Enfance stands at the intersection of autobiography and novel, in what Sarraute
describes as a "more spontaneous, more direct and freer" ¹ form, between speech
and writing and in close relationship to drama. The "grain" of Nathalie
Sarraute's own voice, to borrow Roland Barthes' striking term, is physically
present as pitch, stress, intonation, and color in the talking book version of the
work the writer herself recorded. In the Barrault Company's stage adaptation
at the Thébtre du Rond Point, Paris, in 1985, the play of the voice of the actress
evoking childhood again held center stage.

These audible voices in the text that call upon the sounds and rhythms of
the human voice and of textual syntax are metaphors at once of being and of
language. They can be situated theoretically somewhere between textuality
and Derrida's phonocentrism deriving from Western logocentrism, phono-
centrism, for Derrida, erroneously assumes an absolute proximity or congru-
ence of voice and being. History is not completely erased in a pure play of
anonymous present text as the voices of the past, of mother, father, and step-
mother, of books read, are recalled to life through dialogic interactions in a
distinctive text/texture. Yet the speaking voices and the voices in the text are
those of the actress and of the storyteller, that is, of personae with masks and
selected tones of voice rather than of persons. Sarraute's writing is situated
over the threshold of that modernity ² in which "words ceased to intersect with
representations and to provide a spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things," ³
and where, in a crisis of metaphysical philosophy, the narrative function loses
its foundations, "the great hero, the great perils, the great quests, and the great
goal." ⁴

Nathalie Sarraute claims no allegiance to the theoretical thought ( Derrida,
Lyotard, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze) that has been labelled postmod-

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