Les Fruits d’Or by Nathalie Sarraute

Until February of this year, Les Fruits d’Or felt to me like Duras’ Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein. Twice did I start with both books, only to find myself quickly dropping them and moving to a more familiar book. This time, though, I came prepared; quite prepared actually.
By chance, I stumbled upon Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Preface A Une Vie d’Ecrivain, freely available on ubu.com. I was vaguely familiar with Robbe-Grillet and his Nouveau Roman phenomenon but until I heard him defending himself and his Nouveau Roman and expounding on his thoughts on literature and writing, the Nouveau Roman and the shift in modern literature would still have remained intangible to me.

In those 21 audio clips, Robbe-Grillet sounds fiercely anti-Balzacien but he justifies himself: Europe was demolished after World War 2, it had to be rebuilt again, therefore, the Europeans had the chance of starting afresh; in literature, this meant a rejection of the classical structure of the novel: plot, characters, environment, but most notably the certitude of the omnipresent narrator, and the truthfulness of the dialogue.
Robbe-Grillet -it felt to me- believed he had a mission to compile and push forward the efforts and works of the Nouveaux Romanciers into a school (ironically, a very structuralist endeavor from someone like him) that should have its legitimate place in Literature and Cinema. I don’t think the other Romanciers (Sarraute, Simon, Butor, Pinget) saw the Nouveau Roman as he did; at least Sarraute didn’t but it seemed they all agreed to step out of the dualist form/content of literature, to get rid of perspectives, therefore of characters, to neutralize psychology and to pay a closer attention to the relationship of time/space and to explore non-linear action (if one could label what happens in these books as action)

I anticipated that I would start Les Fruits d’Or once I would be done with those clips, and therefore, I classify the above as my planned literary fortification against what Nathalie Sarraute might throw at me. But there is another aspect of my literary education which I would like to dwell upon; it is not planned -indeed cannot be planned- but it’s an accumulation of experiences and knowledge and I believe other readers will identify with it.

The past 2-3 years have forged in me a somewhat global understanding of modern art, of modern literature, cinema and music. Indeed things have changed a lot, though one could choose to disregard this transformation and maintain an attachment to ancient words or lines or sounds packaged in 21st century form. Much of modern art still eludes me, but I am beginning to appreciate the possibility of experimentation and I feel that, gradually, I’m able to make some sense out of it.

One is struck by the immense change that gradually came over Western Art strolling in a museum from room to room and coming in contact with the shocking, the strange, the objects, the details, the vague, the eerie… The familiarity of human shapes and figures, of landscapes well-defined within a known time and space, the meaning in the painting -if only a recognizable beginning and end- are no longer available to us.
Bit by bit, I no longer rejected discontinuity in a work of art; indeed, if I myself no longer recognize a continuous stream of events in my life, I cannot ask for it from the artist.

I assume that this all started with the death of God which I do not qualify as blasphemous; instead, I consider it liberated imagination, triggered questions, and opened possibilities. It behooves the modern thinker to answer such inquiries in an absence of meaning/structure, though I wonder if one can do more than doubting, or focusing on the fleeting, or finding certainty in repetition – a repetition of events, a mirroring of faces – as if modernity dealt a blow to the linear progression of History as a whole and focused on the micro-event magnified to provide substance to the thinker.

I suppose out of all of this humor emerged; of a different form, no doubt. It’s the humor of the cynics, perhaps, but it’s humor. Liberated from God, independent of a linear progression of time, yet facing the certainty of a linear progression of time, and therefore age, the modern artist revels in the absurdity of the minutiae and dresses juxtaposition in a some comical robe: Kafka, Bunuel, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute…

It is through the gate of modern humor that I decided to tackle Les Fruits d’Or. The first half of it is immensely funny. Because this is Sarraute writing, I don’t know when or where the dialogue is taking place and how many people are there in the book. At times it feels only 1 or 2, at times a gathering of invitees, and at others an infinity of generations…
Still, I assumed that this is a Parisian literary salon where invitees got together for some reason. Eminent among them are two art critics (maybe 3). Because I read it in French, I was able to spot (among the invitees) a man and a woman dialoguing in the opening pages: the woman was surprised at the indifference with which the man handed over a postal card of a Courbet painting of a dog’s head to his female companion, triggering a consternation on the face of the critic.
Because the woman found such an affront too harsh on the critic, she lends him a helping hand and asks him: “And, Les Fruits d’Or, how did you find it?”This last sentence is repeated infinitely throughout the book because [Sarraute’s] Les Fruits d’Or is this question and the implications this question triggers.

The woman is surprised by the reply of the critic: “Les Fruits d’Or, I found it to be good”. This scenario which could have ended in the first two pages, is repeated in various shapes and forms many times, sometimes recounted in its entirety, at others, fragments of it are thrown in paragraphs  where the fictitious Les Fruits d’Or is being defended or ridiculed.
In non-conventional, yet very humorous, dialogues and “actions”, we get a glimpse of the pretentious conformity that people in literary salons slip into in the presence of “eminent critics”.
Personally, this conformity wouldn’t have made much sense to me, had it not been for serendipity and Youtube. Recently, INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel) released its video archives on Youtube, and searching for Robbe-Grillet, I found an episode from a Bernard Pivot show. The invitee was Robbe-Grillet against a threesome of conventional critics and I found it to be a gem: the reaction of the critics and their derision against Robbe-Grillet’s book when Pivot gave a a brief synopsis of it to the guest, and asks him: “Did I get it right?” “And Robbe-Grillet replies: “Yes, this is one way of looking at it”.

Of course Sarraute could not have been referring to that, because the book came decades before that episode, but it clearly demonstrates the attacks Les Nouveaux Romanciers were enduring from critics who, apparently (and as Robbe-Grillet fiercely declares it in that show, “They have not even read Joyce or Kafka or Faulkner”) had no idea of what those writers were writing, and who refused to admit of writers who did not maintain the Balzacienne vein.

But back to the book. Within the frame of this affected elegy and praise, there comes a simple-minded reader who challenges the eminent critics and their backup choruses to demonstrate to this ignorant -book in hand- where the genius lies of the fictitious Les Fruits d’Or lies. This unfolds funny episodes where the critic attempts to elude the challenge by ruse rather than reason, such as when the critic makes use of his divine right to confer a literary quality to an otherwise banal work of art by announcing that it was done on purpose, with the express knowledge and planning of the writer.

The book could be read as both: in the first of half of it, it is an attack on the critics of classic literature, which Sarraute refers to as: “this well-built, properly-oiled, old machine, untouchable and well-preserved”. It is also a reflection on the collective hallucination that accompanies the release of a work of art by an established artist and the wave of synchronized chorus from laypeople and critics alike that uplifts that work to the level of glorious masterpieces.
Conscious of but disregarding the classical focus on content, the writing is one of the most captivating in French literature. (And here I go, impersonating any character from Les Fruits d’Or – and I knew I would fall into that trap) She utilizes this classic French writing habit of successive adjectives or descriptive words to make fun of the classical critics themselves.

Sarraute -if I shouldn’t assume that she is intelligent – shows her support to Le Nouveau Roman – even if without adhering to it – through the posing of a very literary question towards the end of the book when the woman asks: “Le sujet… quelle importance? Simple pretexte.” [What is the importance of the subject? it’s only a pretext]
This has always been the position of the Nouveaux Romanciers regarding content and subject, and they take this from Flaubert who considered that Madame Bovary without the writing, without the form, would not be Madame Bovary, or it would be anybody’s Madame Bovary.
The reviewed book joins this stream of thought. In this book where nothing happens, somehow 160 pages are filled on the premise that someone is surprised that another liked a particular book. It’s amazing when I think of it in retrospect. Indeed, the subject completely disappears to reveal the excessiveness of the writer’s imagination, another typical position adopted by the Nouveaux Romanciers. (The films of Robbe-Grillet and Bunuel, thought not an adherent of the Nouveau Roman, reflect this subordination of content to style)

I waited no less than 5 years to read this book -I think I added it to my  Currently Reading list on Goodreads ever since I opened the account- and now I rank it among my favorite books of all time.