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 Russian
born French novelist and literary critic. Sarraute became one of
the pioneers and leading theorist of the nouveau roman alongside
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, and Michel
Butor. She discards conventional ideas about plot, chronology, characterization
and narrative point of view. From her early works Sarraute concentrates
on the subconscious and conscious mind. In Tropismes (1939)
she uses a series of brief passages, 'tropisms', which, according
to Sarraute, govern behaviour and become the unifying thread throughout
her novels.
['Tropisms' are] "...things that are not said and the movements
that cross our consciousness very rapidly; they are the basis
of most of our life and our relations with others - everything
that happens within us which is not spoken by the interior monologue
and which is transmitted by sensations."
Nathalie Sarraute was born in Ivanova, Russia. Her parents divorced
when she was two, and her mother took her to Geneva and then to
Paris. From the age of eight, she lived in Paris with her father,
who had settled there. Sarraute studied literature and law at the
Sorbonne, spent one year at Oxford, and continued her studies of
legal science in Berlin, before becoming a member of the French
bar (1926-41). In 1925 she married a fellow law student, Raymond
Sarraute.
Sarraute practiced law until about 1940, when she became a full-time
writer. During the Nazi occupation of France, as a Jew Sarraute
was forced to go into hiding - she posed as the governess of her
own three daughters. Her first book, Tropismes, a collection
of twenty-four brief sketches, appeared in 1939. In the book she
indicates that the words used are the verbal translation of non-verbal
communication. The sketches presented nameless people caught up
in the web of their interdependence.
 In
the 1950s and '60s Sarraute developed the ideas that form the basis
of the new novel in such works as Portrait d'un Inconnu (1947,
Portrait of a Man Unknown), an 'anti-novel' according to Jean-Paul
Sartre, for which she took the central theme from Balzac's Eugénie
Grandet - the relationship of a miserly father and his daughter.
Martereau (1953) is a story about the internal tensions of
a family. Le planétarium (1959) eliminates the narrator -
the novel can also be read as a parable of the creative process
and an ironic comedy of manners. Many pages are devoted to the question
of re-upholstering a chair.
L'Ère du soupçon (1956, The Age of Suspicion) is a collection
of Sarrraute's critical essays, in which she attempts to analyse
what she as an author has tried to achieve in her work. Sarraute
dismisses the need for a cohesive narrative, and welcomes the death
of the 'character' in fiction, to be replaced by 'a matter as nameless
as blood, a magma.' L'Enfance (1983, Childhood) is a partial
autobiography, a story of the childhood of a young girl who divides
her time between her divorced parents in Russia and France. Sarraute
again employs short flashes from her past, and snatched lines from
discussions. Sarraute is constantly questioning herself: "Try
to remember... something must have happened..." "Be careful, now
you are exaggeration..." The book was adapted for the Broadway
stage, starring Glenn Close.
 Since
1964 Sarraute has written radio and stage plays, in which she integrates
undercurrents of sub conversation into a banal every day conversation.
Although Sarraute's early works are precursors of the New Novel,
some critics have placed her in the great tradition of Proust and
Henry James as a theoretician of a psychological novel. Her works
have been published in some 24 languages. Sarraute died on October
19, 1999, in Paris.
How could style have remained motionless, fixed, when everything
around it was in evolution - even revolution - during the last
hundred and fifty years? Flaubert wrote the new novel of 1860,
Proust the new novel of 1910. The writer must proudly consent
to bear his own date, knowing that there are no masterpieces in
eternity, but only works in history; and that they survive only
to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded
the future."
(Alain Robbe-Grillet in For a New Novel, 1963)
For further reading: Nathalie Sarraute by M. Cranaki and
Y. Belaval (1965); Natalie Sarraute by R.Z. Temple (1968); Natalie
Sarraute; ou. La recherce de l'authenticité by M. TisonBraun (1971);
French Fiction Today by L.S. Roudiez (1972); Natalie Sarraute
by Gretchen Ross Besser (1979); Nathalie Sarraute: The War of
the Words by V.Minogue (1981); The Novels of Nathalie Sarraute
by Helen Watson-Williams (1981); Sarraute Romanciere by Sabine
Raffy (1988); Sarraute, Le Planetarium by Roger McLure (1988);
Natalie Sarraute and the Feminist Reader by Sarah Barbour (1993);
Natalie Sarraute: Metaphor, Fairy-Tale and the Feminine of the
Text by John Phillips (1994) - Nouveau roman, see also:
Marguerite Duras, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor.
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