The Age of Suspicion by Nathalie Sarraute Page A

wheel- works of our inner mechanisms; with what readiness we consent to believe that a certain cipher code—such as psychoanalysis— applied to the immense mobile mass we call our 'heart of hearts', in which almost anything may be found, can cover it entirely and give an account of all its movements; and with what satisfaction, what a feeling of deliverance, we let ourselves be convinced, and have most of us remained convinced, that this 'heart of hearts' which, quite recently, still offered such a fertile field for discovery, did not exist, was nothing: empty space, so much air.
    But what makes us lose all sense of judgement, and vastly increases our credulity, is a certain need that impels us to look to novels for the above-mentioned satisfactions, which we shall have to qualify as extra-literary, since they can be furnished us quite as well by works that are devoid of literary value as by those that have attained to the peak of perfection.
    Here our already great suggestibility and malleability become really astonishing: in our impatience to experience the pleasures that these books so generously offer us, we try to recognise ourselves in the crudest of images, we make ourselves as inconsistent as possible so as to flow easily into the already prepared moulds that are held out to us; in our own eyes, we become so bloodless and so empty that, however cramped these casts may be, it seems to us that they hold us entirely. Indeed, there is not so much as a fortune-teller's printed slip from which we do not derive an impression of miraculous self-recognition, the moment it raises in us a vague hope of finding consolation and foretelling the future.
    Any novel, consequently, that succeeds in satisfying this dangerous passion, becomes for us, at little cost, the very image of life, a work of the most powerful realism, which we compare with the best of the classics, with the most highly accomplished writings.
    Just here our worst suspicions are confirmed. For confusion such as this to be possible, these, then, must be the satisfactions that admirers of first class works demand of them, and we may legitimately believe, for instance, that most of Proust's readers liked him, and still like him, for reasons that have little to do with what constitutes his real worth, and which are not very different from those for which their parents or their grandparents liked Georges Ohnet.
    It is even, we must now conclude, precisely that which has grown most outmoded in good books, which has been most imitated and is consequently most commonly accepted, taken for granted, that brings them closer in the eyes of their admirers to spurious good novels. Like the latter, they no longer present any obstacles, they require almost no more effort, and they permit the reader, comfortably settled in his own familiar world, to glide weakly along towards dangerous delights.
    And yet good books are the salvation of the reader, in spite of himself. For they present a difference from the others that it would be a mistake to regard as negligible: they bear re-reading.
    But it should not be thought that what separates the authors of these two kinds of works is above all a difference in talent. If we look closely, it is rather a radical difference of attitude towards the object upon which all their efforts must be concentrated and, consequently, a total difference of method. This is so true that we ought to put even contemporary writers in the same category with these earlier writers who are still read, if their attitude and working methods are the same, and whatever their talent—talent being about equally divided between the two categories—or however uncertain the future of their books.
    If we had to designate all of these writers by one name, it would have to be that of 'realists', in opposition to the others to whom, however paradoxical and outrageous this may seem to them, the name 'formalists' is exactly applicable.
    But, people will ask, what do you mean