Memory in Nathalie Sarraute’s Childhood
Emel ÖzkayaChildhood narrative by Nathalie Sarraute, one of the forerunners of the New Novel, is a two-voice autobiography. Published in 1983, the author has brought a new dimension to the autobiography genre. Sarraute born Nathalie Tcherniak describes her childhood in France and Russia between the ages of 6 and 12. The memories, which are not in chronological order, are voiced from a child’s point of view. She talks about her inner life, her primary school experiences, her parents’ separation, and her life in Paris. The second voice is the voice of the adult narrator’s conscience. It tries to compensate for the inconsistencies of memory flaws through the connections of memories and is the guarantor of the rightness of doubtful words. The female narrator and her inner voice continue to keep the perceptions hidden in the childhood alive with words. In this current work, the issues of memory, the perception of time, and people’s roles in and out of the family in the memories will be examined, and the spread of the memories within a specific time will be discussed. Despite the age difference between the child and the adult, the narrator expresses her impressions of her childhood. How close is the adult narrator to the child? Who is actually mentioned in the memories? Based on the role of memory, these issues will be answered by using Genette’s narratological method.
Nathalie Sarraute’un Çocukluk Anlatısında Bellek
Emel ÖzkayaYeni Roman’ın gerçek öncülerinden biri olan Nathalie Sarraute’un Çocukluk anlatısı iki sesli bir otobiyografidir. 1983 yılında yayımlanan Çocukluk anlatısıyla, yazar otobiyografi türüne yeni bir boyut kazandırır. Sonradan Nathalie Sarraute olan Natacha Tcherniak’ın hayatının Fransa ile Rusya arasında, altı-on iki yaş arasındaki çocukluğunun ilk yılları anlatılır. Kronolojik bir anlatımın olmadığı anılar, bir çocuğun bakış açısıyla dile getirilir. İlk sesin birinci tekil kişi ile verildiği çocuk, anlatıcı ses konumundadır. Dış nedene bağlı temel tepkimeyle, çocuk, bilinçaltındaki yaşamından, ilkokulundan, ebeveynlerinin ayrılığından, Paris’teki yaşamından bahseder. İkinci ses ise, yetişkin anlatıcının vicdanının sesidir. Yetişkin rolü oynayan ikinci ses, anıların bağlantılarıyla belleğin kusurlarını telafi etmeye çalışır. İkinci ses, şüphe uyandıran sözcüklerin doğruluğunun garantörüdür. Kadın anlatıcı ve onun iç sesi, çocukluk döneminde gömülü kalmış duyumları kelimelerle yaşatmaya devam eder. “Nathalie Sarraute’un Çocukluk Anlatısında Bellek” isimli bu çalışmada, hatırlama ve öykü zamanından, aile içindeki ve dışındaki kişilerin bellekteki rolünden bahsedilecek, anıların belirli bir zaman içine yayılması ele alınacaktır. Çocuk ve yetişkin arasında mesafeden hareketle anlatıcı-yazar, çocukluktan kalma izlenimleri şimdiki durumun görüngüsünden dile getirir. Anlatıcı bahsettiği çocuğa ne derece yakındır? Anılarda gerçek olarak kimden bahsedilmektedir? Bellek rolünden hareketle, bu sorunsallara Genette’in anlatıbilimsel yöntemiyle cevap verilmeye çalışılacaktır.
‘Childhood,’ by Nathalie Sarraute, is an autobiographical narrative work based on the author’s childhood memories until the age of twelve. Throughout the narrative, the use of two narrative voices in conversation lends the work freshness and originality. One of these voices represents the sound of her childhood, and the other represents a more conscious critique that controls memories and prevents the misinterpretation of facts. Thanks to these two voices, the author who writes her memories in the form of a conversation creates a new autobiographical narrative type by changing the traditional structure of the novel. This text-oriented study attempted to analyze the internal structure of Childhood, published by Nathalie Sarraute at the age of eighty-three by following Paul Ricoeur’s methods of “verification search” (la quête véritative) that makes up the memory and the “cognitive recognition” (le processus cognitif) process. One of the most important pioneers of the New Novel, Sarraute reflects her inner conversations in memory with these two voices in conversation. Sarraute was 83 years old when she published this work and tried to find the memories of her childhood. Her childhood is narrated in two voices by two first-person narrators. The purposes of this study are to indicate that memory does not only consist of memoirs, and to find out how memory and forgetting affect one’s identity and the social status of the main character in Nathalie Sarraute’s Childhood. The narrator recalls the events that she experienced in the past as far back as she can. The narrative is about the memories of a child who has suffers because of her parents’ divorce. The father is sensitive to the child, while the mother is indifferent to her. The narrator, through psychoanalysis, gives place to emotional images in her memoirs. The narrator also combines the results by supporting the points that she does not remember with images and narratives. Memory is not just the recollection of things done and said; it is also a recall of the past as a whole and the application of the past that leads to conclusions today.
