BOOK REVIEW: Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms (1939)

A classic literary exploration of a possibly made-up psychic phenomenon

Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms is the kind of book -- strange, affectless, fragmentary, and almost puritanical in its commitment to nothing at all happening -- that could only have been a product of French mid-century modernism. It’s built around a single insight on the author’s part, and I’d argue that its success depends primarily on how willing or able the reader is to accept this insight as something objectively real, rather than as a quirk of the author’s imagination.

In a surprisingly lucid and straightforward preface, Sarraute briefly spells out the nature and significance of this insight. “What I tried to do [in Tropisms],” she writes, “was to show certain inner ‘movements’ by which I had long been attracted.” She calls these inner movements “tropisms”, borrowing a term from biology which refers, in her own words, to “the movements made by certain living organisms under the influence of outside stimuli, such as light or heat.” Tropisms, Sarraute’s first book, is also her first artistic attempt to account for these mysterious movements.

It’s worth mentioning that Sarraute believes, or appears to believe, that tropisms are not only real psychological phenomena but incredibly important features of the human condition. They lie deeper than ordinary apprehension, she tells us, and thus deeper than words. They are something like the essence of thought, feeling, motivation; indeed, they constitute nothing less than “the secret source of our existence.”

With such an original subject to tackle, Sarraute needed to reimagine what prose fiction could do. She discarded the tradition of psychological realism bequeathed to her by Stendhal and Balzac, and tried instead to construct a style appropriate to her concerns. The result is a series of twenty-four miniature narratives, or prose poems, or perhaps tableaux vivants -- rarely exceeding a page or two, and utterly steeped in ambiguity.

Take ‘Tropism XVIII’, which is fairly representative, in its brevity and mystery, of the book as a whole. On the surface, the story is “about” an old woman sitting in her garden, waiting for tea to be served, while her cook toils away inside the house -- this is more or less all that happens. Yet the very process by which the narrative unfolds works to undermine an easy summary like this.

So here is what actually “happens”, paragraph by paragraph. Sarraute begins by establishing a small cottage on the outskirts of London, with its “percale curtains” and “little black lawn”. Then she describes a “big, wisteria-framed window” looking out on the lawn; finally, our attention is drawn to a cat, seated “quite erect on the warm stone” despite his eyes being closed.

Only in the fourth paragraph (out of six) does the author introduce a human character -- in this case, a “spinster lady” with white hair and pink cheeks “that tend towards purple”. She is reading an “English magazine”. This is all we’re told about her.

In the next paragraph, we get our sole glimpse into the woman’s internal world, which is rendered in terms that would have been familiar to Virginia Woolf: “She sits there, very stiff, very dignified, quite sure of herself and of others, firmly settled in her little universe. She knows that in a few moments the bell will ring for tea.”

In the final paragraph, Sarraute gives us a change of location: “Down below, the cook, Ada, is cleaning vegetables at a table covered with white oilcloth. Her face is motionless, she appears to be thinking of nothing. She knows that it will soon be time to toast the buns, and ring the bell for tea.” 

That’s how it ends. What might be going on here? Who exactly is experiencing “tropism”? The spinster lady? The cook (who, unusually for a Sarraute character, is given a name)? Perhaps the cat?

I have re-read ‘Tropism XVIII” several times and still feel I’m missing something. I think the piece has a subtle beauty to it, recalling the more serene domestic paintings of Monet and Serov, but not without an elusive undercurrent of menace. The emphasis on the bell, for instance, seems significant. In another story (‘Tropism VI’), Sarraute presents bells as a symbol of urgency. The scene presented here is full of sleepiness and calm. The bell in ‘Tropism XVIII’, then, could be said to signify some kind of impending “wake-up call” for one or more characters. Something is about to be served, and it won’t just be tea.

I don’t have the mental wherewithal at present to stretch this interpretation any further; besides, I’d only be pointlessly speculating. What’s interesting, though, is how singularly useless Sarraute’s own musings on “tropisms” were to me in approaching the story, or indeed any of the stories collected here. Having never felt anything like a tropism in my real life, I was surprised to find that they didn’t obviously show up in Tropisms either. In this sense, it might be best to read the book’s preface first and foremost as a statement of intention by the artist, a kind of pontifical manifesto, eager to tell us what art ought to be. Meanwhile, the stories themselves exist outside of their author’s zealous certainties, leading a quiet, and contentedly mysterious, life of their own.