Nathalie Sarraute'un Çocukluk'u: Eleştirel ya da Karşı Bir Öz Yaşamöyküsü

Abstract

This article examines some specific characteristics in Natalie Sarraute's I'Enfance which constitutes a work öf recollection that collects autonomous memories from an album of images and tropisms from a distant childhood. Writing I'Enfance at the age of eighty-three and evoking memories from the age of two to the age of twelve, Sarraute resuscitates her childhood to preserve it against oblivion. Desiring above all to make the sensations and tropisms of her childhood come alive through pronounced words, her own and her close parents'actions, the writer admits that she only chose memories that existed in internal movements. Refusing to write a retrospective, chronological account as if speaking about her vocation as a writer, Sarraute creates new narrative forms notably a dialogical mode that puts her work in typical autobiographical genre. Although the autobiographical pact is respected in the text, some original aspects of the work, such as the quest for generality, the will exploring the world of childhood that is lived introspectively and the recourse to dialogue or the narrative voice intensifying into a more critical voice that intervenes to control the loyalty to the recollection, the work presents great deviations from the norm and makes I'Enfance a critical autobiography and an antibiography.