Ernaux's Testimony of Shame

Ernaux's Testimony of Shame Lawrence D. Kritzman ANNIE ERNAUX'S LA HONTE (1997) is a semi-autobiographical work in which the author explores how a traumatic memory is stored and frozen in the mind.' Her reflection is built on the assumption that memory can never be truly authenticated since traumatic experience precludes direct access to testimony. "Il n'y a pas de vraie mémoire de soi" (37). Consequently her attempt to remember things past, the adolescent youth of the summer of 1952 as "little Annie D," constitutes a quest for understanding unimpeded by the imposition of an artificial reality. "Naturellement pas de récit, qui produirait une réalité au lieu de la chercher" (38). Based on the premise that language puts memory into question, it reflects, however, on the manner in which one perceives the world and takes hold of one's life story however elusive it may be. "Ce qui m'importe, c'est de retrouver les mots avec lesquels je me pensais et pensais le monde autour. Dire ce qu'étaient pour moi le normal et l'inadmissable , l'impensable même" (37). What Emaux recognizes must remain an incomplete narrative nevertheless affords her the possibility of engaging in a cognitive performance capable of unraveling unassimilated memory. In so doing, Ernaux's story suggests that the initial shamefulness prompting her to find the words to "dire l'inadmissible" also entails, and perhaps even requires, the provisional adoption of a mask of shameless normality and invisibility ("dire Ie normal"). Until Emaux is able to do this she cannot let herself feel authorized to take pleasure in being the object of the gaze without the accompanying fear of experiencing affective confinement. At the core of Ernaux's writerly quest is the desire to describe the etiology of her perception of shame. She situates the birth of this feeling in an event of domestic violence that she witnessed in June 1952. "Mon père a voulu tuer ma mère un dimanche de juin, au début de l'après-midi" (16). This scene of primitive violence revealed the dark forces that fatally marked her existence as being flawed and committed her to an interminable feeling of malaise. Trauma, which literally signifies "injury" or "wound," signals, as Freud has suggested, a situation of helplessness and the anxiety that it produces. Victim of an affective paralysis, Emaux lived with a story that she was unable to put into words. "J'ai toujours eu cette scène en moi comme une image sans mots ni phrases" (17). The image of violence imprinted on the mind's eye makes evident the act of bearing witness as well as its failure to be articulated Vol. XXXIX, No. 4 139 L'Esprit Créateur discursively. Ernaux's testimony neither effaces the truth nor attempts to deny it. Yet she cannot undo the shock of the event since the act of witnessing paradoxically realizes what Cathy Carath terms "the witnessing, precisely of impossibility."2 Instead of experiencing a sense of immediacy while observing a photographic image of herself at age twelve, the mature writer now discovers in it an uncertainty that allows her to fall prey to mis-recognition and an inability to repossess the mystery of the past. "Je ne croirais pas qu'il s'agisse de moi. (Certitude que 'c'est moi', impossibilité de me reconnaître, 'ce n'est pas moi')" (25). The traumatic event, the violence her father inflicted on her mother, functions as a disruption in the continuity of experience and necessitates an ellipsis in the narrative of her life's story. "Nulle part il n'y avait de place pour la scène du dimanche de juin" (108). The adolescent girl was obliged to efface the experience that pained her. The wound that is the result of the event, the shock of seeing her mother stricken: the impact of this trauma short-circuited the assignment of meaning and ultimately rendered language somewhat obtuse. "Les mots que je retrouve sont opaques, des pierres impossibles à bouger" (69). In this context memory became the site of the unthinkable, making the young subject immune to self-expression. "Il n'y avait...