SOURCE: Gratton, Johnnie. “Towards Narrativity: Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 31, no. 4 (October 1995): 300-11.

[In the following essay, Gratton writes that although Sarraute's Enfance has most often been cited as an example of a text that implements the poetics of fragmentation, this reading limits the potential of Sarraute's autobiography as a narrative text.]

It is a now accepted and well documented fact that Nathalie Sarraute's childhood autobiography owes much of its compelling quality to the way it implements a poetics of fragmentation.¹ It would be unfortunate, however, if critical attention were to remain focused on the fragmentary aspect of Enfance at the expense of its potential as a narrative text. This potential begins to emerge through two pervasive features: the episodic or micro-narrative status of the fragments themselves, and the fact that they are arranged in what is by and large a chronological order. Together these features create favourable conditions under which a sequence of fragments might eventually pass over into a story, a global narrative scheme. It would be a misrepresentation, I think, to say that the text ever completes this passage, but I shall argue that it does engage in a movement towards narrativity, and that this movement is initiated at a very precise point. I propose to highlight not only the means employed by Sarraute to bring this about, but the value attached to it as a key device in her childhood autobiography.

We can approach the question of narrative by asking what happens to time both in and between the fragments of Enfance. The Sarrautean fragment qua fragment is a micro-narrative organism which dispenses with the business of its own contextualisation. As Sarraute's fragments are characterised discursively by a reluctance to extrapolate from particular to general, a hostility to any form of gnomic posturing, so narratively they refuse to reach out beyond the immediate fringes of that intense, bounded spot of time allocated to them, preferring instead to probe the moment, to home in on a minute detail, so that the time of the text is spent weighing the significance of a certain tone of voice or the effect of a certain choice of word. The episode lacks that broader temporal perspective which would subsume it into an ongoing story. In the case of any given fragment we generally learn where the child is and with whom. Temporal markers are usually less in evidence, though they appear often enough, especially in the opening fragments, to indicate that the episodes occur in roughly chronological order:

je devais avoir cinq ou six ans

(fragment I)

je devais avoir moins de six ans …

(fragment II)

Et tout s'est effacé dès le retour à Paris chez ma mère …

(fragment III)²

Even at this level, however, we are forced to recognise that the episodes follow one another without following on from one another. The text seems to offer no response to those narrative expectations which its own chronological order inevitably creates.

Based as they are on “quelques moments, quelques mouvements qui me semblent encore intacts” (277), Sarraute's episodes explore brief periods of time at very close range. Amplifying only that which lies within their diminished time-span, they do not give themselves enough time to become the linked parts of a story. As close-up of the minutiae of experience, moreover, they prioritise the narrative resources of the present tense. Past tenses do occur frequently, though rarely for long, since by and large they serve an interim function, mediating between the “actual” present of the dialogue, a shared present which commits both narrator and interlocutor to speaking of the past as past, and the so-called “historical” present which is the mainspring of the autobiographical telling embedded in that dialogue. Thus each episode gravitates towards an I-here-now structure in which the narrator relives the experience of the protagonist as though for the first time. It is the experience of a consciousness open to scenes rather than transitions: now I am in a hotel in Switzerland, now in another Swiss hotel, now back in the rue Flatters in Paris. Each “now” keeps to itself, offering few signs that it might have a past or a future, and almost no signs that, from the viewpoint of another “now”, it might be a past or a future. Given this collapse of temporal perspective, it is as if the child-protagonist were herself steeped in a world devoid of wider narrative continuity.

The main premise of this analysis is that a movement towards narrativity may be seen to occur over the fragmented chronological course of Enfance. Such a premise necessarily implies that the model I have just outlined, that of a sequence of temporally isolated and involuted fragments which refuse to cooperate in any global narrative scheme, can only be valid up to a certain point (a point which still remains to be identified). For this is a model which recognises only one of the constitutive dimensions of narrative stipulated by Paul Ricœur, the lesser, episodic dimension; whereas the implication of my premise is that we can go on to find significant traces of a higher order, a “configurational” dimension responsible for the process of narrativisation proper, formally defined by Ricœur as “la synthèse temporelle de l'hétérogène”.³ This dimension is said to arise through a series of shaping operations corresponding to whatever allows a reader not only to follow a story but to gather its scattered elements into a totality. Such operations in effect transform the contingent, linear, purely chronological order of episodes into a global “figure”, yet without suppressing the dimension of time itself, since the figure is not a timeless model but the concrete face of a “synthèse temporelle”.

From the perspective of both “following” and “gathering”, it might be argued that a certain development can already be observed before we reach the aforementioned point. In the opening fragments, despite some prominent indications of chronological order, changes of place and person give rise to confusion, not least because it is against the narrator's better judgement to comment overtly, to step back and explain why as a child she was so frequently shunted around. In typical Sarrautean fashion, it is left up to the reader to gradually piece together the reasons. In the midst of confusion, however, there emerge strong signs of the thematic interconnectedness of these same fragments. Thus a number of early episodes home in on intense moments of sensory experience: orality (if not taste) in fragment II, auditory sensation in III, smell in IV, touch in VI. These form a thematic cluster, rather than a narrative sequence, which overlaps and connects with other clusters to suggest a mosaic-like vision of early childhood as a formative stage of experience marked by the alternating attraction and threat of that which is outside, other, “not-me”, be it something quite simply before me or something mysteriously beyond me.⁴

After the opening fragments (pp. 7-56), the text begins to settle down as more consistent indications of person and place allow us to distinguish two relatively uniform but still not narrative sequences. The first, a set of five fragments (pp. 57-67), deals with Natacha's time in Paris with her father and, in due course, his new companion, Véra. The second, stretching to seven fragments, the last of which builds up to the key “point” of my analysis, returns us to Russia and to the time spent by the child in St Petersburg with her mother and her stepfather Kolia.⁵ As with the earlier but more frequent changes of place, the text moves abruptly between these two worlds, without pause for transition, preferring instead to mark its ellipsis retrospectively and in quite intransitive fashion by drawing a brief contrast between the two cities:

On dirait que ce qui s'étend ici derrière les doubles vitres, c'est de vastes espaces glacés … pas de la neige étincelant au soleil comme à Ivanovo, ni des petites maisons serrées et sombres, comme à Paris … mais partout de la glace transparente et bleutée. Et la lumière ici est d'un gris argenté. La ville où je suis arrivée se nomme Petersbourg.

(p. 69)

The experience of being in transit is a potentially rich autobiographical vein. Yet travel, which must have occupied so much of the young Natacha's time, figures not at all in the early part of Enfance. Sarraute's careful handling of ellipsis is such as to evoke only arrivals and departures, never the actual journeys, a fact which accounts in no small part for the lack of narrative continuity which persists even in this more settled portion of the text.

Under such circumstances, can a narrative configuration be said to emerge from the first hundred or so pages of the text? The opening fragments shape up into something more akin to a paradigmatic configuration. Their elements form an array of founding experiences drawn from a reservoir of origins, and so constitute what might fairly be called a “prehistory”. Somewhat differently, the two sequences which complete the first part of the text seem to develop in the direction of a “proto-narrative”. In other words, though we can now easily discern the ingredients of a roman familial or a roman d'apprentissage, we find them only in indirect, incidental and sporadic form, as raw material, not as the strategically distributed elements of a plot. Any story-line as such remains the product of inference, of our disposition as readers to formulate narrative hypotheses by gathering together that which the text continues to hold apart, and in particular by relating each heterogeneous present to a past and a future. In this respect the barring of narrative becomes one of the surest ways of kindling the reader's incurable desire for narrative. We might then say of Sarraute's writing that, following its own dialogical bent, it invokes the cooperative principle adduced by Ricœur in his discussion of the fictional experiments of the nouveaux romanciers: “Pour que l'œuvre capte encore l'intérêt du lecteur, il faut que la dissolution de l'intrigue soit comprise comme un signal adressé au lecteur de co-opérer à l'œuvre, de faire lui-même l'intrigue.”⁶ What I have here termed “proto-narrative” thus results from a gathering operation performed essentially in and through the act of reading, as much against the grain of the text as with it.

What, then, is this “point” which signals the end of the proto-narrative phase of the text by opening up, for the first time, a more explicitly configurational dimension? It occurs at the end of fragment XXII, when the narrator claims to remember only the last of the many “idées folles” which assailed her over a particular period, adding that “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 …” (p. 101). Here the narrator engages in a brief but crucial prolepsis, of the kind Genette calls an annonce, an advance reference to an event which will eventually be recounted at greater length.⁷ This moment of anticipation produces a quite exceptional effect of temporal perspective as the impending micro-narrative of the last of Natacha's “crazy ideas” is set in the light of a subsequent event. A prolepsis such as this is external, then, to the limited time-span of the fragment itself, but internal to the overall period of time covered by the text (roughly speaking, Natacha's childhood between the ages of four and twelve years). As readers of Enfance, we are of course well accustomed to external prolepsis proper, any flash-forward beyond the end-point of the global time-span, since it features strongly in the text's dialogical structure, with its constant toing-and-froing between the now of the protagonist and the now of the narrator. On the other hand, up to this point we would be hard put to find many notable anticipations of this internal, intermediate kind whereby the text conjugates time zones which are past, present and future for the child.

This prolepsis marks the beginning of a new phase not only in the life of the child but in the life of the text. Thus fragment XXII is immediately followed by a sequence of five short fragments (pp. 104-12) relating Natacha's separation from her mother as she makes her journey from St Petersburg, via Berlin, to Paris. The narrator discloses, for the very first time, an experience of being in transit. Temporal markers begin to reappear: “c'était en février” (p. 107); “cette fois, tu devais rester chez ton père plus de deux mois … jusqu'à la fin de l'été” (p. 108). Moreover we now begin to notice the first signs of the child herself becoming truly aware of time: “—Il est étrange que ce soit juste cette fois-là que tu aies ressenti pour la première fois une telle détresse au moment de ton départ … On pourrait croire à un pressentiment …” (p. 108). A premonition: experientially, the equivalent of a prolepsis. Together, such features endow Natacha's period of transition with the significance of that archetypal narrative configuration, the turning-point.

Henceforth the episodes preceding the turning-point will congeal into a global past, and this as a result of increasingly frequent incidences of analepsis, backtracking, the counterpart of prolepsis. Far from indulging in prolonged flashbacks, Sarraute prefers the rappel, the figure of recall, according to Genette the most common form of internal analepsis, in which the narrative makes a brief allusion to its own past.⁸ In Enfance such backward allusions, heretofore studiously avoided by the text, represent the child's discovery of the past as an effective dimension of experience. Indeed, from the moment of her arrival in Paris (fragment XXVII), Natacha will become painfully conscious of temporality in the visible form of change and difference:

Je ne sais pas si quelqu'un est venu nous chercher, je ne me souviens de mon père que dans le petit appartement triste et comme pas complètement habité de la rue Marguerin … et de son accueil étrange, si différent de tous ses accueils précédents … un peu froid, compassé … et la jeune femme … “Tu reconnais Véra? tu t'en souviens?” Je dis oui, mais j'ai du mal à reconnaître cette très jeune femme aux joues rondes et roses, si svelte et agile dans son costume d'homme […] elle ne ressemblait pas à cette dame aux cheveux disposés en rouleaux de chaque côté de la tête, sagement lissés.

(pp. 111-12)

The theme of Natacha's distress in exile will subsequently give rise to other contrasts underlining the growing gap between her present and her past. Paris lies opposed to St Petersburg. The Paris she knows now, distilled in the forlorn setting of the parc Montsouris, is set against the Paris she once knew, symbolised by the inspiring, luminous beauty of the Luxembourg Gardens. But more than just the other side of the coin, the past increasingly becomes a reverberation in the present, of the present. At the level of narrative discourse, moreover, the incidence of backward allusions begins to alter the relationship of the text's fragmentary parts as the norm of mere successive order slowly gives way to a more cumulative structure. The text now shows signs of having its own memory, so to speak, as distinct from the memory of it, progressively gathered and stored by the act of reading. Whether anticipating a future or going back over its own traces, the text is thickening, shaping up, into something like a narrative. For, as Genette reminds us, prolepsis and analepsis are specifically narrative manoeuvres; or, as Ricœur prefers to call them in his own commentary on Genette, configurational procedures invoked by the writer's narrative intelligence.⁹

Responding to this newly acquired narrative momentum, the remainder of the text goes on to spend more and more time performing these twin manoeuvres. Prolepsis, for example, will go so far as to evoke in some detail certain events located beyond the temporal end-point of the autobiography: “un sujet de devoir de français en troisième au lycée”, liberally quoted (pp. 213-14); the period of Natacha's identification with Napoleon, also located “plus tard au lycée” (pp. 243-4); and an entire episode devoted to her mother's stay in Paris in July 1914, on the eve of the war (pp. 259-60)—whereas the time-span covered in chronological order is brought to an explicit and abrupt end three years earlier, as we leave Natacha once more in transit, aboard the tram taking her to the very first day of her “nouvelle vie” at the lycée Fénelon (p. 276). Nor should we forget Miss Philips (pp. 263-4), a virtual symbol of the text's new-found capacity to venture out beyond its own time, since here is a figure who owes her very existence in the text to prolepsis, as the interlocutor prompts the narrator to perform a forward leap of some twenty years to a chance encounter with her former English tutor.

But the impact of analepsis turns out to be even more important. Initially a manoeuvre occasioned by the child's sense of being unhappily exiled in Paris, it eventually becomes the site of a more reassuring comparison. Having spent almost a year in Paris, Natacha feels within herself a new strength, “une complète et définitive indépendance” (p. 136). The madness she might have succumbed to under pressure from her mother has become a point of reference, a benchmark for measuring what she now is:

Comme il est délicieux, le contraste avec ce que je suis maintenant … comme maintenant mon esprit paraît net, propre, souple, sain … Des idées … pas “mes” idées … plus de ce “mes” louche, de ce “mes” inquiétant … des idées comme chacun en a me viennent comme à tout le monde.

(pp. 135-6)

Another year passes. Thinking back, the narrator recalls a moment of rage when she verbally attacked Véra, now her stepmother. But she then corrects her location of the memory: “Mais c'était au début de mon séjour à Paris, quand j'étais encore ce faible petit enfant titubant, à peine sorti de ses ‘idées’” (p. 190). The episode is an accidental analepsis. Once it has been restored to its proper place, the voice of the child can be heard to confirm: “Mais je suis ici depuis près de deux ans, je ne suis plus cet enfant fou” (p. 190).

Hereafter, with a moment of the child's recent past now firmly established as a watershed, the text moves on to more remote and more ample analepses. In the very next fragment, for example, the narrator evokes her memories of the Russian emigrants who used to gather in her father's house. Here, for the first time, she takes the opportunity to engage in substantial though still impressionistic evocation of an historical past as she recounts what she learned about Russia through the tales of these ageing adversaries of Tsardom. Only now do we get an historical vista, since only now can the narrator introduce one without infringing her key rule of sticking as closely as possible to the cognitive and emotional perspective of her childhood self at any given moment in time. Analepsis is said to be “direct” when attributable to the narrator of the story, and “indirect” when motivated by the memories of a character in the story.¹⁰ Here, then, we have a temporal retrogression which is not only more far-reaching and more amply textualised than previous instances, but also more indirect. Originating in the memories of characters other than the main one, it may be thought of as a kind of third-order analepsis.

Another emerging vision of the past comes in the episode devoted to the visit of Véra's mother (pp. 226-33). Regaling the child with stories of her Russian childhood, this warm-hearted grandmother figure inevitably awakens Natacha's memories of her own early life in Russia. The past becomes a dimension which returns, filling the child with a sense of nostalgia. In narratological terms we have witnessed a case of third-order analepsis prompting a reversion to second-order analepsis.

Through listening, then, the child's consciousness becomes even more attuned to both the quality and quantity of time as durée. “Comme à cet âge-là les années étaient longues” (p. 219), comments the narrator near the end of fragment LVI, offering an image of time that would have been unthinkable at an earlier stage of the text. Time deepens and spreads, till a point comes when the past begins to dominate the fragment's present moment. Fragment LXIV, for example, opens with the voice of the child taking stock of time: “Depuis quelque temps Véra a l'air plus détendue, plus gaie qu'avant, elle n'a plus ses lèvres toujours pincées, son regard très dur, coupant, elle me fait penser à ce qu'elle était autrefois quand elle me faisait danser rue Boissonade” (p. 247). Only on a few occasions since then, “depuis ce temps très lointain” (p. 247), has Véra shown the vivacious side of her personality. For the first time, Natacha can feel genuine affection emanating from her stepmother, though it must have been there, suppressed within her, “depuis longtemps” (pp. 247-8). Here, time is systematically figured in terms of length, a new angle about to be all the more sharply brought into focus by the arrival of Natacha's mother. For the mother belongs to the past and is destined as such to embody more than any other figure the role of temporal switchpoint now being attributed by the child to those around her, not only because of their Russian origins, but because they are visibly ageing, changing. Once immortal, they have become the very evidence of being-in-time. “Il y a si longtemps que je ne l'ai pas vue” (p. 249), says the narrator on behalf of the child. The image of time's length works through the fragment until it culminates in a panoramic vision which encompasses at a stroke all that the very agenda of the fragmentary text works against. Arriving at a hotel in Paris, about to see her mother for the first time in two years, Natacha asks to see Madame Boretzki, and is struck at once by the sheer unfamiliarity of the name. This prompts the interlocutor to point out that Natacha's mother was in fact already being thus addressed when she last lived in Paris with her daughter. But the narrator, espousing the perspective of the child she was at that highly charged moment, responds: “Mais il y a de cela tellement longtemps, un si immense espace de temps s'est écoulé entre l'âge de six ans et celui de onze ans” (p. 250). The child can now look back over her past in terms of duration and flux. The years spreading out behind her attest the continuance of time, amount to a magnified “space” of time. And the text even goes on to evoke the experience of duration in the more subtle Kantian sense of the word as it follows up this image of an irretrievably remote past with the instant, contrapuntal familiarity of the voice heard from behind the door of the hotel-room: “Je frappe à la porte, j'entends ‘Entrez!’ et d'un seul coup, rien ne m'est plus familier que cette voix …” (p. 250). In the midst of change comes the recognition of an underlying permanence, here unavoidably associated with that maternal principle whose perfect embodiment the mother herself has long since ceased to be.¹¹

I have argued that there occurs in Enfance a certain point which signals important changes at the level of both “story” and “discourse”. One of those changes stems from the fact that, as yet, the “story” in question remains notional, at best a hazy proto-narrative put together by the reader. For it is only upon reaching this point that the text finally shows an urge to configure in its own right by embarking on a sudden spate of anachronies, or temporal shifts. Some of these are directly assumed by the narrator, others are character-motivated, but all are aimed beyond the narrowly episodic time-scale of the individual fragment, either upstream or downstream, towards ever more distant temporal horizons. Such extensions into past and future represent an incidence of narrativity inasmuch as they help elicit a pattern of progressive time from what would otherwise remain a succession of one-off moments in chronological time. Thus the autobiographical fragment, the singular event, the particle of experience, is now being scanned from within, and not just by the reader, for evidence of its “higher” value as a contribution to an ongoing story, a developmental history of self-emergence. Paradoxically, of the two types of anachrony set in motion, it is analepsis, the figure of retrogression, which does most to establish a sense of progressive time. This is explained by the occurrence of a run of analepses which taken in sequence imply a number of key developments. The most basic one, as I have already pointed out, consists of Natacha's actual discovery of the past as an effective dimension of experience. From this there flows her growing awareness of the past, which like any other evidence of intellectual maturation necessarily contributes to a general pattern of self-emergence. Finally, we are made aware of her changing attitude towards the past, and this points up a quite specific narrative complication whereby, in order to come into her own, the daughter must dispel the powerful influence of the mother: an influence associated with her past, inherited from her past, still active in her present as a festering of origins.

It is quite clear, then, that the configurational momentum built up over the latter part of Enfance increasingly disposes the text to be understood as unfolding a quest for independence. The effects in question are all more or less subtle, being “shown” rather than “told”, but the reader is alerted to them by virtue of the fact that they occur in conjunction with a more conspicuous narrative development, prepared and then set in motion by fragments XLV and XLVI respectively. As yet, Natacha's experience of formal education has not figured in the autobiography. Her life at school is only brought into focus when, as a ten-year-old, she joins the école communale in the rue d'Alésia. The move from home to school is highlighted once more in that mode of spatial transition which I have identified as one of the narrative features incorporated only selectively and belatedly into the text. Thus, setting off each morning, the child feels she is venturing out, crossing over into a new world:

Chaque matin à heure fixe, avant de refermer derrière lui la porte d'entrée, mon père disait à la cantonade: “Je suis parti.” Pas “Je pars”, mais “Je suis parti” … comme s'il craignait d'être retenu, comme s'il voulait être déjà loin d'ici, là-bas, dans son autre vie … Et moi, je m'élançais au-dehors avec la même impatience …

(p. 165)

Like her father, she too can now lay claim to another life, “cette nouvelle vie, ma vraie vie …” (p. 166). What is announced here, so it turns out, is not just a spatial shift, but a formal modulation from a still rather patchy roman familial, essentially put together by the reader, to a more highly structured roman scolaire concerned with the child's growing sense of control, achievement and self-confidence, as illustrated above all in her ability to manipulate the written word. Here, inevitably, a group of fragments dominated and linked by the explicit theme of progress yields the point where Sarraute's autobiography comes closest to espousing a dynamic of overt narrative progression. As I have already implied a number of times, the delayed onset of narrativity in the text of Enfance would appear to be strongly motivated, not just by Sarraute's misgivings about the idea of replotting her childhood, but by an ethos of subjective realism which requires that the text recreate the psychological and phenomenological perspective of the child Natacha. At this representational level, we might speak with Ricœur of a global act of “refiguration”,¹² with the crucial difference that in the case of Enfance the object of that act is not just temporal experience, as it is for Ricœur, but a consciousness which accedes to temporal experience, to a sense of history, and to an intuition of narrative identity beyond the episodic, only by degrees.

I have analysed this global act of refiguration as occurring in three main stages. The first I have called a “prehistory”, the second a “proto-narrative”, while the third, as yet unnamed, might be dubbed a “near-narrative”. In other words, while the text's configurational momentum opens narrative horizons, it never acquires enough power to overhaul the molecular economy of the fragment, with which Sarraute keeps faith to the very end. Enfance offers no final solution, no ultimate revelation, no “synthèse temporelle de l'hétérogène” to indicate that we have after all been reading a determinate story, as opposed to a text displaying some degree of narrative quality. Indeed, one might even argue the case for a fourth stage operating a withdrawal from narrativity, in that, with four or five fragments still to go, the text gives the impression of tailing off, petering out, breaking up. Not till the very last fragment, in fact, does the autobiographer bother with the formalities of closure, coming on to them so abruptly as to leave herself open to the charge that her ending is arbitrarily chosen and her interest in the “sense of an ending” no more than half-hearted.

Or perhaps we should cut that last sentence and say more simply that the autobiographer chooses to leave her self open. Thus it is difficult to go along with the blurb on the back of the Folio edition of Enfance when it promises “un livre où l'on peut voir se dessiner déjà le futur grand écrivain qui donnera plus tard une œuvre dont la sonorité est unique à notre époque”. Rather, the book goes out of its way to avoid such clichés. Why else, for example, should it appear to tail off if not because the roman scolaire is abandoned prematurely, just when we thought that Natacha's quest for independence was becoming inextricably linked with her budding talent as a writer? Had such a focus been sustained and developed, then the text might indeed have achieved an orthodox sense of narrative closure by firmly identifying a past self as the future Great Writer. But the retrospective illusion fails to materialise, for there are no prophetic signs hanging over the child as she reads Rocambole, or visits Vanves, or even as she sets off on the tram for her first day at the lycée Fénelon.

By virtue of its open-endedness, then, the text confirms that it is not in the business of harnessing its autobiographical subject to a “story”, an “identity”, or a “destiny”. For each of these terms has too strong a ring about it to be applicable to Sarraute's agenda as an autobiographer. Each implies a totalising mould which is far too compact and specific, not to say honorific, to account accurately for that subtle, always humble act of refiguration whereby the fragments of Enfance amount to a record of self-emergence in vicissitude. Each too is largely a projection or imposition of hindsight, a vantage-point consistently renounced by the narrator each time she sets out to relive a moment of her past. Indeed, the need to understand and respect the world of childhood on its own terms is a virtue brought out more and more explicitly as the autobiography nears its end.¹³ If Sarraute is “finally” getting at anything, then, I would suggest we might find it suspended between two assertions, one provoked by Natacha's stepmother, the other by her mother:

Mais je suis ici depuis près de deux ans, je ne suis plus cet enfant fou …

(p. 190: my italics)

je sens que de nouveau maman ne sait plus très bien à qui elle parle … maintenant elle ne me voit plus du tout comme un enfant, elle croit qu'elle s'adresse à un adulte … mais je ne suis pas un adulte, en tout cas pas celui qu'elle voit …

(p. 254: my italics)

If I knew not what I was, I knew what I was not. No longer this, not yet that, in bouts of becoming at each new threshold. Not so much what I became as that I became. A subject emerging, like every child in its own particular way, into someone to be reckoned with.

Notes

1. See in particular Valerie Minogue, “Fragments of a Childhood: Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance”, Romance Studies 9 (Winter 1986), 71-83; Philippe Lejeune, “Paroles d'enfance”, Revue des sciences humaines 93, no. 217 (1990), 23-38; and Johnnie Gratton, “Autobiography and Fragmentation: the case of Nathalie Sarraute's Enfance, Nottingham French Studies 34, no. 2 (Autumn 1995), 32-42.

2. Nathalie Sarraute, Enfance, coll. Folio (Paris, Gallimard, 1985; first publ. 1983), pp. 10, 15, and 19 respectively. Further references will be included in the text. I have numbered individual fragments for convenience.

3. Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit II: La Configuration du temps dans le récit de fiction (Paris, Seuil, 1984), p. 231.

4. For an alternative assessment of the interconnections among the opening fragments of Enfance, and indeed for a different overall découpage to that suggested in the course of the present analysis, see Lejeune, “Paroles d'enfance”, pp. 25-6, 31.

5. Sarraute, who was born in 1900, has clarified elsewhere that the period in question lasted from 1906 to February 1909, prior to which she had already spent four years living in Paris. See the text of her 1990 interview with Arnaud Rykner in Rykner's monograph, Nathalie Sarraute, coll. Les Contemporains (Paris, Seuil, 1991), pp. 153-83 (p. 160).

6. Ricœur, Temps et récit II, p. 42.

7. Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris, Seuil, 1972), p. 111.

8. Genette, p. 95.

9. See Genette, p. 82; and Ricœur, Temps et récit II, p. 124.

10. On this distinction, see Genette, p. 89; and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London, Methuen, 1983), p. 51.

11. On Kantian Dauer as a dialectic of permanence and change, see Ricœur, Temps et récit III: Le Temps raconté (Paris, Seuil, 1985), p. 77.

12. See Temps et récit III, p. 9: “le travail de pensée à l'œuvre en toute configuration narrative s'achève dans une refiguration de l'expérience temporelle.”

13. See especially fragments LXVII and LXIX (pp. 265-7 and 272-7 respectively).