Tropisms (New Directions Pearls)
Language: English
Pages: 96
ISBN: 0811222764
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Nathalie Sarraute's stunning debut―vignettes of "inner movements"―foreshadowed the rise of the nouveau roman.
Hailed as a masterpiece by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Tropisms is considered one of the defining texts of the nouveau roman movement. Nathalie Sarraute has defined her work as the “movements that are hidden under the commonplace, harmless instances of our everyday lives.” Like figures in a grainy photograph, Sarraute’s characters are blurred and shadowy, while her narrative never develops beyond a stressed moment. Instead, Sarraute brilliantly finds and elaborates subtle details―when a relationship changes, when we fall slightly deeper into love, or when something innocent tilts to the smallest degree toward suspicion.
Community, Myth and Recognition in Twentieth-Century French Literature and Thought
long time, ever since, as a little child, he had begged their favour, had tried to attach himself to them, to cling to them, to warm himself, they had refused to 'play', to become what he had wanted to make of them, 'poetic memories of childhood'. They had been brought to heel, these objects had, being well trained, they had the unobtrusive, anonymous look of well-schooled servants; they knew their place and they refused to answer him, out of fear, no doubt, of being dismissed. But with the
Behaviourist tendency and by a metaphysics of the 'absurd.' As a result, if for no other reason than to seek justification, reassurance or encouragement for myself, I began to reflect upon the motives that impelled me to reject certain things, to adopt certain techniques, to examine certain works of both past and present, and to anticipate those of the future, in an effort to discover an irreversible direction in literature that would permit me to see if my own quest was in line with this
direction. Thus it was that, in 1947, I was prompted to study the works of Dostoïevski and Kafka from a particular angle. In the article entitled L'Ere du soupçon, which appeared in 1950, I tried to show the results of the transformations of characters in fiction since Balzac's time, as exemplified in the contemporary novel. And in Conversation et sous-conversation, published in 1955, I called attention to the out-moded nature of dialogue as practised in the traditional novel. In connection
cleaner in the neighbourhood. They never tried to recall the place in the country where once they had played, they never tried to recapture the colour and the smell of the little town they had grown up in, they never saw suddenly appear before their mind's eye, when walking along the streets in their neighbourhood, when looking in the shop-windows, when they went past the concierge's door and greeted her very politely, they never saw rise up in their recollections a bit of wall inundated with
'scale of values'. No conversations about the shape of hats and Rémond fabrics for her. She had profound contempt for square-toed shoes. Like a wood-louse she had crawled insidiously towards them and maliciously found out about 'the real thing', like a cat that licks its chops and closes its eyes before a jug of cream it has discovered. Now she knew it. She was going to stay there. They would never dislodge her from there again. She listened, she absorbed, greedy, voluptuous, rapacious.
