The Review of Contemporary Fiction

I Remain in Darkness by Annie Ernaux and Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience by Lyn Thomas
James Sallis

Annie Ernaux. “I Remain in Darkness.” Trans. Tanya Leslie. Seven Stories Press, 1999. 96 pp. $18.95; Lyn Thomas. Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience. Berg, 1999. 202 pp. $65.00.

Annie Ernaux’s work is remarkably of a piece, each book circling back to paraphrase, correct, emendate, and reinvest earlier ones. Einstein said of himself that in his life he’d had only one or two ideas. So it is with Ernaux, and she has made a life’s agenda of drawing out the universe implicit in those ideas. Her work, with its blurring of fictional, autobiographical, and confessional elements, of the discursive and the representational, leads us virtually with each sentence to question supposed borders between finding and making, re-creation and reinvention; to question the notion of literature itself.

This present volume stands looking off down the hall at the author’s earlier Une Femme (A Woman’s Story). That book, written in the ten months following her mother’s death, attempts to re-create her mother’s history and very presence, all the while (as in all Ernaux’s work) foregrounding the author and the writing process to which the reader bears witness. “I Remain in Darkness” comprises a series of notes Ernaux scribbled out hurriedly during her mother’s illness. The title derives from the last written words of this woman who always told Ernaux “You expect too much of life,” this woman who has now gone missing.

Ernaux offers up the notes just as originally written, unguarded, unreconstructed, unadorned. Ernaux shaves her mother’s face, sprinkles her with cologne to cover the smells rising from her body, or, leaving after a visit, finds that she needs “to listen to music at full blast as I drive along the highway. Today, amid exhilaration and despair, I chose Léo Ferré’s hit C’est Extra. I need to feel sexy because of my mother’s body and her life in hospital.” Of the many savage equations emerging here, the most savage is Ernaux’s absolute identification with her mother. Faced with her mother’s death, with the decline and failure of mind and of body, Ernaux is forced to confront and to flee her own.

Literature, Ernaux notes, is so powerless. Yet writing for her has ever been a cycle of passion, grief and recovery. In Norman French, she tells us, one might say (as her mother did) “That dog died of ambition,” ambition alluding to the trauma of separation, of being far away. Nothing underscores more certainly our separation, our distance one from another, than the sort of identification Ernaux discovers between self and mother. “I Remain in Darkness” is a very ambitious book.

Ambitious, too, is Lyn Thomas’s treatise on Ernaux, the first book-length study in English. It is at least trilingual, intended at one and the same time for “existing readerships, particularly academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students in university French departments . . . students and teachers of French in schools” while also providing an introduction for the general reader. While the latter may balk at chapter titles such as “Gender, Sexuality and Class” and occasionally founder on clauses such as “The complexities of the presentation of this kind of data are a significant theme of the authorial interventions in the text,” Thomas’s study for the greater part presents quite a readable and engaging appraisal of Ernaux’s career to date, particularly in the opening general survey of texts and agenda, “A Writing History.” This in turn is supplemented by a closer reading of the texts’ social and cultural implications, by investigation of Ernaux’s reception both formally (that is, among reviewers and critics) and informally (with reference to readers’ letters), and, finally, by analysis of Thomas’s own reading of Ernaux, of the dialogues engendered between herself and the various texts. Thomas reminds us that every reading, as with each instance of writing, is relational, unstable, a negotiation desperately bargained for, barely and but provisionally achieved. [James Sallis]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction I Remain in Darkness by Annie Ernaux and Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience by Lyn Thomas James Sallis Annie Ernaux. “I Remain in Darkness.” Trans. Tanya Leslie. Seven Stories Press, 1999. 96 pp. $18.95; Lyn Thomas. Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience. Berg, 1999. 202 pp. $65.00. Annie Ernaux’s work is remarkably of a piece, each book circling back to paraphrase, correct, emendate, and reinvest earlier ones. Einstein said of himself that in his life he’d had only one or two ideas. So it is with Ernaux, and she has made a life’s agenda of drawing out the universe implicit in those ideas. Her work, with its blurring of fictional, autobiographical, and confessional elements, of the discursive and the representational, leads us virtually with each sentence to question supposed borders between finding and making, re-creation and reinvention; to question the notion of literature itself. This present volume stands looking off down the hall at the author’s earlier Une Femme (A Woman’s Story). That book, written in the ten months following her mother’s death, attempts to re-create her mother’s history and very presence, all the while (as in all Ernaux’s work) foregrounding the author and the writing process to which the reader bears witness. “I Remain in Darkness” comprises a series of notes Ernaux scribbled out hurriedly during her mother’s illness. The title derives from the last written words of this woman who always told Ernaux “You expect too much of life,” this woman who has now gone missing. Ernaux offers up the notes just as originally written, unguarded, unreconstructed, unadorned. Ernaux shaves her mother’s face, sprinkles her with cologne to cover the smells rising from her body, or, leaving after a visit, finds that she needs “to listen to music at full blast as I drive along the highway. Today, amid exhilaration and despair, I chose Léo Ferré’s hit C’est Extra. I need to feel sexy because of my mother’s body and her life in hospital.” Of the many savage equations emerging here, the most savage is Ernaux’s absolute identification with her mother. Faced with her mother’s death, with the decline and failure of mind and of body, Ernaux is forced to confront and to flee her own. Literature, Ernaux notes, is so powerless. Yet writing for her has ever been a cycle of passion, grief and recovery. In Norman French, she tells us, one might say (as her mother did) “That dog died of ambition,” ambition alluding to the trauma of separation, of being far away. Nothing underscores more certainly our separation, our distance one from another, than the sort of identification Ernaux discovers between self and mother. “I Remain in Darkness” is a very ambitious book. Ambitious, too, is Lyn Thomas’s treatise on Ernaux, the first book-length study in English. It is at least trilingual, intended at one and the same time for “existing readerships, particularly academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students in university French departments . . . students and teachers of French in schools” while also providing an introduction for the general reader. While the latter may balk at chapter titles such as “Gender, Sexuality and Class” and occasionally founder on clauses such as “The complexities of the presentation of this kind of data are a significant theme of the authorial interventions in the text,” Thomas’s study for the greater part presents quite a readable and engaging appraisal of Ernaux’s career to date, particularly in the opening general survey of texts and agenda, “A Writing History.” This in turn is supplemented by a closer reading of the texts’ social and cultural implications, by investigation of Ernaux’s reception both formally (that is, among reviewers and critics) and informally (with reference to readers’ letters), and, finally, by analysis of Thomas’s own reading of Ernaux, of the dialogues engendered between herself and the various texts. Thomas reminds us that every reading, as with each instance of writing, is relational, unstable, a negotiation desperately bargained for, barely and but provisionally achieved. [James Sallis]

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