it was as if it came up against another substance

What arrives here, at no matter what moment, coming from fathomless spaces, and lodges itself, encrusts itself here, enlarges and pushes back even farther these infinitely extensible limits … no one can ever know how far they extend … what should have become an integral part of him, a solid, indestructible part what surrounds him too, which seemed capable of enlargement, of extending its limits farther and farther, wasn't able to penetrate there … it was as if it came up against another substance … a strange unknown substance, impenetrable by things that seem to be able to circulate freely everywhere else.

Here, 1995, by Nathalie Sarraute, tr. Barbara Wright



Such storms, called cloud-bursts by the country-folk, are not rain, rather the spillings of Thor's cup, jarred by the Thunderer. After such a one the water that comes up in the village hydrants miles away is white with forced bubbles from the wind-tormented streams.

The Land of Little Rain, 1903, by Mary Austin

suddenly through the gap

Mudpuddle points me back to Sarraute's Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel, a book that I have come to realise describes Sarraute's own habits as well as those of the other authors she discusses. Over the course of her career her fiction grew more and more closely into the frame of pursuit she ascribes to Dostoevsky, "these attractions, these feigned withdrawals, these pursuits and flights, these flirtings and rubbings, these clashes, caresses, bites and embraces, to excite, disturb, bring up to the surface and allow to spread, the immense, quivering mass, whose incessant ebb and flow, whose scarcely perceptible vibration, are the very pulse of life."

"This is common for an author," I say to myself, "they see their own reflections," remembering the moment between four and five o'clock on Saturday afternoon when I looked at the preface to a 1951 Oxford edition of Sterne's Sentimental Journey, and noticed that the last owner of the book had written, "herself" in the margin with a pen next to one of the paragraphs. I turned to the end of the essay and the author was Virginia Woolf. "We hardly know what jest, what jibe, what flash of poetry is not going to glance suddenly through the gap which this astonishingly agile pen has cut in the thick-set hedge of English prose," she had written, the other person then beginning their pen-mark at "glance" but "glance" in this book is at the start of a line and I think this is the only reason why they have begun there; really they were reacting to "agile pen." They believe that Woolf had such a pen, and that it cut a gap "in the thick-set hedge of English prose." Later I saw a mark in the same ink next to a place where Woolf quotes Sterne, "I think I can see the precise and distinguishing marks of national characters more in these nonsensical minutiae, than in the most important matters of state," -- but the ink mark leaves out the end of the quotation, "where great men of all nations talk and stalk so much alike, that I would not give nine-pence to chuse amongst them," which may mean that they did not think Woolf had the same opinion of great men that Sterne did, or that it was not germane to their point. Next to it they have written, "All imp. to V.W." On another page there is a squiggled line next to, "It is thus that Sterne transfers our interest from the outer to the inner. It is no use going to the guide-book; we must consult our own minds." This time the person has not written the name of Virginia Woolf or put any note but I believe they are still thinking of her. She is in their minds so much that they have stopped using her name. She is implicit. At the end of the essay they have circled the word "must" in "but enough of must; it is not a word that Sterne was fond of using" and given it a long tail that runs into the margin where they have added, "yes thank heavens." This could mean that they think Woolf is too demanding or it may mean that they want to remind themselves of the thing she has done here in her essay.

If they are getting so comfortable with her that they are leaving out her name then they might have been at the stage where they want to talk back to her as well; stop deviating from my comforts, Woolf. The end of the preface is about to meet us both, I see it coming, I will tell you to shut up now, knowing that you will do it: nice: obey -- and she does. "Both the gentleman and the lady are trying to control the novelist’s perspective so that it shall resemble and reinforce their own," she wrote once, in her essay on Robinson Crusoe. The person who wrote "Asshole" against one of the villains in my copy of Radcliffe's The Italian knew that they and the author were in cahoots.

one single move to disengage myself

The narrator in The Aspern Papers brings flowers to the women he is trying to game and the people in the Ullman story take flowers away from lunch. That conjunction of flowers reminded me of the ritual idea that I had been toying with, re. the Ullman story – "they approach the lunch," I had been thinking, "as if they were going to a mass" – and so the approach to Miss Tita became, also, "sacrifice and ritual," as the movement of flowers from the garden into the Venetian palazzo became, in my mind, a continuation of the motion of the flowers away from the house in the Swiss village. "By flowers I would make my way."

As I typed out "sacrifice and ritual" I was also remembering that I had decided to avoid the placement of one book next to another when I thought about them and instead talk about one book at a time which I had not d … I can find dodges for myself and is it all right (I wheedle) if I have comparisons that don't lead to conclusions; for example, after reading Sarraute's Martereau I moved to Flaubert's Sentimental Education, which was being discussed at Wuthering Expectations, and when Frédéric leant a large sum of money to another character without getting a receipt I put the book upside-down on a chair with the pages open because the narrator in Martereau had given away money like that as well; and the ending of Martereau was coming back to me, the narrator's knowledge of, and complicity with, the disgust that he is sure the other characters feel for him; from their direction it is subtly expressed but he witnesses it at the scale that the book sees: "I won't budge, I'm too afraid … one single move to disengage myself, to repel him, one single a bit too brusque move, and something atrocious, something unbearable would happen, an explosion, a frightful conflagration, our clothes torn from us, noxious, deadly emanations, all his distress, his forlornness on me" (tr. Maria Jolas). The "him," who is the character Martereau, asks the narrator to respond and move. There the book ends.

This young narrator is physically weak and sick, he can't undertake heavy professions, and so he lives with his uncle's family instead of making his way in the world, but there is not enough rest in the universe for him. There is no rest; there is no place where he can rest. Even when they are sitting and fishing he can be unsettled by one question about a knot. "Is my knot well tied? A fisherman's knot, you must have learnt it when you were a boy scout." With that, and for the millionth weary time, he is asked to consider himself, his being, his knowledge, the context it has when he puts it next to the expectations of other people, their own abilities, their accomplishments, the "tentacles" that they probe him with; and this is hell.

Martereau is Gothic without needing the mountains, banditti, or such large decorations; the scenery has adjusted itself to a river bank by a house and the imprisonment of the narrator doesn't take place in a castle, but the moods of suspicion, dread, the sublime, suffocation, etc, are shared; the medium for that dread in Sarraute is the intrusion of questions and presences; the Gothic is a genre of intrusions and presences – things coming at you – I say to myself, repeating the words – they come mysteriously at and around, they circle – you can't defend -- and there is the distress of elimination waiting for you --

Now if I finish at "putting the book down" there is no intelligent comparison between Sarraute and Flaubert. So, stop.

well disposed

There is a moment in Nathalie Sarraute's Do You Hear Them? (1972) when the father returns to a phrase that he ended, earlier, with an ellipsis, and provides the information that the ellipsis concealed. The story that he tells is interesting to himself but it is not an unspeakable secret; his coy and shy withholding is at least a little pathetic, and it a sign of the anxiety that eventually instructs the other characters to despise him. Here it occurs to me that the mood of sickened dread that I fall into whenever I read Sarraute is close to the feeling I have when I find a true crime website and run through the stories of murders. Consider murder as an activity by which people are made absent. When Louis Marlow, in his memoir of the Powys brothers (Welsh Ambassadors (1936)), decides to explain his friend John Cowper's reasons for eliminating his mother from his autobiography he interprets it as part of the other man's masochism, an aspect of the same self-abasement that made Powys enjoy bad striptease theatre. I was horrified when Marlow introduced the erased mother into the memoir as if she had been a normal person -- it seemed indecent and shameful; he should be ashamed, ashamed, to reveal her shockingly with these ordinary words -- "Mrs. Powys was friendly to me, well disposed; even, in her reserved way, affectionate: chiefly, I thought, because she saw me as shy and subdued."

Mrs. Powys hated success. She hated, with secret intensity, well-constituted people, or even people whose health was too good. When Llewelyn developed consumption and was determined not to die of it, she was far from friendly to his insistent will. She did not like his going to Switzerland, she did not like him having so many windows open. "These young men," she said, "seem to want to live forever."

I reflect that the unspoken gaps in Henry James' fiction seem playful by comparison, lighthearted, clever, even in Turn of the Screw, which, if Sarraute is like true crime, is like a fairytale instead, the characters standing phenomenally like symbols or metaphors inside one of the enclosures that James liked to establish: witness his palazzi, his country houses, the rooms that close in around Isabel Archer, the home that frames Miss Tita when she is transfigured, her beatitude the hidden thing to be witnessed in that story, the true core or whatever, accessible through sacrifice and ritual. "When I look at it my chagrin at the loss of the letters becomes almost intolerable."

as innocent as a doctor's thesis

Words under pressure can appear sinister, they begin to diffuse a secretion of unreasonable excitement throughout the story (the hysterical and contextually correct "joy" in Ullman's "attentive joy"), and now it is not Ullman I'm thinking of, it is Nathalie Sarraute at the start of "fools say" (1976), interrogating the phrase, "She is sweet;" now I remember her in Between Life and Death (1968) as she wrings out the word "héros." That true core of the bundt cake in Ullman is the momentary solidness of an interrogative chamber atmosphere (boundaried by the overt happiness of these people, arriving with joy and then accepting their flowers at the end), which is, also, the atmosphere of Sarraute's fiction, a fiction that is haunted by a "they," a collection of sportspeople or hunters who are searching for a score, a nasty wound, a little nourishing hit --

There's no use in shutting yourself up in your room to read, simply, or to work at anything as innocent as a doctor's thesis, they won't be taken in. Without showing it they possess – certain of them – an extraordinarily sharp instinct. Signs that, like ostriches, he believes to be invisible are perfectly clear to them.

(tr. Maria Jolas)

– but the hit is always brief and the movement of the books as a whole is the slipping action of a fluid that streams out from under them as they try to put their hands on it; the author's subtlety is a long report on the subject of their trapping or sniffing actions – her characters are sensitive to an invisible pressure that can be or could be forced or persuaded, or detected – "All he needed was for them to let him see that they sensed, as he did, this presence, that it is there for them too … something that exists very strongly, which it is not possible to disregard, which resembles nothing else … if they will just acknowledge that." (Ellipses hers.) Nothing is uttered unconsciously (this is in Ullman as well, and in Walser), and if the character is somehow unconscious of it then the author is not and nor is the reader, ever – so that a conversation in Sarraute's books (which are almost entirely conversation with nearly no description) is like water probing downhill and finding the most sure route but always via people, slippery people, never that solidness in things, never a bundt cake. This is a train of thought that Mudpuddle has put me onto by mentioning "the poetry of chinese taoist hermits" –

Drinking Alone with the Moon

From a pot of wine among the flowers 
I drank alone. There was no one with me -- 
Till, raising my cup, I asked the bright moon 
To bring me my shadow and make us three. 
Alas, the moon was unable to drink 
And my shadow tagged me vacantly; 
But still for a while I had these friends 
To cheer me through the end of spring.... 
I sang. The moon encouraged me. 
I danced. My shadow tumbled after. 
As long as I knew, we were boon companions. 
And then I was drunk, and we lost one another. 
...Shall goodwill ever be secure? 

(tr. unknown)

– wrote Li Po/Li Bai (701 – 762), who was sensitive to the pressure exerted by non-human objects as well as human ones, but in Sarraute the presence is always human and hostile, without a reason for that hostility; without a landscape setting where it might be taking place.