Spotlight on … Nathalie Sarraute Do You Hear Them? (1972)

 

‘There’s probably never been a more serious book about the giggles than Nathalie Sarraute’s Do You Hear Them?, first published in 1972 and newly re-released in English. The sounds start off lovely enough: “Fresh laughter. Carefree laughter. Silvery laughter. Tiny bells. Tiny drops. Fountains. Gentle water-falls. Twittering of birds…” and “clear, limpid laughter… living water, springs, little brooks running through flowering meadows.” But there are also “long peals of laughter like thin lashes that sting and coil up”; “idiotic titters”; and “sharp peals” that “permeate every recess.”

‘That last phrase should be remembered, for it well represents the author’s narrative treatment throughout this work. Considered a key member of the Nouveau Roman, or New Novel, movement, Sarraute (1900-1999) spoke and wrote clearly about her strategies of narrative recess-permeation; in a forward to Tropisms, her first of 17 books, she described her authorial focus as those “inner moments” that “slip through us in the frontiers of consciousness in the form of indefinable, extremely rapid sensations.”

‘Here those sensations are given life through sound. Do you hear them, the title asks? Do you hear those children giggling? The question comes from the children’s father, who sits a floor below with an old friend, attempting to meditate on a recently acquired work of pre-Columbian art, a heavy, puma-like animal of rough stone that “would deserve to figure in a museum.” The father is insulted, intellectually derailed, infuriated at these children of his—these “overfed babies” with access to the best cultural education but who “[turn] up their noses at art treasures” for the comfort of comics and television. Here’s one remarkable passage, delivered with the dizzy poetics on which the whole novel floats:

Alone now, leaning toward each other, the two friends turn in every direction the stone set before them on the low table… the two misers tenderly stroke this precious chest, this casket in which there has been deposited, in which is locked up for safekeeping, preserved for all time, something that calms them, reassures them, ensures them security… Something permanent, immutable… An obstacle set on the path of time, a motionless center around which time, arrested, is revolving, forming circles… They hold on to that, seaweed, swaying grasses clinging to the cliff…

‘The most intriguing thing about Do You Hear Them? may be that Sarraute has taken one simple scene—a father’s object fetishization, his children’s in-character childishness, the resulting conflict—and fashioned something wonderfully strange and complex. Very little else happens in the novel except this single scene, played again and again from different angles and with different colorizations and through different voices, the author handling, flipping and turning the story like a Rubik’s Cube. (This novel, intent on showing multiple sides in something of a single view, does in fact seem Cubist.)

‘Thus the reader is given revolving points of view, so that the book’s anger and its sympathies are continually shifting among the characters. When the father marches upstairs, for instance, we are told that the children are “going to stop, cower in corners, scared to death, startled nymphs caught unawares by a satyr, little pigs dancing when all of a sudden, howling, his great teeth bared, in comes the big bad wolf.” But through another lens these cowerers hold the power—”One single invisible ray emitted by them can turn this heavy stone into a hollow, flabby thing,” and to counter the father’s fuming stair-march we’re given this startlingly poetic image: “they felt clinging to them the threads they make him secrete, that slaver with which he tries to envelop them, the slender lasso that he throws at them from behind… and they stiffened, they withdrew violently, they went upstairs, dragging him behind them, giving him hard knocks, his head bumping against the steps…”

‘Sarraute’s elliptical prose can be exhausting and frustrating, but it will ultimately reward the reader who can keep time with the book’s unusual rhythm and accept its plotlessness. The ideas and emotions the author casts a fog over—matters of taste, childhood fear, disdain for the next generation’s future—remain surprisingly intact when the strange novel is over; the fog clears, and the reader sees more clearly the characters Sarraute has created. While the book includes some simple, declarative statements—”They hold art in contempt,” says the father; “He holds a stopwatch on all our gestures,” says one of the children—the reader senses that the richness of the book is in its faint, poetic, quickly passing passages, such as: “I believe that it’s time… They rise… and inside him something breaks off and falls…”

‘The author’s commitment to locating these “inner moments” feels, in the end, worth the labor of both writer and reader. The moments may have slipped through the consciousness of Sarraute’s characters, but they have not slipped through hers, nor ours.’ — Stephen Schenkenberg, rain taxi

 

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Further

‘Do You Hear Them?’ @ goodreads
‘Do You Hear Them?’ @ Winston’s Dad
A Variation on Conversation in Nathalie Sarraute’s Do You Hear Them?
The Voice of Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute by Hannah Arendt
A Conversation With Nathalie Sarraute
Painting Nathalie Sarraute
Claude Sarraute: A Disobedient Daughter
Nathalie Sarraute: Between Genders and Genres
Desire in Language: Nathalie Sarraute’s Theatre of Interpellation
Nathalie Sarraute, The Art of Fiction No. 115
Download ‘Do You Hear Them?’ @ zLibrary
Buy ‘Do You Hear Them?’

 

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Extras

Le Nouveau Roman et Nathalie Sarraute

Tombe de Nathalie Sarraute au cimetière de Chérence

Nathalie Sarraute “Le texte est toujours entre la vie et la mort”

Radioscopie : Nathalie Sarraute (1989)

INVITEE : SARRAUTE

 

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Interview
from Exquisite Corpse

 

In your books you have a very fine ear, for the interior voices as well as for the development of the text. Another domain of listening, of course, is music. Do you listen much to music?

I like music a lot, almost too much. Sometimes so much even that it gives me a sort of feeling of anguish. But I haven’t listened a lot, partly because of that. It’s quite curious, the effect it has on me. And precisely in the works I prefer, it’s a sort of anguish that I never have from painting, which always gives me a feeling of eternity, security, peace. Of immobility. I love painting a great deal. Music at times reaches something that is almost superhuman, divine. One listens to Mozart and says, It’s not possible that a human being did that.

Were you ever tempted to write another sort of literature, such as the fantastic?

Not at all. Because each instant of the real world is so fantastic in itself, with all that’s happening inside it, that it’s all I want.

At the time of your first book, Tropisms, what was your rapport with the literary world?

I didn’t know anyone, not a single writer. I didn’t meet Sartre until the war. After the Liberation, he wrote the preface for my first novel, Portrait of a Man Unknown (1947).

How did you arrive at the form of those first short texts?

The first one came out just as it is in the book. I felt it like that. Some of the others I worked on a lot.

And why did you choose the name Tropisms?

It was a term that was in the air, it came from the sciences, from biology, botany. I thought it fit the interior movement that I wanted to show. So when I had to come up with a title in order to show it to publishers, I took that.

How did you know what they were at the time, these tropisms? How did you know when you’d found one?

I didn’t always know, I might discover it in the writing. I didn’t try to define them, they just came out like that.

The tropisms often seem to work through a poetic sensibility.

I’ve always thought that there is no border, no separation, between poetry and prose. Michaux, is he prose or poetry? Or Francis Ponge? It’s written in prose, and yet it’s poetry, because it’s the sensation that is carried across by way of the language.

With the tropisms, did you feel that it was fiction? Did you wonder what to call it?

I didn’t ask myself such questions, really. I knew it seemed impossible to me to write in the traditional forms. They seemed to have no access to what we experienced. If we enclosed that in characters, personalities, a plot, we were overlooking everything that our senses were perceiving, which is what interested me. One had to take hold of the instant, by enlarging it, developing it. That’s what I tried to do in Tropisms.

Did you sense at the time that was the direction your work would go?

I felt that a path was opening before me, and which excited me. As if I’d found my own terrain, upon which I could move forward, where no one had gone prior to me. Where I was in charge.

Were you already wondering how to use that in other contexts such as a novel?

Not at all. I thought only of writing short texts like that. I couldn’t imagine it possible to write a long novel. And after, it was so difficult finding these texts, each time it was like starting a new book all over again, that I told myself perhaps it would be interesting to take two semblances of characters who were entirely commonplace as in Balzac, a miser and his daughter, and to show all these tropisms that develop inside of them. That’s how I wrote Portrait of a Man Unknown.

In effect, one could say that all or most tropisms we might find in people could also be found in a single person.

Absolutely. I’m convinced that everyone has it all in himself, at that level. On the exterior level of action, I don’t for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms, Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.

The tropisms would seem to enter the domain of the social sciences as well.

Yes. I’ve become more accessible, besides. It used to be entirely closed to people. For a long time people didn’t get inside there, they couldn’t manage to really penetrate these books.

Why do you think that is?

Because it’s difficult. Because I plunge in directly, without giving any reference points. One doesn’t know where one is, nor who is who. I speak right away of the essential things, and that’s very difficult. In addition, people have the habit of looking for the framework of the traditional novel—characters, plots—and they don’t find any, they’re lost.

That brings up the question of how to read these books. You do without plot, for example.

There is a plot, if you like, but it’s not the usual plot. It is the plot made up of these movements between human beings. If one takes an interest in what I do, one follows a sort of movement of dramatic actions which takes place at the level of the tropisms and of the dialogue. It’s a different dramatic action than that of the traditional novel.

You’ve said that you prefer a relatively continuous reading of your books. But all reading is a somewhat fragmentary experience. With a traditional novel, when one picks it up again to continue reading, there are the characters and the plot to situate oneself, where one left off. In your books, do you see other ways of keeping track of where one was?

I don’t know. I don’t know how one reads it. I can’t put myself in the reader’s place, to know what he’s looking for, what he sees. I have no idea. I never think of him when I’m writing. Otherwise, I’d be writing things that suit him and please him. And for years he didn’t like it, he wasn’t interested.

Even after several books you weren’t discouraged?

No, not at all. I was always supported, all the same, from the start. With Portrait of a Man Unknown, I was supported by Sartre. At the time, Sartre was the only person who was doing something about literature, he had a review. My husband as well was tremendously supportive, from the very start. He was a marvelous reader for me, he always encouraged me a great deal. That was a lot. It suffices to have one reader, who realizes what you want to do. So, it was a great solitude, if you like, but deep down inside it wasn’t solitude. Sartre was impassioned by Portrait of a Man Unknown. So, that was very encouraging. Then when Martereau (1953) was done, Marcel Arland was very excited and had it published with Gallimard. He was editing the Nouvelle Revue Française at the time. I always had a few enthusiastic readers. When Tropisms came out, I received an enthusiastic letter from Max Jacob, who at the time was very admired as a poet. I can’t say it was a total solitude.

Did Sartre or others try to claim you as an existentialist?

No, not at all. He had published the beginning of Portrait of a Man Unknown in his review, Les Temps Modernes, and then he wrote the preface because he wanted to. And he told me, “Above all, they shouldn’t think it’s a novel that was influenced by existentialism.” Which couldn’t be the case, because Tropisms came out almost the same time as Nausea.

It was rather another existentialism.

He was entirely conscious of that. And very honestly he said, “It is existence itself.”

You’ve said that it was during your law studies that you became attracted to the spoken language, which became your written language in effect. How did that opening come about?

When I was working in law I didn’t practice much, but I prepared probate conferences, which were literary; one said them, it’s a spoken style. I’d worked those conferences a lot, they went well. And so, I think that tore me away from the written language, which I’d always been subjected to since childhood by the very strict French homework. It gave me a kind of impetus toward the freer language, which is spoken French. It did play some role.

The language seems lighter, there’s a greater facility in the flow of the writing.

That facility demands an enormous amount of work. What a job!

Did you look for models elsewhere?

No, I never thought of comparisons. They were things that I felt spontaneously, really. It wasn’t taken from literature but from life rather.

Do you imagine other ways of writing about the tropisms?

No, because for me form and content are inseparable. So, that would be something else. If the form is different, it will be another sensation. And for this genre of sensation, it’s the only form.

Do you feel there are other writers who have found certain lessons in the domain of tropisms?

I don’t feel I have any imitators. I think it’s a domain that is too much my own.

Would it be possible to use the tropisms in a more traditional novel?

I don’t see how. What interest would there be? Because in a more traditional novel, one shows characters, with personality traits, while the tropisms are entirely minute things that take place in a few instants inside of anybody at all. What could that bring to the description of a character? On the contrary.

As if at the moment of the tropisms, the character vanishes.

He disintegrates, before the extraordinary complexity of the tropisms inside of him.

Which is what happens in Martereau.

Martereau disintegrates. And in Portrait of a Man Unknown, the old man, the father, becomes so complex that the one who’s looking to see inside of him abandons his quest, and at that moment we end up with a character out of the traditional novel, who ruins everything. In Martereau, it’s the character out of the traditional novel who disintegrates at the end.

Yet in The Planetarium (1959), it seems that more than ever you’re using traditional characters.

On purpose. Since they are semblances, it’s called The Planetarium, and is made up of false stars, in imitation of the real sky. We are always for each other a star, like those we see in a planetarium, diminished, reduced. So, they see each other as characters, but behind these characters that they see, that they name, there is the whole infinite world of the tropisms, which I tried to show in there.

Considering the interior nature of your writing, has it sometimes been difficult to remain at such depths?

No, what is difficult is being on the surface. One gets bored there. There are a lot of great and admirable models who block your way. And once I rise to the surface, to do something on the surface, it’s easy, but it’s very tedious and disappointing.

 

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Book

Nathalie Sarraute Do You Hear Them?
‎Dalkey Archive Press

‘The setting of Nathalie Sarraute’s Do You Hear Them? is a dinner conversation between a father and his old friend about a recently acquired pre-Columbian statue. As they discuss the merits of the piece and art in general, the father hears his children upstairs giggling. This childish mirth is barbaric and devastating to the father, for in their laughter he hears them mocking his “old-fashioned” viewpoint and the energy he wastes by collecting lifeless objects. In his mind, they have no respect for what has been of greatest importance in his life.’ — Dalkey Archive Press

Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David, Hi. Thank you for the X card! Saw it on FB. It cemented the holidays in my … heart. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Oh, yes, that MK cover is very nice. I’m actually having a coffee with Frieze’s editor this weekend unless the sudden travel restrictions against UK people blockades him in London. Point is, I’m hoping he’ll bring me the issue. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. ‘ISAW’, yes, I agree. Lili Taylor used to be the queen of the indies. I wonder what happened. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, fuck knows if those funders stepped back. Getting a straight answer from our producer is like looking for a vegan McDonalds at the bottom of the ocean. I either have to see ‘Crowd’ tonight or tomorrow, or I lose out. I’m trying to figure out how and when this morning. I liked ‘Detransition, Baby’ too. Big, excellent surprise, that book. How does reverse psychology work? I mean, if you nickname someone who’s skinny Fat Joe, does that make him put special effort into staying thin so his name will be incongruous, or does it make him think, ‘That’s my name, so I guess I should grow into it?’ Enjoy your Anita time today! Love in the form of a 3D scanning device that looks really charismatic like a magic wand, G. ** Tosh Berman, I am in agreement with you, sir! ** geymm, Hi. Ah, I see. My impression is that quite a few blog viewers do that with the escorts and especially the slaves posts. I think I’m like the opposite, which is just as odd, I guess. Whatever works, whatever feeds you. IOW, no, you don’t sound completely nuts to possibly completely nuts me. I didn’t watch the ‘Kevin’ film last night, no. I thought I should keep watching ‘Get Back’ because I kind of stalled out on it, so my plan was to watch it then ‘Kevin’, but I forgot how long those ‘GB’ episodes are, and suddenly my night was over. Soon, though. I wish Ezra Miller hadn’t turned into a celebrity/Marvel franchise actor, but he’s still youngish. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I didn’t think ‘American Psycho’ seemed like that when it came out. I was pretty on board with it. I should rewatch it too and see how it suits today. I haven’t noticed any supply issues here or heard that there are any. Things are getting worse here, for sure, but so far there’s just new travel restrictions and the necessity of getting a booster shot or getting your vax pass taken away, which would be hell. ** Brian, Hey, Brian. It is definitely pleasant to allow an emo farm to wander about in one’s imagination. And, hey, we don’t know 100% that it’s not real. Maybe I should check google street view for the Manchester area. Good news about your easy booster experience. Mine’s locked down for January 5th, the soonest available. Now that it’s a requirement here, the websites are crashing from the hordes of desperate booster seekers. You’re almost making we want to watch ‘West Side Story’, so maybe I will, least on my next long plane flight. The mesh of Spielberg/Kubrick in ‘A.I.’ is kind of quite interesting. Of course Spielberg had to turn the ending into a sentimental thing, but there are stretches where his dedication to trying to be Kubrickian are curious and successful even to some degree. Bye bye final! Congrats, sir! I like your slate, of course, and honored by my part in it. Me, I have work to do on the new Gisele piece and arranging the little Xmas Buche-ette feast with friends for Sunday. And like that there. Breathe deep and easy all day long. ** Bill, Hi. Her work is very uneven, imo. ‘ISAW’ is quite good. Yeah, see, I’m totally into the idea of immortality. For me. Well, and for select friends who are similarly inclined. Or at least another hundred years or so. So much to do! Huh, I’ll look into that Tsai Ming-Liang. Hey, I’m riveted by ‘Get Back’ which is nothing but nothing much going on. ** Right. I haven’t spotlight the great Nathalie Sarraute in a while, so I’ve done so. Back when I was on my marathon Nouveau Roman reading kick in the 80s, the novel I’ve spotlit today was her most fascinating, and, at the same time, most vexing one to me. Hot combo, if you like that sort of thing. See you tomorrow.