SOURCE: Van Slyke, Gretchen. “Autobiographical Matrices and Mother Tongues in Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance.” In Corps/Décors: Femmes, Orgie, Parodie, edited by Catherine Nesci, pp. 175-90. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 1999.

[In the following essay, Van Slyke evaluates Enfance as a remarkable study of the relationship between language and identity.]

What better place to study the connections between language and childhood experience than Enfance, the surprise autobiography that Sarraute, finally abandoning her characteristic reserve, published in 1983? In this work Sarraute retraces, through a dialogue between voices identified only as je and tu, her remembrances of childhood from age two up until her entry into the lycée. These flashes of memory illuminate stages in the constitution of the girl's sense of self as it developed in relation to others, primarily her parents. In the nexus of these relations, language plays a striking role, for in this child's universe words, often described in terms suggestive of magnetism and hypnotism, can unleash violent quasi-material forces that aim to overwhelm and utterly subject their intended target.¹

On the other hand, despite its apparently naive charm, Enfance is a highly wrought work in which the adult author chooses to re-expose herself to the powers of language and childhood memories, but only very carefully.² Although je swings freely back and forth between past and present, there is a strong contrast between the child's often frail sense of self and the adult's cocky assumption of authorial agency. Enfance, therefore, contains two stories, of which the second is readable only between the lines: the constitution of the child's sense of self, plus the hard conquest of authorial agency.

In this essay I intend to focus on Enfance as a remarkable study of language and relational identity. A particular feature of the child's experience is that she got along with her parents in very different ways. Her father and mother having separated and divorced before their daughter began consciously remembering things, Natasha (as I shall refer to the child, as distinct from the adult author) saw them as absolutely separate—not only in terms of the countries (France and Russia) where they lived, but more significantly, in the realm of her mind: “je ne les ai jamais vus, je ne peux pas les imaginer se rencontrant, lui et ma mère …” (Enfance 57). Language, likewise, works very differently in each set of relations. Between Natasha and her father, language plays a humble role. Between mother and daughter, on the other hand, words have a literally stunning force. Indeed, how many times was Natasha charmed, shocked, magnetized, hypnotized, paralyzed and petrified by the expressions that slipped off her mother's tongue!

Traditional Freudian thought is clearly unable to deal with the inextricably bound issues of mothers, daughters, language, and power that Sarraute details for her readers in Enfance. Endorsing the dichotomies of male/female, mind/body, culture/nature, these psychoanalytic models account for the (implicitly male) child's entry into language thanks to the father's violent interruption of the mother/infant dyad. Thoughout all this drama the mother remains a speechless onlooker, and the girl a mystery.

More pertinent to the phenomena that Enfance so vividly represents are the studies, from Melanie Klein on up through those of Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Chodorow, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, that explore the lasting importance of the child's—especially the little girl's—pre-oedipal relations with the mother.³ For Freud, girls and their mothers were generally shadowy presences in the wings; for these analysts and critics, they move toward center stage. Although all infants, they argue, first identify with the mother, little boys come to switch allegiance, learning to define themselves as not-female, not-mother. Little girls, on the other hand, continue to build their sense of self on the foundation of their primary, pre-linguistic identification with the mother. This is both a boon and a bane: while girls, and the women they grow up to become, generally enjoy a strong feeling of connection to others, they may also feel themselves caught in the coils of that primary identification, yearning for fusion with the mother at the same time as they struggle for a sense of separateness from that engulfing archaic figure. These analyses of relational identity will shed considerable light on the forces underlying words for Nathalie Sarraute, the child as well as the adult.

Sarraute's earliest memories of her father are attached to the house in Ivanovo where she was born, from which she was removed at age two at the time of her parents' separation and subsequent divorce. Until his anti-tzarist involvements forced him into exile in France, her father remained there for several more years, with Natasha returning for brief visits from her new life in Paris and Geneva with her mother and step-father Kolia. No memories of her mother nor of any other being can be evoked from this place. This house looms in her mind as the exclusive domain of her father (43).

Words play an important, but carefully circumscribed role in the early relationship between the little girl and her father. Gripping his leg, she learns her numbers and the endless round of the days of the week. They give each other lessons in French and Russian pronunciation. While shadowy others try to coerce her into swallowing jam secretly laden with a disgusting dose of calomel, he tells the truth and patiently explains the reason for the unpleasant medicine. Yet the most meaningful part of the communication between the generally reticent father and his daughter tends to bypass language. The sparse, ordinary words they exchange count mainly as tokens of the deep bond that occasionally manifests itself outside of words: “sa main glisse sur ma tête, je sens irradiant de lui quelque chose en lui qu'il tient enfermé, qu'il retient, il n'aime pas le montrer, mais c'est là, je le sens” (44; emphasis added). Indeed, throughout Enfance, with her father and a few others in privileged moments, Natasha will undergo this wordless experience of irradiation, with gentle waves of energy infusing the distance between bodies, dissolving their boundaries and drawing them into a common field of vibration. This will provide the child with her most lively, even ecstatic sense of being loved and accepted, at one with the world (cf. 66-67).

In her interaction with her father Natasha was utterly nonplussed by the disjunction between his gruff “outside” and his softer, hidden “inside.” Furthermore, despite the obvious dependence of the little girl on her father, she recognized him as an independent being, whose interests naturally diverged from her own. After listening to her father's lullabies, the anxious little girl would woozily signal that she was not yet fast asleep: “mais je ne parle pas, cela pourrait me réveiller complètement et je veux dormir, je veux qu'il puisse partir, cela m'ennuie de le retenir …” At this point the skeptical tu suggests that the child's real motivation was to prevent his departure, “qui avait déjà pour toi le goût de la trahison sournoise, de l'abandon.” While je admits that this interpretation is quite plausible, she ultimately rejects it. Rather than any perception of perfidious intent on the father's part, there was recognition of a mutual pact: “je veux juste t'indiquer, puisque c'était convenu, qu'un pacte entre nous a été conclu, je sais que tu veux le respecter, et moi aussi” (53-54).

While this reciprocal recognition of each one's various needs and desires may be explained in good part by the felicitous conjunction of their individual temperaments, one must not overlook the critical contribution of an underlying structural factor. Because the father ordinarily enters the psychic universe of the child much later than the mother, their relationship begins under the sway of the reality principle; posing no intimate threat to the child's sense of well-being, his separateness is perceived as a simple fact. Moreover, leaving the father's house at age two and enjoying only brief visits with him for the next six years could only reinforce Natasha's recognition of her father's autonomous existence.

Trusting in each other's love despite the many kinds of distance between them, Natasha and her father did not need words to confirm their feelings for each other. Indeed, except in the context of a mischievous little game, words worked against the expression of their deepest feelings. Walking in the Jardin du Luxembourg one day with her father, the child asked: “‘Est-ce que tu m'aimes, papa? …’ dans le ton rien d'anxieux, mais quelque chose plutôt qui se veut malicieux …” (57). This was the only possible tone for such a question, since her father had made it clear that he detested such emotionally charged words, particularly in the mouth of a child. Playfully assuming an aggressive role, the little girl fully realized that such words, far from stimulating the wordless irradiation of the father's love (44), would produce just the opposite effect: “ces mots … le feraient se rétracter, feraient reculer, se terrer encore plus loin au fond de lui ce qui était enfoui …” (58). Grudgingly assenting to the game, he played along, said the words, however “ridicules” and “indécents” they may have struck him, and received his reward. Therefore, instead of ripping him apart in order to reveal his hidden recesses,⁴ Natasha let him off easily, merely enjoining him to buy her a balloon: “‘Eh bien, puisque tu m'aimes, tu vas me donner …’ tu vois, je n'ai pas songé un instant à t'obliger à t'ouvrir complètement, à étaler ce qui t'emplit, ce que tu retiens, ce à quoi tu ne permets de s'échapper que par bribes, par bouffées, tu pourras en laisser sourdre un tout petit peu …” (58).

When Natasha was eight and a half, the regular rhythms of shuttling back and forth between her parents came to an end. At that point her mother was living in Saint Petersburg with Kolia, and her father had set himself up in Paris. Slowly it became clear that an unusually long stay in Paris was in fact a permanent move, which required grim adjustments to her father's uptight life in tight quarters with a new wife and the monster-child, Lili. Despite her father's increasingly stern distance from Natasha, the mutual pact between them grew stronger day by day. Even more so than in the past, the rule of reticence governed their behavior, especially in matters concerning Natasha's mother, a great source of pain and bewilderment for them both. During the early months, when Natasha was reeling from her first clear recognition of treachery on her mother's part, her father, obviously moved, quit his cool in order to comfort the child. In this situation of uncommon distress, his words were deliberately, almost inanely common-place: “‘Va te coucher, ne t'en fais pas … rien dans la vie n'en vaut la peine … tu verras, dans la vie, tôt ou tard, tout s'arrange …’” Yet the meaning that they conveyed to the child gave shape to the rest of her life. “A ce moment-là, et pour toujours, envers et contre toutes les apparences, un lien invisible que rien n'a pu détruire nous a attachés l'un à l'autre …,” and she clearly foresaw that her life henceforth would be the “le déroulement de ce qui s'était enroulé là” (116). Again, two years later when Natasha was trying to decide if she wanted to return to the mother who had abandoned her, her father's carefully ordinary words and considerable self-restraint only reinforced her sense of the total, unconditional bond between them. Moreover, it is clear that by that time the rule of reticence had become an internalized precept in Natasha's life: “aucun mot ne doit aller lui porter ce que je ressens … et même si je ne sentais pas envers lui ce que les autres appellent l'amour, mais ce qui entre nous ne se nomme pas, cela ne changerait rien”(175). Autrement dit, parlons peu, parlons bien.

Language works in a wholly other way in the interaction between mother and daughter. In these pages the mother is frequently described as nonchalant, absent-minded and self-centered, and the words she says often reflect that same spirit. In contrast to her soft, silky, seductive outward appearance, her inner self, guarded by her gaze “assez étrange … fermé et dur parfois et parfois vif, naïf … Souvent comme absent …” (94), is perceived as unknowable, inaccessible. In this tantalizing remoteness resides the mother's fascination for her small child: “curieusement cette indifférence, cette désinvolture, faisaient partie de son charme, au sens propre du mot elle me charmait …” (27). Her enchanting appearance is matched by her words. Indeed, while Natasha is living in Paris with her mother up through age six, the mother's words exert such a weird, hypnotic effect on her that they define, against all other competing claims, her whole sense of reality.

When they are together, Natasha takes her mother's words as literal truth. Out for a walk, they see an electric pole; the mother says: “‘Si tu le touches, tu meurs’” (28). Succumbing to temptation, Natasha touches the pole and runs screaming back to her mother, shattered by the conviction that she is truly, irredeemably dead. Wanting a little sister or brother, Natasha gathers some dust and asks her mother to eat it: “Tu m'as dit que c'est comme ça que j'ai poussé dans ton ventre … parce que tu avais avalé de la poussière …” (29). For a long time, despite the amused, bemused, or irritated dismissals that her literal interpretations provoked, despite her mother's bald lie about a visit from grandmother that turned out to be a tonsillectomy (25), nothing could diminish Natasha's blind faith in her mother's words: “Et ma mère était toujours pour moi, aussi bien que mon père, au-delà de tout soupçon” (72).

When the mother and child are separated, her words act as a divine talisman, securing Natasha against the dangers that lurk outside the magic circle of her presence. Not yet six years old, Natasha went on vacation with her father to a Swiss hotel. Before she left Paris, her mother made her promise not to swallow any morsel of food until it was “aussi liquide qu'une soupe.” Taking these words as “sacrées” (18), Natasha does everything in her power to respect them “pieusement” (17), valiantly enduring the outrage and ostracism they bring down upon her head. If she abides by the mother's injunction, “elle ne me quittera pas, ce sera comme si elle était toujours là” (16). Failure, on the hand, means living forever after in spiritual isolation, divorced from that life-giving presence and consumed with guilt: “je commettrai quelque chose que je ne pourrai jamais lui révéler … je devrai porter ça enfoui en moi, cette trahison, cette lâcheté” (17).

Here it is obvious that the spell-binding effect of these words is all bound up with the child's early identification with her mother. The force of this bond has been powerfully illuminated in the analyses, to which I've already referred, of the little girl's long, intense pre-oedipal stage. Initially the child does not recognize the mother as distinct from herself, nor that the mother has or could have any interests different from her own. Even after the child begins to perceive the mother as a distinct being on the cognitive level, she continues to experience herself as fused, physically and psychologically, with the mother, as if they existed within a common boundary. The child's relation to reality is mediated by the all-powerful maternal figure, who acts as her “external ego.” Early experiences of separation, however indispensable they may be for the child's development, arouse not only anxiety at possible loss, but threaten her very sense of existence. Because the child's need for the mother is necessarily much greater than the mother's need for her, her first feelings of love are all mixed up with confusion, frustration, conflict, and ambivalence.

In Saint Petersburg, where Natasha lived with her mother and Kolia between the ages of six and eight and a half, the drama of the daughter's individuation, whose passionate intensity is as much intrapsychic as inter-subjective, started to play itself out in language. Two scenes stand out. The first begins with je's memory of inclusion within the radiating love uniting her mother and Kolia: “ce courant chaud, ce rayonnement, j'en recevais, moi aussi, comme des ondes …” (73). Thereupon tu brings up a chilling memory of exclusion rooted in the mother's words, invested with all their terrible “force de percussion” (27). Watching Kolia and her mother playfully wrestling, Natasha jumped in on her mother's side. The game ceased abruptly: “elle m'a repoussée doucement … ‘Laisse donc … femme et mari sont un même parti.’ Et je me suis écartée …—Aussi vite que si elle t'avait repoussée violemment” (74). However gentle the mother's gesture may have been, the child took it as violent. However innocuously the mother may have proferred these words, the child assimilated them as one of those awful paquets (95) that can be unwrapped only in solitude, perhaps even as a letter-bomb (“percussion,” hence: “percuter,” to explode on impact) that even many years later requires careful handling by je and tu. In their painful final interpretation, the mother's words meant: “J'étais un corps étranger … qui gênait …” (75), an intruder whose elimination was a simple matter of time.

The awful force of the mother's words, portending either unity or isolation, is further magnified in the doll episode. Wholly under the sway of her mother's “pouvoir de suggestion” (92), Natasha has always considered her mother the epitome of beauty until one day in Saint Petersburg a doll catches her eye. Suddenly, “comme une gêne, une légère douleur” springs into her head the phrase: “‘Elle est plus belle que maman’” (91-92). This embryonic gesture of independence opens up a gap that the little girl finds unbearable: “Maintenant que c'est en moi, il n'est pas question que je le lui cache, je ne peux pas à ce point m'écarter d'elle, me fermer, m'enfermer secule avec ça, je ne peux pas le porter à moi seule” (94). Longing to recover her sense of unity with her mother, she decides to divulge the painful thought. The psychic drama reaches a fevered pitch when the mother, instead of blowing away the words with a kiss, withdraws and says: “‘Un enfant qui aime sa mère trouve que personne n'est plus beau qu'elle’” (95). For Natasha, the mother's intended meaning is just as inaccessible as her inner person. Unwrapping this package of words alone a bit later, she embarks on a dizzying series of interpretations and questions, all equally and utterly intolerable: she is a monster, her mother is not a real mother, she doesn't love her mother, what is a real child? what is a real mother? Estranged from her mother, Natasha's inner spaces are no longer, as for other “real” children, clear, rushing mountains streams, but dark, stagnant, polluted swamp-waters that hatch endless generations of stinging thoughts about her mother. Then things take a more metaphysical turn. She is invaded and possessed by devils, without any possibility of receiving the mother's absolution.

In the long catalogue of Natasha's “idées folles, saugrenues,” the last one is clearly the most dangerous to her equilibrium: “elle a fort heureusement précédé de peu mon départ, ma séparation d'avec ma mère, qui a mis fin brutalement à ce qui en se développant risquait de devenir une véritable folie …” (101; emphasis added). Involving only the strained relations between the daughter and her mother, all the previous drama over lines such as “‘Maman a la peau d'un singe’”(99) could be dismissed as childish twaddle. Now, however, Natasha's thoughts slip out of this inter/intra-subjective loop and venture into relations with third parties, that is, into the domain of ethics. After overhearing a maid say that her mother gives the servants the worst pieces of meat, Natasha verifies this mistreatment with her very own eyes. Faced with the horrifying proof of her mother's petty stinginess, she cannot accept that hallowed being's fall from perfection. Condemning the mother whom she has worshiped, seeing that judgment confirmed in the eyes of others wounds the child in her deepest sense of self, still held under the mother's powerful sway. Given the strength of this psychological bond as well as the tremendous ambivalence it engenders, physical separation or madness are the little girl's only alternatives.

Just before her return to Paris at age eight and a half, Natasha inadvertently offends her mother and experiences once again the uncommon force of her words. Overhearing Natasha telling her teddybear that in Paris another maman awaits them in the person of the father's second wife, she retorts: “‘Quelle autre maman? on ne peut pas en avoir une autre. Tu n'as au monde qu'une seule maman.’” Prononced with an “emphase inhabituelle,” her angry assertion of the mother's exclusive prerogative rendered Natasha “muette, comme pétrifiée” (104; emphasis added). This would be the child's vade mecum in her voyage out of the maternal domain.

Back in Paris, geographical borders helped shore up the permeable ego-boundaries between daughter and mother. Yet, despite physical distance, Natasha remained bound to her mother through the forces of memory and the discourse of maternal love that she read and reread in her mother's letters. Over time, however, it became increasingly difficult to know just how to interpret those words. After sending out a coded letter appealing for an early return to Saint Petersburg, she is betrayed (114-115). When the housekeeper fastens a pitiful gaze on Natasha and remarks: “‘Quel malheur quand même de ne pas avoir de mère’,” she desperately flies in the face of evidence and rips up “le carcan” of these words in order to uphold the truth of her mother's endearments (121-122). Yet even before it becomes clear that the mother has permanently abandoned her daughter to her father's care, Natasha has begun to doubt these tokens of love from afar. Now her mother's words, rather than exploding on impact, miss their mark, as they seem addressed to any child; and her obvious contentment far from Natasha gives lie to her laments about “‘notre amour,’ ‘notre séparation’”(121). More and more the mother's letters, with all their “récits enfantins” (126), resemble the children's stories she is constantly writing and publishing, which worrisomely suggests that the epistolary discourse of maternal love is little more than an exercise in literary conventions and clichés. Despite their problematic relation to reality, the mother's letters, tapping into the ever-present power of archaic bonds, continue to enthrall the child grieving in perplexity: “J'ai envie de ne plus jamais recevoir aucune lettre, de briser pour toujours ces liens, mais chaque fois les mots tendres, caressants de la fin me retiennent, m'enveloppent … je suis tout amollie, je ne peux pas déchirer le papier sur lequels ces mots ont été tracés, je le range pieusement dans ma cassette” (126).

Only in the most halting way does the daughter begin to achieve some degree of liberation from the power of the mother, of her language. Her many fruitless attempts to sever this bond testify to its uncanny tenacity, and regression is always an active threat. At age nine and a half, scarcely one year after the doll episode in Saint Petersburg, Natasha imitates in deliberately grotesque fashion, “juste pour m'amuser,” the terrors felt by that old self, “un pauvre enfant fou, un bébé dément, appelant à l'aide …” (135), and exults in total mastery over her ideas, even critical ones about her father. Yet the certainty of “une complète et définitive indépendance” (137) dims when tu wonders if that wonderful sense of autonomy would have held up had she returned to her mother's house. When Natasha is ten years old, her mother makes a very conditional proposal to take her back. Under the shock of this “brusque réapparition de ce à quoi j'avais été arrachée, que je m'étais efforcée d'écarter, que les lettres venues de là-bas, toujours plus lointaines, comme irréelles, avaient aidé à éloigner,” Natasha imagines the once formidable maternal domain reduced to the comfortable dimensions of a little card-board model of a “ville engloutie” (173). With the words “Pas entièrement [engloutie]” tu immediately undermines this reassuring sense of remove. Indeed, on the brink of saying she wants to stay in Paris, Natasha finds it too painful to try to sever the bond with her mother all by herself. In order to “achever d'arracher sans trop souffrir ce qui s'accroche encore,” she needs the anesthesizing effect of her father's words (175). Again, at age ten and a half, Natasha is utterly undone by the force of her mother's discourse of maternal love, despite its dubious clichés. Wanting to be like all the other little girls who had someone to call “maman,” she had dared ask her mother's permission to call her step-mother “maman Véra.” After Natasha read her mother's indignant reply reasserting the exclusive prerogative of motherly love, her tears, “celles d'autrefois, taries depuis plus de deux ans … reviennent plus âcres encore, plus rongeantes” (219; emphasis added).

The most dramatic showdown occurs just after Natasha's 11th birthday, when her mother visits Paris for the first time in two and a half years. Making her way all alone to her mother's rooms, she feels that she is now “tout à fait une grande personne.” Over time and distance the mother's realm has become something “imprécis, lointain, presque étranger …” On the other hand, the discourse of maternal love has clearly lost nothing of its power over the girl, rehearsing its familiar formulas in her mind: “et en même temps je sais que ce que je trouverai est ce que je peux avoir de plus proche sur terre, ma mère, on n'a qu'une mère, qui ne doit préférer sa mère à tout au monde” (249). Finally face to face, the mother looks strange, hard, almost unrecognizable to her daughter, but her voice, skin, and perfume seal recognition, reawakening old memories, old yearnings to touch and caress. Their conversations starts, stops, and falters. The mother's anecdotes about life in Russia, too much like the off-putting “récits enfantins” of her postcards (126), fail to touch her daughter. Shifting to more adult topics, the mother begins venting her scorn for Natasha's step-mother. When she spits out the term “hystérique,” her words recover their old percussive force and find their mark: “Cela me heurte, me cogne très fort, ce qu'il y a dans ce mot … je ne vois pas bien ce que c'est mais ça soulève en moi, ça fait courir des vaguelettes de terreur …” (255). As the “ville engloutie” (173) of the pre-oedipal bond comes rising out of the depths, the little waves become a huge breaker that rolls and tosses Natasha far back and away: “Et d'un coup je sens, comme jamais je ne l'avais sentie avant, l'indifférence à mon égard de maman, elle sort à flots de ces mots … elle déferle sur moi avec une telle puissance, elle me roule, elle me rejette là-bas” (255-256). And when the mother learns that Natasha is going on a excursion with the contemptible Véra, she cuts her visit short and races back to Russia in a huff. Although her words announcing this decision have sunk (“sombré”) out of the adult narrator's conscious memory, the child remained “médusée” (257) by their effect. The ironic discrepancy between the mother's discourse of love and the ordeal of maternal wrath in that room of the “Hôtel Idéal” (250) repeats in the marine imagery that expresses not the bliss of “oceanic feeling” but only a tidal wave of rejection.

Throughout Enfance the mother's language, its tremendous force and problematic meaning, play havoc with the ever vulnerable child. Two remedies join forces to counter this traumatism. While the unconditional pact with her father helps patch over the raw wound of the maternal bond, school forms and strengthens an autonomous sense of self and affords Natasha a therapeutic, carefully sanitized experience of language. At age nine, waiting to see if she has in fact been abandoned by her mother, Natasha suddenly loses control of her hand, and thereby the ability to write. Under the benevolent care of her teachers, she is reborn in language and learns to write all over again. Now the hapless victim becomes her own mistress: “je contrains ma main et elle m'obéit de mieux en mieux …” (134). In an attempt to explain the “étrange attrait” (162) of her dreary little school, je waxes enthusiastic and exclaims that merely crossing the threshold gave her the feeling of a life not more intense, but totally other: “ma vraie vie” (166). Dictations, with all their jewel-like words, are not only a fairly judged, challenging game. More importantly, they create a safe place from the mother's tongue: “il ne pénètre rien jusqu'ici de cet amour, ‘notre amour’, comme maman l'appelle dans ses lettres … qui fait lever en moi quelque chose qui me fait mal, que je devrais malgré la douleur cultiver, entretenir et qu'ignoblement j'essaie d'étouffer … Pas trace ici de tout cela. Ici je suis en sécurité” (168). Against the forces of “la ville engloutie” which threaten to drag her down, school represents a lofty mountain, “un somment d'où si je parviens à l'atteindre, à m'y maintenir je verrai s'étendre devant moi le monde entier …” (173). Finally, her compositions, painstaking exercises in bricolage and pastiche, give her a clear, clean space in which to manipulate words as tools utterly devoid of personal reference. Rejecting the invitation to autobiography in the assigned topic “Mon Premier Chagrin,” she carefully circumvents any psychic messiness in order to produce a perfect simulacrum of confession. As a reward for her efforts, she receives her father's approval, first place in her class and, even more important, feelings of “dignité,” “domination,” “puissance,” and “liberté” (208). In school she learns to tame words and to hold at bay the dangerous forces lurking in and around them.

Although these exercises showed the growing girl's linguistic dexterity, balance, and control, neither she nor her father ever considered them a budding author's apprenticeship. This early work was “parfait, tout lisse, et net et rond,” as Natasha wanted and needed it to be (214). Stability, clear definition, and immutability were the source of the unparalleled sense of well-being they gave the school-girl, even the adult author: “aucun risque de voir quoi que ce soit se mettre à fluctuer, devenir instable, incertain … j'ai perdu pied dès que j'ai dû quitter ces régions où je me sentais en parfaite sécurité” (215). The soothing perfection of these juvenilia is at the same time their fundamental stumbling block. Their primary aim is to keep far away from those regions of “làbas [où] tout fluctue, se transforme, s'échappe … [où] c'est encore tout vacillant, … [où] ça palpite faiblement … hors des mots …” (8-9). In the opening dialogue of Enfance, after tu clamors that a real author must never abandon this realm, je proves her artistic mettle by plunging them back into the protean world of childhood with all its real chagrins. Je is no longer a schoolgirl, eager above all to protect herself. Now it is obvious that pain is the price of art and memory.

In the course of this autobiography it also becomes clear that the dialogue between je and tu makes the pain more bearable. Despite the often cranky tones of their intimacy, they are brought together by their profound mistrust of language, particularly bombast, convention and cliché. Tu's critical remove and compassion help je look unpleasant truths in the face without being utterly overwhelmed. By these aspects the dialogue between je and tu, the latter clearly marked as masculine,⁵ recalls the relationship between father and daughter. Going a step further, we may even venture to say that it aims to recreate that relationship in the process of writing. Whereas je often says that she can no longer hear her mother's words, her father's voice still reverberates in her ears: “je l'entends aujourd'hui si distinctement que je peux l'imiter et j'avoue que parfois cela m'arrive …” (53-54). A few pages later, je, who began speaking in the voice of the little girl teasing her father, slips out of quotation marks and continues her dialogue with tu: “‘Eh bien, puisque tu m'aimes, tu vas me donner …’ tu vois, je n'ai pas songé un instant à t'obliger à t'ouvrir complètement” (58). Given the unconstrained slippage of je between past and present, childhood and maturity, the temporal reference of this utterance in free direct style is undecidable. On the other hand, it is clear that tu designates the father thoughout this passage, over and above the yawning voids of time and death.

Throughout the pages of Enfance the je/tu dialogue functions as the matrix of autobiography. It tests the veracity of assertions, refining literary language so that it becomes, as far as that may be possible, a tool adequate to experience, betraying neither feeling nor memory. Countering the threat of the mother's words, tu's presence internalizes the father's voice and presence and reaffirms je's ever permeable ego boundaries. In short, the je/tu dialogue acts as a psychological garde-fou, a safety railing that enables the adult author to lean over and stare back down at the engulfed maternal realm. So different from Natasha's smug school compositions, this kind of writing doesn't arouse fine feelings of well-being within Sarraute. Rather, in this face-to-face with self and the past, there is real discomfort, but also a deeper satisfaction: a vital reminder that without the risk of pain one no longer feels alive. Sarraute said it best herself: “si je n'écris pas ce n'est même pas une souffrance … j'ai l'impression de ne pas vivre … il me semble toujours pénible et dangereux de me plonger dans l'écriture; mais, en même temps, ce danger m'est nécessaire” (quoted in Rykner 153).

Notes

1. Many thanks to my colleague Cristina Mazzoni for her thoughtful remarks on a draft of this essay.

2. See Lejeune, esp. 25-26, 28.

3. On the maternal metaphor in some French feminists, see Stanton.

4. This is precisely what a slightly younger Natasha did with a sofa in the first memoryscene of Enfance 11-13.

5. Je addressing tu says: “Oui, ça te rend grandiloquent. Je dirai même outrecuidant” (8-9; emphasis added).

Bibliography

Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination. NY: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: UC Press, 1978.

Lejeune, Philippe. “Paroles d'enfance.” Revue des Sciences Humaines 83. 217 (1990): 23-38.

Miller, Nancy K., ed. The Poetics of Gender. NY: Columbia UP, 1986.

Rykner, Arnaud. Nathalie Sarraute. Paris: Seuil, 1991.

Sarraute, Nathalie. Enfance. Paris: Folio, 1983.

Stanton, Domna C. “Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva.” Miller: 157-182.