Happening by Annie Ernaux

A Book Review

Photo by PEYNE François on Unsplash

"Now I know that this ordeal and this sacrifice were necessary for me to want to have children. To accept the turmoil of reproduction inside my body and, in turn, to let the coming generations pass through me." So says the narrator of this devastating short little book near its end. What is the 'ordeal' and the 'sacrifice'? Why has the narrator chosen these particular words to reflect on a 'happening' of the past, the particular past of 1964 when the narrator is a college student in Rouen and happens to get pregnant? Well, the answer is probably obvious by now. The 'ordeal' is pregnancy and its termination by abortion, and the sacrifice is ... what exactly? Is it the foetus? Is it innocence? Is it the woman's body? Is it her conscience?

In the still deeply Catholic world of 1960's France, to have an abortion was not only against the law, but also a sin. How did the soul of the 23 year old narrator -- presumably Ernaux herself -- navigate this 'happening' in her past life? She wrote about it in snippets at the time in a diary which she recovers later to excavate more deeply the details of things she remembers only as fragments; for example, she writes of the jaunty hit tune of the year -- Dominique -- that is playing while she wanders through Rouen looking for a doctor, or the snowy mountains of Le Mont-Dore where she goes skiing on her winter break with the man who had earlier impregnated her. Ernaux is conscious of the fact that she is 'narrating' past events and at one point, intrudes, to say: 'I feel that this narrative is dragging me along in a direction I have not chosen, proceeding along the inescapable road of fatality. I must resist the urge to rush through these days and weeks, and attempt to convey the unbearable sluggishness of that period as well as the feeling of numbness that characterizes dreams, resorting to all the means at my disposal -- attention to detail, use of a descriptive past tense, analysis of events.' Masterly in identifying what makes for good writing, she is aware of how the narrative is also in control of her and makes demands of her as a writer that she must counteract; I thought this was a brilliant observation and made note of it in my own journal about writing.

The word 'guilt' or 'guilty' appear infrequently in the book and the word 'abortion' itself is used sparingly. The word 'shame' is used on occasion. The society Ernaux depicts here is hypocritically and chauvinistically male, hierarchical and callous. It is an impossible world she lives in to have an abortion and devastatingly lonely, for who will help her? Who will be a friend? Who understands? All the other young women around her suddenly appear girlish and silly, and the men unsympathetic and insufferable. And yet there are the angels -- the grim middle-aged woman in a small alleyway apartment in Paris who does the procedure for her -- twice -- and O. whom the narrator describes as a 'nagging little bore' from a 'bourgeoise Catholic upbringing' who is with her in the dark moments when the foetus is expelled.

For Ernaux, the fact that abortion is now legalized and the procedure medically safe, does not discount her need to tell this story:

The fact that my personal experience of abortion, i.e. clandestinity, is a thing of the past does not seem a good enough reason to dismiss it. Paradoxically, when a new law abolishing discrimination is passed, former victims tend to remain silent on the grounds that "now it's all over." So what went on is surrounded by the same veil of secrecy as before. Today abortion is no longer outlawed and this is precisely why I can afford to stay clear of the social views and inevitably stark formulas of the rebel Seventies -- "abuse against women" -- and face the reality of this unforgettable event.

For Ernaux, it is the unforgettable nature of this 'happening' that is the crucial reason for its writing. It has haunted the writer and must now be told in accordance to the epigraphs that appear at the beginning of the book:

I wish for two things: that happening turn to writing. And that writing be happening. (Michael Leiris)

I wonder if memory is not simply a question of following things through to the end. (Yuko Tsushima)