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

and protect themselves from exterior dangers, they cloak themselves in the protective capsules of words.
    Nothing, therefore, should break the continuity of these movements, and the transformation they undergo should be analogous to that sustained by a ray of light when it is refracted and curves as it passes from one sphere into another.
    This being the case, there is really no justification for the heavy indentations and dashes with which we are accustomed to make a clear-cut separation between dialogue and what precedes it. Even the colon and quotation marks are still too apparent, and it is understandable that certain novelists (for instance, Joyce Cary) should strive to blend dialogue with its context—to the extent that this is possible—by simply marking the separation with a comma followed by a capital.
    But even more awkward and hard to defend than indentations, dashes, colons and quotation marks, are the monotonous, clumsy, 'said Jeanne,' 'answered Paul,' with which dialogue is usually strewn; for contemporary novelists these are becoming more and more what the laws of perspective had become for painters just before Cubism: no longer a necessity, but a cumbersome convention.
    Indeed, it is curious to see that, today, those very novelists who refuse to let themselves become what they consider to be needlessly disturbed, and who continue to use the devices of the old-fashioned novel with blithe assurance, seem unable to escape a certain feeling of uneasiness as regards this particular point. It is as though they had lost that certainty of being within their rights, that innocent unawareness that gives to the 'said, resumed, replied, retorted, exclaimed etc. . . .' with which Madame de Lafayette or Balzac so brightly studded their dialogues, that look of being securely where they belong, indispensable and perfectly as a matter of course, that makes us accept them without raising an eyebrow, without even noticing it, when we re-read these authors today. And compared to them, how self-conscious, anxious and unsure of themselves contemporary novelists seem, when they use these same formulas.
    At times—like people who prefer to flaunt and even accentuate their faults to ward off danger and disarm their critics—they ostentatiously renounce the subterfuges used ingenuously by writers of the old school (which today seem to them to be too gross and too easy, and which consisted in constantly varying their formulas), and expose the monotony and clumsiness of this device by repeating tirelessly, with affected negligence or naïveté, 'said Jeanne,' 'said Paul,' 'said Jacques'; the only result being to fatigue and irritate the reader all the more.
    At others, they try to make these unfortunate 'said Jeanne,' 'replied Paul,' disappear, by following them, on every occasion, with repetitions of the last words of the dialogue: 'No, said Jeanne, no' or: 'It's finished, said Paul, it's finished.' This gives to the words the characters speak a solemn, emotional tone which obviously does not correspond to the author's intention. Then, again, they do away as much as possible with this cumbersome appendix by continually introducing the dialogue in a still more artificial way which we feel does not answer to any inner necessity: Jeanne smiled: 'I leave the choice to you,' or: Madeleine looked at him: 'I was the one who did it.'
    All these resorts to too apparent subterfuges, all these embarrassed attitudes, are a source of great cheer to followers of the moderns. They see in them premonitory signs, proof that something is falling apart, that there is filtering insidiously into the minds of the supporters of the traditional novel a doubt as to the merits of their rights, a scruple at entering into possession of their inheritance, which, without their realising it, make of them, as it were, the privileged classes before revolutions, the agents of future upheavals.
    Indeed, it is not by mere chance that it should be at the moment when