Read Online The Age of Suspicion by Nathalie Sarraute - Free Book Online

landmarks, removed from all authority, suddenly faced with an unknown substance, bewildered and distrustful, instead of blindly letting himself go, as he so loves to do, was constantly obliged to confront what was shown him with what he could see for himself.
    Just in passing, he must have been extremely surprised by the opacity of the fictional conventions that had succeeded in concealing for so long what should have been obvious to all eyes. But once he had taken a good look and arrived at an independent judgement, he was unable to stop there. At the same time that they had awakened his powers of penetration, the moderns had awakened his critical faculties and whetted his curiosity.
    He wanted to look even further or, if preferred, even closer. And he was not long in perceiving what was hidden beneath the interior monologue: an immense profusion of sensations, images, sentiments, memories, impulses, little larval actions that no inner language can convey, that jostle one another on the threshold of consciousness, gather together in compact groups, loom up all of a sudden, then immediately fall apart, combine otherwise and reappear in new forms, while unwinding inside us, like the ribbon that comes clattering from a telescriptor slot, is an uninterrupted flow of words.
    With regard to Proust, it is true that these groups composed of sensations, images, sentiments and memories which, when traversing or skirting the thin curtain of the interior monologue, suddenly become visible from the outside, in an apparently insignificant word, a mere intonation or a glance, are precisely what he took such pains to study. But—however paradoxical this may seem to those who, today, still reproach him for his extreme minutae—to us it appears already as though he had observed them from a great distance, after they had run their course, in repose and, as it were, congealed in memory. He tried to describe their respective positions as though they were stars in a motionless sky. He considered them as a sequence of causes and effects which he sought to explain. He rarely—not to say, never—tried to re-live them and make them re-live for the reader in the present, while they were forming and developing, like so many tiny dramas, each one of which has it adventures, its mystery and its unforeseeable ending.
    It was doubtless this that prompted Gide to say that he had collected the raw material for a great work rather than achieved the work itself, and brought upon him the serious reproach still made today by his opponents, of having gone in for 'analysis', that is to say, in the most original parts of his work, of having incited the reader to use his own intelligence, instead of giving him the sensation of re-living an experience, of accomplishing himself certain actions, without knowing too well what he is doing or where he is going—which always was and still is in the very nature of any work of fiction.
    But isn't this like reproaching Christopher Columbus with not having constructed the port of New York?
    Those who have followed him and who have wanted to try and make these subterranean actions re-live for the reader as they unfold, have met with certain difficulties. Because these inner dramas composed of attacks, triumphs, recoils, defeats, caresses, bites, rapes, murders, generous abandons or humble submissions, all have one thing in common: they cannot do without a partner.
    Often it is an imaginary partner who emerges from our past experiences or from our day-dreams, and the scenes of love or combat between us, by virtue of their wealth of adventure, the freedom with which they unfold and what they reveal concerning our least apparent inner structure, can constitute very valuable fictional material.
    It remains nonetheless true that the essential feature of these dramas is constituted by an actual partner.
    For this flesh and blood partner is constantly nurturing and renewing our stock of experiences. He is pre-eminently the