me I’ve already done something like that,” and I can’t recall where.
Has one of the books satisfied you more than the others?
It’s all very difficult. There are always doubts, in regard to what I wanted to do.
Even the doubts, have they played a constructive role sometimes?
I don’t know. I think it’s very painful, and that it’s better not to have any. I envy those who don’t have any, I envy them a lot. They are happy people.
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Book
Nathalie Sarraute The Golden Fruits
Braziller
‘A novel about a new novel and its rites of initiation into the self-hallowed circles of the French literati. Recently published, The Golden Fruits must qualify for the waves of adulation, blind devotion and occasional heretical dissent that constitute the book-worship of a self-styled literary in-group. Not that the novel is the protagonist struggling to assert its worth in this high-spun story–it hasn’t the chance, as the literary vultures make it their own symbolic property, coveting the office of leading critic, whose judgment has only to be well-received by the group to be considered right and “”brilliant””. As the idol of the moment, the book rises and falls in the fluid esteem of its believers as, and all “”humble nostalgics”” must be crushed, perhaps just another novel, another faulty imitation of things past. The social struggle to be the one who really understands the “”imponderables, iridescences, and irisations”” in the novel becomes a satiric comment on literary values. In the end only one loner stands by the fallen God, claiming a resurrection in time and faddism. Mme. Sarraute, member of the French avant-garde, has created a brilliant contrapuntal exercise in conversation, judgment, and social uncertainty– and perhaps a slice at “”Littrachure”” itself. She has now to stand for the same critical nonsense she has so well exposed.’ — Kirkus Reviews
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Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. ** jay. Hi, jay. Thanks. I really liked seeing how many degrees by which a representation of someone can be inaccurate. I’m good, you too, I trust. ** _Black_Acrylic, Worth a trip to Vegas, for sure. ** Bernard Welt, ‘Z’ is quite powerful. I’d forgotten how brutal it is. I haven’t seen ‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ yet. Its theater time here was a blip, so I’m waiting for a stream that works over here. I’m not envious, strangely enough. The only thing I remember about ‘Caligula’ is the spa/baths scene. The baths scene in ‘Satyricon’ its pretty great too. ** Carsten, The anti-fascism in ‘Z’ makes the anti-fascism in ‘OBAA’ seem quite non-overt. We seem to be inured against storms here in mid-country Paris. I can’t remember us ever having one that qualifies as a storm. Growing up in LA with earthquakes and fires and so on, it’s interesting to live in a city that seems immune to natural calamities, other than the Seine overflowing maybe once every couple of decades. Guest-post will be most welcome whenever your time permits. ** Måns BT, Hi, Måns! Yes, indeed. I’ve been up to this and that and, as usual, lots of organizing ‘RT’ screenings, which will continue to swamp my days for another few months. I’m actually going to write to the Zita people today and try to get them to confirm that March date. We might be able to host a screening in Copenhagen if it’s around that time, so I hope I can get a confirmation. No, I don’t know Elis Monteverde Burrau. I’ll look for anything by him in English. I just looked him up, and I guess he’s an actor too? Sure, great if he wanted to be part of the Q&A. Thanks so much, pal. What are you up to these days? xo. ** Steve, Jedward were more -10s era. I think they had some pop hits. Here they are performing at Eurovision in 2011. It’s worth the look. I think they should’ve won haha. I’ve read about ‘The Blue Elephant’. Ok, I’ll pursue, thanks. ** darbz (⊙ _ ⊙ ), I’ve certainly been known to misconstrue. Misconstruing makes life interesting? Oh, ok, gotcha about your mom and the rich people. There’s this artist Sophie Calle who pretended to be a maid and took photos of rich people’s private stuff and exhibited them and got pretty famous. I’m not sure how she got away with it. Urgh, about the court date. There’s a cool video art piece by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto where the great artist Mike Kelley plays the ‘Kappa’. Here’s a piece of it. Never seen a statue of myself, no. Too bad there’s not a transgressive writers wax museum. ** Hugo, Hey, Hugo. Wow, thanks for watching ‘PGL’. It is funny. We wanted the humor to be kind of hidden in the general dark, sincere tone so people would have to find it. But if you read the script, it reads almost like a comedy. Anyway, thank you kindly, sir. Well, I’d certainly be interested to read that graphic novel if that’s any incentive. That does seem like a really good idea. All the best to you too! ** HaRpEr //, Fingers very crossed (about the TV possibility among other things). The definitive MJ depiction definitely has yet to be realised. Knausgaard is kind of Hemingway type, it’s true. There’s this writer I know who has recently gone to the dark Alt Right side who did this post on social media the other day where he was raving about that new Knausgaard novel and concluded with the statement ‘Could it be that the time of the straight white heterosexual writer has finally arrived?’ Like, whoa, as opposed to how it’s been in the past 15 centuries? ** Steeqhen, I had a short period of being kind of fascinated by Jedward. They were so insanely eager to please. Well, I’m glad you’re not stressed about going to work. Maybe the job structure and preoccupation will dispel the demons? ** Nicholas., Hey, big N! How’s it? My birthday passed with barely a mark left, which is how I like it. But thank you. When’s yours? Take care, buddy. ** Uday, I think it’s safe to say that will be EJ’s only appearance on this blog unless some guest-poster sneaks him in. Actually, I’ve seen every Gregg Araki film except for the last couple. He wanted me to play a role in one of his films, but I was too shy. And not just in movies for sure. ** Okay. I’ve been wanting to throw a spotlight on the book above for years because it’s one of my favorite novels and my favorite by the great Sarraute. But there was nothing online about it, and it was too o.o.p./pricey to afford. But I checked again the other day, and it’s now downloadable from Anna’s Archive and Internet Archive, so you could get it if you want, and I can/could finally turn on my spotlight. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 