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NATHALIE SARRAUTE
the pursuit of what is most alive, most pressing, which makes the
traditional sentence explode and gives words new meaning, or else
deforms and invents them, as in Rimbaud, Mallarme and Joyce.
For these writers the problem was no longer to shut us up among
pictures composed of familiar features we recognized, but to rid us
of these features in order to give us fresh impressions, impressions
that can be used only once, and which, later,
will
increase our stock
of reminiscences, and constitute a danger for future writers who
oblige us to evoke them.
This
descriptive form, which establishes Flaubert in the role of
precursor and master of some current writers who are nevertheless
opposed to tradition and whose form is very different from his-their
fallacy, therefore, is hard to understand-is the essential basis on
which the greater part of his work rests.
It pervades
SalammbO J
of which it is the only substance. It fills
the
Education Sentimentale J
which is entirely made up of short
sketches devoid of psychological complexity, which fascinate us pri–
marily as portrayals of manners and customs.
Just here I uttered the dangerous word "psychological," a word
that is much decried and today grown obsolete, it appears, because
it recalls traditional analysis of motives and the entire gamut of out–
dated psychological concepts.
This
is not the psychology I refer to,
but the revelation, the availability of hitherto unknown psychic
forces, the creation of a mental universe that is the basis of all writing
and which no literary form can do without. When it does, psychology
takes its revenge.
Language, as I said before, refers us back to meaning. And
if
language is empty, the reader, whether consciously or not,
will
fill it.
With what, then, can he fill the
Education Sentimentale?
With mental
pictures, descriptions of masked balls and richly spread tables, with
the boudoirs of courtesans or "honest" women, with woodland strolls
and all kinds of sentiments: a romantic affair presented in its most
conventional aspect, its simplest, most superficial form. This is an
emotion characteristic of youth which, had it been explored in depth
and presented in all its complexity, could have been the revelation
of a living reality and possessed all the force of its conviction. But in
LJEducation Sentimentale
it has retained only its literary, its most com–
monplace aspects. It has none of the qualities peculiar to the yearnings
and dreams of adolescence, none of their engaging, naive and some-