"Tropisms" by Natalie Sarraute

 One of the classics of the nouveau roman movement.

This extraordinary piece of experimental fiction consists of 24 vignettes. Many of these are written in such a cryptic form that it is difficult to decipher what is happening (you have to read it more than once). Not one of them contains a named character: they are all referred to by pronouns such as 'they' or 'she'. 

It's a bit like reading a book of poetry except that it is written in prose. It's a bit like looking at a work of abstract art. It reminded me of Erik Satie's music such as his Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes: short and mannered but haunting.

Sarraulte defined 'tropismes' thus: "ce sont des mouvements indéfinissables, qui glissent très rapidement aux limites de notre conscience ; ils sont à l'origine de nos gestes, de nos paroles, des sentiments que nous manifestons, que nous croyons éprouver et qu'il est possible de définir": they are the indefinable movements, which slither rapidly at the limits of our consciousness; they are the origins of our gestures, our words, the feelings that we show, that we think we experience and that it is possible to define". In plants, a tropism is a movement towards a stimulus, thus phototropism is when a plant turns towards the light and geotropism is when a root grows downwards under the influence of gravity.

So tropisms is like stream of consciousness except that it is dealing with preconsciousness. The book feels a little like reading James Joyce merged into the terse dialogue of Ivy Compton-Burnett.

The Guardian (21st October 1999) said "Sarraute's are tropisms with a human face, the buried, never quite conscious to-ings and fro-ings of the psyche that accompany all social contact, ... She is the unforgiving zoologist of our dissembling species, as observed in the habitat she shared with it, of 'civilised' Paris."

The first piece describes people window-shopping. In the 12th a teacher empties Proust and Rimbaud of their power. In the 21st a woman who used to be a "good" (ie docile) girl is now grown up and, submissively listening to others talk, she is overcome with an urge to feel, "shouting incoherencies".

A lot of the tropisms deal with relations between people and how the interior feelings are at odds with the external behaviours. There is often a sense of menace. For example, in the 19th when a man lets others crush and stamp on him and make him blunder into things; it is difficult to know whether he is deriving masochistic pleasure from this or is just too weak to stand up for himself. In the 4th piece there is a strange, sexual and cruel verbal ballet taking place between a man and some women: he seems to enjoy his power in directing the conversation. In the 5th a woman is lying in bed, absolutely still. ‘She hears someone come into the house and go into the study. Her husband? She dares not move. She senses that “the slightest act” might be a “provocation”. In the 15th “she so loved old gentlemen like him” but he grabs her and squeezes “harder and harder” and she can’t get away until her parents arrive.

It reminded me of Fleurs du mal by Baudelaire. 

It's a remarkable book.

Selected quotes:

• “And the quiet little children, whose hands they held, weary of looking, listless, weighted patiently beside them.” (Ch 1)
• “And he sensed percolating from the kitchen, humble, squalid human thought, shuffling, shuffling in one spot, always in one spot, going round and round, in circles, as if they were dizzy but couldn't stop, as if they were nauseated but couldn't stop, the way we bite our nails, the way we tear off dead skin when we’re peeling, the way we scratch ourselves when we have hives, the way we toss in our beds when we can't sleep, to give ourselves pleasure and make ourselves suffer, until we are exhausted, until we've taken our breath away ...” (Ch 2)
• “And they talked and talked, repeating the same things, going over them, then going over them again, from one side then from the other, kneading and kneading them, continually rolling them between their fingers this unsatisfactory, mean substance that they had extracted from their lives ... kneading it, pulling it, rolling it and until it ceased to form anything between their fingers but a little pile, a little grey pellet.” (Ch 10)
• “There were a great many like her, hungry, pitiless parasites, leeches, firmly settled on the articles that appeared, slugs stuck everywhere, spreading their mucus on corners of Rimbaud, sucking on Mallarmé lending one another Ulysses or The Notebook of Malte Laurids Bigge, which they slimed with their low understanding.” (Ch 11)
• “But they asked for nothing more, this was it, they knew it well, you shouldn't expect anything, you shouldn't demand anything, that's how it was, there was nothing more, this was it, ‘life’.” (Ch 16)
• "Here we are at last all together, good as gold, doing what our parents would have approved of, here we all are then, well behaved, singing together like good little children that an invisible adult is looking after, well they walked gently around in a circle giving one another their sad, moist little hands.” (Ch 23)

Tropisms was voted 73rd in Le Monde's most memorable books of the twentieth century. 

October 2024; 84 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God