Nathalie Sarraute: Portrait of a Man Unknown
Nathalie Sarraute’s novels, if they can be said to be about anything at all, concern the difficulties of language, of speaking, of being. What emerges in her writing is never a distinct character - often not even anyone nameable - but rather a smattering of sounds spoken, which offer little to no characterization. Everything is smeared and laden with fog - her texts are characterized by what fails to appear, what fails to be said, or what barely manages to be said after some time spent stumbling. Portrait of a Man Unknown offers us this intrigue and enigma of the void, of absence within the title. Any of her texts could, with no inaccuracy, be called Portrait of an X (a word, a character, a setting) Unknown.
This text, of all the others I’ve read from her, stages the narrative obfuscation she performs most literally. The principal character makes frequent reference to literary characters and settings, and, during rounds of therapy, discusses what feels most real, what makes one feel alive, or the sense of ennui and inanimation one might feel within their own life.There is an opposition between fiction and reality at work in these therapeutic dialogues, where, for her, fiction feels more real, more enchanted, more animate than what, in contrast, could be called ‘reality’ (scare quotes used here to trouble the idea that fiction is not inscribed within reality, rather than being contradistinct from it). The therapist, on the other hand, entertains their literary analysis from a diagnostic perspective. From his perspective, “many a literary character who has since become famous, was, from our point of view, a neurotic.”
For her, memories have a foot in fiction, and vice-versa. War and Peace’s Prince Bolkonski and Princess Marie, for instance: “it should not be forgotten that they are really somebody. They belong among those characters in fiction who are so successfully portrayed that we are accustomed to refer to them as ‘real,’ or ‘alive,’ more real and more alive, in fact, than the living themselves.” Moreover, we should regard those who dwell within our memory - those we know in real life - as “no more ‘alive’ than the precise little colored images engraved in our minds by, shall we say, the soft Russian leather boot, embroidered in silver, that the old prince wore”; details of fictional characters which “seem to us to be more ‘real,’ more ‘true,’ than all the similar scenes we ourselves ever took part in.”
The dialogues between the narrator and the therapist, with these thoughts in mind, signal to the discordances between an artistic or aesthetic perspective of experience/existence, and the more scientific/psychological. Still, even an embrace of the artistic/aesthetic position is not without its dangers: one must, after all, affirm and embrace the grand obfuscation of sense, and recognize that any whole or totality (of truth, meaning, or any manner in which one might have attempted to order and categorize the dimensions of one’s existence) is fragmented and always coming undone.
Doesn’t experience itself inevitably undermine the ways we try to categorize and order our experience; e.g. is our notion of love not, with the right person, in the right circumstances, radically annihilated and redefined? Don’t we, each time, learn what love is all over again, each time we fall in love? To embrace life in its discordant richness, or even to begin to write is to confront the smears, the fraying margins of order and categorization: the ways the chaosmos of life always threatens to unsew the forms in which we schematize life. “How I should like to see all the misshapen tatters, the trembling shadows, the ghosts, the ghouls and the larvae that flout me and which I nevertheless pursue - take on those same smooth, well-rounded forms, present those same pure, firm outlines.” Sarraute’s fiction animates the difficulty of these “pure, firm outlines” presenting themselves, whether in life or in fiction.
Despite therapeutic intervention, and the diagnostic criteria and methods for organizing, sorting, naming and diagnosing phenomenon/behavior, the character only feels themselves to be rejoining life through fiction. In particular, though the ways in which life reminds her of fiction. Further into the novel, she wanders through what seems to her the city of Baudelaire’s Invitation au Voyage, whose text calls out to her, beginning “to vibrate with melodious sound, as pure and transparent and clear as crystal.” In pronouncing the words of the text, “la ville entière” comes to life before, rising “in a single impulse, its main street opened out like an oriflamme, hung with flags and banners, waving in the soft sea breeze, through the golden light.”
Later, passing through a gallery, she sees the eponymous Portrait of a Man Unknown - a figure of a man which presents “the kind of fragmentary, uncertain outlines that the hesitant fingers of a blind man might come upon haltingly, feeling his way.” Only his eyes are clear. The rest is obscure and obfuscated, as if the eyes alone preserved “all the intensity, all the life that was lacking in the still formless, dislocated features.” It is this formlessness and dislocation that Sarraute illustrates within her own fiction. It is as if the principal character were the reader of Sarraute’s texts, winding their way through this absence of literary form, feeling through her foggy prose as if they were blind, or as if they could only barely glimpse the vaguest blur of features through the haze.
Within this formlessness, though is a sort of freedom: one locatable within the absence of determination. There is a sort of pleasure in the fluidity of formlessness, in the play of features that cannot, like a butterfly’s wings, be pinned down. It is this formlessness that opens something otherwise determined and solid - a character, a setting, a portrait of a man painted in clear relief - that allows room for wandering, for interpretation, for ambiguity. All of these fictive sources of pleasure the character enjoys are “scattered about the world” - they are themselves fragments of a world, or of worlds, and they constitute for her “the means of finding my way.” A means of finding, though, to be sure, that entails a share of stumbling. “They were, above all - these treasures of mine - stones, fragments of walls: gleaming bits of life that I had succeeded in capturing.”
Sarraute’s fiction is perhaps a demonstration, or an obfuscated illustration of the fact that life cannot be seized as a whole, and that neither could essentially anything be grasped as a whole - a person, a place, or any phenomenon we might move towards understanding. There is always something left unformed within the form, something we are not able to know within what we attempt to come to know - some ways, for instance, that we never come to truly or completely know someone that we have known for years (the same could be said of/for ourselves). Sarraute’s fiction, here and elsewhere, is a contention with and a navigation of this formlessness that exists within form itself; the sense of dislocation that, in some capacity, always characterizes location (or what it is we might situate within a location: a subject, a text, a portrait - anything).