Sarraute: ‘Enfance’ (review)

This is a welcome, user-friendly guide to Enfance, which will be especially helpful to those studying Sarraute at undergraduate level. However, it also presents insightful analyses for those already familiar with Enfance and critical work on it. Clearly written, but not simplistic, it favours close textual analysis while also indicating at regular intervals secondary sources for students and researchers wishing to extend further their reading (for example, indicating where relevant studies by Lejeune, Jefferson, Minogue etc.). The study opens with a chapter contextualizing Sarraute’s œuvre and the place of Enfance within it, and is followed by a logical sequence of chapters devoted to analysis of the text itself (‘Beginnings’, ‘Resisting the “tout cuit”’, ‘Narrative Voices’, ‘Fragments’, ‘Connections’, ‘An Emerging Self’ and ‘Endings’). Sarraute’s place as one of France’s most distinguished writers, whose works had already been published in the Pléiade series in 1996, ‘an honour very rarely accorded to a living writer’ (p. 1), is highlighted by Bell. She explains the author’s approach to fiction, and explores the precise engagement of the writer with the nouveau roman. The study directs readers to key scenes, narrative forms and patterns of meaning, and opens up the text to detailed textual analysis, supporting the assertion made by Bell that ‘Enfance must be seen above all as a literary endeavour, the effort to find a suitable form for a certain kind of material’ (p. 14). This focused analysis is accompanied by pertinent snippets of supplementary information from interviews with the author and lectures by her to support the central arguments being made. Explanations of key terms such as ‘tropisms’ are clear and provide links between texts. For an introductory guide, there is a thoroughness of approach. The close readings (for example, of family relationships; of the links between the fragments; of the function of narrative voice and relationship between the narrator and her alter ego; of Sarraute’s views on autobiography, and her doubts about the autobiographical enterprise; of intertextual connections between Enfance and other autobiographical works, and intratextual ones with her own œuvre) makes this an excellent starting point for those embarking on study of the text, or indeed embarking on study of Sarraute’s work generally.