Approaching Disappearance by Anne McConnell

Author:Anne McConnell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Chapter 5: Anonymity and the Neutral in Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms

The first section of Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms begins, “They seemed to spring up from nowhere, blossoming out in the slightly moist tepidity of the air, they flowed gently along as though they were seeping from the walls, from the boxed trees, the benches, the dirty sidewalks, the public square.”72 The language encourages us to imagine creeping ivy or the uncontrollable spreading of vine-like weeds as “they” wind through and around the structures of the town. The moist atmosphere calls them forth, and they come to inhabit any space that allows for their proliferation. Sarraute does not identify the pronoun “they” in the first sentences of her text, and further challenges the reader’s attempts to do so by seeming to reassign the pronoun in the second half of the tropism. As we read “They looked closely at the piles of linen in the White Sale display,” the “they” becomes human; “they” look through the same store windows in front of which “they” were sprouting through the sidewalk cracks (13). We also need to consider the possibility that “they” refers to the group of people from the beginning of the tropism, even though it seems to describe plant life at first; perhaps the people emerge from their homes and into the streets of the town in a way that suggests the crawling vines of a plant. In any case, the striking anonymity of the text—which characterizes all of Sarraute’s Tropisms—makes it very difficult to distinguish between different people and things; we might recognize the difference but struggle to find the definitive outlines, boundaries, and qualities that would allow us to identify the characters and objects in the text. The characters—virtually all referred to as “she,” “he,” or “they”—blend together, denying the reader the opportunity to situate himself or herself in the text by identifying with a perspective or voice that would provide a sense of place and vision.73 Sarraute’s Tropisms evokes Blanchot’s discussion of the neutral—a space, a mode, a voice founded upon no one, nowhere. In the anonymous space of the nearly indistinguishable fragments that constitute Tropisms, the absence of narrative conventions like plot and character shifts focus to the movement of disappearance—the continual slipping away of the text from our grasp.

As discussed in the first chapter of this study, Blanchot refers to “the third person substituting for the ‘I’” in The Space of Literature in order to discuss the way that the writer’s ability to say “I” disappears when writing; the narrative voice emerges, although that voice does not become an empowered substitute, speaking where the writer cannot (28). Blanchot explains, “It does not denote objective disinterestedness, creative detachment. It does not glorify consciousness in someone other than myself or the evolution of a human vitality which, in the imaginary space of the work of art, would retain the freedom to say ‘I’” (28). In other words, the substitution marks the disappearance of the speaking subject, an individual consciousness through which

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