This is one paragraph from a long, and quite good essay about Nathalie Sarraute’s life and writings, Sensations Under Glass: Nathalie Sarraute Casts a Cold Eye by James Gibbons in the Dec/Jan issue of Bookforum:
Secreted within Sarraute’s youthful confidence as a writer was a longing for a state “beyond comparison,” as she recollected in an interview; a striving toward a nearly beatific ecstasy of purity and autonomy. Writing would always offer the promise of transfiguration, the assumption of an alien form of selfhood, rich and strange. It was precisely this embrace of transformative possibilities that Simone de Beauvoir, discussing Sarraute and the nouveau roman in The Force of Circumstance, castigated as decadent aestheticism. After citing a remark made by Sarraute at a conference in the Soviet Union — “When I sit down at my desk, I leave politics, current events, the world, outside the door; I become a different person” — de Beauvoir lets rip: “How is it possible not to put the whole of oneself into the act that for a writer is the most important one of all — writing? This deliberate maiming of oneself and of one’s work, this escape into fantasies about the absolute, are evidence of a defeatism justified by the depths to which our country has sunk. France, once the subject, is now no more than the object of history; her novelists reflect this degradation.” As expressed here, this attitude makes one fairly cringe. That Sarraute had precariously survived the humiliations of Vichy—she refused to wear the yellow star required of Jews, faked a divorce to protect her husband, and posed as the governess of her own children, under a crafty assumed name keyed to her initials (Nicole Sauvage) — makes especially jarring de Beauvoir’s alignment of France’s supposed postwar “degradation” with the experiments of its writers.
I don’t have any comment; I just find both points of view very thought-provoking.
-Julie
