1.
Revising a draft essay and thinking about Annie Ernaux’s writing, cutting thousands of words (as usual), I return to her commitment to indeterminacy and its refusal to grant absolution. Her texts never elide the affect of shame and abjection on narrative form. Shame touches everything. Overcoming, in Ernaux, is the arc of narrative bullshit. There is no redemption, no salvation: only the dead statues that surround her in the cathedral she revisited after her abortion.
As an artistic mode, the pieta hovers over the speaker’s assertion of "fearless insight" which arises "from the arid patch of facts." Secular epiphany and hagiographic-femme feels distant from what the author intends to give us. But I use my "we" loosely: I use it and lose it the way a loose woman loses her voice.
What is at stake for Annie Ernaux as a writer? I ask this dull, unshattering question in order to procure permission for writing about my own Annie, rather than presenting the definitive one. The request for permission here is merely rhetorical, since I will write my own Annie regardless in the hopes that this Annie will enable me to answer other questions presented by her writing. Among these questions: What is at stake for Annie as a character in each of her novelizations? And what is at stake for her readers, particularly the women she hoped would be part of her audience?
2.
Can the verb "transcend" be applied in any shape or formality to this labor, this writing, this life. Should I punctuate myself appropriately by posturing this as a question.
And if I don’t . . .
3.
There are so many Annies, I think again, as dusk descends on Birmingham, Alabama; the horizon pukes up the viscous pinks of its pollution. A friend with three cars tells me he loves Annie Ernaux for her sparsity. "She reminds me of a female Hemingway," he ventures. And I can see how this might be true for him. Just as I can see how Tobi Haslett’s brilliant, deBordian Annie might give us a reading in which each of Ernaux's books presents "the charge" to see and do something, to "rifle through the particulars so you can synthesize and thus transcend them."
I can visualize the transcendent scenario. I can imagine there is a sense in which the male-identifying critics have, so to speak, nailed it.
The pink horizon shrieks idiotically, loosening its skirts near the coal-fired power plant. It remains at the periphery of my vision when marveling over the way criticism has enabled readers to believe we can ‘read the same’ book, or live in the same world. Being that shadow of a shade who is less sure of the ground she is standing on, less certain of her "position" on the literary terrain, so to speak, I note the shame of this Birmingham skylines that passes for sunset—- a shame that often takes refuge behind soporifics that purport to overcome or rise above what exists.
But the sky cannot rise above the coal-power that poisons it. There is no overcoming. No greenwash can scrub this enough for a redemption.
4.
In 1995, four years after the publication of Simple Passion, French author Alain Gerard published Madame, C’est A Vous Que J’Ecris, a novel that responded to Ernaux's from the perspective of the mysterious, married lover. Gerard chronicles the affair as he saw it.
Where Ernaux's speaker applies "ecriture plat" or the flat affect in writing, the stylistic tone borrowed from reportage, Gerard's speaker emerges from indignation, and a sense of having been wrong. To Eranux's refusal of moral judgment, Gerard brings moralization, emasculation, and betrayal of romantic love.
Simple Passion focuses on the writing subject, the woman’s hunger for the absent lover, and the lover, who has made all the more interesting in his absence. Annie knows this. And by protecting the identity of her married lover, she is also protecting the reader from the other banality of his personality. By devoting so much space to describing the waiting, providing us with a phenomenology of washing herself wait for this man, Annie writes into desire. The anticipation of the lover is superior to the Love.
As for Betrayal, I think of it as the moment when we discover that we don't ‘know’ the Other. The one we love is a stranger to us. Only the stranger remains fascinating. The stranger is the part we want to keep as well as the part we can't believe. While desire craves a stranger, the relational parameters require maintaining a firm boundary between the ordinary portions of our life.
Ernaux keeps her affair secret from her sons and friends. As an event, her relationship with A. never locates itself in the mundane. A. appears powerful because his life and career determine when they can meet, but that is his only power, really. He is a sexual object. And a sexual object is, ultimately, an asexual one.
The nineteenth century epistolary novel emphasized the formal conventions of a polite, Victorian femininity. In this form, how much a woman knew was constantly renegotiated with respect to how well she knew her place, and how well she performed obsequiousness. The feminine epistle spoke earnestly, prioritizing feelings and aesthetic responses over claims to intellectual discovery. In a brilliant, embittered move, Gerard deploys the gender-coded femininity of the epistolary genre to complicate A.'s character while also challenging gender’s connection in the form of the letter. In comparison to Gerard’s entreaties, Ernaux's reportage seems evasive, overly neutral, and possibly spiked by guile.
Gerard’s A. begins by contesting Ernaux's claim that the novel is not a betrayal. "Nous nous étions promis de ne jamais rien livrer de notre secret," he writes. (We promised ourselves that we would never book anything of our secret.) After portraying her lover as a sex object, Ernaux insults his manhood by narrowing it to his dangling organ. "Choosing to forget that a man isn’t reduced, even if he sometimes fears it, to that oblong protuberance that adorns statues, silencing the crudest part of our nature, you weakened it," A. accuses.
The charge of emasculation brings to mind the Hermes— those roadside gods associated with Roman decadence—and the dream I keep having of a small classroom with pegs along a wall intended for coats and backpacks, except that each peg is a wooden penis, and the girls are aware that their clothing, their school bags, their lunch, sacks, all hang from this oblong protuberance on the wall.
It goes without saying that the fear of emasculation is closely related to the sort of cultural sensitivity the penis has come to expect. Girls are socialized to protect the penis from knees, elbows, sharp bumps, teeth, insults, withering words, insecurity, disapproval, and the wiles of the cocktease. What the penis expects, the penis must get. Surely there is nothing more serious than a disappointed penis given the power its owner exercises.
Gerard's A. wanted "a story" but what he got was a cheap, pornographic voyeurism with no emotional depth and no spiritual entanglement. He refuses to accept that this is her version of desire: she is either lying or trying to hurt him. He cannot imagine that the book about him is finished. It would have been more feminine if she'd revealed him and exposed the truth of his marriage, rather than foreground her own salacious diddling in the feminine imaginary.
5.
Now I digress in Paris, where Roland Barthes introduced Michel Foucault to Pierre Klossowski around 1963. Barthes observed that both men had a thing for Nietszche's eternal return.
In 1947, Pierre Klossowski married Denise Marie Roberte Morin Sinclaire, a war widow who had been deported to Ravensbrück as a result of her Resistance activities. Setting the suspended vocation aside, all of his future work was to be "dominated by and dedicated to her haunting beauty," as David Macey wrote in The Lives of Michel Foucault (Verso Books).
Denise is the Roberte of Klossowski's drawings and novels. Denise is the one who led his hand to the large-scale drawing graphite and color-pencil sketches executed painstakingly on paper. In Macey’s words:
Klossowski's novels and drawings make up an imaginary world in which erotic, religious and philosophical themes merge, and, being a self-confessed monomaniac, he has little interest in anything outside that world. Although his work — and especially the trilogy known as Les Lois de l'hospitalité — is sometimes dismissed as misogynist and even pornographic, he insists that it has a mystical content and belongs to a gnostic tradition. Maurice Blanchot endorsed Klossowski's claims when he described his writings as "a mixture of erotic austerity and theological debauchery". Both the novels and the drawings are sequences of scenes, understood in the theatrical sense of that term, and of humiliating encounters between Roberte and characters from a threatening commedia dell'arte. Roberte becomes an object of exchange, circulating endlessly in an erotic economy. She is raped and assaulted, is seduced and seduces, and takes on many different identities but remains unpossessed, inviolable, it being the author's conviction that the deepest level of individuality is a core which is both non-communicable and non-exchangeable. Like the tableaux vivants imagined and staged by de Sade's libertines, Klossowski's words and images betray an obsession with representation itself: representations of plays, of drawings, of drawings of scenes from plays, books about books. They are a theater of simulacra in which everything is represented, and nothing is real. The theatrical scenes that make up the trilogy, in particular, originated in planned drawings that were not actually executed.
Klossowski locates his "theater of simulacra" in the era of ancient Roman decadence, where so-called "simulacra" and simulated effigies of the gods lined the avenues. The presence of the gods on the streets testified to their material existence but also served as a reminder to citizens that worship was required. This was the time of the roadside Herms. What drew Klossowski to these simulacra was their capacity to "sexually determine the divinities they represented, as David Macey explains in his biography of Foucault: "The indeterminacy of their essence was replaced by a materialization, which was that of a sexuality. Gradually, the classical reference became combined with a meditation upon the nature of icons, and the simulacrum is finally defined as constituting the sign of an instantaneous state and cannot establish an exchange between one mind and another, nor permit the transmission of one thought to another... The simulacrum has the advantage of not purporting to fix what it represents or says of an experience; far from precluding it, it implies contradiction."
Michel Foucault’s interest in hermeneutics should be mentioned here, for Foucault discovered a link between the simulacrum and the demon stalking Nietzsche's Gay Science in one of Klossowski's essays. “This is the demon who says that everything in your life... will return to you, all in the same succession and sequence',” Macey observes:
Nietzsche then asks: 'Would you not throw yourself down and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine"?
The ambiguity of the demon-god is also that of the sign-simulacrum known as Roberte. For Klossowski, language is an unstable medium in which startling transformations can occur. It is also closely related to the body: Roberte is a word made flesh and her body is of a flesh made of words.
The body-language relationship generates texts which must have appealed greatly to Foucault's own enjoyment of wordplay. In Roberte ce soir, for example, erotic encounters can be couched in the language of Thomist theology, as when Roberte is penetrated by the sed contra of a colossus while she stimulates her own quid est to orgasm.
In addition to a shared obsession with Nietzsche, Foucault and Klossowski also shared a fascination with de Sade. Apart from Blanchot's Sade et Lautréamont, Klossowski's Sade, My Neighbor was one of the first devoted studies of the Marquis. Klossowski read Histoire de la folie intently (it’s not clear that Foucault had read it prior to reading Klossowski’s essay). Gilles Deleuze, who was Klossowski's friend, intimated that Klossowski's work was compelling for a man who resisted the lure of self-definition. All of Klossowski's writing “strives towards a single goal: ensuring the loss of personal identity, dissolving the ego; that is the splendid trophy that Klossowski's characters bring back from a journey to the edge of madness," to quote Deleuze via Macey.