Nathalie Sarraute belongs to the the modern novelists who take a discrete- fragmentary and physical-intuitive outlook to the representation of the human psyche. In fact, according to Sarraute, it is only within dialogism that the actualities of the human psyche manifest themselves, and such actualities stem from strains and stresses between characters which run through the underlying subspace of the dialogues—what Sarraute calles sub-dialogue, or tropism. We claim that there exists a distinct quality in Sarraute’s tropismes which detaches the reader from the horizontal axis of the narrative and leads him/her vertically into a veiled abstract world, a quality which we call “linguistic transudation, that is, a transudation which disconnects one from the stereotypical level and leads him/her to the veiled underlying world by rendering the imperceptible tropismes tangible. In this article, by referring to Mikhail Bakhtin insights on dialogism and polyphony, we demonstrate how our “linguistic transudation,  as a linguistic technique, maps into to the writer’s view of  discourse  and the negation of the Cartesian Supreme Subject. In fact, Sarraute  dialogism as fragmentary and discontinuous conception shows the resemblance with the principle of discontinuity as a philosophical term in phenomenology.

Keywords: linguistic transudation, The Other, Sarraute, Bakhtin, phenomenology

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