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...