It’s an odyssey from doctor’s office to doctor’s office. Concerned, stern faces of the doctors, sometimes stupid sayings. Nobody wants to help the young student in Rouen, abortions are illegal in France in the early 1960s. Finally Annie Ernaux gets the address of an “angel maker”: Madame P.-R., an elderly nurse in the 17th arrondissement of Paris.
Her method: She inserts a probe into the woman’s cervix, which causes a miscarriage after a short time. For the 23-year-old who got pregnant unintentionally, the last chance.
Annie Ernaux, born 1940 as a working-class child in Normandy, is a master of self-exploration. She has written several auto-fictional books and ruthlessly dissected her family. In doing so, she has repeatedly asked the “class question”, addressing her own origins, like Édouard Louis or the sociologist Didier Eribon. The Frenchwoman is now popular with us too, and in recent years her books have gradually come out in German.
The new book, “The Event”, (from the French by Sonja Finck, Suhrkamp Verlag, 104 pages, € 18.) Already published in France in 2000, it is special in that it is not the story of your mother or father that is in the foreground, but of yourself – with a traumatic event that has left its mark on the present day. It is also special that Ernaux places her pregnancy in connection with her origin.
Chronicler of her life
A young woman from the provinces who was the first in the family to study. Who has emancipated and removed herself from the family through her education. She is pregnant now, and it is clear that she does not want to have a family at this point. As an unmarried pregnant woman, she has the feeling of suddenly falling back into the precariat: “In sex, my origins caught up with me, and what grew inside me was, so to speak, the failure of my social advancement.”
It is important to avoid this failure. When the nurse inserts the tube, young Annie is in great pain. The miscarriage just doesn’t happen. So the student has to go back to Paris to undergo the procedure again. A miscarriage then occurs in the student residence in Rouen. In the process, she loses so much blood that she has to go to the hospital – now Ernaux has finally lost control of her body.
When the author describes all the details of her miscarriage, from cutting the umbilical cord to the flow of blood to throwing the fetus in the toilet bowl, it is difficult to bear while reading. But as in her other autofictional books, she writes soberly and precisely. Ernaux is a disinterested chronicler of her life, it is not for nothing that she describes herself as “her own ethnologist”.
It is as if Ernaux had filtered out all unnecessary emotions from her text. Part of the sparse style is that she reduces the names of her protagonists to their initial letters. The brief calendar entries from back then also appear aloof from the protocol, for example: “A short, uneventful bleeding. Enough to fool my mother. “
Ernaux wrote the book in 1999
The urgency that Annie Ernaux achieves with her art of condensation is also reflected in the excellent translation by Sonja Finck.
The condensation is not just a narrative strategy, by the way, it corresponds to the lifestyle of the student at the time: The weeks of pregnancy from October to January have a strange intensity for her, she feels as if she has suddenly dropped out of time, out of her normal life, there is a feeling of strangeness towards other people, towards the other fixed points of their everyday life.
So the curse of loneliness lies over pregnancy. There is the friend, the parent of the child, with whom she is loosely connected and who is not at her side emotionally.
There are the parents to whom she dares not confess what happened. Only a few fellow students know about pregnancy, some are “fascinated”, for them it’s all “an exciting story with an uncertain outcome”.
In addition to the chronological report on “The Event”, there is a second level in the narrow book: self-reflection. Ernaux wrote her book in 1999, around 35 years after her pregnancy. “I don’t want to do in this text what I haven’t done in real life or only very rarely, screaming and crying. Instead, stay close to the feeling of a steadily flowing unhappiness, “she writes. A kind of self-absolution to justify her withdrawn tone.
Why did Annie Ernaux, who later became the mother of two sons, write this book in the first place, why did she share her intimate experience with the public? Ernaux answers the question herself. It is important to her not to “disguise the reality of women”, she does not want to make herself “an accomplice to male rule over the world”.
There’s another reason for this book, and it’s a lot more personal. After it is over, after she has survived the scraping in the clinic, Ernaux feels something like pride “to have gone to a place where others would never venture”. In her room in the dormitory she hears Bach’s St. John Passion. And suddenly feels relieved, she is no longer alone with her pain. In this way, in writing, she can transform the terrible past into a personal victory. And redeem yourself with it.
