Telling Anxiety: Anxious Narration in the Works of Duras, Ernaux, Sarraute and Hébert by Jennifer Willging (review)

1 58Women in French Studies jouissait, il y a plusieurs générations, l'auteur(e) d'aujourd'hui érigerait donc le critère de l'arbitraire et de l'illimité en geste impérial, car, ironiquement, qui manipule cet arbitraire et cette fragmentation et qui pourrait nous en sortir, sinon l'auteur(e) lui-même/elle-même ? Martine Motard-NoarMcDaniel College Willging, Jennifer. Telling Anxiety: Anxious Narration in the Works of Duras, Emaux, Sarraute and Hébert. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp 261. ISBN 978-0-8020-9276-2. $60.00 Telling Anxiety: Anxious Narration in the Works of Duras, Ernaux, Sarraute and Hébert focuses on four novels written by francophone women between 1968 and 1997. Obviously about anxieties (different sources, symptoms, revelations) in women's writing, the study revolves around not only the manifestation of apprehension within the narration itself, but also how each ofthe narrators deal with their own anxiety evident in their self-expression. Using the definition of the "anxiety of authorship" according to The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), Jennifer Willging argues that, as commonly established, women writers used to have to hide their gender in a stream of repression, deceptions, trickery and lies. Nowadays, although women are free to reveal their femininity in their writing, the same challenges lurk below the surface as a possible legacy of the past. She insists on examining how authors actually tell their stories, driven by desire to share their memories or imaginations, but also in order to expel their worries—a feeling that usually coincides with such an aspiration. In order to do so Willging illustrates her theory from two different types of narrators. The first stories are based on feminist writers' autobiographies: Marguerite Duras' Monsieur X. dit ici Pierre Rabier and Annie Emaux 's La Honte. The second are completely extracted from fiction: Entre la vie et la mort, by Russian-bom author, Nathalie Sarraute, and Les Fous de Bassan by Québécoise Anne Hébert. The first half of the analysis concentrates on the autobiographical texts by Duras and Emaux. "Narrating the Self, Narrating the Other" is introduced by two female narrators and divided into two chapters. The first, "'Truth' in Memory and Narrative," shows how the work of (and on) the memory drives and pushes the narration. The narrator is divided in her mission: she wants to tell the truth of her history, but also to push these memories out of her head for good. Then, in "Shame in Memory and Narrative," Willging focuses on Emaux's telling of a traumatic event that took place twenty years ago and on the mechanism used to keep her faithful to the depiction of her memories. The anxiety ofbeing loyal to the truth may confound the results of the narration, but it nevertheless plays a crucial role in the rest of her life. The originality of the second part of the book called "Narrating Life, Narrating Death" is that the two stories with which it deals are narrated by male characters. This pertinent choice Book Reviews159 in the detachment between author and actual narrator shows the broad concern of Willging in examining the depths of anxiety, but also where it comes from, and how it forces the author to hide behind a stranger—a male. The third chapter, "The Anxiety of Influence and the Urge to Originate," shows how essential it is for reality and language to be united in order to proceed to the creation of the writing. Blending female muse and male voice, the narration leads us to a certain criticism of authors' preoccupations and anxieties. Finally, Chapter four, "The Sound of Semiotic," takes us to a different analysis between Kristeva's concept of"semiotic," and a new point ofview on terrible memories: the perspective ofthe perpetrator. Willging's aim is first to dissect each text to determine its narrative structure and expose the anxieties and desires that animated the authors to share their stories. Building from there, she examines how they are cast upon the reader and how they are received to ultimately conclude the role anxiety has in the literary arts ofrecent...