The Silence and the Lie
THEATRE
By ROBERT ABIRACHED
IF you are at all familiar with the work of Mme
Nathalie Sarraute, you will most likely have been surprised to learn that this explorer of the infinitely small was to make her debut in the theatre: what, at first glance, could be further from the drama than the themes and the tech- nical precision of these novels? Imagine an aquarium full of placid fish: if you took a magnifying glass to examine them (better still a microscope), you would see a world of sluggish monsters wallowing and swaying among great waves and shadows. The least breath brings up- heaval, an infinitesimal storm arises among strings of bubbles, slowly the storm and swell subside, but, even in calm water, these strange pinkish creatures continue to be insensibly modi- fied by their tropisms : this scientific term is Mme Sarraute's own, to express the idea that all being is a process of constant change under the influence of impalpable stimuli. It is a physiologi- cal term applied to psychology: the essential, in each of us, takes place beyond reach of the naked eye, beneath the visible surface.
What, in fact, happens to us from day to day? We may talk, but we never stop thinking around the edges and between the lines of language : what matters, for Mme Sarraute, is precisely this 'sub-conversation,' the barely conscious commen- tary which surrounds and overlaps everything we say, that indeterminate area of language where nothing is really said but where everything shifts. Similarly, a secret life of microscopic events and setbacks takes place, so to speak, in the shadow of our everyday existence. Beneath our scaly sur- face, like the fish in the aquarium, we secrete images, we thrust and counter thrust, we suffer change and interference which we have no means of pinning down.
The novelist's task is to seize on these 'minute dramas, each with its sudden reversals, its mystery and its unexpected denouement.' But he will not waste time reassembling into 'characters' the separate particles he has managed to scoop up: it is, after all, no longer possible to set much store by those solid, well-rounded individuals which the novel has relied on for so long, and which have been undermined, once for all, by the discovery of a swarming shifting psychological life which knows no such boundaries. We must go further than Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy; armed with new techniques, we must press on towards those un- known countries which Joyce and Proust have already indicated with the foresight of genius. In 'the age of suspicion,' the modern novel can no longer impose rigid patterns, no longer attempt to explain reality in terms of fixed and fossilised images: Mme Sarraute, for her part, has chosen to explore that dim territory in which the present takes shape, in which thought and impulse fuse in slow motion, a territory that falls well short of observable reality.
Here feelings split apart almost before they have formed, the air is thick with menace, pickers with anticipation: all consists of faint shudder- ings, reverberation, promise, changing reflections. It is for the reader to find his own thread through this reality which- forms and dissolves at every
turn, to advance and understand. But the specta- tor? How can such a universe be projected in the theatre?
As a matter of fact, the two short plays of Nathalie Sarraute which have just received their premieres in Paris under Jean-Louis Barrault were both first written for radio : Le Silence in 1964 for the Stiddeutscher Rundfunk (Stuttgart), and Le Mensonge in 1966 to be broadcast simul- taneously in Germany, Belgium and France. Re- ' duced simply to voices, the characters confronted each other in an arena defined by nothing more substantial than their speech: stripped of in- dividuality, set down in a kind of social no man's land, they managed to remain hovering on the verge of the world as we know it. Now, in the persons of flesh and blood actors, with no means of taking to thin air—the present success is dis- tinctly paradoxical.
It should be noted, first, that Jean-Louis Barrault chose these two plays to mark the open- ing of a diminutive new theatre: the Petit Odeon, in what was once the foyer of the Theatre de France, holds barely 118 people seated round an improvised, L-shaped platform. No barrier of any kind separates actors from audience— very little in the way of decor or complicated lighting, none of the prestige normally associated with theatre-going and no attempt at theatrical illusion. This arrangement imposes at once a style of acting stripped to the minimum and a concentrated, inward-looking dramatic tech- nique: and, if the company did not quite man- age to find their feet at this first attempt, Mme Sarraute's characteristic methods, of analysis under a microscopic lens, proved ideally suited to the setting.
A trivial incident enlarged and examined under the microscope, as if the movement of time stood still in a kind of interregnum, an analysis using -wanly language as its instrument, characters barely defined, chosen for convenience from a world where money holds no sway, a plot or action which slithers forward imperceptibly only to come back at last to its point of departure: these are the elements of Mme Sarraute's two plays. Le Silence deals with an uneasy situation which develops when one man at a party obstinately refuses to open his mouth: conversation seizes up or accelerates by turns around him, masks are torn down, storms whipped up, duels fought with blunted foils, until suddenly the silent figure pronounces a word. The drama falls apart as quickly as it had built up and life returns to its usual rhythm: nothing whatsoever has happened. In Le Mensonge, it is a character with a mania for truth who lets loose the whirlwind : because Pierre happens to correct a perfectly inoffensive slip in a remark of Simone's, everything shudders and collapses in this little gathering of ordinary, sociable, civilised people—it is as if a chasm had opened before our eyes and immediately closed. Here "again, things return to normal, and the dialogue becomes an exercise in lucidity broken 1,11 within itself.
What we have here, then, is a kind of chamber theatre, to be played mezzo voce but with ex-
traordinary precision : Mme Sarraute has chosen to explore new territory for the drama, though her choice of material may seem to run counter to larger and more strident contemporary move- ments. Disembodied, almost abstract, her dialogue strangely creates its own space and timespan, begets a new life in which echo, as it were, re- places the sound which made it, and shadow the solid body which cast it. But, watching, we sense that these shadows and echoes add up to a world more real than the visible one which man has spent so many thousands of years mapping and making out, to try and make himself feel less lonely.
There still remains the question of whether we possess actors capable of rendering the infinitesimal tragedy of that which has no name or marker, as Mme Sarraute places it before us. I should be curious to see an English company attempt it : where the actors of the Theatre de France failed more or less (except for Madeleine Renaud who found, as always, le ton juste), the actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company; for instance, might perhaps succeed, by virtue of a technique at once more supple and more introspective, and which sets greater store by physical expression.
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