BOO KS
267
tendentious definition of reality she proposes. Reality, for Sarraute,
means a reality that is rid of the "preconceived ideas and ready-made
images that encase it." It is opposed to "the surface reality that every–
one can easily see and which, for want of anything better, everyone
uses." According to Sarraute, for a writer to be in contact with reality
he must "attain to something that is thus far unknown, which it seems
to him he is the first to have seen."
But what is the point of this multiplication of realities? For
truly, it is the plural rather than the singular that Sarraute should
have used.
If
each writer must "bring to light this fragment of reality
that is his own"-and all the whales and sharks have been noted; it is
new species of plankton she is after-then the writer is not only a
maker of fragments, but condemned to being an exponent only of what
is original in his own subjectivity. When he comes to the literary market–
place bearing his jar of tiny and as yet uncatalogued marine specimens,
are we to welcome him in the name of science? (The writer as marine
biologist.) Of sport? (The writer as deep sea diver.) Why does he
deserve an audience? How many fragments of reality will readers of
novels tolerate? How many do they need?
It
really is science, or better yet sport, that Sarraute has in
mind. Hence her revulsion against the beautiful and the pleasurable as
such. The writer must renounce "all desire to write 'beautifully' for
the pleasure of doing so, to give aesthetic enjoyment to himself or to
his readers." Style is "capable of beauty only in the sense that an
athlete's gesture is beautiful; the better it is adapted to its purpose,
the greater the beauty." The purpose, remember, is the recording of
the writer's unique apprehension of an unknown reality. But the final
justification for this activity-what for Sarraute frees the novel from
all moral and social purposes-is that the novelist is after truth (or
a fragment of it) like the scientist, and after functional exercise like
the athlete. The only morality the new novel admits is the morality of
scientific truth and of strenuous effort.
Thus Sarraute summons the novel to take its belated place in the
anti-hedonistic revolution that has already conquered painting and music
-to
renounce pleasure and beauty, because these are attached to
"familiar appearances."
It
is
a stern appeal, and may find a willing
audience. In an overcomplex world in which most things are painful
or boring or difficult, it may seem tender-minded to object to the novel
becoming so also. But if this is the future of the novel, then there should
be corresponding changes in the physical object itself, the book. In such
a future, with novels addressed to a highly restricted audience, the fact
