Stillborn
Reviewing Annie Ernaux’s abortion memoir.

By Emmy Chang, NR Associate Editor.
November 3-4, 2001

Happening, by Annie Ernaux, trans. Tanya Leslie (Seven Stories Press, 95 pp., $18.95).

he word "abort" isn't actually used until p. 18 of this 95-page memoir; "abortion" debuts three pages later. Which is well in keeping with the genre: From The Choices We Made to NARAL, abortion advocates hammer eagerly and endlessly on the silence that was women's lot, in the Bad Old Days before Roe and Stenberg. Ernaux herself was 23 when, in 1963, her period stopped during a tepid affair in Bordeaux. "This thing had no place in language," she writes; in her diary of the time, she used the word "pregnant" only once.

Things have changed, of course. Ernaux can tell her story freely now, though she acknowledges that it "may […] be branded as distasteful."

Which it's actually not. In fact, Happening is convincingly written, with moments of real immediacy. (In this book, wryly: "My ass had caught up with me." In the diary, writing of the father, an indignationless: "He's leaving me to cope on my own.") The three months from conception to termination are rendered in a flat, stark prose anchored in time by references to JFK, "If I Had a Hammer," The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Ernaux conveys especially well the surreality and shame of her position — that of a first-generation intellectual foolhardy enough to have succumbed to the distinctly low-class affliction of getting knocked up.

I attended literature and sociology classes, I ate in the university canteen, I drank coffee twice a day at La Faluche, the students' hangout. Yet I was living in a different world. There were the other girls, with their empty bellies, and there was me.

We follow her through a failed attempt with a knitting needle, and visits to two doctors: "Love children are the most beautiful of all," says one brightly; the other cannily prescribes shots that turn out to be for preventing miscarriage. A (married) acquaintance, to whom she goes for help, tries to seduce her.

The rest of the story is familiar. She finds an illegal abortionist, expels the fetus "like a grenade," flushes. She's hospitalized but recovers, and visiting a church, recalls, "I felt bathed in a halo of light and for [the priest] I was a criminal. […] I was through with religion." For years, Ernaux would celebrate the anniversary of her abortion.

So far, so good. The strangeness only comes when she explains why she is writing this book, or at least writing it this way. Her title, Évènement, is from Michel Leiris — "I wish for two things: / that happening turn to writing. / And that writing be happening." — and that desire suffuses the book:

[T]hese things happened to me so that I might recount them. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.

And while most people of course don't abort with the thought that, 40 years later, they may be able to turn it into a book — that, surely, is a French prerogative — Ernaux does draw a disturbing, because overt, parallel between the book she carried to term, and the child she didn't. It is her stated goal to validate her experience by making from it a thing that will last forever (or at least stay in print). Of course, artists have laid claim to godlike powers at least since Arachne; and not irrationally so, since every creative act echoes the primordial one. But it's one thing to say artistic creation feels like childbirth — quite another to say it surpasses it.

Frederica Mathewes-Green has written that "if we miraculously padlocked all the abortion clinics tomorrow […] all we'd have is women banging on the locked doors and crying." The society of Happening — which is luridly fascinated by crisis pregnancies, but offers only stigma, not help — cannot stand. But do we truly want the Ernaux alternative, the one we're living today? By its teachings, abortion is "the mechanism that wipes out disaster," and the result of a pregnancy test analogous to the result of an AIDS test (p. 10). By its teachings, we are to "liberate" women so that they may say, with Ernaux, "When I made love and climaxed, I felt that my body was basically no different from that of a man." By its teachings, we are expected to be sufficiently mature, sufficiently intellectual, to hold a literary life to be more sanctified than a human one.

Ernaux could hardly be said to romanticize abortion — but surely she deromanticizes birth. Happening shows, albeit unwittingly, that as a culture we cannot celebrate both.