I've been wanting to explore more of Ernaux's writing since reading her extraordinary book “The Years” last year which so creatively blended autobiographical narrative with social commentary. Her slender book “Happening” is in a similar vein but about a specific period of her history. In 1963 Ernaux was twenty three years old, single and pregnant. She desperately wanted to terminate the pregnancy because of the social shame it'd bring to her family and the limitations it'd impose on her early life. Since abortion was illegal at that time she had to resort to other means. She describes the mindset of the time: “As was often the case, you couldn't tell whether abortion was banned because it was wrong or wrong because it was banned. People judged according to the law, they didn't judge the law.” For many years she didn't discuss this period from her past, but in this book she describes her extremely difficult experiences while also meditating on the process of grappling with her memories. In this she makes a short, impactful statement about changing times and the challenges young women face in particular.
It's one thing to read about a period of history in a specific location where abortion was illegal but it's quite different to read about an individual's own experiences. Part of the reason it took her so long to write about this was that it was a subject not often discussed in society, but Ernaux maintains her conviction that “any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled. There is no such thing as a lesser truth.” Something which makes Ernaux's story so impactful are her feelings of ambiguity about her experiences – not that she didn't make the right choice but that she's still feeling through what this incident meant in her life and she's still trying to unravel why the process of getting an abortion was so difficult. For instance, she was treated very brusquely in the hospital and she eventually understands that this is because they believed she was working class rather than a university student. As with many social taboos, the process of overcoming obstacles and avoiding the attendant feelings of shame are made more difficult for poorer and more marginalized members of society.
She marks her experiences as a definitive point of transition in her life and what I found most moving were the melancholy images which have been pressed into her memories. The daily sense of fear and gloom she felt at the time resurfaces so sharply when recalling a small exchange or a physical object from the past. She describes how “Above all I wish to capture the impression of a steady flow of unhappiness, conveyed by a pharmacist's inquisitive attitude or the sight of a hairbrush by a steaming basin of water.” This narrative seems to be a way of disentangling the continuing effects of trauma. There's a straightforward honesty to Ernaux's writing I find so refreshing because she so openly discusses her process of composing her history and subject matter while she writes it. With some other writers this might seem too self-conscious but with Ernaux it takes on a meaningful clarity. She states how “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.” As with any great writer, she manages to do just this turning the extremely personal into something which has universal meaning.
