"Fools Say" by Nathalie Sarraute

First published:“Disent les imbéciles,” 1976 (English translation, 1977)

Type of work: New Novel

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: Unspecified

Principal Characters:

This Sarrautean nouveau roman, or New Novel, offers neither the characters nor the plot of the traditional novel. Instead, a number of different unidentified voices speak in reaction to one another and in unspecified contexts.

The Novel

"Fools Say” is composed of thirteen sections which embody the subdialogue or subconversation of unidentified individuals. Nathalie Sarraute deals with what she calls “tropisms,” which may be defined as one’s immediate reactions, in all of their minutiae, to outside stimuli. (“Tropism” is a biological term which refers to an organism being either attracted to or repelled by a stimulus.) These tropisms, substrata of psychological reactions, constitute a nonverbal reality to which Sarraute assigns words. The hidden depths of a person’s emotional or psychological complexity lie far beneath any rational patterns of behavior. At this level, human psychology is in constant flux. Sarraute focuses on these ephemeral responses because human beings—regardless of group, gender, creed, color, or nationality—participate in this tropistic realm.

In re-creating such subtle psychological data, Sarraute ignores the fully developed characters which, in a traditional novel, provide readers with a sense of reality. She eliminates any appeal to outside or verifiable reality through her use of shifting voices in contexts which are completely open to speculation and interpretation. While the pronouns shift dizzyingly, each voice in “Fools Say” seems to exist because of a need to find a secure place amid the voices in conflict. Only glimpses of relationships are perceived. The progression of the novel is circular; from the fears in adolescence to the fears of so-called adulthood, the nightmarish suspicion persists that one does not exist or will not be heard. Subtle fusions of thought and feeling at the level of the tropism constitute human reality for this author. Because of the constant shift of voices, there is no way of rephrasing the experience that each reader will have when plunged into this intangible, always malleable reality as re-created by Sarraute.

For Sarraute, man’s linguistic arsenals, all of his categories, theories, and systems, lead him to conclude falsely that there is a word for everything. Furthermore, man argues—again falsely—that anything which does not fit into his linguistic schemes is not real. He has created a grid of platitudes and cliches by which he categorizes and judges others, but which he insists cannot be applied to himself. Thus, man’s willingness to define others but not himself reveals the pretension and hypocrisy which make him vulnerable to Sarraute’s lethal irony. Each person’s attempt to create a harmonious world for himself, by allotting roles for others to play, can lead to nothing but one more cage created by words.

Each voice or idea might be secure in its own narrated construct, but it would cease to exist, as ideas atrophy if they are not exposed. Yet an idea might be destroyed in free discussion. Thus, the lure of imposing or attempting to impose one’s ideas on others is clearly irresistible. To attempt to define the world on one’s own terms leads to an ongoing struggle, in which some voices will prevail and others will be canceled, and everything will be altered by clamoring demands for acceptance and recognition. In the conflict of voices as each seeks to make his use of words the accepted ones, any idea which does not serve some entrenched power is irrelevant. In the context of this novel, those who seek to maintain power by controlling the use of words, those who insist that anyone who disputes this power is a fool, are fools. Political dictators are not as powerful as the established arbiters of words.

There is no resolution to this ongoing battle; there are no victories in humanity’s conflict over words. If people control words, they are also controlled by words. If reality is defined by words, even the arbiters or supporters of hierarchy are vulnerable, regardless of whether they know it. If one does not accept the status quo and authority, one is pilloried as a fool. If one argues that those who function within categories and hierarchies are themselves fools, one will be attacked. To be silent is to give consent to a petrified and self-serving power structure. To find that one has no words which are effective is to find that one is crazy.

The voices in this novel emit opinions, promote incomplete arguments, and struggle to escape inner conflicts; generally, outside authority prevails in what must be described as a terrorist world. The novel begins with a grandson ordering others away because they have reduced his grandmother to an object. He is accused of jealousy, of believing that his grandmother belongs solely to him (he is told that authorities have proved that jealousy and hatred always go together), and he recants in horror, pleading madness. As the novel ends, with a voice protesting, “no, he didn’t think, he can’t think, he must have gotten the words from someone else, he can’t remember,” it is clear that fear knows no age, that all people, in their fears, are equally defenseless.

Authority reigns in this novel and to no good effect. Judgments are made on the basis of personality by some external authority. Judgments and endless assumptions—which are false or unverifiable—are based on the slightest of actions. Hence, the creation of any personality—the creator’s or that of another—is constantly in question and certainly not to be trusted.

The Characters

Because Sarraute is not dealing with individual characters, the reader is prevented from making the customary judgments by which any member of the human species is classified. Here, human voices are heard, but the rest of their beings remains amorphous at best. The voices and the ideas that they express can be discussed only in their relationship to one another.

Appearances never cease to provoke questions. Can one’s temperament be deduced from one’s forehead, chin, eyes, nose, or hands? For what traits is one responsible: for those traits perceived and therefore developed, or for those traits which are less practiced but developed against the odds? Can emotional states or stages be deduced from physical appearance? When are children real children and when are they only acting like children? Can one ever know with cats? Can one be sure that they are not simply acting like cats?

Sarraute forces the reader to question the nature of human personality. What is actually known about any individual? How can the endless assumptions and conclusions that are drawn be anything less than ludicrously inaccurate? From a photograph, a personality is perceived; from personal papers, a character is constructed. Everyone knows how to do it, and whatever does not fit or cannot be explained will be ignored. From one slight word or action, a whole character is revealed. A pair of newlyweds is blissful, until she notices the care with which he counts a tip into the waiting palm. She suddenly knows that she has married a stingy miser, and that she has no choice except to divorce him or go through life knowing that people will say, “there goes the poor bride who married a miser.” By one mark of one claw, the lion shall be known.

The false authority of words results in an emotional tyranny from which there seems to be no exit. A grandmother cannot swallow the image of “sweet,” applied to her by her grandchildren, but cannot avoid it, either. When told by his relatives that he will grow to be as ugly as his uncle, a boy knows terror. An adolescent who believed that he was nothing before he was bound by the words of others is incapable of freeing himself, of returning the ball, of saying, “If I’m a fool, you’re another.” He does not know how to defend himself.

If one really believes in perfect equality and is not merely mouthing witty nonsense, one is obviously to be pitied. To retreat with one’s idea, to keep it out of the fray, is to watch it atrophy and die. To decide that one is nothing but a construct built by others is to lose all sense of identity. To find that everything else is moving and that one’s words are incomprehensible is to find that one is invalidated and in need of rehabilitation. One must accept one’s intelligence as less than, more than, or equal to Descartes’. “Different from” will not do. One offends against law and order, if one does not accept an assigned place in the established hierarchies.

Critical Context

"Fools Say,” Sarraute’s seventh novel, may well be her most abstract, but her dense, precise prose has always focused on the most fundamental of human emotions. Her first volume was Tropismes (1938, 1957; Tropisms, 1963), a collection of sketches. Her first two novels, Portrait d’un inconnu (1948; Portrait of a Man Unknown, 1958) and Martereau (1953; English translation, 1959), with first-person narrators, were followed by the essays in L’Ere du soupcon (1956; The Age of Suspicion, 1963); these essays were used as a manifesto for what has been called the New Novel. More significant, it is in these essays that Sarraute discusses subconversation and what she is trying to do in her fiction. She accepts Fyodor Dostoevski and Marcel Proust as her predecessors and begins where Proust ended. Her work is distinct from that of New Novelists such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor, in that however experimental it may be, it belongs to the realist tradition.

Sarraute’s other novels include Le Planetarium (1959; The Planetarium, 1960); Les Fruits d’or (1963; The Golden Fruits, 1964), in which there is a discussion by many voices of the literary value of a novel titled The Golden Fruits; Entre la vie et la mort (1968; Between Life and Death, 1969), which presents the vacillating consciousness of a writer in the process of writing; and Vous les entendez? (1972; Do You Hear Them?, 1973), which focuses on the reactions of a devoted father hearing and trying to interpret his children’s laughter. L’Usage de la parole (1980; The Uses of Speech, 1980), like Tropisms, is a collection. Sarraute has also written five plays, which have been successful both on the radio and in stage productions.

In contrast to the isolation and alienation of Samuel Beckett’s world, Sarraute creates a community of voices. Her insistence on the validity of tropistic reality, despite the ever-present threat of misinterpretation, makes it clear that human significance, for this author, can be found only amid the cacophony of other voices.

Bibliography

Besser, Gretchen Rous. Nathalie Sarraute, 1979.

Bory, Jean-Louis. “Le Sapeur Sarraute,” in Le Nouvel Observateur, December 6, 1976, pp. 86-88.

Davin, Antonia. “Nathalie Sarraute’s ‘Disent les imbeciles’: The Critic’s Dilemma,” in New Zealand Journal of French Studies, May, 1981, pp. 56-79.

Minogue, Valerie. Nathalie Sarraute: The War of the Words, 1981.

Temple, Ruth Z. Nathalie Sarraute, 1968.

Watson-Williams, Helen. The Novels of Nathalie Sarraute: Towards an Aesthetic, 1981.