Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference (review)

Specialists and those with only a casual acquaintance with the work of Nathalie Sarraute will find new, invaluable insights in Ann Jefferson’s critical work on Sarraute’s novels, essays and autobiography. Jefferson revisits key aspects of Sarraute’s texts in light of the novelist’s preoccupation with questions of difference. Jefferson assigns types of differences to three broad categories: social relations, gender/sexual issues, and generic questions of writing. Always attentive to the ways differential oppositions break down in Sarraute (most often because identities are never entirely stable), Jefferson underscores the persistent anxieties that articulate questions of sameness and difference for the novelist. These concerns, argues Jefferson, are characteristic of modern literature in general, which sees itself as part of the “conditions of existence” rather than separate from them (2). While sketching out a framework for her discussion of difference and conflict through the theoretical works of Barthes, Lyotard, Derrida, Saussure, Girard, and others, Jefferson resists any temptation to apply these thinkers to Sarraute. Instead, she brings out the resonances between theories of difference (for example Derrida’s différance, Lyotard’s différend) and literary works. She also wisely does not attempt to trim down the myriad forms difference takes in Sarraute’s oeuvre to one over-arching (reductive) definition. Instead, through close textual analysis, Jefferson brings out all the complexities in Sarraute’s work, noting that “difference and sameness never remain where they appear to have been found” (13). This is a subtle piece of scholarship that manages great clarity in murky issues.