Towards an Ethics of Witness, or the Story and History of 'une minuscule détresse' in Annie Ernaux's L'événement and Nancy Huston's Instruments des Ténèbres

This paper investigates what is at stake, ethically and aesthetically, in writing about the disturbing issues of abortion and neonaticide. It focuses on L'Evénement by Annie Ernaux and on Nancy Huston's Instruments des ténèbres. Though very different in form and content, these two novels, written from a distinctively female viewpoint, are metatextual works which reflect on the act of writing such taboos, and of representing irrational, defective mothers in the context of poststructuralism and postmodernism. In her exploration of the genre of the memoir and that of historiography as defined by Paul Ricoeur, Ernaux seeks a form of writing which discards pathos and the moral involvement of the reader, while Huston attempts something similar through humour and the grotesque. Yet at the same time, these novelists renegotiate the notion of retelling experience as defined by Walter Benjamin in 'The storyteller' —the rewriting of the chronology of excruciating events, drawing a parallel between private and public history. In this perspective, their depiction of dark mothers, which goes against the comforting myth of the good mother, reads as a political and humanistic project. Ernaux's and Huston's respective aesthetics define a new kind of ethics involving the reader and centring on the notion of witness, exhorting their readers to undertake a performative reading.