Nathalie Sarraute

Abstract

Nathalie Sarraute’s strong ‘political’ feminism does not, she has said, have a direct relationship to her creative work. She does not think as a woman, she says, and one must not consider men and women as separate, for this leads to a ‘destructive segregation’. Any definition of l’écriture féminine would include elements found in works by male authors, Proust, for example (Rykiel, 1984, p. 40). Women in her work are not militant feminists or even career oriented: ‘These images of women that I have shown are images of feminine behaviour as you continue to see it everywhere. Many women accept playing the role that society imposes upon them’ (Besser, 1976, p. 286). She also considers that her own life has no relevance to her work: ‘You will find nothing there; or else you will be making arbitrary interpretations’ (Saporta, 1984, p. 8). Sarraute’s experiences as a Jew in occupied France, for example, have no overt relevance to her work. We are far from the autobiographical work of Colette or Marguerite Duras. Yet while granting the possible divorce between beliefs held and books written (easier to do, perhaps, than granting the divorce between personal experience and written work, as Sarraute also requests us to do), we may find underlying her work a vision of the world that reflects her position as a woman, a use of writing that shows a conscious or perhaps unconscious assumption of gender.

When I write, I am neither man nor woman, cat nor dog. I am not me… I don’t exist. (Rykiel, 1984, p. 40)

I have never understood how some writers can display their life as they do… What counts is the books. (Saporta, 1984, p. 23)