Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute

Author:Nathalie Sarraute
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2015-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

XII

During his very well attended lectures at the Collège de France, he amused himself with all that.

He enjoyed prying, with the dignity of professional gestures, with relentless, expert hands, into the secret places of Proust or Rimbaud, then, exposing their so-called miracles, their mysteries, to the gaze of his very attentive audience, he would explain their “case.”

With his sharp, mischievous little eyes, his ready-tied necktie and his square-trimmed beard, he looked enormously like the gentleman in the advertisements who, with one finger in the air, smilingly recommends Saponite, the best of soap powders, or the model Salamander: economy, security, comfort.

“There is nothing,” he said, “you see I went to look for myself, because I won’t be bluffed; nothing that I myself have not already studied clinically countless times, that I have not catalogued and explained.

“They should not upset you. Look, in my hands they are like trembling, nude little children, and I am holding them up to you in the hollow of my hand, as though I were their creator, their father, I have emptied them for you of their power and their mystery. I have tracked down, harried what was miraculous about them.

“Now they hardly differ from the intelligent, curious and amusing eccentrics who come and tell me their interminable stories, to get me to help them, appreciate them, and reassure them.

“You can no more be affected than my daughters are when they entertain their girl friends in their mother’s parlor, and chatter and laugh gaily without being concerned with what I am saying to my patients in the next room.”

This was what he taught at the Collège de France. And in the entire neighborhood, in all the nearby Faculties, in the literature, law, history and philosophy courses, at the Institute and at the Palais de Justice, in the buses, the métros, in all the government offices, sensible men, normal men, active men, worthy, wholesome, strong men, triumphed.

Avoiding the shops filled with pretty things, the women trotting briskly along, the café waiters, the medical students, the traffic policemen, the clerks from notary offices, Rimbaud or Proust, having been torn from life, cast out from life and deprived of support, were probably wandering aimlessly through the streets, or dozing away, their heads resting on their chests, in some dusty public square.

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