Few living writers can embody as well as does Nathalie Sarraute the
evolution of French literature, specifically (though not solely) of the
novel, across the whole of the twentieth century. Born in 1900, she is
as old as the century itself and has been writing for a full two-thirds
of it (she began her first collection of short prose texts, Tropismes, in
1932 and published her latest work, Ouvrez, in 1997). Between the
1940s and early 1970s her critical essays and public lectures, pursu-
ing lines of enquiry already opened up by her novels, took issue with
the relationship of fiction to reality, the ever-changing nature of that
reality, and the imperative for the novelist to create new modes of
representation to take account of the constant transformations in
our understanding of ourselves and of the world around us. Pro-
foundly ingrained in her writing is her response, as reader, to those
Modernist writers whose novels shaped contemporary fiction, and
whom of course she first read as contemporaries: above all, Proust,
Joyce, and Woolf (among nineteenth-century precursors she
emphasizes Dostoevsky and--to a limited extent--Flaubert).
Thus the publication by Gallimard in 1996 of her ( Euvres complètes in
the renowned Pléiade series offers a unique retrospective on one
prominent writer's engagements with, and contribution to, the
development of fiction throughout this century. (They are of course
already incomplete, for they preceded the publication of Ouvrez in
late 1997.) Germaine Brée sums that contribution up in a recent
essay: