Tropismes Reading Order

Tropismes (Tropisms, 1939, revised 1957) by Nathalie Sarraute is the work that opened French literature to an entirely new understanding of what a character might be. Written in the late 1930s and published just as the war began, Tropismes is not a novel in any conventional sense: it is a collection of twenty-four short prose pieces (twenty-four in the revised edition) — each one a few hundred words — that attempt to capture the tiny, involuntary movements of the psyche as it reacts to social situations. The title is drawn from biology: a tropism is the involuntary turning of an organism toward or away from a stimulus (plants turning toward the sun, roots growing toward water), and Sarraute uses the term to describe the equally involuntary, pre-verbal reactions that human beings have to one another — the micro-movements of aggression, appeasement, submission, and desire that occur beneath the surface of ordinary social exchange. The pieces have no named characters, no plot, no dialogue in any conventional sense — only the movement of consciousness reacting to a stimulus: women talking in the afternoon sun, a man walking through a city, children on a beach. Sarraute's language in Tropismes is her own invention: precise without being referential, registering a quality of experience that existing fiction had not noticed. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the preface to the revised edition, recognizing in Sarraute's work a new literary form. Tropismes is the founding document of the Nouveau Roman and one of the most genuinely original works of the twentieth century.