Publication, 1938–39

This chapter marks the completion of Nathalie Sarraute's tropisms by the summer of 1938, in which she had written nineteen short texts. It explains how the word “tropisms” became a phenomenon with which her work would become permanently associated. It also mentions the writer Hector Bianciotti who once said that to say tropism is to name Nathalie Sarraute. The chapter recounts how the tropisms' publication in the “Mesures” was turned down by the editor Jean Paulhan, criticizing it as a little unclear, a little too slow and lacklustre. It talks about Georges Pelorson, who provided Nathalie with an alternative opening and accepted her texts in the Volontés, the monthly literary review he had founded in December 1937.