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

articles that Virginia Woolf wrote shortly after the First World War on the art of the novel? Their naïve confidence, their innocence of another age, would only elicit a smile. 'It is difficult,' she wrote with enviable candour, 'not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old.' . . . The tools used by classical writers were 'simple,' their materials were 'primitive,' and their masterpieces, in her opinion, had 'an air of simplicity.' 'But compare their opportunities with ours!' she said. And added proudly that, 'for the moderns,' the point of interest would 'very likely lie in the dark places of psychology.'
    No doubt she had much to excuse her: Ulysses had just appeared. In a Budding Grove was about to receive the Goncourt Prize. She herself was working on Mrs. Dalloway. Quite obviously, she lacked perspective.
    But for most people, the works of Joyce and Proust already rise up in the distance like witnesses of a past epoch, and the day will soon come when no one will visit these historical monuments otherwise than with a guide, along with groups of school children, in respectful silence and somewhat dreary admiration. For several years now interest in 'the dark places of psychology' has waned. This twilight zone in which, hardly thirty years ago, we thought we saw the gleam of real treasures, has yielded us very little, and we are obliged to acknowledge that, when all is said and done, this exploration, however bold and well carried out it may have been, however extensive and with whatever elaborate means, has ended in disappointment. The most impatient and most daring among the novelists were not long in declaring that the game was not worth the candle and that they preferred to turn their efforts in another direction. The word 'psychology' is one that no present- day writer can hear spoken with regard to himself without casting his eyes to the ground and blushing. It has something slightly ridiculous, antiquated, cerebral, limited, not to say, pretentiously silly about it. Intelligent people, all progressive minds, to whom an imprudent writer would dare admit his secret hankering for the 'dark places of psychology'—but who would dare to do so?— would undoubtedly reply with pitying surprise: 'Indeed! so you still believe in all that? ...' Since the appearance of the 'American novel' and the profound, blinding truths with which the literature of the absurd has continued to swamp us, there are not many left who believe in it. All Joyce obtained from those dark depths was an uninterrupted flow of words. As for Proust, however doggedly he may have separated into minute fragments the intangible matter that he brought up from the subsoil of his characters, in the hope of extracting from it some indefinable, anonymous substance which would enter into the composition of all humanity, the reader has hardly closed the book before, through an irresistible movement of attraction, all these particles begin to cling to one another and amalgamate into a coherent whole with clear outlines, in which the practised eye of the reader immediately recognises a rich man of the world in love with a kept woman, a prominent, awkward, gullible doctor, a parvenue bourgeoise or a snobbish 'great lady,' all of whom will soon take their places in the vast collection of fictitious characters that people his imaginary museum.
    What enormous pains to achieve results that, without contortions and without hairsplitting, are obtained, shall we say, by Hemingway. And this being the case, if he handles them with equal felicity, why object to the fact that he uses the same tools that served Tolstoy in such good stead?
    But there's no question of Tolstoy! Today, eighteenth and even seventeenth century writers are constantly being held up to us as models. And should some die-hard, at the risk of his life, continue to want to explore gropingly the 'darker sides,' he is immediately referred back to The