The Age of Suspicion by Nathalie Sarraute Read Free Book Online Page A

into the author's territory. To achieve this, the device that consists in referring to the leading character as 'I' constitutes a means that is both efficacious and simple and, doubtless for this reason, is frequently employed.
    Suddenly the reader is on the inside, exactly where the author is, at a depth where nothing remains of the convenient landmarks with which he constructs the characters. He is immersed and held under the surface until the end, in a substance as anonymous as blood, a magma without name or contours. If he succeeds in finding his way, it is thanks to stakes that the author has planted for purposes of his own orientation. No reminiscences of the reader's world, no conventional concern for cohesion or likelihood, distract his attention or curb his effort. Like the author, the only barriers he encounters are those that are either inherent in all experiment of this kind, or are peculiar to the author's vision.
    As for the secondary characters, they are deprived of all autonomous existence and reduced to mere excrescences, quiddities, experiments or dreams of the 'I', with whom the author identifies himself. At the same time, this 'I', not being the novelist, need not be concerned with creating a universe in which the reader will feel too much at home, nor with giving the characters the proportions and dimensions required to confer upon them their rather dangerous 'resemblance.' His obsessed, maniacal or visionary eye may seize upon them at will, abandon them, stretch them in a single direction, compress, enlarge, flatten or reduce them to dust, to force them to yield the new reality he is striving to find.
    In the same way, the modern painter—and in this connection, it might be said that, since Impressionism, all pictures have been painted in the first person—wrests the object from the universe of the spectator and deforms it in order to isolate its pictorial content.
    Thus, in a movement analagous to that of painting, the novel, which only a stubborn adherence to obsolete techniques places in the position of a minor art, pursues with means that are uniquely its own, a path which can only be its own; it leaves to the other arts—and, in particular, to the cinema—everything that does not actually belong to it. In the same way that photography occupies and fructifies the fields abandoned by painting, the cinema garners and perfects what is left it by the novel.
    The reader, instead of demanding of the novel what every good novel has more than often refused him, i.e. light entertainment, can satisfy at the cinema, without effort and without needless loss of time, his taste for 'live' characters and stories.
    However, the cinema too would appear to be threatened. It, too, is infected by the 'suspicion' from which the novel suffers. Otherwise, how may we explain the uneasiness which, after that of the novelist, is now being evidenced by certain 'advanced' directors who, because they feel obliged to make films in the first person, have introduced the eye of a witness and the voice of a narrator?
    As for the novel, before it has even exhausted all the advantages offered by the story told in the first person, or reached the end of the blind alley into which all techniques necessarily lead, it has grown impatient and, in order to emerge from its present difficulties, is looking about for other ways out.
    Suspicion, which is by way of destroying the character and the entire outmoded mechanism that guaranteed its force, is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium. It forces the novelist to fulfil what Arnold Toynbee, recalling Flaubert's teaching, has called 'his deepest obligation: that of discovering what is new,' and keeps him from committing 'his most serious crime: that of repeating the discoveries of his predecessors.'
    Temps Modernes February 1950.
     
     
    CONVERSATION AND SUB-CONVERSATION
    W HO today would dream of taking seriously, or even reading, the