23 May 2008

Nathalie Sarraute: The Planetarium



Nathalie Sarraute is associated with the nouveau roman scene, but she was inspired by Proust and Virginia Woolf. That is obvious in her book The Planetarium, which was published in 1959. I read the book in English, even though there is also a Swedish translation (that was perhaps how I heard about Sarraute in the first place). Stylistically, the novel builds on a form of stream-of-consciousness. The story - what little there is of it! - is told from the point of view of the characters of the book. But, really, this is not a narrative. If I were asked to sum up the story, I'd say it's about leather chairs, English club style. Door handles. A crammed apartment. That's about it.

On a more philosophical level, the novel explores a world of resentment. A young, procrastinating academic, and his quite anonymous wife, are offered ugly furniture by their in-laws. They live in a crammed apartment. Their eccentric aunt, who cares for nothing other than fancy furniture, offers them an apartment swop, but she regrets it instantaneously, to the bewilderment of all others, to whom she appears as a crazy hag.

The characters in Sarraute's novel hate each other dearly. They wallow in resentment and self-loathing. Their world is a world of small injustices, wrongdoing and pay-back. Malice. The real tense in the story is due to the different perspectives, clashing against each other. Sarraute's novel analyzes the way self-understanding & the way we understand others are connected, intertwined. But there's not much understanding here, even though there is a lot of psychological scrutinizing, mapping. The characters understanding of each others are connected with their attitudes; spite, impatience. Everything they say & think express a very intentional, but not very conscious, attempt at miscrediting everyone else. In a quite dostoyevskian way, Sarraute brings out why the characters live in a twiilght of consciousness & blindness. She describes a form of consciousness that comes to nothing, because it is expressive of the desire to destroy and to hide. One verb sums it all up: to beguile. Social calculation that never really works the way it is intended to - because it can't (a brilliant point in itself, I'd say).

These characters live in a mix of self-abasement and self-aggrandizing. They are the twin of Dostoyevsky's underground man. When trying to express the wrongs that have been done to them, they compare themselves to Caesar - that's their manner of talking. There are hints of self-understanding, but as soon as something like the voice of conscience worms into their blabbering reality, they take care to belittle it. The little there is of clarity, is brushed aside - in the name of "God, I'm a nasty person" and "well, I'm not that bad, after all, am I?" I'm sure you recognize this pattern from Notes from the underground.

Sarraute's story (or anti-story) is set against the backdrop of the "decency", the preoccupations, of bourgeoise life. Of what I've said so far, it might not have appeared as if she's interested in social critique - but in my opinion, she is. To make a name for oneself, to succeed, to fit in. The ever recurring easy chairs bring to mind a leisurly life, but for Alain & his ilks, life cannot be too leisurly (that would signify decadence). Alain himself is constantly blamed for being an effeminate good-for-nothing, too attached to nice things (too like his aunt Berthe). Alain is a worrying reminder in the heads of others. Alain's sleazy leather chairs constitute a reminder of himself, the way he understand himself, the way others impose their pictures of him on him. It is, thus, no coincidence that the leather chairs form the centre of the book. They stand for something that the characters are, but that they, at the same time, want to turn away from. The chairs are eponymous of the embarrassment, the shame felt by the characters in relation to themselves & others.

One of the interesting things about the book, and I understand it as no mere stylistic tool, is that it is not always clear whose perspective is presented. In this way, the reader is invited to reflect on the world of the different characters - how similar the characters are, because they share everything: envy, disgust, grudge. Is this yet another book, elevating alienation to the status of "authentic being"? Nope. The characters of the book are depicted as closed systems, planets, who have no real contact with each other besides that of envying & holding a grudge against everyone they know (and everyone they don't know, too). All confrontations end with anti-climax, a form of spiritual suffocation. These people treat each other as means-to-an-end -Sarraute brings out the absurdity in this, and this she does better than anyone. Sarraute is no Sartre, no Camus, even though her book shares with them some main themes.

In one especially devastating scene, Alain, the failed academic, receives some visitors in his crammed apartment. His artsy-fartsy "friends" pay him a visit with the sole intention of humiliating him, of relishing his crazed demeanour. Alain is embarrassed. He doesn't know what to do with himself. He is ashamed of his furniture. His friends ridicule his attempts at respectability.


"Good evening...delighted...Good evening...Why, not at all, come in...No, you're not disturbing me...Certainly not, what an idea, you know quite well that I'm very glad..." His smile is edgy, constrained, he feels this, his voice is badly pitched... He offers them seats, clumsily displaces an easy chair, he all but knocks over a small center table which, calmly, skillfully, they catch just in time, set straight again, all his gestures are jerky, awkward, his eyes must have a feverish light in them...


But what kind of petty novel is it that revolves around furniture? Well, Sarraute's style is more stringent, more systematic than most of the things I've read in my life. The broken, dissociated sentences mould the precise, yet somehow streaming, language. I don't mean that she strangles the life of her characters (or, well - a little...) - their lifelessness is part of the perspective she conjures up. Resentment: dying, while struggling to keep up the appearence of projects, initiatives, activity. She writes about the way self-deception can be seen as a kind of death (hello, Mr. Kierkegaard). In this respect, she is not cynical at all, even though her novel is no-nonsense darkness.

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