Why in the “fall” of the Middle Ages did childhood appear as a privileged path for the renewal of writing and at the same time as the site for a return to the origins of the novel? The phenomena can be seen as a nostalgia for the past, for writings that the age had decided must be conserved, a longing for a long-lost literary country. To write of childhood is also to nurse the possibility of adding something to it, to fill in a blank, but in doing so to introduce an amused distance to the original material. Childhood is a place of narrative possibilities and renewal, the privileged site to unite past and future; the adventure of childhood is redefined as a buried or repressed “always already there” that must be brought to the surface. This article intends to lay out a few perspectives and analyse the question of rewriting as parody and of its relation to the scheme and theme of the childhood of the hero. It sets out from three principal axes: contrapuntal writing and pirating, the metafiction, and memory and repetition, because in the end everything plays out in the tension between stammering (balbutiement) and rambling (radotage).