SOURCE: Miller, Judith G. “Nathalie Sarraute: How to Do Mean Things With Words.” Modern Drama 34, no. 1 (March 1991): 118-27.

In the following essay, Miller analyses Sarraute's plays in the context of her other prose writing, calling attention to the relationship she creates between language and imaginative construction in works that are vastly different from traditional theater.

“How could we live if we took umbrage at every little phrase, if we didn't quite reasonably allow words, after all insignificant and anodyne, just to pass on by, if we created a huge story out of so little, out of less than nothing?”¹ This question, posed by the chatty narrator in one of Nathalie Sarraute's meditations in L'Usage de la parole (1980), ironically underscores the focus of all of Sarraute's work, for she has spent a fifty-year writing career creating “stories” (or better, “dramas”) out of what would appear to be very little...