A glance at a page of Nathalie Sarraute's, with its quotation-marks, dashes, trails of dots, broken sentences, clusters of groping quasi-synonyms, and incomplete syntax, is sufficient to indicate that we are in the realm of the undefined. Reading her novels confirms that we are not in pursuit of definition. On the contrary, we move not from the indefinite to the security of definition, but to an open-ended interrogation. The processes of this prose do not dissolve in paraphrase or summary. They are not 'doing' something, they are 'being' something. They are not talking about something, which can be summed up beyond and without them: they are talking to the reader, and saying the something which they are.

In this poetic enterprise, Tropismes at once establishes the poetic tone, and initiates the reader into the dramas of preverbal experience. The first two novels induct the reader into the new...