.
XXIII
They were ugly, they were dull, commonplace, without personality, they were really too out-of-date, clichés, she thought, which she had already seen described everywhere, so many times, in the works of Balzac, of Maupassant, in Madame Bovary, clichés, copies, copies of copies, she decided.
She would have so liked to repulse them, seize them and hurl them away. But they stood quietly about her, they smiled at her, pleasantly, but dignifiedly, very decorously, they had been working all week, all their lives they had counted on nobody but themselves, they asked for nothing, except to see her from time to time; to rearrange a little the tie between them and her, feel that it was there, still in place, the tie that bound them to her. They wanted nothing more than to ask her—as was natural, as everybody did, when they went to call on friends, or on relatives—to ask her what she had been doing that was nice, if she had been reading a lot lately, if she had gone out often, if she had seen that, didn’t she think those films were good . . . They, themselves, had so enjoyed Michel Simon, Jouvet, they had laughed so hard, had had such a delightful evening . . .
And as for all that, clichés, copies, Balzac, Flaubert, Madame Bovary, oh! they knew very well, they were acquainted with it all, but they were not afraid—they looked at her kindly, they smiled, they seemed to feel that they were safe with her, they seemed to know that they had been observed, depicted, described so often, been so sucked on, that they had become as smooth as pebbles, all shiny, without a nick, without a single hold. She could not get at them. They were safe.
They surrounded her, held out their hands to her: “Michel Simon . . . Jouvet . . . Ah! she had been obliged to book seats well ahead of time, had she not . . . Later, there would have been no tickets to be had, except at exorbitant prices, nothing but boxes, or in the orchestra . . .” They tightened the tie a little more, very gently, unobtrusively, without hurting her, they rearranged the slender tie, pulled . . .
And little by little a certain weakness, a certain slackness, a need to approach them, to have them approach her, made her join in the game with them. She sensed how docilely (Oh! yes . . . Michel Simon . . . Jouvet . . .) very docilely, like a good, amenable little girl, she gave them her hand and walked in a ring with them.
Ah! here we are at last all together, good as gold, doing what our parents would have approved of, here we all are then, well behaved, singing together like good little children that an invisible adult is looking after, while they walk gently around in a circle giving one another their sad, moist little hands.
.
XXIV
They were rarely to be seen, they remained buried in their apartments, shut up in their dark rooms, watching and waiting.
They telephoned to one another, ferreted about, called back again, seized upon the slightest indication, the slightest sign.
Some of them took delight in cutting out the newspaper advertisement according to which his mother was looking for a seamstress to sew by the day.
They remembered everything, they kept jealous watch; holding hands in a tight ring, they surrounded him.
Their humble brotherhood, with its half-obliterated, dimmed faces, stood about him in a circle.
And when they saw him crawling shamefacedly to try and slip in among them, they quickly lowered their entwined hands, and crouching down all together around him, they fixed upon him their empty, dogged eyes, they smiled their slightly childish smile.
Nathalie Sarraute
“Sarraute has cracked open the ‘smooth and hard’ surface of the traditional characters in order to discover the endless vibrations of moods and sentiments, the tremors of a never-ending series of earthquakes in the microcosm of the self.”
—Hannah Arendt, The New York Review of Books
“This is her form! Her texture is anti-novelistic, though she’s decided to write ‘novels’ and launched an important critique of the novel on the basis of her method.”
—Susan Sontag
Awarded the Prix International de Littérature, Nathalie Sarraute (1900–1999) was one of the leaders of the Nouveau Roman, along with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, and Michel Butor. She wrote eleven novels, several collections of essays, stories, plays, and an autobiography, Childhood, which was adapted into a one-act play starring Glenn Close. Her first work, Tropisms was published in 1939 and has been hailed as a masterpiece by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The writer and activist Maria Jolas (1893–1987) was one of the founding members of the influential expat literary magazine Transition.
Copyright © Les Éditions de Minuit, 1957
Translation copyright © John Calder, Ltd., 1963
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