The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Shame by Annie Ernaux
Robert Buckeye

Annie Ernaux. Shame. Trans. Tanya Leslie. Seven Stories, 1998. 111 pp. $16.95.

Each book of Annie Ernaux’s is the same book, each an effort to explain, resolve and understand the original sin; that she was encouraged by her working-class parents to go further in school than they did so that she might have opportunities they did not; and that the result of her education was to drive a wedge between their lives and hers.

In Shame, her most recent exploration of the stigma she bears, she writes of the summer of 1952 when she was twelve years old, and dwells on three events: the Sunday her father tried to murder her mother; the trip she took with her father on a pilgrimage to Lourdes to fulfill a promise to her mother; and the onset of puberty. Her first reaction to her father’s act that Sunday had been, “You’ll breathe disaster on me,” and looking back on it forty-five years later, she sees it to be both a seminal event in her development as a writer and the enduring mark of her shame. (“We stopped being decent people.”) On the trip to Lourdes, she sees both her father and herself as others see them and experiences, for the first time, the damaging effects of class. The shame she feels at the onset of puberty culminates in the central event of her first book, Cleaned Out, an abortion she has in college. “Let me be cleaned out, through and through, freed from all that holds me back,” she ends that book, but she can never be freed, finally, from what holds her back because it will always be part of her. If her writing is a means of closing the wound, it merely serves to keep it open.

It has been the particular strength and virtue of her writing to refuse to make this story a story; to make it literature would be to falsify it, distance ourselves from it, give it a drama it does not have. Ernaux insists it can only be what it is. In Shame she continues to chip away at the consoling and romanticizing effects of narrative. Surely the effects of what Richard Sennett refers to as the hidden injuries of class, must have been present in the very fabric of the life of her neighborhood, and she picks over the detritus of habit, language, dress, behavior, and practice in school, at home, church to find what must have been there that she missed. “The values of any civilization,” Leo Frobenius writes, “go down to its least details.” Ernaux does not turn away from them, and her book is an itemization of the cost. [Robert Buckeye]


Interview with Founder Board of Directors Funders Submission Guidelines Dalkey Archive Full Catalog Current and Forthcoming Titles Recent Titles Review of Contemporary Fiction Special Library Offer Special Backlist Sale Stores & Wholesalers Academics Libraries Reviewers Context Casebooks Author Interviews Links Dalkey Archive News Events Newsletter

The Review of Contemporary Fiction Shame by Annie Ernaux Robert Buckeye Annie Ernaux. Shame. Trans. Tanya Leslie. Seven Stories, 1998. 111 pp. $16.95. Each book of Annie Ernaux’s is the same book, each an effort to explain, resolve and understand the original sin; that she was encouraged by her working-class parents to go further in school than they did so that she might have opportunities they did not; and that the result of her education was to drive a wedge between their lives and hers. In Shame, her most recent exploration of the stigma she bears, she writes of the summer of 1952 when she was twelve years old, and dwells on three events: the Sunday her father tried to murder her mother; the trip she took with her father on a pilgrimage to Lourdes to fulfill a promise to her mother; and the onset of puberty. Her first reaction to her father’s act that Sunday had been, “You’ll breathe disaster on me,” and looking back on it forty-five years later, she sees it to be both a seminal event in her development as a writer and the enduring mark of her shame. (“We stopped being decent people.”) On the trip to Lourdes, she sees both her father and herself as others see them and experiences, for the first time, the damaging effects of class. The shame she feels at the onset of puberty culminates in the central event of her first book, Cleaned Out, an abortion she has in college. “Let me be cleaned out, through and through, freed from all that holds me back,” she ends that book, but she can never be freed, finally, from what holds her back because it will always be part of her. If her writing is a means of closing the wound, it merely serves to keep it open. It has been the particular strength and virtue of her writing to refuse to make this story a story; to make it literature would be to falsify it, distance ourselves from it, give it a drama it does not have. Ernaux insists it can only be what it is. In Shame she continues to chip away at the consoling and romanticizing effects of narrative. Surely the effects of what Richard Sennett refers to as the hidden injuries of class, must have been present in the very fabric of the life of her neighborhood, and she picks over the detritus of habit, language, dress, behavior, and practice in school, at home, church to find what must have been there that she missed. “The values of any civilization,” Leo Frobenius writes, “go down to its least details.” Ernaux does not turn away from them, and her book is an itemization of the cost. [Robert Buckeye]

Search the full text of our books: