Go to the first chapter of "Here"

Go to Chapter One

In Search of Lost Words

In nearly every respect, Nathalie Sarraute's Here is a strange novel. Its celebrated French author (recently honored by the publication of her complete works in the revered Pleiade Series) is 96 years old but writes with the exploratory boldness and impassioned anti-bourgeois sensibility of a young French intellectual. Moreover, this is a novel with no plot and no characters in any conventional sense of the word. Indeed, in the entire book not a single person's name is used. Instead of identifiable individuals, Sarraute gives us a series of voices that function as a kind of collective consciousness (most often referred to by "They", "We" or "He") somewhat as the chorus functions in ancient Greek tragedy.

While the novel offers few of the pleasures of traditional narrative, it's thematically rich and could rightly be called a novel, or perhaps more accurately, a poetic essay of ideas. What Sarraute is relentlessly concerned with in Here is the power and poverty of words, especially words of bad faith--the inevitably deceptive, cliche words we constantly use and the anxiety and despair they create in us.

Sarraute begins her narrative, composed in 20 numbered sections, by recreating the thwarted struggles to recall forgotten names, be it the name of a person, tree or renowned artist from the Renaissance.

"It will come back, it can't have disappeared forever, that's impossible, it's been here for so long . . . it was that frail . . . slightly stooping . . . evanescent . . . silhouette that brought it for the first time, they came here together and it remained more deeply implanted here than its bearer. . . . And now all of a sudden, in the place it had taken, where it was certain to be found, there is that yawning gap, that hole . . ."

The here to which Sarraute refers is both one's place in time and space and the continuum of consciousness. When the first missing word is finally recaptured at the end of Section 3, it seems to act as a Proustian springboard releasing the material of the next 17 sections, all of which are concerned with the effects of simple, banal words and phrases on one's sense of "here." For example, in a section that investigates reactions to the question, "Do you like traveling?," each response varies according to the social circumstances and attitudes of the listeners at the nameless social gathering. Another section describes the quasi-comical psychic shocks set off by someone saying the word "why" ("This is the first time, never up to the present had 'Why?' appeared . . . and now all of a sudden 'Why . . . yes, why does he do that? ' ")

While there is virtually no mention of either love or sex in these pages, Sarraute does demonstrate an acute awareness of the need for social power, or at least a temporary feeling of superiority, along with the accompanying fear that one will be left without it. One of the most scathingly effective sections deals with the unmasking of envy and insecurity revealed by the question "Have you read it?" posed to an aspiring, but frustrated writer.

Considering the paucity of concrete references in Here, Sarraute's darkly comic insights into society are especially impressive. The effect is sometimes as if the conversations of a party in, say, Remembrance of Things Past had been condensed and abstracted, the voices unhinged from their characters' names to duel with each other in the atmosphere. Sarraute is able to accomplish this in part because of her coolly precise yet evocative prose, finely translated by Barbara Wright. It's rigorous and unsentimental but never without compassion, even in its most ruthless dissections of social absurdities. Yet Sarraute (like Proust) aims for more than merely exposing angst-ridden social climbers. There's a philosophical and metaphysical dimension at the heart of Here, with its descriptions of anonymous people scurrying between language and silence. The choice between the two is the central one we're given but it's a choice that baffles and torments us. For Sarraute, words have become simultaneously drained of meaning and agents of terror. But silence, which ultimately implies death, is at least as terrifying. Humans hover between the two possibilities, finding the forgotten word while recognizing that the search for new losses will begin again. "The paralysis. This coma. This death. What's the use of trying to recover it with the words of life."

It's this cycle of anguish and the defenses we erect against it that is the deepest subject of this oddly elegant, often eloquent book.

Richard Burgin edits Boulevard magazine. His third collection of stories, "Fear of Blue Skies," is forthcoming.