"The Shame", by Annie Ernaux: writing so as not to be swallowed

In "The shame" (originally published in 1997), Annie Ernaux – winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature – tells about a remarkable event in her life. The book begins in a raw and objective way, with the following sentence: "My father tried to kill my mother on a Sunday in June, in the early afternoon." To think and reflect on this book, I transcribe throughout the text some excerpts – all taken from the digital version of the book – and I make comments.

From the psychoanalytic point of view, much could be said about the effects of this event on Annie as a child and Annie as an adult. It is a trauma, characterized by its intensity and by the subject's inability to react to it proportionally. Or, to use Ernaux's words, it is "horror without words".

Typical of trauma is its unspeakable, unnameable character; an experience of the order of the Real, in the Lacanian sense. The horror to which the writer refers leads to a psychic disorganization, to a point of no return, as she describes below:

Then, that Sunday became a kind of filter that stood between me and all the things I was experiencing. He continued to play, read, act as before, but somehow he was absent. Everything had become artificial. I started to have difficulty memorizing the content that, before, I learned with a single reading.

Ernaux is not unaware of psychoanalysis, on the contrary, he states that he made use of this resource, as well as family therapy, arriving at what he calls "rudimentary conclusions" about his family dynamics. These explanations are not enough for her, after all, it is really an excess that we are talking about when we talk about trauma. It is in writing that the author will seek to investigate and elaborate this irreversible event.

I write this scene for the first time. Until today, it seemed impossible to do this, even in a diary. As if it were a forbidden action that would bring a punishment. Maybe that of not being able to write anything else later. (I felt a kind of relief a little while ago when I found that I was continuing to write as before, that nothing terrible had happened to me.)

"(...) Because I have always kept this scene inside me as an image, without any words or phrases other than those I said to my boyfriends, the words I used here to describe it sound strange, almost disconnected.

To then try to situate and reach the scene of that Sunday, the writer goes to the Archive of her city of origin and searches for the newspapers of the time. He realizes that, deep down, he had the feeling that he would find the lived scene portrayed in one of them and that none of the news of the time would reach a corresponding level. "Only she was the real scene."

Annie says she would like to be an "ethnologist" of herself. Handling the images of her memory as documents, illuminating "the languages" that constituted her, the words that were present at the time, the writer tries to dissect what happened that Sunday, when she was thrown into a place close to madness and death. In other words, it makes an effort to weave past and present together. However, he comes up against something impossible:

(...) The woman I am in 1995 is unable to see herself in the girl of 1952, who only knew her small town, her family and her school, who only had a reduced vocabulary at her disposal. And, in front of him, the immensity of time to live.

Even with all the work of putting it into words, the author realizes that the scene remains meaningless, continues to be a basis of comparison for other pains, without ever finding corresponding pain.

(...) In fact, nothing was revealed, apart from the brute fact. I want to shake up this scene, frozen for so many years, to tear from within me its sacred character as an icon (demonstrated, for example, in my belief that it is she who leads me to write, that it is what is at the bottom of my books).

In another excerpt, Ernaux states that "There is no true memory about oneself." And, in my view, it is precisely a fiction that she builds throughout the text, a fiction of herself, of this woman who, as a child, lived the unspeakable. She tries to account for how that event changed her, even making her think that it is this memory that impels her to her craft, that it is this memory that is the substrate of her writing. Maybe it is.

Even if the writer feels that nothing has been revealed, the fact of writing about it seems to produce effects, in some way it "thaws" the scene, dissolves what had remained only as an image. It is precisely the unnameable that we are trying to name, it is the unrepresentable that we will try to represent. However, there will in fact remain, in the manner of the "navel of the dream", something unfathomable, obscure, about which it will not be possible to say or interpret anything.

In this regard, Annie Ernaux says of her recollection of that Sunday:

It is the nameless place of origin in which I feel, when I return there, taken by a torpor that empties me of all thoughts, of almost all precise memories, as if it were going to swallow me again.

Faced with the memory of the horror, Annie writes. Write so as not to be swallowed.