SubStance

SubStance 33.1 (2004) 144-147

Jefferson, Ann. Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000. Pp. 214.

Specialists and those with only a casual acquaintance with the work of Nathalie Sarraute will find new, invaluable insights in Ann Jefferson's critical work on Sarraute's novels, essays and autobiography. Jefferson revisits key aspects of Sarraute's texts in light of the novelist's preoccupation with questions of difference. Jefferson assigns types of differences to three broad categories: social relations, gender/sexual issues, and generic questions of writing. Always attentive to the ways differential oppositions break down in Sarraute (most often because identities are never entirely stable), Jefferson underscores the persistent anxieties that articulate questions of sameness and difference for the novelist. These concerns, argues Jefferson, are characteristic of modern literature in general, which sees itself as part of the "conditions of existence" rather than separate from them (2). While sketching out a framework for her discussion of difference and conflict through the theoretical works of Barthes, Lyotard, Derrida, Saussure, Girard, and others, Jefferson resists any temptation to apply these thinkers to Sarraute. Instead, she brings out the resonances between theories of difference (for example Derrida's différance, Lyotard's différend) and literary works. She also wisely does not attempt to trim down the myriad forms difference takes in Sarraute's oeuvre to one over-arching (reductive) definition. Instead, through close textual analysis, Jefferson brings out all the complexities in Sarraute's work, noting that "difference and sameness never remain where they appear to have been found" (13). This is a subtle piece of scholarship that manages great clarity in murky issues.

Jefferson's first three chapters discuss difference in social relations. Sarraute's "tropisms," those "indefinable movements at the borders of consciousness" [End Page 144] (Jefferson quoting Sarraute, 18), are the cornerstone of social difference. As barely noticeable movements of attraction and repulsion that people experience toward an object, a person, a remark...etc., tropisms, as Jefferson suggests, embody an implicit value judgment for Sarraute: "the inner life of the tropism is real, the external world of physical and social realities mere appearance; psychology is the proper stuff of fiction" (18). Jefferson shows how Sarrautean characters undergo the tropism as an anxiety about feeling different from others, but also as an angst about being subsumed by the other in the name of sameness. To differ is to undergo a painful loss of contact with others, "to break a bond" (23); this is perhaps one of the most characteristic features of Sarraute's novels. On the other hand, both Sarraute and her fictional writers and artists (in Le Planétarium, Entre la vie et la mort, Vous les entendez?, Enfance, etc.), also consider difference as a mark of distinction, a "pure affirmation of self in which the surrounding world acquiesces and to which the readers in their turn are called upon to assent" (37). But this need for the reader's acceptance or acknowledgment clearly suggests the writer's longing to find commonality, to suppress difference so that the tropisms can be recognized as everyone's experience. In her third chapter, Jefferson associates the Sarrautean subject's anxious experience of contact with the other, and the humiliations it can produce, with Julia Kristéva's theory of abjection. On the flipside of this negative experience are "intimacy and fusion which are the hallmarks of the aesthetic as well as of the intersubjective experience," for Sarraute (74). Both negative and positive experiences can either be imbedded in, or impeded by, language.

In the middle chapters, Jefferson turns to sexual and gender difference, arguing that the individual and the body appear in Sarraute's novels as fragments and metaphors rather than as whole entities. Individuals are frequently replaced by voices, bodies are only seen as parts. The particularities of race, ethnicity, and sex (or gender) are not determinative for the tropism. In fact, Sarraute underplays forms of physical difference in order to appeal to the commonality of the imperceptible experiences she sets out to dramatize. Jefferson...