Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Kind of an Introduction
- 1 Acculturation, Otherness and the Loss of Jewish Identity in Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky
- 2 Aesthetic Otherness in Woolf's “Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens” and “Lappin & Lappinova”
- 3 The Prose of Otherness in Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles
- 4 D. H. Lawrence and Ranamin: Otherness and Visions of a Fascist American Utopia
- 5 The Aesthetics of Otherness in Nathalie Sarraute's Tropisms
- 6 The Square, The Lover and Hiroshima, Mon Amour: Fiction, Film and Duras's Notion of the Other
- 7 Otherness and Sexual Alterity in Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères
- 8 Mystery, Authority and the Patriarchal Voice in Dacia Maraini's Voices
- Index
5 - The Aesthetics of Otherness in Nathalie Sarraute's Tropisms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Kind of an Introduction
- 1 Acculturation, Otherness and the Loss of Jewish Identity in Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky
- 2 Aesthetic Otherness in Woolf's “Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens” and “Lappin & Lappinova”
- 3 The Prose of Otherness in Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles
- 4 D. H. Lawrence and Ranamin: Otherness and Visions of a Fascist American Utopia
- 5 The Aesthetics of Otherness in Nathalie Sarraute's Tropisms
- 6 The Square, The Lover and Hiroshima, Mon Amour: Fiction, Film and Duras's Notion of the Other
- 7 Otherness and Sexual Alterity in Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères
- 8 Mystery, Authority and the Patriarchal Voice in Dacia Maraini's Voices
- Index
Summary
Nathalie Sarraute was part of a French movement in the 1950s and 1960s known as the nouveau roman or new novel. This movement was a reaction to what had been one of France's most important literary movements, French Realism. But, while it is nominally an attempt to portray reality realistically, Realism actually has a number of different meanings—mostly depending on the person perceiving that reality. According to Balzac, French Realism laid the foundations for a particular kind of reality; what the new novelists did was to undermine that reality with yet another notion of reality, emphasizing that no one person's point of view is a standard for someone else. A face painted by Renoir is different from one by Picasso or Dalí, but the face remains a face. The new novelists decided not merely to record reality by representing it as closely as possible, but to invent it. The movement fashioned itself on exploration of forms. It is out of that tradition that one finds Sarraute.
In a 1990 Paris Review interview, “Nathalie Sarraute, The Art of Fiction No. 115,” Sarraute says some revealing things about the text:
INTERVIEWER
You started writing Tropisms when you were thirty-two; it is a short book of twenty-four pieces, yet it took you seven years.
SARRAUTE
It took five years, which is still long. Then I spent two years trying to find a publisher for it. Finally a very good publisher, Robert Lafont, who had discovered Céline and Queneau took it. He published it in the same collection as Queneau.
INTERVIEWER
How did you arrive at the form for those first short texts?
SARRAUTE
The first one came out just how it is in the book. I felt it like that. Some of the others I worked on a lot.
INTERVIEWER
And why did you choose the name Tropisms?
SARRAUTE
It was a term that was in the air, it came from the sciences, from biology, botany. I thought it fit the interior movement that I wanted to show. So when I had to come up with a title in order to show it to publishers, I took that.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Notions of OthernessLiterary Essays from Abraham Cahan to Dacia Maraini, pp. 49 - 58Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2019