Alors vous voyez, j'ai renoncé, je suis l'univers entier, toutes les virtualités, tous les possibles... l'il ne le perçoit pas, ça s'étend à l'infini...
–Tu ne t'aimes pas
In this paper, I argue that Nathalie Sarraute's writing can offer an important direction to contemporary thinking about ethics and sexual difference. To elect Sarraute as a writer who speaks to the question of "ethics and sexual difference" or even "women's writing" may seem perverse, and calls for some sort of initial explanation. Sarraute's work, from Tropismes (1939) to the 1989 text to be discussed here, often blurs, disregards, or specifically rejects the difference between the sexes in favor of other idiosyncracies of a writing or written subject. It is precisely for this reason, I will argue, that her work is important to current discussions of writing and sexual difference. For it is the premise of this article that in order for sexual difference to be addressed and recreated in writing or elsewhere, there must be a risky turn to a position feminism emphatically rejects: what we could call, what Sarraute does call, the neutral.
What feminists know and have known – before Luce Irigaray's "any theory of the 'subject' has always been appropriated by the 'masculine'," before Simone de Beauvoir's "a man is in the right in being a man," or Virginia Woolf's "it is the masculine values that prevail" – is that protestations of neutrality come down to a male-sexed universalizing. As Jean-François Lyotard observed regarding the catch-22, the injustice, of the feminine position, "women can only be part of modern society if their differences are neutralized." And yet, Woolf also wrote, "it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex" (108), and de Beauvoir similarly claimed, "What woman essentially lacks today for doing great things is forgetfulness of herself" (Deuxième sexe, Second Sex II: 702). Even Irigaray suggests that the "wonder" of sexual difference lies beyond its conventional avatars, women and men: "to move us, it is necessary and sufficient that it [sexual difference as wonder] surprise, that it be new, not yet assimilated/disassimilated as known." This general tendency within feminism, within patriarchy, towards a desire for another version of femaleness, if not of both sexes, most often reveals itself in a fantasy of androgyny that entails a rejection of reigning conventions and regulations of sexual difference. Woolf attempts to imagine an androgynous writing, one in which both sexes, and the difference between them, are present (Room 107-108). De Beauvoir laments that "what we need is an angel – neither man nor woman – but where shall we find one?" (Deuxième sexe 29, Second Sex xxxiii, Parshley's translation). And Irigaray too imagines angelic go-betweens: "Angels, very rapid messengers who transgress, thanks to this speed, all enclosures [...]. They proclaim that this crossing is accessible to the body of man. And above all to the body of woman. They figure and tell of another incarnation, another parousia of the body" (EDS 22, ESD 16). As Irigaray will go on to emphasize, this new, other body, and other being, is entirely unforeseeable, unpredictable. It is impossible to say what we might encounter as we create it.
Such an acknowledgment and imagination of the unforeseeable is what I will contend Nathalie Sarraute approaches, to the point of arguing for it, in Tu ne t'aimes pas. This is not to attempt to place Sarraute among a possible group of those who produce feminine writing, such as that famously indicated by Hélène Cixous in her essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa." Sarraute's writing rather moves away from (perhaps beyond) this feminine in its extended reflection upon the question of the identity of one who is reflecting upon herself. Who, Sarraute asks, are the subject and the object of a phrase such as "you don't love yourself"? Unlike other women writers before her, Sarraute does not begin with the assumption, or hypothesis, "I am a woman," and its possible meanings. Instead, Sarraute sees her writing as concerned with "interior dramas," the Sarrautean tropisms in which "there is, I am firmly convinced, no difference between men and women, just as there is none in their respiratory or circulatory systems." Any assertion of a text's masculinity or femininity is, for Sarraute, "based on prejudices, on pure conventions."
By refusing to know in advance who "you" or "I" are, who men and women are, Sarraute's writing allows us to run what I am calling feminism's necessary risk. It is by now a familiar one. In his 1984 seminar "Women in the Beehive," Jacques Derrida spoke of this danger in the context of the institutionalization of feminism within universities, an institutionalization that necessarily carries with it assertions of power:
[...] but there is a more dangerous and adventurous question. It is that whoever asks questions by definition not coded on these principles of progress risks to appear – in the eyes of women who are activists for women's studies – reactionary, dangerous, only limiting the progress of their positive research. [...] So a problem arises: if you keep the philosophical axiomatics, implying that women are subjects, considering women as subjects, then you keep the whole framework on which the traditional university is built. If someone tries to deconstruct the notion of subjectivity within women's studies, saying "well, woman is not a subject, we no longer consider woman as a subject" – this would have two consequences: one radically revolutionary or deconstructive, and the other dangerously reactive.
It is this "radically revolutionary" move that Sarraute's writing may allow us to make, but only and always by hazarding the company of "dangerously reactive" tendencies within a literary tradition (and within cultures, psyches) understood to be phallocentric.
According to Sarraute, then, the interior drama would have a merely conventional relation, if any, to sexual difference. Masculinity and femininity would be as relevant to this domain as they might be to the physiology of the circulatory or respiratory system. Setting aside the actual pertinence of sexual difference to those systems, and taking up what Naomi Schor calls "Sarraute's refusal to be read as a woman writer" (Bad Objects 128) as it is expressed in her work, we will be able to hear in this refusal something distinct from a wish for neutrality understood as identity or sameness. Sarraute's conviction that in writing there is no sexual difference, I will suggest, provides her work with an open space in which "another incarnation," another subject, takes form.
A fundamental fact about this subject, apparent from the beginning of Tu ne t'aimes pas, is that it is not singular but plural. In an essay concerned with portraits of men in women's writing, Schor argues that this plural subject is a challenge to traditional forms of representation that Sarraute's prose shares with other women's writing. In Schor's words,
one of the major differences between men's and women's writing, at least in France, is that there are, so to speak, no 'images of men' in women's writing because that writing is marked from the outset by a profound suspicion of the image and its grounding phallicism. Rarefaction, multiplication, pastiche, and disfiguration are some of the operations to which the image, the male image that is, is subjected in French women's fiction from La Fayette to Sarraute. (Bad Objects 131)
Tu ne t'aimes pas would seem to back Schor up on this point, because in it Sarraute explicitly addresses this impossibility of a coherent image coextensive with identity. The narrative "we," a manifold and polyvocal subject, has never managed to develop for itself such an imago. "That's precisely one of our deficiencies... those images of ourselves that others send back to us, we don't manage to see ourselves in them... [...] they slide over us, they don't adhere, everything that stirs in us moves them aside, they cannot fix themselves" (15). According to Schor (in her reading of female portraits of men in works by La Fayette, de Staël, and Sarraute), this profound suspicion of the coherent, representable image on the part of women writers results in "a morcelizing of the masculine imago [that works] to dethrone the visual from its hegemony over representation in favor of the tactile. And the promotion of the tactile inevitably leads to an end to mastery" (130). Whether or not an emphasis on touch suggests or can accomplish an end to mastery is debatable. However that may be, Schor suggests that if this female morcelizing of a hegemonic representation is possible, and even inevitable, it is because women themselves historically lack a strong, well-defined self-image, a prerequisite for a practice of representation that possesses the power "to fix the Other in a static image, a stereotype" (131). Only those who have an inflated self-image reflected back to them, the hypothesis goes, are capable of such objectifications of others. Bereft of that empowering self-image, women have never relied, at least not to the extent men have, on stable and stabilizing concepts of representation and representability: they have had no one reflecting back to them a coherent, "larger-than-life" image of themselves which would reinforce such a concept. Thus, Schor concludes, we can "understand why it is that for women writers, for whom the mirror has for centuries remained empty, the representation of men is bound up with the death of the image of man" (131), and with the emergence of different concepts and literary practices of representation.
Schor's analysis of representation in French women's prose implicates another term which will be important in our approach to Sarraute's writing: experience. In Schor's reasoning, it is possible to discover a more or less direct relation between the experience of women and their writing: women have a certain (fragmented, not totalized) experience of subjectivity, and therefore their writing manifests an uncertainty or suspicion with respect to the possibility of solid, full identities. This logic, which emphasizes the plasticity of identity (a plasticity recognized and experienced by women and disavowed by men), is, it must be acknowledged, circular. It rests upon an understanding of experience as prediscursive, which in turn reënforces a generalized account of that identity called woman, an account which leans on the transparency and immediacy of her experience. Experience comes first and forms the woman; the woman then writes, and her writing necessarily reflects the kind of subject into which her experience has made her. In other words, rather than presupposing an essential female identity, the argument assumes a female experience that comes before, and causes, the discourse produced by women. Arguing in another context, historian Joan Scott explains the effects of such appeals to experience:
The effect of these kinds of statements, which attribute an indisputable authenticity to women's experience, is to establish incontrovertibly women's identity as people with agency. It is also to universalize the identity of women and so to ground claims for the legitimacy of women's history in the shared experience of historians of women and those women whose stories they tell. In addition, it literally equates the personal with the political, for the lived experience of women is seen as leading directly to resistance to oppression, to feminism.
When it comes to her reliance on a fairly straightforward understanding of experience, Schor's claim about female representations of men in French women's writing probably fits Scott's description. Although her primary aim is certainly not to argue that "women are people with agency," and although in most of her writings Schor is very far from positing essentials which are then inevitably expressed in particular instances, her description of feminine representations grounded in women's lived experience does in fact "universalize the identity of women," understood in this case as subjects who experience the other side, or the contrary, of men's experience in patriarchy (wholeness, complete images), and it does assume that this shared history is directly infused into women's "stories," which in turn become, inevitably, stories or representations that resist or counter the dominant forms. Thus the very possibility of such resistant representations is seen to rest on, to follow from, a pre-existing women's experience.
We might ask, taking up this question of experience: and so what? Is it not the case, at least since Virginia Woolf's novels, indeed, since George Sand's Lélia's generically unconventional "history of an unhappy heart," or de Staël's Corinne, that many women, and many of their artistic creations, do testify to this different experience of subjectivity, of reality and its representability? Surely this is not disputed? Perhaps not, and yet it must be interrogated, because, as Scott explains, resting upon a transparent, prediscursive (which is to say an always already legitimated and legitimating) ground called experience "closes down inquiry into the ways in which female subjectivity is produced, the ways in which agency is made possible [...], the ways in which politics [or any representations] organize and interpret experience – the ways in which identity is a contested terrain, the site of multiple and conflicting claims" (Scott 31). To pass directly from woman's experience to woman's writing, though at times intuitively appealing, is to exclude questions about how and who we understand "woman" to be, and thus ultimately is to essentialize not only experience, but also female identity. It is to assume a priori the identity of the person to whom an experience is attributed, rather than to ask, for example, how that experience constitutes, in part, an identity. Is experience, even as self-consciously narrated and interpreted, the whole of what makes us who we are? Is there not something beyond what "happens" to me or what I say I have experienced that is at work in the constitution of a self? Scott suggests, "It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience" (26). She goes on to argue that to rest claims about representation on the authority of experience is to presume that a given discourse flows from experience, and to exclude the reverse, that our experiences are always informed by how we talk about them, and never immediately available to us in themselves. Finally, Scott's argument can be taken beyond the fact that experience is never an immediately available datum, beyond the observation that experience is always narrated, and hence, interpreted. Experience is also necessarily inscribed by the ways in which we do not talk about it, by, specifically, its unconscious articulations, so that to say one is the sum-total of one's experiences is to say that one is the sum-total of much that is inaccessible to conscious knowledge.
The next question we have to ask is whether the reliance on a supposed female experience is not in fact very much in line with the logic of Sarraute's work. For does not Sarraute's style suppose a prediscursive reality which the author experiences and then attempts to craft into a written expression which would match that experience as closely as possible? Sarraute has spoken of her writerly vocation in just such terms. In a 1996 interview with Monique Wittig, for example, Sarraute's description of how she came to writing, the obstacles she encountered to representing what she wanted to represent, and the example of the relative insubstantiality of her literary characters sounds perfectly in keeping with an understanding of experience as the prime motor of discourse.
Monique Wittig: You started to write Tropism in 1932?
Nathalie Sarraute: Yes. Up to then I hadn't found any form that could interest me in conveying what I felt. When I began to write, the novelistic forms which existed did not allow me to bring to light those elusive inner movements. Those movements could not be accommodated by any preëxisting forms. When I wrote my first Tropism, I tried to convey an interior sensation, movement, for which the character, so to speak, was but the simple support, barely visible.
Nathalie Sarraute: Oui. Jusque-là je n'avais pas trouvé aucune forme qui puisse m'intéresser pour rendre ce que je ressentais. Quand j'ai commencé à écrire, les formes romanesques qui existaient ne me permettaient pas de mettre au jour ces mouvement intérieurs insaisissables. Ces mouvements ne pouvaient pas s'accommoder des formes préexistantes. Quand j'ai écrit mon premier Tropisme, j'ai essayé de rendre une sensation, un mouvement intérieur dont le personnage, si l'on peut dire, n'était que le simple support, à peine visible.
(Monique Wittig, "Le Déambulatoire. Entretien avec Nathalie Sarraute," L'Esprit Créateur 36, 2 [Summer 1996] : 4)
Sarraute here describes her writing as a process of experiencing some prediscursive feeling, and then attempting to find or create a form which might accommodate it, an effort which results in, among other things, a particular way of representing characters. The interior and immediate experience she has leads directly to forms which, in Schor's words, "resonate with feminist critiques of representation" (Schor, Bad Objects 130). For Arthur Babcock, Sarrautean representation proceeds as it does precisely because the writer recognizes language as that which kills pre-linguistic experiences. In her prose, according to Babcock, there is an imperative to tear oneself away from language, "Because the danger of language is that it will suppress the living substance that exists before language and that is the purpose of writing." For Sarraute, Babcock argues, it is always a matter of language coming after "a tropistic substance that exists first" (70). In the above-cited interview with Wittig, however, Sarraute proceeds to throw this neat picture, where unmediated experiences precede and cause the written form and content of representations, into some doubt. Even as she alludes to the "reality" to which she would try to get through her writing – that original, insaisissable feeling – she also moves away from it.
In my last book, Ici, it seemed to me I was approaching nearer to what is "reality." [...] "Here," one doesn't know that one is in the for intérieur. That which appears occupies everything. And when it appears, one establishes partitions so that it might occupy precisely all the space that one reserves for it.
And behind, as in an ambulatory, words circulate, always standing at the ready to rise up, whether one makes them come or pushes them away. There is in this a whole interaction which interested me. I had the illusion again this time of approaching, if this has any meaning, "reality."
– Et par-derrière comme dans un déambulatoire des paroles circulent, se tiennent toujours prêtes à surgir, soit qu'on les fasse venir ou qu'on les repousse. Il y a là toute une interaction qui m'a intéressée. J'ai eu l'illusion encore cette fois de me rapprocher, si cela a un sens, de la 'réalité'."
("Le Déambulatoire" 7-8, emphasis added)
As if they were in a special enclosure made just for them to move about in, words circulate and come forth. The enclosure, or ambulatory, where words walk about in a state of readiness (whether or not the subject wants them there) is behind "here," behind immediate consciousness, and behind even the thought which seems to take up all space, to occupy everything. Language does not come later, as a simple after-effect of experience, it enters, whether or not one seeks it, shaping experience as an interaction. In this spacial inversion of the notion of a prediscursive "reality," a reality met with before any words, it is language that lies behind or before experience, and the interaction between them that constitutes reality. The traditional reading of Sarraute as discounting the primacy of language in favor of a pure experience fails to acknowledge this complexity in her writing. Babcock, again, insists on "Sarraute's conviction that the naming of psychological qualities and relationships is a falsification, a handy convention that we use instead of looking for the real truth" (Babcock 57), thereby eliding Sarraute's persistent doubts about, and complications of, "the real truth." While Sarraute certainly cannot be said to argue for the view that language simply precedes reality, neither does her writing espouse a naïve apprehension of the Truth or the Reality that exists in some ideality beyond language.
We might suggest then that on the question of representation and experience Sarraute finds herself in fundamental agreement with the psychoanalytic insight that human beings are beings who speak, who are inhabited by language in such a way as to be split by it. Because of this split, the experience of reality is never immediate, nor absolutely opposed to the medium of language. Instead, "experience" would be understood as part of an interaction that comprises the linguistic and the sensual and that does not neatly distinguish between the two, does not place the one beyond the other. The sensual is always also linguistic, and vice versa, language happens always in the context of bodies. As we will see, Sarraute's work often dwells on the ways in which the "tactile" or perceptual is from the beginning bound up with words. The key point here is not what Babcock calls "the extreme view" that "there is no reality outside language" (68) or even the notion, specifically rejected by Sarraute, that "everything begins with words." Rather, the point is that nothing is untouched by language, even, or especially, that which feels beyond it. At the very least, such feelings are in a relation with language that is inescapable, even if inadequate.
All of this is to place Sarraute, as Schor does, within a twentieth-century literary tradition which questions and rethinks the nature of the subject, and which has also seen the attempt to rethink feminine subjectivity. Certainly Sarraute has been foremost among French writers in creating and articulating new literary forms that announce and dissect a particularly modern version of the self, a project which has been explicit at least since her 1956 L'Ere du soupçon, essays in which she gave her account of the novel as a genre that was necessarily transforming itself. (Paul de Man called it "the diagnosis of the current state of a literary genre which has become problematic." ) But Sarraute's work presents a challenge not only to the genre of the novel and to largely nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of representation; more important for our purposes here, her work also confronts feminist theory's representations to itself of a sexed subject, representations that have often been strongly indebted to appeals to the "lived experience of real women" as a ground upon which to rest, rather than as a terrain to investigate. Whether or not "Sarraute's search for the neuter is another stunning denial of gender," as Leah Hewitt has put it, Hewitt joins Schor in the interpretation of Sarraute's style as "veer[ing] away from androcentric conceptions of human representation. The privileged status of the unitary voice, of unique identity, is undermined" (67). is, to say the least, open to question.
Feminist attempts to articulate a sexed subject face constantly the risk of that subject's reification, its being destined, for example, either to a repetition of the (positive) essentialism of the masculine subject, or to a (negative) vision of the subversion and destruction of the prevailing order, a vision that forgets or fails to imagine another kind of creation, and another kind of creating subject. Arguably the most important response to this risk has been Irigaray's articulation of a sex, and a subject, which is not one, but at least two. In Tu ne t'aimes pas, Sarraute echoes this feminist and psychoanalytic concept of an I who is, from the first, a we.
But they said to you: You don't love yourself. You... You who showed yourself to them, you who proposed yourself, you wanted to be of use... you advanced toward them... as if you were not only one of our possible incarnations, one of our virtualities... you separated yourself from us, you put yourself forward as our unique representative... you said 'I'..."
– Mais ils te l'ont dit: Tu ne t'aimes pas. Toi... Toi qui t'es montré à eux, toi qui t'es proposé, tu as voulu être de service... tu t'es avancé vers eux... comme si tu n'étais pas seulement une de nos incarnations possibles, une de nos virtualités... tu t'es séparé de nous, tu t'es mis en avant comme notre unique représentant... tu as dit «je»...
The emphasis is immediately placed on the as if: the fiction of identity, or more precisely, its necessarily fictive composition, is this narrative's starting place, not its conclusion. Even before this passage, the first typographical sign on the first page alerts us to the difference of the Sarrautean subject: the dialogic dash introducing the conversation it – they – are having with themselves. Outside, this subject may form an apparently single unit; inside, it is taken for granted that 'I' is a plural pronoun. Thus the narrator, or one of its incarnations, responds to the above observation:
Each of us does that at every instant. How to do otherwise? Every time one of us shows himself outside, he designates himself by 'I,' by 'me'... as if he were alone, as if you all didn't exist... (9)
The Sarrautean subject is not only plural, but in a state of continual flux. The I or the we who has heard the phrase "you don't love yourself" is already different from the we who contemplates the remark later. Even at the instant the remark was heard, 'we' can only designate the subject partially, for there is never a full complement, so to speak, of all the voices who make up 'us,' in attendance.
It is not to all of us that this 'we' applies... We are never all present... there are always some among us who are sleeping, lazing about, getting distracted, turning away... this 'we' can only designate those who were there when you made that sortie, those whom that kind of performance makes ill at ease, they feel struck... (10)
To say the least, this is not a self-identical subject. At any given moment it differs from itself, even while it is keenly, often painfully, aware of the apparently single picture it presents to the world in which it lives and speaks. Its experiences, both "internal" and "external," are crowded with second guesses and prolonged analyses of what constitutes them (the experiences), both for 'us' and for those outside us who see some of our faces. Sarraute's prose here and elsewhere is both disarming and seductive, and these qualities are bound up with what is often felt to be the immediacy of her writing. The reader is simply given the Sarrautean conversation to listen in on. Without pretext or explanation, the prose is there, announcing in its presence both its strangeness to and its intimacy with the reader who may find it. I would emphasize here that this sense of immediacy is precisely of the writing, and not of anything, any experience, the writing describes. More precisely, the immediacy of Sarraute's prose in Tu ne t'aimes pas lies in her attempt to investigate the terrain of experience not as something which merely happens to someone (an ineffable frisson that language inevitably kills), but as a process of multiple events, events which include the registering and the narration, of vague or precise associations, histories, sensations, recognitions. This attempt does not limit itself to a subjective internality. Germaine Brée calls the style of this work "an audacious technical overturning" that hinges on the "elimination of a 'central consciousness' knotting the threads of the novel, replaced here by a crowd of voices." And these voices also come from outside the interior crowd, constantly implicating it in an external "reality" which is always yet to be fully apprehended, comprehended, constituted. Brée continues,
The "for intérieur" from which these voices emanate evolves in a sort of anarchy but maintains relations with an external society that invests it, towards which one delegates "emissaries," "representatives" as different and interchangeable as the "faces" that every individual shows the society that surrounds her [...]. Over the years, Nathalie Sarraute has often alluded to the "inside-out glove." The metaphor applies perfectly to this "novel." All the voices of the world of her writings find their place here; but situated in the interior of the terrain of this fragmented ego. (42)
The voices, though they emanate from a for intérieur, do not and cannot form one consciousness or self because they do not, cannot apprehend themselves as one. What Irigaray refers to as the (possible, yet to be) wonder of sexual difference, not yet assimilated and not yet known, would seem to find a place here, where the subject itself is never, in Irigaray's words, the whole of the subject. And the so-called immediacy of Sarraute's prose, as I indicated above, contains in fact an exploration of what is usually apprehended as experience's immediacy. Thus it can be read as an attempt to formulate mediation where none seemed possible, necessary, or desirable.
Sarraute's writing would locate any space of sexual difference or another subject not in a utopian future or not-yet moment, but in the now, a now to which there is, however, no immediate access, and in a subjectivity or subjectivities which are also impossible to conceive as immediate. Writing thus becomes a process of revealing, representing mediations that are already there but are usually invisible, and of creating new mediations that might allow for the assimilation and knowledge of a newly perceived or created present and presence. This is why we find in Sarraute no feminist arguments for the "rights" of "women" or for their inclusion in an already existing universal. Nor do we find narratives preoccupied with struggles for the identification and satisfaction of authentic desires. Instead, Sarraute's writing in Tu ne t'aimes pas is far more in line with an Irigarayan notion of becoming. In J'aime à toi, for example, Irigaray describes the difference between what, traditionally, feminisms have concerned themselves with, and what it is that she argues for:
For this becoming, it is not enough to accede to the immediate needs or desires of a woman, nor simply to grant her help in obtaining the object she wishes for, even an intellectual object. [...] It is mediations and means of distanciation that women need above all. The immediate is their traditional task – associated with a purely abstract duty – but it resubmits them to the spiritual authority of men. Thus to grant to a woman that which she wants without teaching her the detour of mediation amounts to acting as patriarch, at fault with respect to her. (J'aime à toi 17, emphasis added)
In yet another revisiting of the question of what a woman wants, Irigaray suggests that this question can take us only so far, and that to go further it is necessary to leave it behind, in the domain where its answer hinges, ultimately, on what men might or might not (be able to) grant women. According to Irigaray, it is not enough first to discover, then struggle for, then obtain what one wants, because this trajectory on its own only results in a repetition and a continuation of a logic which is faulty, and at fault, with respect to sexual difference and women. Instead of the profound question of desire, Irigaray proposes that of mediation and distanciation. She further proposes that any future in which sexual difference might emerge depends upon the resolution, by women, of the "opposition between subjective and objective as regards feminine identity, especially in its historical dimension" (J'aime à toi 19).
These two concerns (mediation versus immediacy and the subjective/objective opposition with respect to identity) are Sarraute's in Tu ne t'aimes pas. As I noted above, the plasticity and plurality of identity is the starting point in this work, not a utopian notion. And rather than setting themselves the task of imagining this plurality, the narrative voices instead try to imagine how the conception of a unitary subject is possible; a subject, in the phrase of the book, that loves itself. Such a notion calls for explanation.
"They truly love themselves? [...] But how do they do it then?"
"It's very simple. They feel that all the elements of which they are composed are indissolubly joined, all without distinction... the lovely and the ugly, the bad and the good, and this compact ensemble that they call 'I' or 'me' possesses the faculty of dividing itself into two, of looking at itself from the outside, and that which it sees, that 'I,' it loves.
"Exactly the way it happens to us when we look at others, those who are not us – and we love them... They love themselves as well." Exactement comme cela nous arrive quand nous regardons les autres, ceux qui ne sont pas nous – et que nous les aimons... Eux, ils s'aiment aussi eux-mêmes... (14)
The unitary, self-contained and self-same subject, a compact fantasy made up of (only) two instances, one objective and one subjective, is able to love itself precisely because of its singleness: it is the subject par excellence of the One/Love both Jacques Lacan and Irigaray discuss. Illusory though this unity may be, it produces certainty and resoluteness. Sarraute wonders if it is not "the most enviable of gifts" (14), and proceeds to entertain the possibility that this 'they' who love themselves constitute a privileged group, endowed perhaps with a fuller subjectivity than 'we.' The voices imagine that these others have been given something "by good fairies," either at birth or over the course of their development, that has allowed them to become so gifted. We, who were not "made for happiness," have somehow missed out on the necessary ingredients for this self-loving subjectivity. Perhaps they have had special help, then. They were given, from childhood on, "looks of love, of admiration... they saw themselves reflected in the eyes of others... and that image..." (15). But here another voice interrupts, remarking that this is precisely what 'we' have never been able to do: see ourselves in the images of ourselves that others send back to us. Whether because of our conscious effort, or, as is more often the case, whether the images simply don't stick, this subject has never internalized those reflections long enough to contemplate them as forms which correspond to it.
In order to press this question, the voices begin to ask whether or not they are really an exception, whether this subject too might not in fact love itself, or, on the other hand, whether there are many others who do not love themselves. This questioning begins with the recollection of a person, a recollection which itself begins not with the person, but with a piece of him, his hand. First there is a hand, with no other part visible; then there is the person's look: whoever it is is looking at his hand, "and in his look, so much love..." (20) At this point, the voices begin a kind of interrogation which proceeds as a series of propositions and denials. One voice notes that those who love themselves (as this man does) start by loving everything they can perceive of themselves, from their hands to other body parts, to their reflection in the mirror. Another voice interjects, "And us? Have there not been moments when we too..." It is immediately cut off: "Brief moments, rather of astonishment... Is that me, really?... But there came very quickly another and still another reflection... And then our looks, occupied elsewhere, hardly stopped to contemplate..." (21) There follows a repetition of suspicion and denial:
"Yes, but our hand too, when you think about it..."
"But precisely, we don't think about it." [...]
"[...] And yet in us as well two cigarettes... and even one sometimes... It must be a more frequent effect that one thinks..." [It's a question of the hand-man's comments about cigarettes and his digestive system.]
"But nothing like that slipped into us at that moment. [...]"
"And yet does it not seem that even at that moment, a brief memory..."
"Quickly pushed back... not worth the attention [...]"
"That recalls that we were not alone in looking at him, listening to him. Some persons were seated like us at that table... they were also contemplating him in silence..."
"But then... those people, so attentive and silent, would they not be like us? Would they too, like us?..."
"Cease to exist in his presence?"
"They would not love themselves? We wouldn't be an exception?"
– Ne s'aimeraient pas eux-mêmes? Nous ne serions pas une exception? (21-24)
This last question is answered in the negative, and it is explained that the others' self-love was actually being nourished in the presence of one in whom self-love was great and perfect. And again, 'they' are contrasted with a we who are multiple. Imagining 'ourselves' seen, through the eyes of others, as single, as someone, the reaction is a combination of incredulity, naïvete, and perhaps a touch of haughtiness: "'Yes, us... reduced to that...' 'We so numerous... unencompassable... incommensurable...'" (28)
"Happiness"
As opposed to this incommensurable we, others, who are "made for happiness," look within themselves and find a self. They are trained from babyhood to see themselves as everyone else sees them, so that they feel themselves to be "real" babies, boys, girls, women, and men, and nothing else. Real women and real men are an agreement which rests on the convention of identity internalized, taken in from without. This other subject, however, insofar as it distinguishes itself from those who say 'I' (and even from itself when it says, of necessity, 'I') is a "strange distribution of populations," including frisky youths, adolescents gathering with tottering old folks, old folks with young ones, and many, many children (32). Others construct a tiny, but hard and solid, statue of themselves, and then work to become it. But this subject's statue – when it has one that allows it to show to the outside "a presentable, quite solid 'I'" – its statue quickly disintegrates. "Who remembers clearly what that 'I' was?" (37) As soon as the statue is left "alone among us," it shows itself to be a mere snowman, and promptly melts (39).
The book's early tone of ironic self-pity (we are not made for happiness, we're ungifted, unfavored) soon changes to one of comic experimentation with identity, self-love, and happiness, and then to contempt for these existential gold-standards. As Anthony Newman notes, "Everything in Tu ne t'aimes pas finds itself under the knife of a massive, global irony that concerns the desire of the one who doesn't love himself to be like the one who loves himself. In sum, if it is this, more or less, that the text says, what it means is pretty much the opposite." Those who love themselves and therefore live in happiness are in fact "victims" whom nothing can help. Attempts to disabuse them only lead to accusations ("you don't love yourself," for example) and anguish. And attempts to be like them ("Just a second.. hold on... I think I'm going to get there... There... I'm there... I feel that I love myself..."[58]) end in distraction and comedy, as when the voice who momentarily finds "Happiness" complains to the others about their insistent questions and snide remarks, and thereby loses it: "'I wanted to find that sensation one has when one lives in Happiness... I had it already... but your continual interruptions...' 'We were only trying to help...' 'Now I have to start all over... Where was I?'" (63)
But the victims of unity of self and Happiness are not only externalized, and smugly pitied or scorned by this subject. On the contrary, it knows the ruse well because it too has been duped, at least at times. "'But remember...'" one of the voices demands, "'there are some even among us... [...] You recognize that you reached out towards Happiness... and with what nostalgia... you went there...'" (52) There is a quick defense, another qualification of another suspicion:
"We were dragged... you know how easily influenced, how gullible we are... Well, all those advertisements, that continuous propaganda, those illustrious models on exhibit, that advice, those encouragements, those narratives about those who find themselves there... one couldn't resist... Anyway, you who are so strong, you who don't let yourself be taken in, you followed us..."
"Say rather that you pulled us along with you, aided by those from without, our near and dear, our relations, our friends... they wrapped us up in what was flowing from their looks, from their words..." –Dites plutôt que vous nous avez tirés avec vous, aidés par ceux du dehors, nos proches, nos parents, nos amis... ils nous ont enrobés dans ce qui coulait de leurs regards, de leurs paroles... (52)
But however they got there, to Happiness, once there they felt restless, claustrophobic, clumsy, as if they might break something, and mischievous, looking for hidden faults and finding, chiefly, boredom (55). Nevertheless, the subject is implicated in what it criticizes and disdains, and the reader soon suspects that the subject disdains "Happiness," self-love, and the unity of identity precisely because it is implicated in them. One thinks of an episode in Sarraute's Enfance, in which the young Nathalie is looking at blossoms and trees in bloom and a green lawn with pink and white daisies:
the sky, of course, was blue, and the air seemed to be gently vibrating... and at that moment, it came... something unique... which will never again come back in that way [...] but what? what word can get hold of it? not the all-encompassing word 'happiness,' which is the first to come to mind, no, not that... "le ciel, bien sûr, était bleu, et l'air semblait vibrer légèrement... et à ce moment-là, c'est venu... quelque chose d'unique... qui ne reviendra plus jamais de cette façon [...] mais quoi? quel mot peut s'en saisir? pas le mot à tout dire: «bonheur», qui se présente le premier, non, pas lui..." Enfance (Paris: Gallimard, 1983) 66-67.
Similarly, in Tu ne t'aimes pas the voices console themselves in their inability to "know Happiness" by pointing to Happiness's inadequacy. After a voice reminds the others that, after all, not knowing happiness has its advantages too, another seconds the idea: "It's already an advantage not to be obligated to plaster that name of Happiness onto every sensation still intact, living... to crush it..." (64)
Sarraute's insistence that language kills the experience has often been noted. But in this case, the observation is not limited to the fact that the name can never measure up to or capture the ineffable experience, which it therefore tarnishes or ruins. Sarraute is concerned here to underline the reality that the word itself creates, a reality that has its own killing force. "Happiness," like loving oneself or being confident one is a unified whole, is dubious not just because it misses some unique, elusive mark, but because it constitutes a strict ideal which stifles and regulates any possibility of freedom. In failing to name one thing (a sensation), the word also names and constitutes something else, and comes to have a regulatory force. Not to know it is thus to refuse to be under its rule.
"And not to see spilled everywhere that glossy varnish, shining, gaudy... without a blemish, without a crack...
"And that exhausting vigilance, that continual surveillance. A police regime. The least deviation, the least suspicion of freedom that might put Happiness in danger, and one is called back to order... brought back into Happiness bound hand and foot..."
– Et cette vigilance épuisante, cette continuelle surveillance. Un régime policier. Le moindre écart, le moindre soupçon de liberté qui pourrait mettre le Bonheur en danger et on est rappelé à l'ordre, ramené dans le Bonheur pieds et poings liés... (65)
The rebellion against Happiness produces, in others, the shock of a broken taboo. They refuse to believe when they are told it is a trap, an enslavement, a matter of dupery (69). Or else they defend themselves and their kingdom by shooting out looks of pity and astonishment. The voices reflect that it is better to keep quiet, since there is really nothing that can be done for Happiness's victims (67).
And yet there was one instance in which it was really too much, when one of those "evil-doers" was holding up a particular Happiness, and went too far in his imposition of the rule. The Happiness in question was that "of maternity, of paternity," and it was being dangled before another of happiness's victims who was deprived of it. "[W]e rushed out, we mounted the assault... 'What Happiness? That's not happiness!' 'Not Happiness?' We were seized, interrogated... 'It is not a happiness to have children? Did yours by any chance not give you any?'" (67) And the victim turns "pitying" or "incredulous" eyes on us. Again, the objection here is not that "Happiness" fails to describe something (the indescribable joy of maternity, for example) but rather that it does describe something absolutely alien, thereby erecting a false front, a fortress in which there is no room for a maternity that, in the subject's faltering phrases, "includes also..." or "is not always..." (67) Language kills, yes, but this is not its only function. The narrator(s) imply that it might also make room for something that is not an easy fit. That it might gesture towards, evoke, suggest, even tell in silence, especially the silence of Sarraute's ubiquitous ellipses. In other words, language might function as a medium for the unknown, rather than as a denial of it, a diversion from it.
Love, language, selves
Later in the book, as its subject is attempting to speak of what was apparently "a mutual love" (un amour partagé) Sarraute directly addresses the relation between language and the inexpressible. Rather than oppose the two, she evokes their simultaneity and their location at a distance.
"When something... how to evoke it?...""Was it a color, a line, a barely perceptible nuance, an intonation, a silence... but it does not let itself..."
"It never let itself be captured by any word..." [...]
"Wasn't it Cézanne who said about something else..."
"But was it really something else about which he said that 'it is entangled at the very roots of being... At the impalpable of feeling'?"
"Feeling, for its part, is over there where words circulate, alight, designate..."
– Le sentiment, lui, est là-bas où les mots circulent, se posent, désignent...
"It was fun from time to time to make an excursion there..." (123)
Feeling is what never gets contained in a word just as it is also precisely the realm where words throng, looking to land somewhere and designate, as in the ambulatory Sarraute evokes in the above-cited interview. There would be no feeling, which is itself "impalpable," in isolation from the impossible attempt to name it, nor from the declaration that "what we feel is not inscribed anywhere" (130). Thus the we of Tu ne t'aimes pas is not simply distinct from those who, for example, do love themselves, are self-identical, or do believe that they find and use words adequate to their feelings. Quite the contrary, this subject is both the we who, as it were, know better, and the he, the you, the they, the I and the me who, quite literally, run to their mother-tongue, their mother and their tongue, to be reassured, confirmed in their need to know that the interior disorder can be contained, made manageable, or simply made, by words.
The voices talk about those among them who are capable of extracting and naming what cannot be named, that which simply "happens... neither seen nor known" (130). They remember one who was capable of producing an "I suffered," and an "I cried." And even an "I'm having fun." He simply absented himself for a second "unbeknownst to us" in order to go outside and report, "I'm having fun," in order to close in what was scattering and escaping. Then he could return among us, secure that everything was in order. "Isn't he like the child who abruptly, in the middle of the game, leaves his friends, runs toward his mother, receives a kiss and returns reassured, fortified..." (131) The game, the place where 'we' are and where the unknown happens, is a realm of risk and the impossibility of certainty, security, or definition. Language, the kiss of the mother-tongue through which, for example, "feelings" can be delimited, picked out, and identified, brings not simply form to what happens but mediation, indirection, simultaneously rendering events foreign and articulate, estranged and speakable.
The subject, overflowing and breaking up, runs to language, and language embraces the subject at a given moment, forming for it a link, a tie between the overflow, the risk, which is hot to the point of boiling, and the frozen inertness of the known, "embalmed and exhibited in a glass coffin" (132-133). The mother-tongue is herself not the killer – her kiss not quite the kiss of death – but is a link to death, and may tend toward that end when used as a blind, a false front. She is already there (again, like the words in the ambulatory), and may be called upon, or else will emerge on her own, but the way in which she emerges is not already set in stone. The fashion and the effect of language will depend upon an interaction, among the child, the mother, and the game; among the subject, language, and the "fragile, perishable" (133), but not simply pre- or extra-discursive, experience.
Thus far, I have noted the plurality of Sarraute's subject, her complicated understanding of representation and experience, and the way language acts as a necessary liaison between, and interaction of, the two. I have also suggested that Sarraute's at least partial definition of experience and of the subject as unknown and unknowable links it with Irigaray's emphasis on the sexed subject's fundamental incompletion in the recognition of both the other's and her own status as not entirely knowable or appropriated. Probably the most serious doubt such a parallel has to confront, though, stems from Irigaray's emphatic distinction between multiplicity, which she rejects, and two-ness, which she tries to elaborate. Elizabeth Grosz and Pheng Cheah summarize the development of Irigaray's thought around this key distinction.
It is widely accepted that Irigaray's critique of phallogocentrism involves an exposure of the violent logic of the one, a Platonic monologic that reduces the other to a pale copy or deficient version of the same [... and that] Irigaray regards [...] as the theoretical underpinning of a variety of historical patriarchal social and cultural structures as well as phallocentric discourses on femininity and feminine sexuality [...]. However, [...] it will [...] be somewhat of a surprise to many of her readers that Irigaray regards multiplicity as complicit with the logic of the one. In her view the multiple is the one in its self-willed dispersal into unrelated atomistic singularities, many others of the same. The alternative model she offers is the paradigm of the two, a mode of original relationality or being-with-the-other in which the otherness of the other is respected.
Is Sarraute's "moving mass" (16) of a subject, with its multiple, clamoring voices, a subject she likens at one point to a flock of birds or a school of fish (87), in any way comparable to Irigaray's being-two? I propose looking at the ways in which it manifestly differs from Irigaray's dual subject, before considering further their possible links.
First, as I've mentioned, there is the fact that Sarraute's subject is made up of a throng of voices, as numerous "as the stars in the sky" (17). And it is not a question of many 'I's or many 'me's, but always of an 'us' which refuses those terms. "'Among us, we don't use those 'me's, those 'I's...'" When someone said, "You don't love yourself," it meant the defeat of any lingering illusions of singularity. "'We saw ourselves, with more clearness than ever, disintegrated into a multitude of disparate 'I's... whom could one love in all that?' [...] 'And then those 'I's, those 'you's [ces «tu»] were erased [...] of themselves diluted into formless masses, into 'us'es, 'you all's... made up of numerous similar elements...'" (86-87)
Sarraute's subject sees itself as having passed through a moment when singular 'I's and 'you's had some significance, to a moment in which it sees such clear, atomizing distinctions merely make it impossible for it to speak. In her interview with Wittig, Sarraute cites Beaumarchais, from The Marriage of Figaro, to describe the subject in Tu ne t'aimes pas as "a formless assemblage of unknown parts." Indeed, we might read Sarraute as specifically rejecting two as too small a number when it comes to the self, for it does come up in Tu ne t'aimes pas, in a recollected conversation with someone to whom the narrator felt she could speak openly.
The question is put tentatively, whether the other feels himself to be "a very compact and unified whole" that is "clearly delimited" and "that you can look at from without." The man responds in the affirmative, and then adds the complicating nuance that in fact "there are two men in me, I am sometimes the one and sometimes the other, not both at once..." to which the narrator replies, "Two contradictory beings... [...] That's very few..." (17) Of course, as we shall discuss shortly, Irigaray's being-two is not about being inhabited by two contradictory beings, but for the moment, it is enough to note that Sarraute's we is many more than two, a multitude upon which she repeatedly insists.
The second major difference between these two visions of the subject concerns, of course, sexual difference. Despite the fact that Sarraute's narrative voices are usually masculine (because, she says, the feminine pronoun just doesn't work as a universal), there have been attempts to read her prose as putting forward a particular identification with, or vision of, the feminine. We have already seen Schor's argument that Sarraute's writing is in at least implicit accord with feminist critiques of the subject. But there have been more emphatic attempts at linking her prose to an argument about the feminine.
Raylene Ramsay, for example, reads Enfance as introducing what she calls a "'complementary' or telescoping movement [...] between the masculine and the feminine," a back and forth which dramatizes the child Natacha's torn affections and loyalties between her divorced mother and father as representatives of the two opposing poles of sexual difference. A propos of Sarraute's consistent taking on of a masculine voice, Ramsay suggests,
At the level of the énoncé [...], it may be the case that Sarraute identifies more closely with the critical, investigative 'masculine' voice of her own writing enterprise. Yet, at the level of the énonciation, aware that words are flattening and inadequate and that single, reasoned judgments are simplifying, it is the uncertain, 'feminine' voice of seeking and emotion that seems to exemplify what is most characteristic of Sarraute's work. (57)
However, we must admit, it is precisely about this level that Sarraute is speaking when she declares, "On the level on which the interior dramas I strive to bring to light are produced, there is, I am firmly convinced, no difference between men and women." The voice characterized by uncertainty, seeking, and emotion, then, does not, for Sarraute, have a content called feminine.
What insists in Sarraute's prose, in Tu ne t'aimes pas just as much as elsewhere, is a dogged refusal of any final, or finally meaningful, sexual identification. When we try to follow genders, grammatical or personal, over the course of a work, we are likely to come up empty-handed, or else to find ourselves constructing over-elaborate formulae which equate certain words or phrases (the "elle" that stands for "une personalité forte") with certain traits (self-deluded femininity?). Reading attempts at such interpretations leaves us less convinced than struck by their inevitable failure to respond to the shiftings of the Sarrautean subject, its first person plural that will not settle into a singular. Ramsay articulates one such attempt to locate sexual difference in Tu ne t'aimes pas: "Gender is grammatically determined ('une forte personalité' is a woman). Or it becomes a shifting, potentially multiple complex beyond the 'real man' and the 'real woman.' Gender emerges from the feeling experienced by some of the more introspective interlocutors of being androgynous or a mixture of both man and woman" (Ramsay 142). The problem here is that androgyny comes up in this book only once, and then to be dismissed immediately as one more impossibly "simple" form of identity, one which 'they' often ascribe to themselves, but to which 'we' cannot or will not limit ourselves:
"How do they manage to feel so clear, so simple?"
"They must train for it very early..." [...]
"Once they've gotten this habit of feeling themselves the way they are seen, they keep it forever... at every stage of their life, they feel themselves to be women, men..."
"And nothing but that. 'Real' women, 'real' men... [...]"
"If they stopped feeling 'real', how would they be? One would be perhaps very surprised..."
"There are many who feel like a mixture of man and woman... but always the most simple of mixtures..."
– Il y en a beaucoup qui se sentent comme un mélange d'homme et de femme... mais toujours le plus simple des mélange... (30-31)
Androgyny is presented merely as one among the many whole, compact modes of being that 'we' see around us but do not share. Thus to claim, as Ramsay does, that the we in Tu ne t'aimes pas is "intimate," "individuated," and ultimately gendered insofar as it is to be identified with "the character, experience, and situation [of] an aging woman," Nathalie Sarraute (142), a "woman writer" who is confessing (158), is to do nothing more than bring us back to the beginning. For, while the logic of Tu ne t'aimes pas might allow for the possibility of agreeing with such a proposition, it also suggests, primarily, its meaninglessness. Who is this "Nathalie Sarraute," or this or that I or you?, is, of course, the book's first and last question, so that to say that the book's subject is its female author is to have said nothing at all. The book itself will continue to ask, for example, what or who "a" "woman" writer might be. On the question of sexual difference, then, suffice it to say that Sarraute has little to offer directly, because she considers it a question that does not come up in the universe of tropisms, which Schor calls "those multiple, minute stirrings that lie midway between the inchoate formlessness of the semiotic and the rigid armature of the symbolic" (130). In that almost pre-linguistic realm where words and sensations are melting into an inevitable, mutually constituting interaction, it is as if there is not yet any clear distinction made between male and female, men and women. (There are certainly no "real men" or "real women" – those chimerical embodiments of convention – as we have seen.)
Instead, there are possibilities, virtualities, which do not include the following sexed terms: "'real' women, 'real' men, 'real' fathers mothers, sons, daughters, grandparents," but do include the (unsexed or not yet sexed terms?): "young people, adolescents," "old people," and "children" (32). One of the most important challenges of reading Sarraute in the light of feminism is to take seriously her writing's insistence that it has no place for sexual difference. In doing so, we may be able to grasp something more fundamental to her work, something which it shares, I will argue, with Irigaray's thought, and which is essential to the possibility of thinking about a sexed subject in an ethical context.
After the feminine subject
For both Irigaray and Sarraute, the important point about the plurality of the subject is its non-totality. In short, it is impossible to know the self, because the self is always more than its I, or, as Irigaray puts it, "You are not, nor am I the whole, nor the same, principle of totalization" (J'aime à toi 164). If there is, as yet, for Irigaray, no sexual difference in Western cultures' institutions and identities – no culture of sexual difference – this absence is intimately bound up with the principal of totalization, especially epistemological totalization, that she critiques. And if "there is no sexual difference" in Sarraute's writing, this is because for Sarraute sexual difference has to do with the "real" women and men of whose identities she is so suspicious, and not, as it does for Irigaray, with a new horizon of being in the world.
This distinction between what each writer is talking about when she addresses sexual difference allows us to understand how Sarraute, who refuses to be read as a woman writer, who insists there is no sexual difference in her work, can nevertheless be read parallel to a radical attempt at rethinking sexual difference. When she repeats that sexual difference is not what she is concerned with, she is speaking precisely about conventional representations of men and women in the world and the differences between them. For Sarraute, such differences are particular and should not be transferred from the domain of the idiosyncratic and the personal onto the literary or generic. As she puts it, "I think these distinctions [calling male or female the qualities or defects of a text] are based on prejudices, on pure convention. They are unverifiable assertions which rest on a very small number of examples, examples where the male or female author claims to possess certain qualities he believes proper to his sex." When Sarraute discusses sexual difference in relation to writing, then, she is speaking about, in short, so-called "real women" and "real men" as they exist in either literary or lived conventions, and it is in that light that her refusals have to be understood: "The female condition is the last thing I think about when writing." Incidentally, I would suggest that this is the sexual difference that Virginia Woolf is talking about, too, when she notes that it is fatal for anyone writing to think about their sex, their "female" or "male" "condition." This is not the same thing as thinking about sexual difference in Irigaray's sense.
What Sarraute manages to avoid by not infusing something she would call female into her texts is what Gayatri Spivak has called the "misfiring" of the name of woman. According to Spivak, the longer feminism holds on to "woman" as its sole essence and cause, it will be doomed to essentialize that name (and all who bear it) in the name of history (especially the history of women), and thus to repeating a history it wishes to overturn. (Her point is logically similar Joan Scott's vis-à-vis experience, discussed above.) Insisting on the power, not to mention the adequacy, of the word "woman" to name an identity that would be shared by millions, Spivak suggests, is to forget what "woman" must always fail to name, and here she is referring directly to the Derridean deployment of "woman" and the "feminine" to name (and misname) "the non-truth of truth." Counter to what she calls "Derrida's anxiety about not compromising the living feminine in the interest of a gynegogy which would sell itself to the death-story of the patronymic," and counter to egalitarian feminism's dogmatic reaction against both deconstruction's and psychoanalysis' critiques of the subject, Spivak suggests
that we should not share this anxiety for the name, we should not identify the guarding of the question with this particular name. [...] We must remember that this particular name, the name of 'woman', misfires for feminism. Yet, a feminism that takes the traditionalist line against deconstruction falls into a historical determinism where 'history' becomes a gender-fetish.
This is exactly what cannot happen in Sarraute's prose: the history, the story, cannot become a "gender-fetish," and cannot be fetishized convincingly along the lines of gender, because its subject is not named, not written in terms consonant with stable, stabilizing, genders. It is as if she were saying, with her "there is no sexual difference in my writing": If you want to see "real men and women," look elsewhere (and they are paraded around in no small numbers); in here, it's something else that's being written.
In Tu ne t'aimes pas, Sarraute indicates explicitly that it is a philosophical tradition into which her we does not fit, at least not completely, a tradition which finds its roots in the Socratic "Know thyself" and in ensuing interpretations that take the imperative to be totally fulfillable, and set about defining the self (as member of a family, as citizen, as subject, as individual, as separate from others, as alienated, as split, and so on). It is an imperative over which the subject puzzles, and towards which it moves, over the course of the narrative, pairing it with other duties, especially self-love, self-identity, and unity of self. Toward the end of the book, the voices remember an instance when one of them uttered, out loud and in some sort of public, the phrase, "With me, it's pathological" (207). The immediate question debated among them is whether or not this was said for others, on the outside, and thus in order to display and show off an I, or whether it was part of a Sarrautean (internal and critical) sous-conversation. The voices argue: some accuse those who said it of performing, of grandstanding: "You rose up before them, chest thrown out, one hand over your breast... 'With me, it's pathological...'" (207) Others protest their innocence: "Nothing of the sort, you're making it up, we were turned in on ourselves, we said it as if we were talking to ourselves..." (208) The proof that an exhibition has taken place turns on the demonstration that 'we' too do effect (or affect?) the subjective stance par excellence, that of looking at oneself from without, objectively, the self-reflective first task of philosophy:
But even before they could make a move, you escaped [from one of their 'cells' within which you were about to shut yourselves], running toward them, [...] Wait a second, don't close me in... not completely... I have split myself in two... an operation that you recommend, [...] I know how to look at myself from the outside, I can see myself, know myself... Know yourself, right? you prescribe that... I'm capable of it, you see, I come and place myself beside you, at the same distance you are at, and from there I look at myself with the same impartiality, the same pitiless clairvoyance... I have learned how to assimilate your teachings, I have retained your classifications, I am applying your regulations, [...] let's look together at what is there in me... ah yes, it's sad to say, but one cannot designate it otherwise: it's 'pathological'. (208-209)
This we, who has gradually, in fits and starts, approached and admitted its own ability, or sporadic tendency, to love itself, now recalls its having taken on, dressed up in, the regalia of self-love as self-knowledge. Like an obedient (philosophy) student, the subject followed the formulae that are meant to lead to a complete vision, an objective clairvoyance. It goes without saying that this moment – much as in the Socratic dialogues and in contemporary philosophical engagements with identity and difference – this moment comes in order to come up short, to be shown to be impossible. Equally important, though, is that it comes also to be shown to have taken place nevertheless.
In this sense, Tu ne t'aimes pas is less an examination of why its subject does not love itself or form a "compact whole," than it is, throughout its first half especially, an exploration of how and why anyone does (seem to); how and why even 'we,' despite our protestations, have occupied this position of wholeness, this self-loving posture. Recalling getting up before others, assuming such a stance, the subject at last attempts to think what the relation might be between this apparently unifying act and the plural being it knows itself to be, and is mystified to begin with. "'We didn't understand anything about it, we didn't seek to understand...' 'It was one of those strange phenomena about which one says that one couldn't believe one's eyes, nothing one knows would allow one to explain it...'" (212) This subject, it would still like to claim, can know nothing of pretensions to one-ness or completeness. And yet the entire book is directed to this moment at which its subject admits to itself that it, too, shares in the self-love it disdains and holds to be impossible. Which is also to admit that the main opposition it has set up and rested upon throughout, that between them (who love themselves) and us, is in doubt. Only at the book's end do the narrating voices finally imagine those outside of them as vulnerable to them. Only at this point do they attempt to imagine their effect on others.
"But now, after all that we have seen, can we not ask ourselves if what we made them feel when we rose up before them..."
"One sole block, locked, closed in on itself." [...]
"It unfurled over them, indifferent to their presence."
"It came who knows how and then who knows how it passed..."
"A blind force..."
"A hurricane that make them bend down..."
"Were they not a bit afraid?"
"Afraid?"
"Yes, why not? it's not impossible, it was so abrupt, so violent... they could have felt at first a slight, fleeting fright..."
– Oui, pourquoi pas? ce n'est pas impossible, c'était si brusque, si violent... ils ont pu sentir d'abord une légère, passagère frayeur... (212-213)
At no other point in the book do the voices consider the feelings of others to be as mysterious and subject to question as its own. To the contrary, 'they' (every one of them a simple, compact whole) usually stand for everything with which 'we' do not and cannot identify because of our excessive nature: the fantasy of the One/Love, the self-loving one, the subject who knows itself. What happens at this point is a reversal. It is suddenly the we who take the place of the compact whole, the solid block, and the significance of loving oneself is revealed in the reactions of those affected by the event. It has nothing much, in fact, to do with the self, and everything to do with those who – as a result of the self's unifying, its forming a solid, single point – are able to identify themselves, to see themselves in light of it, in contrast to it, in relation with it. This, the subject seems to be grasping, is nothing other than what it itself does when it looks without it, identifying itself (in all its non-self-identity) in opposition to those who love themselves.
Sarraute's subject would have expected some sort of devastation as a result of its violent, furious sortie. The strong, overpowering, and it should have thought destructive force of its "tornado" did not destroy, did not elicit defensive reactions: "Our involuntary 'sortie' had not provoked in them what one would have expected, not the slightest retort, the hint of a rebuff. And even..." (212) The we's sudden and violent taking on of an emphatic I has somehow had a salutary effect on the others. After a possible, passing fear, "'so much firmness, strength, assurance, princely unconstraint, perfect liberty...' 'fortified them...' 'reassured them...' 'raised them up...' 'They felt themselves traversed by a beneficent wave...'" (213) There is a realization that this is what they have wanted, a release from the subject's refusal to be identical to itself, from what Lacan called the "asymptotic" relation of the I to the image of the self reflected back to it. Seeing the complex, plural subject as one provokes "admiration, tenderness, gratitude [reconnaissance]..." for the release it effects (213), for the illusion it confirms. What "we have given them for a few seconds" is "what the one who loves himself gives them constantly." We have succeeded in becoming "the one, among all, the most gifted at loving himself," and in so doing, encounter the gratitude and relief of others, and realize that it is this with which we were reproached when told, "You don't love yourself": with not giving out, and participating in, the fantasy of wholeness that strengthens, reassures, and raises up. Not to gather one's self up and present it to others, definite and willful, is to inflict a wrong of some kind:
If we listen to it now, that 'You don't love yourself' that so surprised us, quite a long time ago now, we hear in it above all a reproach, a blame not only for the wrong we are doing to ourselves, but for what we make them undergo. (215)
Finally, this gathering cannot be disowned. It is, in fact, an interaction that the entire book enacts. Sarraute indicates as much by drawing a parallel between the we who makes itself into an I before others and the act of running to language in order to contain a reality that seems otherwise to overflow its bounds. The one among 'us' who ran to the mother-tongue to receive its kiss (I'm having fun), to be "reassured, fortified" (131) foreshadows the we's final sortie, which has the same effect upon those who witness it as language's kiss had on the subject, reassuring and strengthening them, providing a kind of fixed point around which it is then possible to form. Both moments create a "bienfaisant" feeling ("c'est si bon, si bienfaisante" [131]; "Ils se sont sentis tranversés par une vague bienfaisante" [213]), formed out of the containment and definition provided by a sudden access to language, that the subjects call a gift of love, a gift which can only be bestowed by "the one among all who is most gifted at loving oneself" (214). Any attempt at language entails the chance of such beneficence, just as it also inevitably risks delineating borders of both the other and the self that are immediately inadequate and straightening. While the bulk of Sarraute's work is arguably preoccupied with this straightening effect upon the multiple, excessive self (effected by others, by "them," or by the subject's own recourse to language), what Tu ne t'aimes pas brings into relief is that without such recourse, inadequate and confining thought it be, others cannot emerge as anything but statues, straw men who are to be either scorned or feared in their simplicity. In other words, when otherness is confined within the multiplicity of the self, it is nothing but sameness multiplied, or, again, as Cheah and Grosz put it above, describing Irigaray's argument, "the multiple is the one in its self-willed dispersal into [...] many others of the same."
If agreeing to and confirming a certain version of identity has a strengthening, reassuring, and uplifting effect, and failing to reflect that version is necessarily to do a kind of wrong, to weaken, trouble, and lower the self which would know itself whole, then such a weakening, troubling, and lowering is precisely what thinkers of sexual difference, most notably Irigaray and Cixous, argue is necessary for a transformation of the subject from male/neuter to sexed, male and female. But the subject's transformation cannot stop at that. The effort to think toward another sexual difference does not culminate in this troubling move, as Irigaray's later work especially emphasizes. There has to be, further, a continuation of thought without the groundings provided by what she calls the logic of the same, of identity, a continuation of thought which will somehow positively value its troubling work, its non-sameness.
For Irigaray, leaving the ground of identity, of the Universal as One, is concomitant with a rethinking of what can constitute a ground, of what can constitute and ground a being. What she proposes is a new formulation of the universal, a universal based on the plurality of sexual difference. Her being two, taking its number from the two sexes, is the model she takes because of the specific sort of transcendence it implies, on both the inter- and intra-subjective levels. To be two, and to be of two, means for Irigaray to acknowledge that the other is irreducible to the self, and that even the self is never wholly identical to itself, belonging as it does to a universal gender, to a kind, which transcends its individuality and which the subject must remake, constituting her or his expression of the universal. In this sense, the universal of sexual difference can only be conceived as a process, and as not yet having arrived – both in terms of a contemporary cultural poverty that does not allow for it, and in terms of its own fluid nature. She writes, "The culture of this universal does not yet exist. The individual has been considered particular without sufficient interpretation of that universal which is in him or her: woman or man" (J'aime 85).
What Sarraute's subject confronts in Tu ne t'aimes pas is not so much the impossibility of being one in favor of its intimate sensation of being many, nor the impossibility of others ever knowing the self. Rather, it confronts the inescapable fact that, feel what it may, it reaches the other and appears to the other in a form it cannot comprehend – even as radically dispersed – on its own, in a form which only takes shape thanks to its mutual constitution by those without and those within. To say "I" is meaningless then, not simply because we are too complex, but because we literally do not exist unless there is already (or has already been) a we through which to be constituted.
This is where Sarraute's subject jibes with Irigaray's "new incarnation." In both visions, there is the primary acknowledgement that the subject is only itself because of and in mediation. 'We' are given to ourselves only through others' (inadequate, or excessive, or mistaken) reflections and our acceptances and rejections of them. Language, then, is explored for the sake of discovering to what extent it might function not simply as a naming tool, or as Irigaray puts it, as a discourse of basic needs rather than of the creation of culture. "Language itself remains generally at the level of needs, including the need to master nature, objects, others, notably by naming them" (J'aime 77-78), a situation which ends up denying the need for an engendering communication, "not only in the form of transfers of information, but of intersubjective exchanges" (79). Such a language as Sarraute's in Tu ne t'aimes pas, I would argue, performs precisely this switch from denotation to communication, and in such a way as to be engaged in the creation of a reality that is just finding its words as they are written into utterances.
This highly volatile, shaky, yet forthright language does not operate on the basis of already given assurances, identities, or objects, but instead heads towards the possibility of new ones. In Irigaray's terms, "It would be a question [...] of finding a new economy of existence and of being which is not that of mastery nor of slavery, but rather of exchange without a constituted object, a vital, cultural exchange, of words, of gestures, etc." (80). Sarraute's prose does enact such a new economy, while also acknowledging the force of that language and culture which reign. In order to enact it, she writes the subject, writes as the subject who is no longer one and not yet the other (in Irigaray's sense of the other of sexual difference). Whence the impossibility of reading Sarraute's prose as a writing of sexual difference; but whence also its primary openness to a new thought of sexual difference geared toward the future. A fundamental shift then, has already taken place when the Sarrautean narrative begins, and continues to unfold as it proceeds. The openness of her dialogic prose echoes Irigaray's call for a movement out of the fixed and the past toward the unfinished and the future:
Thus, between the hierarchical transmission of a language and a tongue, of an order and a law that would be there already, and the current exchange of a meaning between us, there is a difference of subjective economy. The first model of transmission of teaching is more parental, more genealogical, more hierarchical; the second is more horizontal and intersubjective. The first model risks being enslaved to the past, the second maintains a present for the construction of a future. (81)
To Irigaray's question, "how to make a we?" as opposed to a series of more or less disconnected Is and yous (85), Sarraute's prose responds with the impossibility of any gathering that would be complete. Incompletion itself, and its acknowledgement, are what lead, in Sarraute's writing, to the possibility of a we, of a dialogue where the unexpected gets said, where responses do not always come, where even at book's end, there is no finishing, but instead, notably, a question mark. Having vacillated between scorning and acknowledging self-love throughout the course of the book, and having finally assumed the personage (among others) of the one who is even the most gifted at self-love, Sarraute's narrators end their conversation with an incomplete fragment that serves to punctuate the work. Returning to the position of the we who do not manage to dwell in self-love, and recognizing that this causes others to undergo a kind of suffering, they speculate tentatively that, could they but remain there, "it would be good for everyone." "'If we could...' 'We wouldn't ask for better...' 'We wouldn't ask for better?' 'No better? Really?'" (215) More than expressing suspicion of the security and complacency of self-love, these last questions punctuate the book with the only mark that refuses to be final in as much as it calls for a response: the question. The epigram with which this paper begins, in which one of Sarraute's narrative voices recalls its I having given up trying to be one, having accepted itself as "the entire universe, all virtualities, all possibles... [...] it extends to infinity" (17) frightens the listener, who moves away, closing himself up and suggesting she talk with "someone more competent" (18). The words would seem to indicate a psychotic character that, as Sarraute puts it at another point, knows no boundaries when it comes to the self. But the point of Sarraute's unbounded subjectivity is not to set it free of all limitations; rather, it is to reveal the subject as perpetually unfinished, never having drawn the last, defining, delimiting line of its self-portrait. Which brings us back to Naomi Schor's remarks on portraits in French women's writing. Where Schor sees no proper images of men in French women's fiction, we can add that in Sarraute's Tu ne t'aimes pas, the many (incomplete and open) images of selves that appear and reappear reveal themselves in order to discover what it is that they are not (yet), and what they might be in the light of a subjectivity imagined not on the model of the individual, but on the model of many 'we's who cannot say 'I,' not even when there is an attempt to break them down into smaller units. The plural is simply the most basic requirement for the subject to speak, to assume a voice: "un «je»... non, [...] il fallait un «nous», un «vous»" (87).
The experience this subject constitutes in and through the work is not that of an individual claiming for itself the parameters appropriate to its identity, even to its emergent identity. In this sense, Sarraute's subject leaves behind what we have discussed of Irigaray's universal-as-being-two, where transcendence is figured on the model of the fundamentally unknowable other gender, a transcendence which in turn informs the perpetual incompletion of self-knowledge. Sarraute, in effect, skips over the ground of sexual difference as she proceeds towards another subject. But for both Sarraute and Irigaray, an essential point is that the subject is its (always intersubjective, always manifold) lived experience; that the subject will have constituted itself and that experience as the very interaction, the ever-changing mediation, between the two.
Paradoxically, by insisting on this radical openness even to the point of refusing to posit as basic a distinction as sexual difference, and by concentrating instead on the intricate, intimate turnings of the self within the "medium" of language, Sarraute's writing allows a space for entirely new, unpredictable expressions of sexual difference. It does not, of course, prescribe such expressions, and can hardly even be said to formulate them explicitly, but such is the roominess of her subject's definition that one does find subtle, but specific, transformations enacted: a radically pluralized subject contests the complacency with which "the happiness of motherhood" is proclaimed and enforced. And language becomes, as we have seen, a maternal kiss that enables a subject to gather itself, at least enough to go on with its game, the experience of which can threaten to explode the very possibility of a self.
1 This is the title of the first essay in the middle section ("Speculum") of Irigaray's Speculum. ("Toute théorie du «sujet» aura toujours été appropriée au «masculin», Speculum, de l'autre femme, Paris: Minuit, 1974. 165-182. "Any Theory of the 'Subject' Has Always Been Appropriated by the 'Masculin'," Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 133-146.) All translations from the French in this article are mine, except where otherwise noted.
2 Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième sexe, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1949) I: 14. ( The Second Sex, 2 vols. (trans. H. M. Parshley, New York: Knopf, 1953) I: xxi (Parshley's translation).
3 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Hartcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1929) 77.
4 Jean-François Lyotard, "One of the Things at Stake in Women's Struggles" (trans. Deborah J. Clarke with Winifred Woodhull and John Mowitt, Sub-Stance 20 [1978]) 13.
5 Irigaray, Ethique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1984) 77. An Ethics of Sexual Difference (trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993) 74-75. Hereafter cited parenthetically as EDS and ESD.
6 In that essay, Cixous names Colette, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Genet as the only French writers of the twentieth century in whose work one can find "inscriptions of femininity." ("Le Rire de la Méduse," L'Arc [61, 1975: 39-54] 42; translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen as "The Laugh of the Medusa," Signs [Summer, 1976], and reprinted in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms: An Anthology [New York: Schocken Books, 1981. 245-264] 249.
7 Nathalie Sarraute as quoted in La Quinzaine Littéraire no. 192 (August 1974) 29. Also cited in Naomi Schor, "Portrait of a Gentleman: Representing Men in (French) Women's Writing" in Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (Durham, NC: Duke UP: 1995) 128.
8 Jacques Derrida, "Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida," originally published in subjects/objects (Spring 1984), reprinted in Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, eds., Men in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1987) 189-203.
9 In her most recent book, Entre Orient et Occident: De la singularite à la communauté (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1999), Irigaray, for example, has attempted "to say how it is that the practice of respiration, of breaths, is not neutral, and how woman and man breathe and use their breath in specific ways: the one (she) keeping it more inside, especially for the purpose of parturition, the other using it almost exclusively to make, to construct outside of the self, for the other" (21). ("j'ai tenté de dire en quoi la pratique de la respiration, des souffles, n'est pas neutre, et comment femme et homme respirent et utilisent leur souffle de manière spécifique: le gardant davantage en soi, notamment à fin de partage, pour l'une, l'employant presque exclusivement à faire, à construire à l'extérieur de soi, pour l'autre.")
10 Irigaray and other feminist thinkers have much to say on the subject of touch as opposed to vision or the line of sight in relation to mastery. I merely wish to signal here that touch, for all the blurring it effects of limits that may look clear-cut to the eye, is of course an ambiguous sense. If one can caress with one's eyes, one can also wound with a mere touch. And further, the gentle caress of a touch may not (ever?) be devoid of an element of mastery: does not even the nurturing mother necessarily manipulate her infant even as she soothes it? Indeed, if she does not "master" her child in some fashion, will she not be failing her or him?
11 Scott is referring generally to feminist appeals to the experience of women, and specifically to historian Christine Stansell's "insistence that 'social practices' in all their 'immediacy and entirety' constitute a domain of 'sensuous experience' (a prediscursive reality directly felt, seen, and known)." See Christine Stansell, "Response," International Labor and Working Class History 31 (Spring 1987). As another example of the appeal to women's experience in feminist scholarship, Scott refers to Mary Hawkesworth, "Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth," Signs 14, 3 (Spring 1989) 533-557.
12 Joan Scott, "'Experience'" in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds. Feminists Theorize the Political (New York & London: Routledge, 1992) 31.
13 Indeed, in the first essay of Bad Objects, Schor cites Joan Scott on just this point, discussing the problem of the universal. Schor writes,
For, as Joan Scott notes [...], what is significant is not that particularity is puffed up into universality or even that universality depletes particularity; it is that what appears as a prior cause (i.e., particularity) is in fact a subsequent effect. (9) And in her preface, Schor literally states that it is discourse, or the story, that makes experience: "My 'story,' which makes my experience both unique and typical [...]," she writes, indicating by her syntax, at least, the made, not the immediate, nature of experience (ix, emphasis added).14 Scott concludes the above-cited passage, "Indeed, the possibility of politics is said to rest on, to follow from, a pre-existing women's experience" (31).
15 This is a fact whose importance has asserted itself more clearly within feminist thinking during the 1990s, in works by such scholars as Scott, Judith Butler, and others. Perhaps it could not be so asserted earlier because of the widespread anxiety about undermining the validity of egalitarian feminism's subject: woman, and women, who are the ones having all the experiences which authenticate their claims against oppression and to equality. It seems that only once these basic assumptions (expressed in the keywords having [transitively], experience, authentic, and equality) have been both questioned and found inadequate, is feminism able to start thinking without their grounding. Only when equality is no longer prescribed or exalted, in other words, can one begin to imagine an ethics without its reigning guarantee.
16 "Monique Wittig: Vous avez commencé à écrire Tropisme en 1932?
17 Arthur E. Babcock, The New Novel in France: Theory and Practice of the Nouveau Roman (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997) 69.
18 For intérieur means conscience, or consciousness, and it is a term which lends itself to Sarraute's employment of multiple voices, since "for" comes from the Latin "forum." As Germaine Brée notes, "'For', according to the Littré, as everyone knows, is an allusion to the Roman 'forum,' a public tribunal; the 'for intérieur' is thus an intimate tribunal, but like the other one, endowed with several voices." (Germaine Brée, "Le 'for intérieur' et la traversée du siècle," L'Esprit Créateur 36, 2 (Summer 1996) 38.
19 "Dans mon dernier livre, Ici, il m'a semblé m'approcher davantage de ce qui est la 'réalité'. [...] 'Ici', on ne sait pas qu'on est dans le for intérieur. Ce qui apparaît occupe tout. Et quand cela apparaît, on établit des cloisons pour que cela occupe justement tout l'espace qu'on lui réserve.
20 Quoted in Bell, Sheila M., Nathalie Sarraute: "Portrait d'un inconnu" and "Vous les entendez?" (London: Grant & Cutler, 1988) 16. Bell cites "a corrected version [of a discussion at the 1971 Cerisy colloquium on the new novel] supplied to me by Sarraute" as her source. See also Nouveau roman: hier, aujourd'hui (the proceedings of the 1971 colloquium at Cerisy-la-Salle), Jean Ricardou and Françoise Rossum-Guyon, eds. (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1972).
21 Paul de Man, Review of L'Ere du soupçon, Monde Nouveau XII, 101 (June 1956) 57-61. Cited in Ann Jefferson, "Nathalie Sarraute – Criticism and the 'Terrible Desire to Establish Contact," L'Esprit Créateur 36, 2 (Summer 1996) 61, n.1.
22 Leah Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes: Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé (Lincoln & London: Nebraska UP, 1990) 63. Hewitt adds, "Because she strives to undermine notions of uniqueness, fixed identity, and unequivocal truth, the specificity of gender constitutes for Sarraute another firm categorization that the tropism unravels. Her wariness of the notion of feminine writing goes in tandem with her desire to avoid making women writers marginal, and her interest in the tropism transcends the content of gendered experience" (64).
23 With respect to feminism, one could imagine the phrase "You don't love yourself" in a consciousness-raising context. It would represent, for example, the moment when a woman realizes that she has internalized masculinist thinking to such an extent that she fails to value herself "as a woman." In this sense, Sarraute's book could be read as a response to a certain strain within feminism that concerns itself with the affirmation and celebration of woman-ness and female selfhood. To the challenge, or revelation, "You don't love yourself," Sarraute responds with another challenge: Who doesn't love whom? What version of the subject are you presupposing, or even enforcing, in your rush to affirm what you are?
24 Nathalie Sarraute, Tu ne t'aimes pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1989) 9.
25 "– Chacun de nous le fait à chaque instant. Comment faire autrement? Chaque fois que l'un de nous se montre au-dehors, il se désigne par «je», par «moi»... comme s'il était seul, comme si vous n'existiez pas..."
26 "Ce n'est pas à nous tous que ce «nous» s'applique... Nous ne sommes jamais au grand complet... il y en a toujours parmis nous qui sommeillent, paressent, se distraient, s'écartent... ce «nous» ne peut désigner que ceux qui étaient là quand tu as fait cette sortie, ceux que ce genre de performances met mal à l'aise, ils se sentent atteints..."
27 Germaine Brée, "Le 'for intérieur' et la traversée du siècle," L'Esprit Créateur 36, 2 (Summer, 1996) 41.
28 "Le 'for intérieur' d'où émanent ces voix évolue dans une sorte d'anarchie mais maintient des rapports avec une société extérieure qui l'investit, vers laquelle on délègue des 'émissaires', des 'représentants' aussi différents et interchangeables que les 'visages' que tout individu montre à la société qui l'entoure [ . . . ]. Au cours des années, Nathalie Sarraute a souvent fait allusion au 'gant retorné'. La métaphore s'applique parfaitement à ce 'roman'. Toutes les voix du mondes de ses écrits y trouvent leur place; mais situées à l'intérieur du terrain de ce moi fragmenté."
29 See Luce Irigaray, J'aime à toi: Esquisse d'une félicité dans l'histoire (Paris: Grasset, 1992).
30 Which brings to mind Irigaray's remark, à propos of any particular subject's inscription in a genealogy which transcends her or him: "In this sense, there is no immediate subjectivity. That concept, or that notion or expression, is erroneous." (J'aime 92)
31 Pour ce devenir, il ne suffit pas d'accéder aux besoins ou aux désirs immédiats d'une femme, et pas plus de lui accorder simplement une aide pour obtenir l'objet qu'elle souhaite, fût-il intellectuel. [...] C'est de médiations et de moyens de distanciation dont les femmes ont surtout besoin. L'immédiat est leur tâche traditionnelle – associée à un devoir purement abstrait –, mais il les resoumet à l'autorité spirituelle des hommes. Ainsi accorder à une femme ce qu'elle veut sans lui enseigner le détour de la médiation revient à se comporter en patriarche, fautif à son égard.
32 – Ils s'aiment véritablement? [...] Mais comment font-ils donc?
– C'est très simple. Ils sentent que tous les éléments dont ils sont composés sont indissolublement soudés, tous sans distinction... les charmants et les laids, les méchants et les bons, et cet ensemble compact qu'ils appellent «je» ou «moi» possède cette faculté de se dédoubler, de se regarder du dehors et ce qu'il voit, ce «je», il l'aime.33 Leah Hewitt's reading of Sarraute's tropisms tends to continue this train of thought in gendered terms, focusing on the differing childhoods of boys and girls. She speculates that Sarraute's writing might be an example of Nancy Chodorow's theories of gendered psychological development. She writes, "Although Sarraute's tropisms are resistant to modern gender theory at the level of individual characters, they do seem to respond to the insights of feminist psychoanalytic theory at the level of textual creation and reception, that is, the way the text stresses relational configurations, rather than individualized identity. The theories of Nancy Chodorow on the dissymetries between girls' and boys' early development and Judith Kegan Gardiner's use of those theories [...] stress that masculine identity is based on successful separation and individuation from the mother: to be a male is not to be a female like the mother; the boy's sense of self is rooted in the need for autonomy and independence. Women's identity, on the other hand, is traced more along relational lines. A girl's [...] ego boundaries tend to be more permeable, emphasizing contact and fusion with the other rather than differences. [...] In writing, this translates as a breakdown in traditional generic boundaries (autobiographies are novelistic, novels are autobiographical)" (Hewitt 68-69). I take such theories of development to be fundamentally flawed in that, in brief, they equate experience and subjectivity without interrogating the grounds of the former, which is then itself understood as the (causal) condition of possibility for the latter.
34 –Oui, mais notre main, à nous aussi, quand on y pense...
–Mais justement nous n'y pensons pas. [...]
–[...] Pourtant en nous aussi deux cigarettes... et mêmes une seule parfois... C'est sans doute un effet plus fréquent qu'on ne croit...
–Mais rien de tel ne s'est glissé en nous à ce moment. Aucune comparaison entre lui et qui que ce soit...
–Pourtant ne semble-t-il pas que même à ce moment, un bref souvenir...
–Vite repoussé... ne méritant pas l'attention [...]
–Ça rappelle que nous n'étions pas seuls en train de le regarder, de l'écouter. Quelques personnes étaient assises comme nous à cette table... eles le contemplaient aussi en silence...
–Mais alors... ces gens si attentifs et silencieux, est-ce qu'ils ne seraient pas comme nous? Est-ce qu'eux aussi, comme nous?...
–Cesseraient d'exister en sa présence?
35 "Tout dans Tu ne t'aimes pas se retrouve sous la coupe d'une ironie massive, globale qui concerne le désir qu'a celui qui ne s'aime pas d'être comme celui qui s'aime. En gros, si c'est cela, peu ou prou, que dit le texte, ce qu'il veut dire est plus près du contraire." (Anthony Newman, "Le sentiment de culpabilité: domaine tropismique par excellence?" Esprit Créateur 36, 2 [Summer,1996] 101).
36 –Nous avons été entraînés... vous savez combien nous sommes influençables, crédules... Alors toutes ces réclames, cette continuelle propagande, ces illustres modèles exposés, ces conseils, ces encouragements, ces récits de ceux qui s'y trouvent... on n'a pas pu résister... D'ailleurs vous qui êtes si forts, vous qui ne vous en laissez pas conter, vous nous avez suivis...
37 Nathalie Sarraute, Childhood (trans. Barbara Wright in consultation with the author. New York: George Braziller, 1984) 56-57, translation modified.
38 –Et de ne pas voir partout répandu cet enduit lisse, luisant, clinquant... sans une tache, sans une fêlure...
39 –Quand quelque chose... comment l'évoquer?...
–Etait-ce une couleur, une ligne, une à peine perceptible nuance, une intonation, un silence... mais ça ne se laisse...
–Ça ne se laissait jamais capter par aucun mot... [...]
–N'est-ce pas Cézanne qui a dit à propos d'autre chose...
–Mais était-ce vraiment quelque chose d'autre dont il a dit que «ça s'enchevêtre aux racines mêmes de l'être... A la source impalpable du sentiment»?
40 Cheah, Pheng, and Elizabeth Grosz, "On Being-Two," Introduction to Diacritics 28.1 (Spring 1998), a special issue on "Irigaray and the Political Future of Sexual Difference" 6.
41 "Le Déambulatoire" 7. Wittig provides the exact reference in her own article (from Le Mariage de Figaro, act V, scene 3: "Quel est ce moi dont je m'occupe, un assemblage informe de parties inconnues.") Monique Wittig, "Avatars," L'Esprit Créateur 36, 2 (Summer 1996) 109 and 116, note 2.
42 Raylene L. Ramsay, The French New Autobiographies: Sarraute, Duras, and Robbe-Grillet (Crosscurrents: Comparative Studies in European Literature and Philosophy. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996) 57.
43 Schor, p. 128. Schor identifies this quote as a "response to a journal questionnaire on the fictional inscription of sexual difference," but does not cite the journal.
44 Or again, such readings can lead the reader into hasty psychoanalytic generalities about the author herself. Ramsay strays into this realm in writing about Sarraute's resistance to being read as a woman writer and of her keeping gender difference at bay in her work, speculating that such refusals "may conceal anxieties of influence and self-image" (137), thereby overlooking the vital point Sarraute is pursuing about the very possibility of something like a self-image.
45 –Comment font-ils pour se sentir si nets, si simples?
–Ils doivent s'y entraîner très tôt... [...]
–Une fois qu'ils ont pris ce pli de se snntir tels qu'on les voit, ils le gardent toujours... à chaque étape de leur vie, ils se sentent être des femmes, des hommes...
–Et rien que cela. De "vraies" femmes, de "vrais" hommes... [...]
–S'ils cessaient de se sentir si "vrais", comment seraient-ils? On serait peut-être très surpris...
46 In the very technical sense that one could imagine the author might not say no to the suggestion that the tropistic realities of the book have some kind of origin within her. Although one suspects that Sarraute herself would disagree even with this possibility. In 1994, speaking with Ramsay and reacting to her study of this book as a "new autobiography," Sarraute "insisted that Tu ne t'aimes pas was in no way autobiographical, that just as there was no relationship between Picasso's art and his life, there was no necessary connection between her life and her writing" (Ramsay 227, n.1).
47 Cf. Babcock, p. 70, where he quotes Sarraute debating whether or not there is a "pre-language."
48 Quoted in La Quinzaine Littéraire 192 (August 1974) 29. Also cited in Schor, Bad Objects 128.
49 Pierre Boncenne, "Nathalie Sarraute," interview in Lire (June 1983) 92. Also cited in Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes 62.
50 Especially in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, bilingual edition, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979).
51 Gayatri Spivak, "Feminism and Deconstruction, Again" in Teresa Brennan, ed., Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis 217.
52 This act of emerging and making a statement could be the same one that begins the book, described on the first page as an episode when "you showed yourself to them, you who proposed yourself to them," a "performance" that makes others of us feel ill at ease. The main difference, at the end of the book, is that there is none of the regret or chagrin that accompanies the scene at the beginning ("You should have restrained me..."), nor is there any longer a resistance to seeing that, in fact, we presented to them a form "of a classic simplicity," a simplicity which becomes, in the final episode, that of a "tight block," which, when we return from the sortie to ourselves, produces "no regret, no reproach" (9-11; 212). By this point, it seems the subject has accepted the inevitability of what happens when it presents itself to others, and has recognized that even in this self-gathering, there is still a fundamental incompletion and openness which are a function of our relation to others. Thus, that which has prompted the book also concludes it, but transformed.
53 – Mais avant même qu'ils puissent faire un mouvement, vous vous êtes échappés, courant vers eux, [...] Attendez un instant, ne m'enfermez pas... pas entièrement... je me suis scindé en deux... un opération que vous recommandez, [...] je sais me regarder du dehors, je peux me voir, me connaître... Connais-toi toi-même, n'est-ce pas? vous le prescrivez... j'en suis capable, vuos voyez, je viens me placer auprès de vous, à la même distance où vous êtes, et de là je me regarde avecc la même impartialité, le même impitoyable clairvoyance... J'ai su assimiler vos enseignements, j'ai retenu vos classements, j'applique vos règlements, [...] regardons ensemble ce qui est là en moi... hé oui, c'est triste à dire, mais on ne peut pas le désigner autrement: c'est, «pathologique».
54 – Mais maintenant, après tout ce que nous avons vu, ne pouvons-nous pas nous demander si ce que nous leur avons fait éprouver quand nous nous sommes dressés devant eux...
– Un seul bloc, serré, refermé sur soi. [...]
– Ça a déferlé sur eux, indifférent à leur présence.
– C'est venu on ne sait comment et puis on ne sait comment c'est passé...
– Une force aveugle...
– Un ouragan qui les a faits se courber...
– N'ont-il pas eu un peu peur?
– Peur?
55 Ainsi, entre la transmission hiérarchique d'un langage et d'une langue, d'un ordre et d'une loi, qui seraient déjà là, et l'échange actuel d'un sens entre nous, il y a une différence d'économie subjective. Le premier modèle de transmission ou d'enseignement est plus parental, plus généalogique, plus hiérarchique; le deuxième est plus horizontal et intersubjectif. Le premier modèle risque d'être asservi au passé, le second ménage un présent pour la construction d'un futur
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