SOURCE: Minogue, Valerie. “Voices, Virtualities, and Ventriloquism: Nathalie Sarraute's Pour un oui ou pour un non.” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 49, no. 2 (April 1995): 164-77.

In the following essay, Minogue discusses the challenges associated with staging Sarraute's theatrical works, which, the critic notes, although recognizable as human experience, are clearly not centered around any recognizable representation of reality.

Nathalie Sarraute's reputation as a novelist was already established when she began work on her first play in 1963. She had never thought of herself as a playwright. Her material is, and always has been, not action, plot and character—the stuff that plays are normally made of—but what she has termed ‘tropisms’, currents of feeling on the underside of spoken words. There are no startling revelations, no murderous or amorous goings-on in her novels, and, most damaging perhaps in stage-terms, Sarraute's resolute refusal of characterization forbids the creation of personnages...