SOURCE: Miller, Nancy K. “Memory Stains: Annie Ernaux's Shame.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14, no. 1 (summer 1999): 38-50.

The force which opposes scopophilia, but which may be overridden by it … is shame.

—Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality

I've always wanted to write books that I could not speak about afterwards, and that made the gaze of others unbearable.

—Annie Ernaux, Shame

“My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” This starkly simple sentence begins the slim volume of reminiscence that unfolds from that act manqué. The sentence and the scene it introduces come as a shock to the readers of Ernaux's previous work.¹ Why, so many years after the published narratives devoted to her father and her mother, did Annie Ernaux decide to recount this episode for the first time? Or since that is the subject of the memoir itself, let me move the burden from writer to reader. How do readers—acquainted with Ernaux's recorded past or new to its universe—respond to the familial trauma exposed in the pages of Shame? Like testimony of unspeakable suffering that requires a listener “who is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo” (Felman and Laub 57), memoirs that carry the burden of traumatic experience demand the reader's adhesion. In this case, picking up the terms of Ernaux's epigraph, and freely adopting Lejeune's famous pact of responsiveness to trauma's work in writing, will the reader keep the bargain or shudder and look away?

The scene. It was a Sunday. Annie had been to mass. Her parents, struggling owners of a small café/grocery store, had been bickering during lunch; her mother in a bad mood had picked a fight. Suddenly, beside himself with rage, her father grabs her mother and drags her into another room. The girl goes upstairs and throws herself on the bed, burying her head in the pillow. But she hears her mother's voice screaming from the cellar, calling for her daughter, calling for help. When the twelve-year old Annie reaches her parents, her father is holding her mother by the shoulders with one hand and with the other is threatening her life, wielding a scythe used for cutting firewood. (Despite the confident details of recall, a doubt creeps into the description: her father was grabbing her mother either by the shoulders or the neck.) Then, abruptly, the images stop. The memory of the scene moves on to its closure—and by evening life has returned to normal. The mother marks the end of the drama she seems to have provoked: “Come on now,” she said, “it's over.” The three go for a bike ride in the countryside. The scene took place on June 15, 1952—the first precise date, Ernaux writes, of her childhood.

This is the memory, the defining moment of childhood, that Ernaux now wants to recount, after having confessed it, she admits, to a few lovers, who seemed unable to reply. Something terrible, she thought, would happen once she put pen to paper. A punishment. A permanent writer's block. But no, the words continue to come; the words to describe how the effects of this trauma produced an inalterable sense of difference in the girl's idea of herself: “We stopped belonging to the category of decent people, who don't drink, don't fight, and who dress properly to go into town.” No matter what outer signs of belonging to the world of proper people she might display, inside the rupture was fatal. The sheer fact of having borne witness to the scene set in motion a free fall into abjection that cannot be halted.

Shame reshapes identity, becomes a way of life, becomes almost invisible, as though it had entered the body itself. The guilty knowledge of shame that excludes you in your own eyes from decency, operates regardless of whether others know about it. Does bringing the private guilt into the public eye compound the sense of stigma? For Ernaux the question is almost rhetorical. “But what shame equal to the power of what I experienced in my twelfth year could come to me from the writing of a book?” None, so why fear the shame of writing? Over a decade ago, Ernaux described in A Woman's Story the details of her mother's descent into Alzheimer's disease. Ernaux remarked then that she was writing not only for herself—to make bearable for herself the drama of disintegration she witnessed daily—but “for other people, so that they can understand.” For Ernaux, individual experience is always shareable—potentially collective, or at least social—and always passes through the mesh of class difference as the individual gathers cultural meaning in the world of others. And because of this belief that an event's meaning inevitably comes to be processed or understood through class relations, it makes a compelling kind of sense to put the writing of shame out into the world of so-called decent people, against whom she defines herself—or did. But the shame of not belonging, of feeling excluded by a horrible secret is never wholly contained by class boundaries, and so the readers of Shame often join Ernaux where she might least expect to be met. I would argue further that the success of her work points to the complexity of class assignment, since readers both identify with—you tell my story—and disidentify across unpredictable class lines. What I want to track here are the places in the narrative—the story which unfolds from this initial assault on the mother—where shame spreads, leaks into other domains for the writer, and also for the reader.²

If in doing memory-work we become detectives of our lives, as Annette Kuhn has suggested in her book Family Secrets, we often return to the scene of the crime, looking for clues to the mystery of how we became who we are, but despite the Freudian tones that we therapy-conscious American readers might hear in the repeated use of the word “scene,” or the invocation of trauma, of perhaps a screen memory behind which stands an intolerable primal event, Shame is not, the author insists, turned toward psychoanalysis. Rather, you could say that the memoir is a complex explication de texte of a sentence, the phrase that Ernaux remembers having uttered as a response to her father's panic at his own behavior. He was crying, Ernaux recalls, and saying over and over again, why are you crying, I didn't do anything to you. The girl's panicked reply is: “Tu vas me faire gagner malheur.” In the French version the local, hence unfamiliar, expression receives an explanation in a footnote (one of two in the narrative); in the English-language translation, the note drops out and moves into the text, but I keep it here: “In Norman dialect, you're going to make me “catch” unhappiness [in the Leslie translation: “You'll breathe disaster on me”] means to become crazy and unhappy forever in the aftermath of a shock.” It's this childhood fear that she will be driven crazy even now that has prevented Ernaux as an adult from putting the scene into the public domain. To write the scene might mean stripping those childhood words of their magical and terrifying meaning. In some sense the book reads as an apotropaic gesture, warding off harm: to put the scene into words is to make it move, dislodge it from its sacred place as the origin of all that brought the woman to writing. But it also shows the desire by the writer, the adult in the present, to regain mastery over the terror, to domesticate it. Ernaux writes: “Since I've succeeded in producing this narrative, I have the impression that it's just a banal event, more frequent in families than I had thought.” The tension in every memoir is the constant testing of your private, exclusive event against the narratives of other; in the process one can't help but modify one's sense of uniqueness.

But the retrospective account does not erase the original shock of traumatic experience. Moreover, if trauma always means a blow to body or soul, trauma always also means its lived effects in memory. As Jean Améry memorably declared in another register of extreme, that of torture during the Holocaust, “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured” (34), just as he writes of the “first blow” the victim in the camps receives, “At the first blow, however, this trust in the world breaks down. The other person opposite whom I exist physically in the world and with whom I can exist only as he does not touch my skin surface as border, forces his own corporeality on me with the first blow. He is on me and thereby destroys me. It is like a rape, a sexual act without the consent of one of the two partners” (28). I don't mean to compare the two experiences literally, of course, but there is an eerie overlap between the two descriptions of traumatic events; Ernaux's account of the radical effects produced in her, in her body, of witnessing the scene, makes her a victim of a blow that shattered her world, her view of her place in it, and her innocence, through the threatened violence, the blow that doesn't land. Her (always ambivalent) identification with her mother's body and her more porous identification with her father make her a participant in the scene; the daughter feels the father's rage seeping into her mind and body. The gesture of the blow strikes fear into the daughter, a fear that lives on forty-three years later. Such is the afterlife of certain memories, memories that function as indelible stains in the brain; just as traumatic memories show up differently when you scan the brain as a physical object.³

Like most writers turned toward the past, Ernaux begins by opening the family album. She studies her past self through two photographs from the summer of 1952—before and after. The photographs will haunt the narrative. The first, important placemarker of her Catholic childhood, was taken on the occasion of the renewal of her vows. In this formal photograph, twelve-year Annie D. is kneeling on a prayer stool, holding her rosary beads and her missal. A studious-looking girl with glasses and a bad permanent, she seems to be just a face. “Impression that under the nun's habit there was no body, because I can't imagine it, even less imagine it as I feel mine now. Astonishment to think that nonetheless, it's the same one today.” Although the girl's face is detailed in the description, it's in fact the secrets (always veiled) of the body that preoccupy Ernaux in this narrative. The body's potential for shame and pleasure and its relation to writing emerge after the initial revelation as the driving subject of Shame (as it was also in the earlier book about her father's life and death, A Man's Place). The second photograph, and the one more important to Ernaux in the construction of her narrative, was taken almost three months after the disastrous day, at the end of the summer. The photograph is set in Biarritz, where the girl has gone with her father on an organized trip to Lourdes. Standing next to her father, the daughter is smiling. She looks thin, flat, because of the design of the skirt. “In this outfit,” Ernaux remarks, “I look like a little woman.”

Bent on retrieving the girl of that summer, the writer stares at the photographs, hoping, we might almost say to reincarnate herself. But at the same time, the founding dilemma remains intact. If the writer had never seen these photographs before, would she recognize herself? This is the autobiographer's torment: “Certainty that ‘this is me’; impossibility of recognizing myself, ‘it's not me.’” What is the solution? How can we become historians of our past lives faced with so much uncertainty? Here Ernaux engages the paradox, defined by theorist Philippe Lejeune, of the autobiographer who is condemned to write at the end of the twentieth century after the death of the author, not to say subject. “We indeed know,” Lejeune, famously sighs, “that the subject does not exist, we are not so dumb,” and yet. … There's something about the photograph that compels belief in a past, if not present truth. “That was,” says Barthes about the referent lurking in the photograph's aura. That was, therefore I am? The riff on the cogito is seductive, difficult to resist, even for the hardheaded.⁴ And yet. Ernaux reads the two photographs as bookends that hold the closing days of childhood innocence: the one, the good little Catholic girl, the other, the girl who no longer coincides with the child posing in good faith. The second photograph marks the beginning of the time defined by shame, the time after which shame forever becomes her.

Ernaux's strategy—since solution there is not beyond the practice of writing—is to act as though she were a historian marking out dates on a time line. To locate her twelve-year old notions of history, Ernaux gathers the material traces of that fatal year: a black and white postcard of Elizabeth II, a sewing kit, a postcard from the trip to Lourdes (a collective pilgrimage), a collection of postcards, her missal, and the score for a song, “Voyage à Cuba” [Miami Beach Rhumba], the words to which she can still conjure up as she writes in 1995. And then, following the impulse to flesh out the time line that could recalibrate individual experience with the world historical record, Ernaux goes to the archives to examine the newspaper her parents read to see what really happened that day. That this research is not a neutral activity is confirmed by the return of the dread invoked earlier and summarized in the phrase from the scene punctuating her consciousness, as if just turning the pages of that month would bring the madness on, like the recurrence of a disease. Although some of the events and personalities in the newspaper are still familiar, they have lost their effect, or they signify only as historical markers, emptied of affective power in the present tense: “That Stalin, Churchill, Eisenhower were as alive for me as Yeltsin, Clinton or Kohl are today seemed strange.” Thus, despite moments of recognition—the comic strip, the title of some movies—in the end Ernaux concludes that these documents of a regional or national life, the thousands of little facts contained in the pages of the newspaper, cannot touch, do not coexist on the same plane as the scene. “It alone was real.” She leaves the municipal archives suddenly aware that she had almost expected to find the scene reported in the local paper.

If the signs of the public record, the surround of a collective life, can't account for that reality, what can? For Ernaux, here and elsewhere, the crucial issue in any understanding of an individual or social life is the way the things of the world are divided up, not the things themselves. What matters is not, as she puts it, the number of refrigerators, but who possesses them. It's those distinctions that define the shape of a child's life by the power of social codes: what you don't have, what other little girls do. The writer's task is to find the words that define the boundary between what is normal (other people) and what crosses the line between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the everyday and the extreme.⁵ Finding the words to say it would not erase the problem of time and memory; impossible for the woman of 1995 to step back into the shoes of the girl of 1952 since that past has been reworked and transformed by the very memory of that scene and reshaped by the writer in the present tense. History and experience have already rescreened the event.

Ernaux here would seem to throw up her hands in face of the difficulty every autobiographer must grapple with: are you still what you once were? “There is no true memory of the self.” And since there is no true memory, she turns to another gamble of recovery, less historical and more anthropological. “To become, in a word, an ethnographer of myself.” Continuing to circle around the scene of the day, the day she thought she would go mad, Ernaux returns in memory to her village as a participant-observer committed to uncovering the protocols of archaic rituals and rites.

The bulk of the narrative that makes up Shame records and analyzes the codes and languages that contained the childhood world of her village. But over and over nothing in the ethnography of this provincial universe explains, Ernaux concludes, the scene of that Sunday in June, the day in Normandy after which nothing was—or ever could be—the same. The signifying status of this scene, Ernaux maintains, not only escapes psychoanalysis—eliminated at the start; it also seems to escape the class grids of social life that Ernaux typically relies on to make meaning. The scene remains an inexplicable, indelible stain.

Aftermath of the aftermath.

Much later in the narrative, we come to another scene of shame, which, in my reading, unsettles the foundational status of scene number one. This second scene (this is not literally the second scene in sequence since there are several others, minor, to be sure, that stud the narrative; shame, Ernaux remarks, is only “repetition and accumulation”) takes place three weeks after the domestic violence that opens the memoir. We move here from father to mother, from one extreme of bodily threat to another. It's a Sunday night and Annie returns home late after a school outing. All is dark and shuttered in her parents' home. Finally, the lights go on and her mother, still half-asleep, comes down to open the door to the store. With the lights behind her, she appears as if on a stage to an audience of the teacher and a few pupils wearing “a nightgown that was wrinkled and stained (we used to wipe ourselves with it, after urinating).” With a shock, the girl Annie D. sees her mother from the outside, through the gaze of the world of her private school classmates.

Shame? I confess that as a reader, the description of the soiled nightgown, capped with the throwaway parenthesis of the ethnographic detail—we used to wipe ourselves with it, after urinating—brought me up short. Earlier Ernaux revealed that she slept in the same room as her parents, as was the custom of the country, and shared a chamber pot with them, so in a way, this further detail should not have been shocking. “It's as though,” Ernaux writes, “through the exposure of this body gone slack without a girdle and the stained dress, that our true nature and our way of life were revealed.” Here the guidelines of social distinction give meaning to the epiphany: “For the first time, I had just seen my mother through the eyes of the private school.” Ernaux explains that had it been customary in her parents' world to wear a bathrobe, neither the nightgown nor the mother's body would have been revealed to the teacher and the other girls; the memory of the episode forgotten in the wash of personal history. But since it was not, and since there was no bathrobe to cloak maternal abjection, shame inevitably ensued. Suddenly, your parents are no longer your parents—in the way that parents tend to be for children until adolescent distance sets in—they have become other to you. Shame again here derives from an act of witness—seeing or being seen. Shame in this other sense is relational, not solitary; it depends on a the gaze of another (here the teacher and the girls) which affects your own vision. And yet, Ernaux maintains, we feel we are alone in our shame. This is one of shame's paradoxes; shame is both what's most private and most revealed. Had her mother only worn the bathrobe, the nightgown would have remained indoors, unseen; but of course, the body will always give off its secrets, no matter how much we try to cover it up.

If the traces of urine speak volumes about what makes the mother's body scary to a girl, especially a girl on the threshold of puberty, the nightgown talks, gives off messages, tells one kind of irremediable truth. I imagine myself in the daughter's place and share her shame, her embarrassment in front of her classmates, but am I with her or with the classmates whose distaste (stupefaction is her word) she imagines? Ernaux remarks in Exteriors, “‘I’ shames the reader.” We don't need to rehearse the heavily theorized mother/daughter entanglement to understand this moment. How many times did I cringe at the very notion of being seen—say in Junior High School—with my mother. But somehow, at the same time, the detail of the stained nightgown causes me to turn away, avert my eyes. I pull back and say no, not me, I don't want to be in this picture. This moment of disidentification, as I suggested earlier, is central to the experience of reading autobiography. For every response of identification, there is a moment of distancing, where readers, however captivated, reconstitute themselves, replace themselves in their own stories, becoming the outsider—here, the decent person who remains at a judging distance. (No, not in my village, as dissenting anthropologists like to say.) But Ernaux's scene of exposure goes further into the dark zones of these familiar positions by attaching the shame to the body's soil. In my high anxiety about what's revealed, I think fleetingly: she's gone too far, she's going to extremes. As soon as I make that judgment I realize something else: My class is showing, as clearly as the stains on the nightgown. And yet never in this memoir have I felt closer to what I take shame to mean, to the abjection that threatens even as it marks boundaries of identity. For me, the stained nightgown trumps the symbolic murder that itself stands in for the primal scene of parental sexuality.

Ernaux contends that this scene of maternal humiliation was incommensurate with the attempted murder, and yet in memory, she states, the second appears to be an extension of the first. After the trauma, everything seemed shameful; shame inhabited every moment. As a reader of the two scenes, three weeks apart, that defined the summer of 1952, I reverse the measure. This one feels more personally upsetting, more traumatic. Am I being perverse? What, on the face of it, could be more frightening than a murderous impulse captured in full swing? Do I feel this because fear and terror (minus the scythe, of course) are what I lived in my own family? Because the father's act was a threat that remained incomplete—almost a symbolic gesture, the wrath of paternal authority—and the mother's associated with the abject domains of the murky, maternal body?

It's hard for a daughter to separate from the mother; this we know. In A Woman's Story, Ernaux clearly images the passion of attachment and resentment that inheres in the mother/daughter plot. In a dream she had about her dead mother as she was writing the book about her, she sees herself “lying in the middle of a stream, caught between two currents. From my genitals, smooth again like a young girl's, from between my thighs, long tapering plants floated limply. The body they came from was not only mine, it was also my mother's.” But at the same time, Ernaux remembers her adolescent desire to separate in order to embark on her sexual life. “I experience the same feeling of depression I had when I was sixteen, and fleetingly, I confuse the woman who influenced me the most with an African mother pinning her daughter's arms behind her back while the village midwife slices off the girl's clitoris.” This mother/daughter boundary confusion underlines both scenes through the daughter's ambivalent connection. Perhaps this second scene feels closer to the readerly bone because it comes almost as an afterthought to the first, tormenting, one that sets the entire narrative in motion. The scene carries less authorial freight, but it hones in nevertheless on a body unprotected by constraint—the body at its most revealing, not naked but not veiled either. This body makes visible what remained hidden by the traumatic assault upon the mother in the basement. Now the shame is visible—like a wound—to the look of the outsider, the look she wishes as a writer to find unbearable. (In this chapter, Ernaux offers a dictionary of shame, aphorisms about what it means to suffer from it.)

It's on this question of extreme emotions that I return now to the defiant remarks on the jacket blurb that are drawn from the next to last page of the memoir; these lines return us to the present, the time of writing. It's the summer of 1996 and bombs are falling in Sarajevo. In the newspaper, these episodes are called “the shame that grips us.” A moral morass. In the face of this public sense of shame, Ernaux continues to dwell on the meaning of her personal, private—and now, as she writes—exposed shame. If the Sarajevo bombing is forgotten by newspaper readers the next day, these intimate horrors remain embedded in memory. History, with a capital H, fades; personal history remains.

But wait, we have not come to the end of Shame; the book is not closed yet. In the very last paragraph of the memoir, Ernaux suddenly casts all she has written in a new light. She returns to the photograph, the photograph of a girl with her father. She thinks about the fact that her father has now been dead for twenty-nine years. And she marks her distance from the girl in the picture: “I no longer have anything in common with the girl of the photograph, except for the scene of that Sunday in June that she is carrying in her head and that made me write this book because it never left me.” Our past selves continue in us; our autobiography is the story of how we live that continuity in discontinuous time. The girl of twelve and the writer of fifty-six are joined by the scene. Are they one and the same? Here, in the last sentence of the memoir, another radical break occurs. “It's only this scene that connects the two of us, that girl and myself, because orgasm, in which I experience myself as myself the most fully, only came two years later.” What separates the writer from her childhood self is an experience of sexuality she could only guess at as a maturing girl. If the self born out of extreme sexual pleasure—orgasm—is the source of permanent identity, does sexuality dislodge class as a defining, foundational knowledge?

Here, I can only venture out on the limb of interpretation, following the connection Ernaux implicitly makes between the scene in the cellar and the orgasm to come. What separates Ernaux the writer from “la petite D.” is another intense experience that shatters categories: sexual bliss. Seen this way, Ernaux places the burgeoning of her own sexuality under the sign of an unconscious logic that exists in but also beyond class. Perhaps there is shame to come—or the refusal of it in sexual experience. In A Man's Place, a book also structured by the dynamics of shame, Ernaux briefly describes her parents' affective relations, saying that her mother was “always ashamed of love.” She explains that while in her presence her father, she came to understand as she was growing up, would “make sexual allusions” to her mother and hum tunes like Parlez-moi d'amour to convey his meaning; her mother would sing too, sometimes at the top of her lungs. In Shame, Ernaux is demonstrably proud of her sexual curiosity—her lack of shame; she describes her fascination with the older girls in school, looking for signs of sanitary napkins; these are the ones she seeks out “to learn about sexual things.” She doesn't ask her mother.

The book Shame closes, as Ernaux's work often does, on this always difficult question of what belongs to the past, what to the present, on the work that memory does keeping the world of childhood alive, work done always from another scene, from a geography removed from the scenes of childhood. Can a writer stop going back? What's there to gain in the return? Or lose?

Let me mention just briefly another piece of the family memoir that Ernaux published in 1997, “I Remain in Darkness” [“Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit”] for some glimpses of an answer. This short work is a series of diary entries written during her mother's illness and disintegration, the subject of the 1988 memoir A Woman's Story. In the preface to the diary pages, Ernaux explains that she did not reread these pages during the time she was writing the memoir. She thought she would never publish the diary entries, wanting perhaps to leave the more distanced account of the later work as her final word on her mother's story, but then decides—at the time of publishing Shame—that she now believes that the integrity and coherence of a work should be deliberately threatened—“mises en danger”—whenever possible. Publishing what was not meant to meet the public eye is a way of courting that danger.

In yet another publishing venue of this same literary season, in the 1996 winter number of Philippe Sollers's journal L'Infini, Ernaux published an autobiographical piece called “Fragments autour de Philippe V.” (Phillippe V. is also the dedicatee of Shame.) The frankly erotic character of the fragments, which describe Ernaux's first and autobiographically recent sexual encounter with a young man, a student, did not come as a complete surprise to Ernaux's readers, in particular to those of Simple Passion [Passion simple (1991)], a narrative that recounts the story of a French woman's passionate affair with a married man, “A.,” who lives somewhere in Eastern Europe and that begins with the description of an X-rated movie. It's a porn flick that turned up on television one evening about the encounter between two sexes (represented by their genitalia) of which the crowning moment classically is the money shot, the sight of ejaculation that proves the sex is “real.” This woman writes in the aftermath of the affair, in the first person. After providing the basic details of the movie shots, Ernaux meditates on the surprising fact that “it's only now that it has become possible to see the two sexes join together, and the [emergence of] sperm—something that one couldn't watch without almost dying, now as easy to witness as a handshake.” For Ernaux this spectacle has its importance for writing. “It seems to me,” she concludes, “that writing should aim at this, the impression provoked by the scene of the sexual act, the anguish and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgment.” (You may hear in these lines the elements of a connection to the representation of the second violent scene in Shame—in particular the sense of “stupefaction” produced by the sight of the private suddenly made public: the soiled traces of the mother's body and fluids. But in Shame, moral judgment is not suspended; the shock translates immediately into locatable class terms.) What's important here in Simple Passion is the link established between the effects that writing can produce and the effects of witnessing a sexual act. Or more precisely, the desire for writing to enact a form of suspension: that in the time of reading you enter the scene. You see the sperm, you see the arc of the scythe. You catch your breath, but do you suspend judgment?

“Fragments” narrates the early stages of another sexual passion. What's crucial here is the inaugural moment when Ernaux acts on her desire, makes the first move—or rather the first move that interrupts polite conversation, the physical act that sparks the explosion of sexual passion. The woman gets up and passes her hand through the young man's hair. It's a deliberate gesture. The next day—this text is largely though not entirely elliptical—Ernaux reviews the scenes of the previous night and reflects upon the importance of her gesture, of having started something: “I thought it was of the same nature as that of intervening in the world, of beginning a story. And I felt that for a woman, the freedom to write without shame goes with that of being the first to touch, with desire, the body of a man.” What comes first? Touching a man's body or putting the first marks of writing on a page? What would it mean for a woman to write freely? Without shame. This desire for a kind of freedom also releases the writing of the narrative Shame, in which the repressed scene between the father and the mother is brought out of the shadow and into the domain of published words. What, Ernaux asks, as did Sade, in the epigraph to Simple Passion, is the relation between sex and writing? And more specifically between an older woman and a much younger man.

In a series of short paragraphs that come to embody that relation, Ernaux describes an experiment in which the couple makes love on a sheet of drawing paper to see what kind of painting would emerge from the mixture of his sperm and her menstrual blood. It was his idea; the two are pleased with the result. The man frames the first “drawing” and hangs it in his room. Over the next few months, they repeat the performance, which gave them the impression that sexual pleasure could have a kind of permanence, that “all was not over with orgasm, that a trace would remain—the date and hour recorded on the sheet of paper—something like a work of art.” The fragments conclude with a statement that is also a poetics: “Write and make love. I feel that there is an essential link between the two. I can't explain it, but only retranscribe the moments where this appears to me as a kind of obvious truth.” The paper written by the body, as Barthes might say, paper bodies—but also fleshy bodies that emit fluids, that leave indelible traces, like those on the nightgown, or on the sheets. On sheets of paper, the writing of Ernaux's poetics bodies forth, like a reenactment of the moment in which a sexual passion demands and requires expression. This writing produces the trace of pleasure, pleasure's document, the bodily signature, acts of presence marked in historical time: like the summer of 1952, or that moment in 1954 when Annie discovered orgasm.

In 1997, Philippe V. signs his name—Philippe Vilain—to a novel that tells the story whose beginning Ernaux evoked briefly in print in “Fragments.” Published in Philippe Sollers's collection called L'Infini, which is housed at Gallimard, Ernaux's publisher, L'Etreinte [The Embrace] is an “autofiction” that recounts the passion of a young man who has an affair with a woman, he does not fail to note, old enough to be his mother, a well-known writer named by her initials, A. E. The affair ends badly when the young man, a student, becomes insanely jealous of the lover, “A.,” with whom Ernaux lived an intense affair revealed in Simple Passion. Vilain's novel was well reviewed in Le Monde and excoriated in Le Nouvel Observateur.

Are we or are we not in the same story that Ernaux tells in “Fragments”? Within the night of seduction, at least, these crucial moves belong to a shared narrative. In fact there are other particulars of this founding encounter that also mesh through the actual repeated language, and the sequence of actions and gestures. The pronouns change, of course, and mark the difference in perspective that an encounter between a man and a woman—or any two people entering a relation—necessarily entails. But there's an important difference in the young writer's point of departure. Part of his frame for that evening is Ernaux's first novel, Les armoires vides [Cleaned Out]; reading that book brings Phillippe V. to make the move that in turn leads toward the sexual connection that now hangs between the two actors. He has read her novels; she has read his letters. He perceives, he writes in an early letter, in the heroine's difficulties with her parents and in the shame she sometimes felt about them, a deep connection to his own life. This identification is precisely the other side of the projected disgust of readers whose gaze she will not want to endure.

What ties these three pieces together is the entwining of writing and danger, of a danger in turn bound to the exposure of uncontainable bodily acts, and secretions. As you tell the secrets of others and violate family codes, you separate yourself from their power over you, even as you return to them in memory. In French, as in English, there is a saying about what should remain private, in the family: “Il faut laver son linge en famille.” In English we are exhorted not to wash our dirty laundry in public. I can't help feeling that the outed nightgown—part of the various meanings of “linge” is precisely the kind of dirty laundry meant to remain hidden from view, meant to remain indoors, protected by a bathrobe, Like many family memoirists, Ernaux knows this and yet daringly resists the maxim. It's as though you have to get your dirty little secrets out, out of your system and onto the page, into the public space, in order to integrate the past into present writing.

In autobiography, the very acts—performed and witnessed—that might seem to beg not to be revealed are the very ones that produce writing. Thus the inaugural trauma of the scene in the basement is transformed into a shareable narrative when finally put into words; secret guilt becomes public shame, and shame becomes Shame. Ernaux's memoir project, in its deceptively simple language, gives voice to the scenes that never cease to haunt us, readers attracted in this fin de siècle, to the abyss of memory, the deep pool of reflection in which we furtively look to find our darker selves. “‘I’ shames the reader,” Ernaux maintains in Exteriors. Should we conclude that we enjoy being shamed?

What I've called memory stains are permanent traces of what we might hopelessly wish to forget: the screens of the primal scene, the abject forms of the maternal body, but also what we wish to preserve: the erotic performance of fluids (in a weird echo of maternal excretions), traced in the place of words on a sheet of paper. Publishing “Fragments” rescues the bodily acts that might otherwise vanish unless preserved on a page. Consigning to paper the scenes that threatened to obliterate you is to try as an adult to repair the irreparable in a child's past.

Can an auto/biographical writer go too far to get there? Rousseau didn't think so.

Notes

1. Shame has been translated by Tanya Leslie. I've preferred to provide my own translations, less graceful and more literal, although I have also consulted hers. For this reason I will not include page numbers, which could confuse readers looking for the exact passage.

2. On these and other issues, I refer the reader to Lyn Thomas's new and illuminating study, Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience. Her chapters 4 and 7 are particularly relevant to this essay. This excellent book, the first on Ernaux in English, is both an introduction and a work of theoretical analysis.

3. John Eakin's How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves gives a fascinating account of what neuroscience is discovering about how memory works that provides new ways of understanding the process of memory itself.

4. On the complexity of the debates around the photograph and the detail of these references, see Jay Prosser's essay in this volume, and also Marianne Hirsch's study, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory.

5. On the relation of the everyday to the extreme in a collective experience, see Michael Rothberg's essay in this volume.

Works Cited

Améry, Jean. “Torture.” At the Mind's Limits. Trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. New York: Schocken, 1986.

Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999.

Ernaux, Annie. Exteriors. Trans. Tanya Leslie. New York: Seven Stories, 1996.

———. “I Remain in Darkness.” Trans. Tanya Leslie. New York: Seven Stories, 1999.

———. “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit.” Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

———. La honte. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

———. La place. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.

———. Le journal du dehors. Paris: Gallimard, 1993.

———. Les armoires vides. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.

———. A Man's Place. Trans. Tanya Leslie. New York: Seven Stories, 1996

———. Passion simple, Paris: Gallimard, 1992.

———. Shame. Trans. Tanya Leslie. New York: Seven Stories, 1998.

———. Simple Passion. Trans. Tanya Leslie. New York: Seven Stories, 1993.

———. Une femme. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.

———. A Woman's Story. Trans. Tanya Leslie. New York: Seven, 1990.

Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso, 1995.

Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota, 1989.

Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

Thomas, Lyn. Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience. Oxford: Berg, 1999.

Vilain, Philippe. L'étreinte. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.