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SUSAN SONTAG
"into the stream of those subterranean dramas of which Proust only
had time to obtain a rapid aerial view, and concerning which he
observed and reproduced nothing but the broad motionless outlines."
The novel must record without comment the direct and purely sensory
contact with things and persons which the "I" of the novelist experiences.
Abstaining from all creating of likenesses (Sarraute hands that over
to
the cinema), the novel must preserve and promote "that element of
indetermination, of opacity and mystery that one's own actions always
have for the one who lives them."
There is something exhilarating in this conception of the novel,
based as it is on an unlimited respect for the complexity of human
feelings and sensations. A view which regards "the efforts of Henry
J
ames or Proust to take apart the delicate wheelworks of our inner
mechanisms" as wielding a pick and shovel has dazzling standards of
psychological refinement indeed. Who would dare to contradict Sarraute
when she says that the feelings are an immense mobile mass in which al–
most anything can be found; and that no theory, least of all a cipher
like psychoanalysis, can give an account of all its movements?
But views of the complexity of feeling and sensation are one
thing, programs for the novel another. True, all accounts of motives
simplify. For that reason the future of fiction, of new techniques for
representing motives, remains open. But I cannot agree with Sarraute
that the passion for intelligibility, although necessarily purchased at the
price of simplification, is a dangerous one. Character may be (as she
insists) an ocean, a confluence of tides and streams and eddies, but I
do not see the privileged value of immersion. Skin-diving has its place,
but so has oceanic cartography, what Sarraute contemptuously dismisses
as "the aerial view." Man is a creature who is designed to live on the
surface; he lives in the depths- whether terrestrial, oceanic, or psycho–
logical-at his peril. I do not understand her contempt for the
novelist's effort to transmute the watery shapeless depths of experience
into solid stuff, to impose outlines,
to
give fixed shape and sensuous
body to the world. That this should not be done in the old ways
goes without saying. But I cannot agree that it should not be done at all.
Sarraute invites the writer to resist the desire to amuse his con–
temporaries, to reform them, to instruct them, or to fight for their
emancipation; and simply, without trimming or smoothing or over–
coming contradictions, to present "reality" (the word is Sarraute's) as he
sees it, with as great a sincerity and sharpness of vision as he is capable.
I will not here dispute the question of whether the novel should amuse,
reform, or instruct (why should it not?) but only point out what a
