Telling Anxiety: Anxious Narration in the Works of Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hébert (review)

The topic of Jennifer Willging’s book will certainly interest many readers, since anxiety seems to be the malaise of our contemporary Western society. In her study, Willging examines the manifestations of anxiety in selected narratives of French writers, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Nathalie Sarraute, and of Quebec writer, Anne Hébert. More specifically, Willging’s objective is to analyze the confluence of anxiety, desire, and narration.

Though one may not agree with Willging when she states, in her introduction, that women are ‘more susceptible to anxiety than their literary brethren’ and that French and French-Canadian women have more difficulty assuming authorship than Anglo-American writers (Anne Hébert’s status as Quebec’s most illustrious author for more than six decades belies both statements), the results of her specific analyses are compelling and often fascinating.

The book is divided into two parts, both in terms of content and methodology. The first two chapters focus on openly autobiographical texts: Marguerite Duras’s short narrative, ‘Monsieur X. dit ici Pierre Rabier,’ which deals with resistance and collaboration during the Second World War, and Annie Ernaux’s La honte, a narrative exposing a violent scene – the author’s father trying to kill her mother – that took place when Ernaux was eleven years old. In both chapters, truth, reality, and memory are recurring themes. Willging has recourse to other texts (notably Pierre Péan’s version of the events linked to the resistance), interviews given by the authors and their other writings to shed light on the relationship between narration, anxiety, and truth. As one would expect, the narration of past traumatic events is both gripping and problematic. Willging persuasively demonstrates the complexities inherent in these texts by showing that the ‘act of remembering both invites and hinders the act of narrating.’ The second part of the book deals with Nathalie Sarraute’s Entre la vie et la mort and Anne Hébert’s celebrated novel, Les fous de bassan (In the Shadow of the Wind). Since these texts are not autobiographical, they elicit a different kind of analysis, that is, a much closer reading of the texts. In Sarraute’s novel, Willging focuses on the narrator, who is a writer, to demonstrate the manifestations of what Harold Bloom called the ‘anxiety of influence.’ It is, however, in her study of Les fous de bassan that Willging’s analytical talent becomes most apparent. Using Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic, she gives a brilliant and original demonstration of the way that sounds express, in a poetic manner, both anxiety and madness. She first examines the ‘book’ of Nicolas Jones, the pastor of a small English community on the seaside in Quebec. Though the narrative takes place in 1982, it recounts the events of 1936 when his two nieces were murdered. Prone to extreme anxiety, the old pastor is disturbed by many sounds such as the wind, insects, the beating of his heart, and an array of voices: ‘Voices, nothing but voices, sounds, nothing but sounds. I light another pipe, ears filled with the music of bygone days and shrill voices.’ Willging gives a convincing and insightful description of how anxiety permeates Nicolas’s entire discourse. Her analysis of the madness that characterizes Stevens Brown’s last letter to Michael Hotchkiss is equally convincing and detailed. The breakdown of the character’s psyche is expressed by the memory of the shrill sounds of the gannets frequently seen in the seaside village: ‘I lift my arm, the birds scatter, they cry. I drop my arm on the hospital sheet and flocks of them return and they cry once more, sharpening their beaks against my skull.’ The relationship between language and anxiety or more precisely the capacity of language to express anxiety, by means of rhythms and sounds, is clearly and at times brilliantly exemplified in this chapter.

In spite of...