SOURCE: Ramsay, Raylene. “The Unself-loving Woman in Nathalie Sarraute's Tu ne t'aimes pas.” The French Review: Journal of the American Association of Teachers of French 67, no. 5 (April 1994): 793-802.

[In the following essay, Ramsay proposes that Sarraute's autobiographical sequel to Enfance, titled Tu ne t'aimes pas, continues the discussion she initiated in the first work about the nature of self and its relationship to others, including language and textual strategy.]

Nathalie Sarraute's successful “new autobiography” Enfance (1983) could be described as a dialogic reconstitution of the self which took fragmented uncertain form in interaction with the significant others of childhood (mothers, father, teachers). At the same time, it is a reconstruction of these others within the present moment as they too are re-formed by memory and given recognition by the two different voices of the text. Such questions of the self and the other and their relations with the textual strategies that construct them are again central in the sequel autobiographical fiction, Tu ne t'aimes pas (1989).

In Marguerite Duras's autobiographical fiction, Emily L. (1987), the self, its past and present experience, its virtualities or self imaginings, comes into being within a mobile constellation of writer-narrator (Duras) and her interlocutor-companion (Yann Andréa) and the people they observe in a bar and reinvent as characters—the dispossessed Emily L., (the woman poet assassinated) and her husband, the “Captain.” This shifting constellation breaks down the polarities of subject and object and creates a circulation of desire between self and other(s), self and other selves, self already-written and self writing. What emerges from this circulation are the questions at the heart of Emily L. or indeed of Duras's other “new autobiographies,” L'Amant (1984) and L'Amant de la Chine du nord (1991). These are investigations of inter-subjective sameness and difference, of impulse to domination or submission, and of the more intense existence of self and the self-loss that are both part of love.

Duras's intense, “a-moral,” sexualized stories of rebellion in the name of desire may appear very different from the apparently “a-sexual,” constrained mini-dramas in Sarraute's work. Yet, the experimental texts of both these women avant-garde writers are characterized by a similar (impossible) movement between life and text and search for a new kind of authenticity—something essential, deriving from the body but in conjunction with the instant of the writing—and by a preoccupation with the master-slave dialectic. The argument proposed here is that the non-binary constellations these texts create and their defiant art of the (im)possible (which attempts to move beyond textuality, to bring it to life [or life to it]) suggest new solutions to the postmodern double-bind and ways beyond imprisonment in ready-made language.¹

In Tu ne t'aimes pas, the circulation between same and other, dominator and dominated, masculine and feminine is not inter-subjective as in Emily L., but, continuing along the path taken by Enfance, explores the intra-subjective domain. The “I” becomes legion, a “we” that is vast and unknowable. The planetarium of different impulses, rivalries, fears, desires, aggressions, and solidarities is held together at once by the physical sensations and psychological movements provoked by the judgement “tu ne t'aimes pas” and by a “self” always-already there, fixed in the linguistic formula. A drama for many voices, some grouping as the chorus, spins a dimly perceived, evanescent, multiple-stranded psychological reality, a self beyond subject and object, same and different, masculine and feminine out of the coarse thread of this common and polarizing language. A single spokesperson or ambassador sent out from the inside by the infinite number of his brothers and sisters to speak to the outside constitutes a temporary “I,” one voice among a myriad constellation of others (“nous”), we/us, who might decide to speak.

Addressed as a “you” (both “vous” and “tu”) by the others (“nous”), the “I” can only exercise a temporary and local power of persuasion in dialogue and interchange with contradictory, changing, but interactive and related voices. Such an abstract dance of multiple, contradictory, mobile selves, never definitively known, works to break down both the self of Lejeune's autobiographical conventions (a single personality whose pact with the reader is one of sincerity and truth) and the binary foundations of the autobiographical genre (self and other, individual and society, private and public).

The emotional responses evoked by the negative judgement passed by the outside on this “we” (nous) that is described as an enormous moving mass of often opposing forces, (“une énorme masse mouvante … où tant de choses dissemblables s'entrechoquent, se détruisent …”), constitutes the stuff of which the text of Tu ne t'aimes pas is made. Censure takes the form of the phrase “Vous ne vous aimez pas.” The insecurity, shame, weakness, humiliation, and lack of the wholeness and coherence that self-knowledge, self-possession or power would guarantee, carried by the label “unself-loving,” contrast with the security, solidity, self-knowledge, and sense of self-imposed limits, superiority, and strength evoked by other clichés that might constitute its opposite, self-love (“Je suis comme je suis” [153], “Je me connais” [154], “Qui aime bien châtie bien” [154], “Qui est parfait?” [154]).

The “I,” porte-parole, addressed sometimes as a familiar “you” (“tu”) by the other members (“we”/“us”) of what, to fall back on another commonplace, (that is, a place common to all), is described as a “complex personality” is also reproached by the “we” for presenting the self to the outside as a fearful and grotesque “clown” (“un pitre,” “un gaffeur”). By exposing himself enviously watching those outside who, having fixed boundaries and being all of a piece, appear dignified, solid, and admirably positive in their narcissistic (self-observing) or unreflecting (natural) self-love, he has cast doubt on all the members of the “we.”

The “you” accepts the charge of indiscretion humbly and prepares to investigate the fault, the defect, the illness implicit in the criticism of his apparent lack of self-love (“Vous savez ce que vous avez. Vous ne vous aimez pas” [12]). With the help of the “we,” he proceeds to sound memories and sensations that are manifestations of love or lack of love of self with a subtle, voyeuristic, and very persistent psychological curiosity and a diffuse and shared disquiet; to tease out the hidden implications of the inability to take an “oath of allegiance” for which he is being blamed.

In the subtly drawn sketches that follow, (one person contemplating his own hand with satisfaction, another obliging a guest whom she has invited for a month's vacation to perform continually to meet her own high standards of superiority), it is the self-loving other, he who possesses a “sense of self” and is able to solicit and accept the admiring gaze who emerges as stronger and better endowed than the voyeuristic observer. This is the case of the intellectual leader whose unexamined self-love “irradiates” his followers with a sense of force, freedom, firmness, and self assurance, promoting their own self-love and subsequent well being. On the contrary, admiration or love offered by the other gives the discomforted narrator a sense of inauthenticity, of having been constructed in another's image, of being a snowman, a statue, or a sawdust doll.

Already in the novel Disent les imbéciles (1976), Nathalie Sarraute's elderly pronominal protagonist (“she”) had struggled to escape the mirror of the conventional metaphor of the lovable assigned to her gender, age, class, and national origin, refusing to be contained by the image of the blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, china doll grandmother. The fascination of the beautiful doll mechanically opening and closing her eyes and batting her eyelids to charm, experienced in childhood and evoked as early as Tropismes (1939), where the doll appears in a store window attracting shopper-housewives to the annual linen sale, is exorcised again in Enfance. Natacha remains estranged from the gift of a beautiful, smooth, hard, china doll who can only say “papa” and “maman.”

In Tu ne t'aimes pas, Nathalie Sarraute, at 89, is once again pursuing authenticity and self-knowledge out of a refusal of what is now seen clearly as a lifeless doll (fabrication and inauthenticity) and out of an intense commitment to a literary work on the non-stable, successive, and often contradictory states of self and the (im)possibilities of love. This new text emerges from the same swampy land of non-binary psychological movements, the turbulent, ever-changing flow that no name can name (“Nos flots agités, toujours changeants ne peuvent porter aucun nom” [129]) that underlies the dialogues and the subconversations in Enfance and in Sarraute's earlier fictions. Indeed, these movements are the complex, evanescent, emotional movements, that Sarraute labeled “tropisms” as early as 1939. The coarsely-fashioned, mass-produced words of conventional language (“des mots de série grossièrement fabriqués, saisissant brutalement, enserrant, écrasant justement ce qui leur échappe, ce dont ils ne peuvent pas s'approcher, ce qu'ils n'osent pas toucher” [126]) effect what Sarraute calls the “embalming” and “exposing” in a “glass casket” of this moving changing reality.

In Tu ne t'aimes pas, Sarraute is seeking a more receptive, pliant, sensitive, and less uniquely violently controlling text. Within and without the common stock of words of love (“un amour partagé,” “un grand amour,” “un amour sans nom,” “quelqu'un qui s'aime”), claims Sarraute, tiny, multiple, contradictory sensations and emotions constitute a much more complex life of that emotion. In her latest and perhaps last work, Sarraute is suggesting that much as the name takes away real presence, the word “la mort” (156), for example, limiting and reducing the feeling of death, the existing separate notions of self-love and of self-hatred obscure the complex intermingled psychological experiences they designate. As one of the voices of her text takes it upon herself/himself to declare, for every self-truth recounted, there is a counter (but not mutually exclusive) truth.

Creature of language, and thus designating the lost origin, (for the text is also erasing of the visual and the felt in favor of the readymade sign that translates the latter), the “I” (or “we”), like language, in Sarraute's new work, is, at the least, double-faced. It bears witness to what it effaces, to the possibility of some essence transported or captured, imperfect reference to a more complex self that still proliferates and moves, organically, in the hollows of the sentence and behind the words but also to an individuated (although not necessarily unified) psyche, life, and gender. Despite the erasures operated by dominating language and within the very materiality of the rhythms and images and the metaphorical and metonymical chains of that language, it is possible to discern the moving shapes of this new “self.”

In Tu ne t'aimes pas, Sarraute has abandoned the dialogical voices gendered feminine and masculine (an emotional feminine voice and a critical, logical, interruptive masculine voice) that characterized the dialogue in Enfance as essentially oppositional. Gender becomes a shifting, potentially multiple, complex reality or feeling beyond the “real man” and the “real woman,” constructed from the texts around us—perhaps beyond even the feeling experienced by some of the more introspective interlocutors of being androgynous or a mixture of both man and woman.

The unself-loving “I” becomes part of a network of sites touched by the circulation of the contradictory feelings of the “we;” feelings of inadequacy, hurt, and imposture, but also of superiority and uniqueness. He/she is at once the critical site of the search for honesty and reaction against pretension, of the searching out of the illusions of love and superiority in others, and the locus of the desire to please and to be loved by the other (and the others in the self). At another and metatextual level, the “I” emerges clearly as an agent of intellectual deconstruction or “démolisseur.” It is evident to him that, like the “pirate” and the “angel,” (male and female) of the family portraits—simple binary divisions—the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde syndrome, identified by the father-husband/professional man as a certain complexity within, remain inadequate. The two parts might simply appear to fit together in a pre-constituted frame to form an overall whole self that is lovable with faults. But it is recognized that the splitting within to self and guardian of self, or self and critic of self, embodied in a set phrase such as “Tu n'as qu'à t'en prendre à toi-même” does not constitute an adequate description of the swarming “we.”

The last and unnumbered page of the work poses the central question again: “Comme ce serait bon pour tout le monde … comme tout le monde y trouverait son compte si on pouvait, nous aussi, l'éprouver, cet amour de soi”. The response to this nostalgic proposition is irony and an interrogation that concludes and renews simultaneously the inquiry begun on the first page of the text. (“On ne demanderait pas mieux.”—“Pas mieux? Vraiment?” 216). For, as the text has made clear previously, the superior person needs to employ a self-divided vigilance in order to protect her or his superiority and the dominant person requires an unreflecting insensitivity to self to be protected from the judgements of others. Self-satisfaction is a “painted wax doll” (“poupée de cire peinte” [19]) or fabrication. The “exhibitionism, submission, divisions, and soliciting” of the clown's failed and embarrassing act from which the departing spectators discretely avert their embarrassed gaze is less vigilant, less insensitive, less painted, and more authentic.

The woman writer seems to be suggesting that deception and dangers lurk behind self-love as unique and global dwelling. In the final instance, the lack of self-love, the non-reconciled feeling of guilt for abandoning “the outstretched arms” of the hungry and the dying in order to live one's own life is as valid as self-love. The self-conscious awareness of the self's infinite possibilities for egoism and domination and of the needy relation that many of the self's members have with the others may itself be self-sustaining. In any case, the dichotomous slashing between the self-loving and the unself-loving becomes mobile as the polarization demanded by self-love, the demarcated absolute territories, give way to the mobile domain of non-exclusive contradictions, fluid self boundaries and complexes of sustained tension between love and hate, pride and dissatisfaction, optimism and anxiety, sadism and masochism.

In a lengthy dramatic scene in which the “we” is both a spectator and a participant, the self-satisfied intellectual leader confides to his neophytes the suspicious content of the personal diary he has discovered hidden in the stove of his dignified host's room. In the diary his colleague describes being taken to an extreme limit of humiliation, experiencing blows and slaps that he does not return, a pain not chosen and controlled as by Proust's Baron Charlus but perhaps, he confesses, submitted to out of obscure desire rather than from fear. Images appear, “de très vieilles images montent d'un stock commun … elles flottent, suspendues …” (185) slightly different in each of the followers but produced from a single model “locked within us over a very long time” and provoking a nervous, childlike tittering in the audience. The self-assurance, invulnerability, and monolithic self-love of the dominant figure of the leader seem to tremble and fissure for an instant in the light of the indiscretion, voyeurism, or even sadism suggested by his fascinated probing into the other's masochistic intimacy.

In this scene, there is an implicit fracturing of the leader's intellectual doctrine that seeks the purity of straight lines converging, of hardness, of the cube and the eradication of the suspect traces of feeling or of the words that take hold on our heart (“nous tiennent à coeur”), that is, are dear to us. For although the positive self-assurance with which the leader “irradiates” his neophytes is taken to derive from self-evident qualities, these followers, the text suggests, are simply victims of a persuasion, deceived by the apparent invulnerable transparency of their leader, by his self-love.

A certain discretion and a self-effacement that are very different from Duras's self-assertive public persona have marked Sarraute's public life. The mixed shame of personal revelation and pleasure of exhibitionism put into play in her autobiographical fictions may derive from the complexity of Sarraute's personal relation to her writing and to her reader as much as from her dissections of certain expressions of the tribe and the ideologies they carry. As in Duras's autobiographical works, the boundaries between private and public, inside and outside, become indistinct. Sarraute's texts draw their material, as has her life, from the clichés, bourgeois brandnames, good vintages, reputation, dignity, self sufficiency, and treasure troves of diplomas and medals enumerated in Tu ne t'aimes pas that answer the desire for security and status. They emerge from beneath the literary authority that, as one Sarrautian voice in the text argues, has placed a fine layer of varnish over things and eliminated words which speak to the heart; eliminated, for example, the personal, childlike, immediate, and spontaneous sensation that arises from touching the smooth rim of the ancient well. The certainty and self-love of the intellectual leader and the acceptance by the neophyte listener of the general consensus that forms around that person, characterize and guarantee such (literary) power and authority.

In contrast, certain voices in Sarraute's text move toward undignified self-exposure in a search for the roots of feeling, toward confession of abjection, (preference for the domain of the entre-deux), and of lack of self-love. The complexities of the hypersensitive, defensive, even paranoiac or vengeful reactions of the self, its ambiguous and complex relations with humiliation, its need for love and approval and fear of abandon, and its difficulties in sustaining independence are simultaneously disclosures of the impossibility of absolute authorial power or even authority. But the non-authoritarian unself-loving writer may come closer to the missing words that speak to the heart.

In her fictions, Sarraute's evocation of love has consistently been discrete and never immediately personal; a subconversation of emotional need associated closely with the fear and fascination of domination and the fear of loss or abandon. In Tu ne t'aimes pas, which can be situated somewhere between a fiction and an autobiography, one fragment organized as a dialogic exploration with an interlocutor takes a line of well-known Romantic verse—“un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé”—as its generator to investigate some of the multiple, contradictory (but, once again, not mutually exclusive) movements that swarm behind the word “passion.” These include the fear of not existing or the fear of being annihilated by the other's abandon or forgetting, the fear of independence, the impossibility of happiness alone, as well as the hunter's instinct to pursue what flees before him.

Whereas a reader familiar with the very few personal details about her life that Sarraute has made available or with the text of Enfance might find allusions here to the fear of abandonment by the mothers of her childhood, or to the recent loss of her husband, the movement is, as always in this writer's work, also toward the general, the universal, the tropism. Yet, the selection of the tropistic movements, of the common places with which Sarraute works, or of her metaphors, like the rhythms of her re-writings of a readymade language are individuated and not anonymous. As in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the “you,” “we,” “she,” “they,” are, in the final instance, “me” but, in this instance, a woman writer searching the word “love” and seeking authenticity, not a male writer playing with love/a woman.

Sarraute, like Duras's heroines, (or indeed, like Flaubert's Madame Bovary), understands that the “love” or “happiness” of convention, “20 ans de bonheur” (47) may, in fact, be boredom, or as Sarraute images this in her text, a “large, grey, rubber doll” (“cette grosse et grise poupée de caoutchouc … [54-55]). Beneath both the cliché and the recurrent doll metaphor, lurks Sarraute's own uneasiness, the feeling of the assassination of time, of being the wolf dressed up as grandmother. Like the “happiness” of self-love, this happiness of “love” may, her text suggests, also be a deception. The (unself-loving) instinct to crawl toward suffering, or to succumb to the emptinesss left by a lost object, on the other hand, may have validity.

The word “happiness” is not, however, empty. It does conceal incandescent points in vast misty spaces that Sarraute claims can have no possible baptism by name; moments that remain in the margins (“dans les limbes” [49]). As for Marguerite Duras, (or indeed for Rousseau in his Rêveries), these ideal moments are less on the side of traditional self-love, on the side of the seduction of the other (the reader, the lover), than on that of self-loss, of being swept away, melted, dissolved, melded, out of ourselves (“Quand on était comme emportés, soulevés, fondus, confondus, dissous … On était hors de nous-mêmes …” [48]).

Is Nathalie Sarraute's exploration of self-loss and lack of self-love, the pragmatic feminist literary critic might ask, again aghast, the final wisdom of the life of a woman who in her revolutionary and finely intelligent war of the (masculine) words can be seen to be a pioneer? Is Sarraute, already different from her fellow French as an émigré from Russia, denounced as a Jew during the Occupation, and coming late to writing, without self-confidence but encouraged by her husband, simply the daughter of a time which inculcated self-effacement in its females along with fascination with the self-love, strength, and domination located in the authoritative (male) other? Or can Sarraute be seen as revolutionary in her examination of a topos culturally gendered feminine but which touches humankind? Is her work not a more self-aware, finely wrought approach to the human psyche and to more fluid, mobile, ways of re-writing the old words and the arbitrary divisions of the old worlds? It is of note that two of the most influential French women theorists of the period, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, both practicing psychoanalysts, have been writing close to questions of feminine hysteria, masochism, and “abjection” (fascination with the realm of the entre-deux).

It does seem that the gap between Anglo-American pragmatic Feminist theory concerned with reclaiming for women the strength and visibility that men have enjoyed and the French writings more concerned to deconstruct such a strength has further widened with Tu ne t'aimes pas. The lack of self-love, revealed in a textual glass, and thus generalized, placed in a complementary (contradictory but not mutually exclusive) relation with pride, the authority of knowledge, and self satisfaction, has curious similarities with the mystical self-sacrificial abnegation of Duras's Emily L. and her relationship with her poems and with the other: “Et ces poèmes … cette douleur terrassante … cette lumière rougie de sang dans le lieu de laquelle elle entrait seule, dans l'innocence et le mal.” (Emily L. 99). Emily L. sacrifices her poetry to the love she shares with the captain, a love that can include even his lack of understanding and jealousy of her work.

Whether self-abnegation is seen to derive from a female Nature or from a female Condition, it is, of course, considered by many feminists to be a stumbling block to women's full emancipation. For others, it is, at the least, a vital women's question. Duras's new autobiographies contain explicit confession and exploration of the erotic attraction of self-opening, humiliation, and prostitution; of self-immolation to and absorption by the passion of the other. Although the little brother and the lovers, too, can be positioned at the pole of pain and sorrow or of masochism, I argue that it is predominantly the feminine figure who seeks her own drowning or “ravishing” as mystical and passionate martyrdom in identification with the victim of a crime passionnel.² In Sarraute's autofictions, too, there is a constant movement between the voyeur-writer's own troubling fascination with or ravishing by the other(s) words, and the writer's own controlled interrogation of words; between the trembling in the observed monolithic self that may fissure, open up, erupt to reveal “indecent” or exhibitionist others and the powerful controlling author.

Perhaps self-love may be best attained in self-loss—he who loses his life will gain it—as New Testament teachings and mystical religions have professed. Or, perhaps, and this is the reading I favor, like Duras's carnavelesque inversions of received values, Sarraute's thematics and textual strategies operate a certain recuperation of apparently “negative” “feminine” qualities while suggesting the narrowness of the limits for a healthy, whole, self-loving self set by the (common) language in power and by its progeny, common knowledge.

It is impossible to translate Sarraute's “masochistic” self-explorations or the tropistic movements she attempts to capture without reducing these to the very dolls, the hard polished linguistic surfaces she attempts to fissure, to squeeze or slash open—“sadistically?” Her metatextual alerting of the reader to the strategies of persuasion that the authoritative text (and she herself, on occasions,) employs and that her scrupulousness pushes her to subvert, to the traditional autobiographical quest for the reader's love,³ may discomfort. In this text, sometimes fiercely and sometimes humbly seeking after new kinds of self-knowledge, we might find, rather, evidence of Sarraute's love for her seeking reader. Perhaps Sarraute's final question mark after “nothing better” (than self-love) should have the final word to these interchanges on love between the selves that play the role of authority and censor and a self that is a scapegoat, (a scape-goat self-designated for an important and subversive cause).

Sarraute's work attempts to function beyond the splitting of the “we” into the “masculine” and the “feminine,” the good and the bad, the unconscious self and its self-conscious monitor or keeper, or indeed into sadism and masochism, locked in a mutually exclusionary struggle for power or knowledge. The reader of the traditional autobiographical text who is called to love the “I” in spite of his/her split character (strengths and weaknesses) like the “I” himself/herself, in search of self-love, enters a much less unified and more shifting and complex world. This is not only because she is caught within the polyphonic repeating voices or closed textual web of postmodern conception, but because, for Sarraute, the textual self is more than the circulation of textual voices. It has a material origin in the complexity of the psycho-sexual body, of sensations and feelings, of life.

As it rewrites the binary divisions between self and other, and the play of domination and submission between self and other in the self (ego and superego, ego and id) in multiple, contradictory but coextensive voices (at once same and different), this text draws its meanings in part from its subversive rewriting of traditional language, gender and genre, that is from its textual politics. The edges of the sameness and the difference that constitute the clear meaning of linguistic signs are blurred as the private and public, the collective and the individuated, the masculine and the feminine become part of a circulation. Although definitive meaning is deferred and the meanings of the self are constituted only in the present, local, play of the text, we are, once again, not imprisoned in the text “all alone.” In Sarraute's Tu ne t'aimes pas, the impulse subversive of ready-made categories and binary distinctions penetrating language from outside and deriving from sensations and hidden infra-psychological movements (a complex circulation including the self-critical and the self-loving) creates the power of the writing of the powerless or unself-loving woman.

Notes

1. My earlier general studies of the French “new autobiographies” postulated their “complementary” and “chaotic” character.

2. This is discussed in my “Through a Textual Glass, Darkly: Masochism in the Female Self in Duras's Emily L.”

3. See, for example, Elaine Marks, “The Dream of Love: A Study of Three Autobiographies.”

Works Cited

Duras, Marguerite. L'Amant. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984.

———. L'Amant de la Chine du nord. Paris: Gallimard, 1991.

———. Emily L. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1987.

Lejeune, Philippe. Moi aussi. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986.

———. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975.

———. “Paroles d'enfance.” Revue des Sciences Humaines, 217 (janvier-mars 1990), 23-38.

Marks, Elaine. “The Dream of Love: A Study of Three Autobiographies.” Twentieth Century French Fiction. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1980: 72-88.

O'Callaghan (Ramsay), Raylene. “The Art of the (Im)possible. The Autobiography of the French New Novelists.” Australian Journal of French Studies XXV, 1 (1988): 71-91.

Ramsay, Raylene. “Autobiographical Fictions: Duras, Sarraute, Simon, Robbe-Grillet Rewriting History, Story, Self.” The International Fiction Review 18.1 (1991): 25-33.

———. “Through a Textual Glass, Darkly: Masochism in the Female Self in Duras's Emily L.” Atlantis: Journal of Women's Studies/Revue d'Etudes sur la Femme 17.1 (Fall-Winter, 1991): 91-104.

Sarraute, Nathalie. Tropismes. Paris: Denoël, 1939.

———. Disent les imbéciles. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.

———. Enfance. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.

———. Tu ne t'aimes pas. Paris: Gallimard, 1989.