‘With the exception of the early Tropismes, all of Nathalie Sarraute’s books are now available in English. Thanks are due to her publisher and to Maria Jolas who, to quote Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, has put her work “into English of such verisimilitude that it seems merely orchestrated in another key.” Novels are rarely masterpieces, and this is as it should be; it is even rarer to find a translation that is perfect, and this, perhaps, is not as it should or could be.
‘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
NS @ goodreads
Nathalie Sarraute by Hannah Arendt
Lessons with Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute interviewed
Nathalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader: Identities in Process
Her novels broke with fictional realism, examining human behaviour at its most secretive
THE USE OF SPEECH BY NATHALIE SARRAUTE
Nathalie Sarraute and England
On Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms and why we write
Being Beside One’s Self
Nathalie Sarraute Fiction and Theory
A propos de Nathalie Sarraute
L’objet lumineux dans l’œuvre de Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute et l’anti-roman
Le dialogue selon Nathalie Sarraute
Fiction et révélation : Vous les entendez ? De Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute et la violence du texte
Eloge de NATHALIE SARRAUTE: Apprendre à dire l’indicible
Buy ‘Portrait of a Man Unknown’
‘PoaMU’ @ Internet Archive
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Extras
Nathalie Sarraute et le Nouveau roman en 1969
Nathalie Sarraute – pour un oui, pour un non
Un siècle d’écrivain 1995 Nathalie Sarraute
INVITEE : SARRAUTE
Tombe de Nathalie Sarraute au cimetière de Chérence
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Interview
from The Paris Review
You wrote your first novel at the age of twelve, then nothing until you were thirty-two. Why?
NATHALIE SARRAUTE: My mother wrote all the time, and to parrot her I wrote a “novel” full of all the platitudes I had read in love stories at the time. I showed it to a friend of my mother who said, Before writing novels one should learn to spell! Psychologists would see in that episode a typical childhood trauma. Actually, I think I did not write until much later because I had nothing to say.
At the lycée I liked writing essays because the subjects were imposed from outside. It made me realize how pleasant it was writing well turned-out sentences in a classical style—one was on equal terms with the classics, safe in their company. Whereas in my own writing I jump into a void, without any protection. I stumble and stammer, without anything to reassure me.
The traditional novel, with its plot and characters, etcetera, didn’t interest me. I had received the shock of Proust in 1924, the revelation of a whole mental universe, and I thought that after Proust one could not go back to the Balzacian novel. Then I read Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etcetera . . . I thought Mrs. Dalloway was a masterpiece; Joyce’s interior monologue was a revelation. In fact, there was a whole literature that I thought changed all that was done before. But as I said, I myself didn’t write because I had nothing to say then.
You started writing Tropisms when you were thirty-two; it is a short book of twenty-four pieces, yet it took you seven years.
SARRAUTE: It took five years, which is still long. Then I spent two years trying to find a publisher for it. Finally a very good publisher, Robert Lafont, who had discovered Céline and Queneau took it. He published it in the same collection as Queneau.
How did you arrive at the form for those first short texts?
SARRAUTE: The first one came out just how 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?
SARRAUTE: 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?
SARRAUTE: 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.
SARRAUTE: 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?
SARRAUTE: I didn’t pose 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 en- closed 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 that was the direction your work would go?
SARRAUTE: I felt that a path was opening before me, a path that 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?
SARRAUTE: Not at all. I thought only of writing short texts like that. I couldn’t imagine it possible to write a long novel. And afterwards, it was so difficult finding these texts; each time it was like starting a new book all over again; so 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 the 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.
SARRAUTE: 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.
SARRAUTE: Yes. I’ve become more accessible, besides. My work 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?
SARRAUTE: Because it’s difficult. Because I plunge in directly, without giving any reference points. One doesn’t know where one is, or 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 it; they’re lost.
That brings up the question of how to read these books. You do without plot, for example.
SARRAUTE: 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 that 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, to discover where one has left off. In your books, do you see other ways of keeping track of where one was?
SARRAUTE: I don’t know. I don’t know how one reads it. I can’t put myself in the reader’s place, or 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?
SARRAUTE: 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 was also 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 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?
SARRAUTE: No, not at all. He said, I had better write a preface for it, otherwise you won’t find a publisher, because he had become very famous by then. But despite his preface nobody wanted the book, and in the end a small publisher took it. It had only one little notice and was ignored. Later Sartre told me, If you persist in writing like this you’ll sacrifice your life.
Simone de Beauvoir, while she didn’t mind Sartre being surrounded by, or even having affairs with pretty actresses and secretaries, was said to be terribly jealous of women of superior intelligence who got close to him, and she broke your friendship. Is that true?
SARRAUTE: It is true that she separated us completely. But I heard that she couldn’t bear Sartre having an intellectual relationship with anyone, male or female. She caused the break with Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Camus . . . She wanted to be the only one.
But I liked Sartre very much. He had an attentiveness that denoted generosity, and I think he was warm. Simone de Beauvoir, on the other hand, was cold and distant, and as they were very close it colored his attitudes too, sometimes. He listened marvelously.
That might explain why some women were seduced by him, despite his physique.
SARRAUTE: I don’t know, as I certainly wasn’t one of them! I liked him as a friend, but found him physically one of the most repulsive men I had ever seen—it was terrible! The physical aspect of a man was always very important to me.
What about your own feminism?
SARRAUTE: I militated for the women’s vote in 1935. I have always been a feminist in so far as I want equal rights for women. But the idea of “women’s writing” shocks me. I think that in art we are androgynous. Our brains are not different, but until now women were less educated, so they produced fewer works of art. People always compare women to each other. I was once asked at a conference what was the similarity between Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras. I said that there was an enormous similarity: they were both called Marguerite! Otherwise there is not an iota of connection between them.
Some people have seen a feminist bias in your work.
SARRAUTE: Imagine! But I hardly ever think of gender when I write about my characters. I often prefer he to she because he is neutral but she is only female. In The Planetarium there is an old woman who is anxious because a door-handle has been badly put on her door. Well, a young man wrote to me and that “this old lady is me!” He explained that he had just been married and moved to a new apartment, and that he was just as worked-up about some details as my character. You can imagine how pleased I was!
Some time ago I received a doctoral thesis whose subject was woman’s condition in my novels! I was flabbergasted! But if I had wanted to discuss woman’s condition I wouldn’t have written the sort of books I have. Woman’s condition is the last thing on my mind when I write.
To return to tropisms, do you feel there are other writers who have found certain lessons in that domain?
SARRAUTE: 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?
SARRAUTE: 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?
As if at the moment of the tropisms, the character vanishes.
SARRAUTE: He disintegrates before the extraordinary complexity of the tropisms inside of him.
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Book
Nathalie Sarraute Portrait of a Man Unknown
George Braziller
‘Sarraute’s first novel was turned down by Gallimard, despite a preface by Sartre, in which he used the word anti-roman (anti-novel). This is a pretty accurate description. The characters are not named and the plot is at best sketchy. Sarraute has said that the novel is an updating of Balzac‘s Eugénie Grandet, a novel about tight-fistedness and how it is passed from father to daughter. In Sarraute’s novel, an unnamed narrator tells the story of an also unnamed father and daughter, who are also miserly. Initially he struggles to tell the story. He is a writer and trying, like many writers, to do something new, to get away from the Balzacian approach to writing. However, when he is advised to stick to the conventional method which, of course, also involves naming his characters, the narrator considers this approach sensible. However, he then sees the Portrait of a Man Unknown in an art gallery. He has known this painting before. It is hidden in the worst lit part of the gallery and, of course, is a portrait of an unknown man by an unknown artist. This painting resonates with meaning for him, despite the outlines of the picture being vague. He then feels that he can describe the father and daughter, without having to fully portray them à la Balzac, in his own way. And this is what he does, watching them carefully, from afar or from close up. He spends his time following them and watching them but he is unable to get that sense of them that he seeks. In the end, the daughter introduces him to her fiancé, giving him a name (Louis Dumontet) and a description. He realises that the new ways have not worked and he is back to the old, traditional Balzacian novel. Can the new ways work? Sarraute asks.’ — The Modern Novel
Excerpt
*
p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hopefully Mizu was looking in. Last I checked, French MUBI isn’t showing the ‘Twin Peaks’ marathon. French MUBI has a history of being very persnickety. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for ‘Shifty’. ** scunnard, Great, groovy, let me know whenever. Thanks, pal. ** Hugo, Yes, the game looks very up my alley. Even film editing/post-production is gruelling compared to novel writing, and with game building … I can’t even imagine. That is quite a dream. Sadly, as I’ve said, I almost never ever remember mine. They flee the second I become conscious. Well, yeah, he clearly wanted it to be read, but published? That seems like a stretch. Your thinking about words is real ‘writer thinking’, I think. I guess non-writers can aspire to diligent, meticulous expression too though. Thank you about ‘God Jr.’ I’m proud of it. I don’t … think I know that Emily Youcis video, but I will certainly check. Thanks. I like that squib from your poem. I admire it. Its costuming and rhythm are very impressive. I hope the totality pans out. Needless to say, ‘In Youth is PLeasure’ -> ‘Lord of the Flies’ meets ‘Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers’ causes the (my) mind to reel in the ecstatic sense. If you can pull that off, wow. Heavy encouragement. The second novel also sounds very promising. That’s exciting stuff and news. Thank you for my percolating. ** Carsten, Congrats on the submission. As always, keep part of yourself braced by the fact of how subjective and political the editorial selection can be, just in case. But great! Hopefully they’re wise. A well connected friend of mine who’s done TV and film work and who is in the LA art scene was our casting director. We told her what we were looking for vis-a-vis the characters, and she sent out feelers to people thought might be right. She sent us the info and pix of those who interested in trying out, and, if we liked someone, and if we didn’t already know them, we had them film a short video of themselves answering a set of questions. If we liked that, we met with them, talked, had them read a little dialogue. We were specifically looking in the LA art world for people. Almost every performer in the film apart from the extras are either artists, art students, art world scenesters, or the children of artists. That was our method. ** Bill, Oh, that is a coincidence. Ed could be very nice. He could also be very catty and backhanded, which no one is talking about right now for understandable reasons. We’re solidifying the SF visit right now. I should know early next week. But I hope to get to see you. Should be wholly possible. ** Steve, We go to LA on the 15th for a few jet-lag recovery days then up to SF. That’s fantastic news about your radio show! Holy shit, that’s great and exciting! Will you change the show in any way for the new context? ** Misanthrope, Good: your doctor lock-in. I gave in and am seeing a doc for my toe shit on Tuesday. I keep forgetting that now that I’m a legal, visa-toting Parisian I have French health insurance, i.e. free doctor visits, so I don’t have that excuse anymore. May we both stay at least 90% alive until we see the professionals. ** pancakeIan, Her writing is really terrific. And she’s wonderful in the Waters films too, of course. Of course I know Angelo Badalamenti from his Lynch scores. Amazing composer. Amazing that you knew him. RIP. I took a google peek at Celebration, and, yes, I get you. I have a friend in LA who’s a higher-up person in Disney’s publications division, and, for a few years Disney was going to force and her a ton of other Disney employees to move to Florida and live in some ‘magical’ community to be built for them, and she was horrified and going to quit, but then they changed their minds. Actually, the rent prices here are lower than in Los Angeles as well as in New York and London and probably a lot of other big cities. Not that it’s cheap to live here, mind you. ** Darbz 🎃, Pumpkin! Halloween is only months, albeit too many of them, away! Good thinking re: the bat SFX. Hm, maybe we’ll pop a few bats into our new film, come to think of it. Gosh, obviously I would love the Louis Wain post if finishing it becomes a pleasure for you. Of course you can include your collage! All the better. You can make the post however you like. Thanks!!! No, I only ever played a primitive normal piano when I was a kid. My parents had a Grand Piano in the house, so I did practice on that. Yeah, my weird pedo piano teacher. She was very strange. Um, my only recent awkward conversation was on instagram with some guy who was trying to pressure me to make a film with him, but I don’t know if that counts. I don’t think I have too many awkward conversations only because I usually just ask questions and listen if it’s not a good friend. No, your grammar made utter sense to me, but you know I aspire to read and write in strange grammar, so I’m not the best judge? ** julian, Hi, j. I like ghost stories too. I can get very addicted to those ghost investigation reality TV shows if I’m not careful. Oh, a friend was staying overnight at my house. We went downstairs in the middle of the night to eat because we had the munchies. There was this porthole window in the door between the kitchen and the kind of ‘pantry’ room in our house, and, when we were going back upstairs, which necessitated walking through the party to the stairs, we both saw this figurative smoke/fog thing walking around in the pantry through the porthole window, and it seemed to approach the window and look at us, and we freaked out and spent the rest of the night acting weird in the kitchen. Never saw it or anything like it again. And we were, let’s just say, very baked. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. I understand. I hope the negative phase passes. I don’t know what to suggest you can do to break it. I know with me, bad periods will just abruptly end for the tiniest, most casual reason that doesn’t seem like it would make any difference, which I guess makes me think I just psych myself into negativity and that the world itself is ultimately not significantly less good or bad than it usually is during those dark periods. I don’t know why. I don’t know. Strange stuff and so awful when you’re in them. As may not surprise you or anyone around here, I get complaints somewhat regularly about the p.s. being a single dense paragraph and not broken up for easier readability. But I like that challenge. But then I guess I would. Anyway, kind of a meh criticism you had there, but sorry. ** Steeqhen, Important to remember how pleasurable typing can be. I can’t remember how Pikmin 2 ends. Well, actually now I do thanks to you. I think I rarely totally finish games. I play until I know it’s about to end, and where I can guess how it’s going to end, and I bail at that point. Same with most novels, actually. I don’t know The Civil Wars. I know Joy Williams, if it’s the same JW, because when I search for the writer Joy Williams, the recording artist Joy Williams comes up and hogs the search results. ** Alice, Hi, Alice! It’s really good to meet you. Thank you for entering. I would need to give your question a degree of time and thought that rushing through the p.s. doesn’t allow me in order to give it a considered and worthy answer. But I will say, briefly, that I think I agree with that statement, yes. I think my work is infused with empathy at its core, and that’s crucial to me, although I’m not sure so many people seem to realise that about my work. I can completely relate to your thinking/feeling as you develop your novel. That rings entirely true to me. That’s a beautiful quote by Kathy. Long story short, yes, I do feel similarly to what I understand of how you describe your attitude and thoughts about your own writing. I would even say that self-knowledge is very important and maybe even necessary? I’m sorry not to speak more lengthily. It’s very interesting to be inspired to be thinking about it. Thank you. If there’s anything else you want to talk about, I’ll do my best, and it would be a pleasure. Anything else you can say about your novel? ** Uday, Ashbery is my favorite writer in the English language, so yeah. Luckily I got to know him and become kind of friends with him. Lita Ford, wow. I too have never understood people’s desire to live outside big cities. I don’t even understand the desire to get a ‘summer home’ in the country or to ‘retire’ to some supposedly idyllic place. I just can’t relate to that dream at all. ** Okay. I haven’t spotlit a book by the great Nathalie Sarraute in a long time, and today I have spotlit her first novel, which is generally thought to be the book that inspired and started the Nouveau Roman movement. So, a pretty key book. Have a look and think, and I’ll see you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
Filmmaker Elizabeth Purcell, who introduced yesterday’s screening of L’AMOUR, said it hadn’t played New York since 1978. Unfortunately, I could see why. It’s a would-be farce with extremely grating performances (from some of the lesser players in Warhol/Morrisey’s orbit) and little real wit.
I plan to stick with the “Radio Not Radio” tag. I need to go to the station for a training session next week, then my first show will air either on the 14th or 21st. I’ll be doing it live rather than recording it in Audacity, and I can interact with listeners: their website has a chat room, and people can walk into the studio off the street. I assume I’ll reach a much bigger audience working with an institution like EVR. But the music I play won’t change, although I will be approaching some of my favorite labels (Glitterbeat, Nyege Nyege, Principe) about getting promo downloads. (The DJs have to supply the music ourselves.)
Any plans for the weekend? I’m seeing Mikio Naruse’s THE WHOLE FAMILY WORKS on Saturday.
Dennis, Good on you for the doctor’s appointment. I think we’ll be okay.
Did you know that Joe Mills worked with Ed once? Joe edited an anthology of gay Scottish fiction. Irvine Welsh and Alisdair Gray were contributors. I guess Ed advised/consulted on it. The funny story Joe told was that Ed’s first question when they met in Glasgow was, “Where are the cruising spots?”
I hope you have a great weekend. I’ll be catching up on sleep. Not that I haven’t slept well or anything, but I wouldn’t mind a good 10 or so hours tonight. 😛
Nathalie Sarraute is a new name to me, and inventing the Nouveau Roman is quite the legacy. Thank you for this introduction!
Existentialism and Marxism were ideas I was juggling with when I first encountered any experimental fiction back in my teens. Living in Glasgow, reading Nausea and Trocchi, all those things had a big effect on me at the time. Sarraute would seem to be swimming in that same primeval soup.
Dennis, do you know the French expression, “revenons à nos moutons”–“Let us return to our sheep”? Like all French expressions, charming, and typical that it derives from a late medieval play that I guess everyone is supposed to know over there in France. Meaning, let’s get back on topic. I think of it often, because my whole thing is digression and wandering and I foster the illusion that I kind of have a point. So:
Carsten, if you’re around, how interesting about the interests you have. We went to Mexico City to get away around January 20–live near DC and inaugurations are a horror show, even when the incomer is not a crypto-fascist sadistic lunatic–so of course a big draw for me is the history of Aztec/Mexica and other Mexican human sacrifice. You can read up and read up and still come nowhere near the sensation of being among the sacrifice stones and temples and the images of the hungry gods. Loved the delight that a guide to Anthropology Museum showed when she saw she had some people who really wanted to understand the pre-conquest belief system. It’s a marvelous place, Mexico, and we’ll be spending more time there. I guess you know René Girard on sacrifice and Bataille–about whom Dennis knows a whole lot more than I.
Yeah, since you asked, when I first went to my doc, pretty sure I had a gall-bladder crisis — a main thing is insane pain between and below the shoulder blades–he said, I was doing pretty well still having one at 72. My stuff was hard to read on the first hospital tests so I had to have a third, radiological test, because instead of stones blocking the gall bladder ducts (processing fat consumed), my organ was just kind of deteriorating, which ultrasound couldn’t see, only the radiology could. The rest of me undoubtedly falling apart, too, though at a slower rate than most guys my age, my doctor insists. Tell that to my dick, huh. This morning I was thinking how weird it is to think of people shaving my belly while I was unconscious. The scars are starting to itch.
I’m so happy to have Cookie Mueller and Nathalie Sarraute here, both terrific. A very good day, too, for me to read Sarraute on the concept of character, because–kind of spooky stuff in my dreams lately–this morning I dreamed that I had to do a presentation on “persona” in Greek tragedy (not in reality a Greek term) and instead of that kind of taking an exam unprepared kind of anxiety dream, I went right into the history of masks to impersonate gods and immortals and ended up–this is kind of the point-declaring that the concept of character in literature/drama/film doesn’t derive from personal identity in life; the concept of personal identity derives from character in stories. There you go.
Also you may not know that here in the lunatic asylum of the US, a former FBI director posted a photo of seashells on a beach reading “8647”–that is, get rid of the current president–which hordes of MAGA and GOP reps wanted investigated by the Secret Service as a death threat. (Eyeroll) Not too interesting but three days earlier I woke and wrote, “The message was written in seashells on sand.” Not the weirdest thing that’s happened lately, either. I really ought to close my eyes and think, What poem will I have written by tomorrow? You probably know that Alice Notley wrote, “My dreaming self was better at some aspects of poetry writing than I, awake, was.” Not that writing comes from dreams, but from that other, dreaming self, yes, I think. What do I know?
PS A propos: Gary Shteyngart and Christopher Bollen have written very lovely appreciations of Ed White. He boosted and charmed so many people, it only makes sense. Mark Simpson is the one writer I’ve seen take on the problematic right after Ed’s death, and I think he does it very well. https://marksimpson.substack.com/p/farewell-edmund-white
While sort of lamenting the fact of any writer heading off into the simplicity of “Gay Pride,” he also notes that one can never know where someone’s impulses come from–Ed’s insanely repressive upbringing, his early HIV diagnosis, his activism–I think we all know that there are different kinds of activism, and sometimes the most intellectually coherent, even authentic, is not the most efficient, while the simplistic is the most practical. And yes, there’s a lot of the American aspiration to the economic elite–how you gonna pay for all those hustlers? But I respect Mark especially for admitting that if he couldn’t have done what Ed did, it might have something to do with not having the depth of yearning that Ed had.
I’m in a weird place myself, since local Gay Pride has been flattering me, resulting in placement in two (tiny) anthologies, and I think I like the work I gave them pretty well–it’s not like I had to stretch much to find work that would fit in–but the thing is, right now I feel like every publication anywhere makes me more eligible for residencies, money, gigs . . . I’m still going after a few journals and presses I really like, though.
Hi there Dennis, I look forward to hearing your answer. The relationship to empathy stood out to me when I read Blood and Guts in High School for my dissertation. I saw this depiction of dysphoria where the visceral narration contrasted against a fragile environment. For as much as reality is played with in that novel, I find that there’s a state of truth that always contradicts the oppression surrounding it. That, and what I’ve read of Acker’s writing, motivated me to consider the relationship between transgression and empathy.
I appreciate that you’d like to hear about my novel. Interestingly, you mention self-knowledge. This process of creation has been one where I’ve confronted how I’ve repressed thoughts of mine. It came to me when I was reflecting on my relationship with my dad. He was astray and hard to connect with. Five years ago, he was charged with murder which has limited my contact with him. When it happened, I responded with disassociation. I wasn’t sure how to confront it. In that regard, writing has granted me clarity. I’m interested in the power of sparse moments where you’ve seen an obscured individual under their terms. I’d like to commit to the novel whilst I’m waiting for the start of my master’s degree.
Recently I’ve been interested in the writer Valerie Solanas. I watched Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol and loved it. Part of what stood out was the juxtaposition of Valerie’s solipsistic relationship to gender and Candy Darling who begins her transition at a similar time. I have a close friend who is currently reading her play Up Your Ass and it seems entertaining. I’d like to know if you have any thoughts related to her?
It’s nice to hear back from you. I hope all is well. Take care
I like what Sarraute says about there being no border between prose & poetry. Spot on. The separation is an artificial construct that has nothing to do with the language, which, as she says, carries the sensation. To riff on Duke Ellington’s famous line, if it sounds like poetry, it’s poetry–no matter how the words are laid out in print.
Re. the submission: I try to submit work in a spirit of total Buddhist non-attachment. I have no idea what the editors’ aesthetic parameters/preferences are. They may violently diverge from mine. If they do go for it, great, my stuff finds a second home. If they don’t, that’s fine too, no shame in being homeless. Hell, as seen above, Gallimard rejected Sarraute despite Sartre’s endorsement. Ultimately it’s the work that matters, not its temporary home.
I’m guessing the casting process you described there was for Room Temperature. Makes sense, & sounds like a smooth & intuitive way to assemble a team. I have no proper casting plan for my project yet. The instinct is to cast from among a pool of people I know. The downside of doing that in Spain is obvious: I don’t know that many people there yet. But we’ll see, this is an episodic project & I want to do it gradually anyway.
By the way, Bernard & I already connected on Facebook following his comment.
Hi Dennis. (Maybe I should stop saying “hi Dennis,” I feel like this would get repetitive.)
I just got back from a friend’s exhibition, where I learnt a lot about the art of Indonesian street vendor signs, so I’m pretty petered out as of writing.
Thank you for elucidating to me on the “TPK” thing a bit more. It’s not something I really thought about. I’m not a Wallace superfan, I haven’t even cracked through all of “Infinite Jest” – I will one day, though, but I spent the first month of this year going through “The Recognitions” and being disappointed in not loving all of it. I feel like that’s the case with a lot of doorstoppers if I’m being honest. Even the best ones have flabby parts. I’m told to read Proust sometimes, but when I took a look, I realised that I didn’t want to be too influenced by him. So all of that is for another time, if ever.
On the subject of “writer thinking”, I remember coming to this mindset with a bit of apprehension, actually. Part of me wishes I could have been a musician or a filmmaker, but then I realised that what I wanted to do was much more suited to the medium of writing. Which is odd because I have always had the suspicion that communication is inherently flawed, especially in everyday language and contexts. I dunno, there’s a kind of lack. I think you know that, though. — Also, I just remember the people in university who were writers were incredibly, uh, boring. That’s mean, but I have to be honest and say that it’s true. There was just a lot of “genre” writing, which I respect, but I’m not in love with. A lot of fantasy and sci-fi books don’t do anything for me. But it was a very hard and demotivating time, and I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Though I did become more dimly aware of what it was I wanted to do in the first place.
The Emily Youcis video I was talking about was this one here btw, you might have already seen it though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CxHATXa_j0&list=PLa910-Wh0BbyeM5fCcXU9g7wuX5TmsaFU
A very fascinating piece, even though the creator (became? was?) is a white supremacist with a GG Allin fixation. It might interest you.
Have a good one
I’ve never heard of Nathalie Sarraute or this novel, but it seems very very interesting and ahead of its time. I can be a little weary of translated works because I feel like I might be missing something that the author intended in the original version, but the excerpt seems promising. A metanarrative about an author trying to tell a story in a unique way, but failing to an extent by conceding to certain expectations, sounds a lot like what I’m trying to do with the novel(?) I’m working on right now, so I should probably read this as a reference for how to write something like that. It’s interesting that you and your friend both saw the ghost. Is there a word for when two people under the influence share the same hallucination? Folie a Deux? I’ve only ever done weed once and it wasn’t a great experience, so I haven’t ever experienced anything like that before.
Hi ! Sarraute’s style reminds me of the author of ‘Fable’ and ‘The Inquisitory’ . But maybe she’s part of the same French movement.
Interesting about your friend who works for Disney. I wonder if she was part of the group they were trying to relocate because of the film studios park Eisner had built here in the late 80s . Originally it was ‘Disney MGM Studios’, but now it’s called ‘Disney Hollywood Studios’ . It was supposed to be an actual working film production studio that guests could tour . But the movies and tv shows they made there in the 90s were really lousy, for the most part. So it was totally revamped/rebuilt, and now it’s just a movie themed park , like Universal Orlando . I heard that one of the main reasons the film studio didn’t work was that Disney wanted to move many of their L A based employees to Orlando , and they balked . Because relocating to Florida would be a downgrade . After living here for so long, I can understand that. They had a whole new animation building built as well, but when the film production didn’t work out they fired all the animators, and now it’s just office space.
Funny, I didn’t realize Angelo Badalamenti had died. I’m so out of touch these days. Being such a lover of music, I figured you knew of him and appreciated his scores. You can see him playing the piano while Isabella Rosselini is singing in ‘Blue Velvet’ . And he also has a small part as a gangster in ‘Mulholland Drive’ . He was very supportive of my flute playing when I knew him .
Well, glad to be wrong about Paris rents . Seems like rents are high no matter where one lives these days, though. I spent some time in Montana , right during the middle of Covid, and even there ,out in the middle of nowhere, I had to pay through the nose for a place.
later !
Hey. I’ve only read ‘Tropisms’ by Sarraute and have been aching for more. Many of what are held up as her classics are out of print in English so it’s difficult to find a way in. I’ve read parts from ‘The Age of Suspicion’ which I thought were fascinating but I haven’t read the whole thing yet. Really cool that she anticipated the Nouveau Roman but then she wasn’t fully understood until the NR crew heralded her as great.
I completely agree about small seemingly insignificant things being the things that get you out of a rut. The thing is though is that I’m trying to level myself out so that when something bad happens I’m not completely crushed and sent into a depression. I go between these highs and lows. I’m not bipolar, it’s just the way I operate, and this isn’t very healthy. The problem is that I really really like extremes. God, I’m such a drama queen. There’s no cure for that though haha. My dad told me once that I was emotionally unequipped to handle life and I’m just really trying to prove him wrong, but I have to admit that I am a mess. I think my task is just to turn every flaw I have into an attribute, which I’ve been trying to do for half of my life anyway.
I do think it’s all going to change this summer, and if not then, then soon after. I’m definitely in a transitional phase. I just need to meet people or something, which is always an embarrassing thing to admit.
This answer, ‘SARRAUTE: I militated for the women’s vote in 1935…I think that in art we are androgynous…not an iota of connection between them.’ is wow. Especially if we take this view of androgyny: things being attractive as they are not. Compounding the city desire: there is almost always something dull about people from small towns, and you can tell either in this dullness or through an enormous hunger should they wish to escape. But back to Sarraute. One of many that I know I’ve read, and yet shamefully can remember very little about, except one of the Tropisms which came to me perfectly as I began writing this comment—the cottage on the outskirts of London.
Got groped by this guy at the park last night, which was highly unpleasant and furthermore a tough situation to get out of without involving the police, which would have been disastrous, but on the plus side it started a line of thinking about language and ethics that’ll probably serve me well. Wishing you a harassment-free day.