Skin-diving has its place, but so has oceanic cartography, what Sarraute contemptuously dismisses as “the aerial view.” Man is a creature who is designed to live on the surface; he lives in the depths—whether terrestrial, oceanic, or psychological—at his peril. I do not share her contempt for the novelist’s effort to transmute the watery shapeless depths of experience into solid stuff, to impose outlines, to give fixed shape and sensuous body to the world. That it’s boring to do it in the old ways goes without saying. But I cannot agree that it should not be done at all.
