Mlle. Wittig [in L'Opoponax] certainly manages to render the sensation of childhood as a kaleidoscopic flurry of incident, devoid of any general principles and which the child, inevitably, sees as it were from the underside, since the process of growing up consists precisely in getting one's head, to some slight extent at least, above events. Catherine Legrand makes no overall sense of her experiences…. My reservation about L'Opoponax … is that the jumble of vivid, physical descriptions of childhood is not enough, because I seem to remember that, in childhood, plotlessness on one level was accompanied by a constant endeavor to create a plot on another level. Mlle. Wittig's child does not live with one foot in a mythic dream, which, I imagine, is the normal childhood practice. She is too positivistic. All the penumbra of childhood emotion, which is so difficult to describe, has been removed from these...