Overstepping the Boundaries: Sexual Awakening, Trauma, and

Writing in Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille and Christine

Angot’s Une semaine de vacances

Shirley Jordan

L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 59, Number 3, Fall 2019, pp. 5-18 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2019.0028

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/734225

[ Access provided at 11 Apr 2020 18:51 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

 Overstepping the Boundaries:
Sexual Awakening, Trauma, and Writing in Annie
Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille and Christine Angot’s
Une semaine de vacances
Shirley Jordan

T
HIS ARTICLE ADDRESSES recent works by two iconic disrupters
of sexual/textual boundaries, Annie Ernaux and Christine Angot. The
life-writing projects of both women offer a series of determinedly
transgressive gestures, and both have repeatedly courted risk, not least via
their persistent disturbance of the public/private divide, in defiance of what
Ellen Rooney refers to as that binary’s “uncanny power […] to make things
of interest simply disappear.”1 Both writers are deeply preoccupied with form;
both seek to lend appropriate shape to difficult or traumatic episodes of their
lives and to draw us into structured consideration of the kind of limit-testing
experiences that many of us feel unable to articulate but cart around as an
unformulated residue. Both speak to us with a distinctively troubling if now
familiar voice, and both have carved out their terrain by refusing containment
within the confines of existing self-narrative practice.
The texts I shall analyze, Mémoire de fille2 and Une semaine de vacances,3
probe experiences of teenage sex that were painfully formative and that, while
frequently alluded to in the work of both authors, had remained incompletely
articulated. The texts share certain core similarities: the damaging nature of
the experiences explored; their enduring presence as an epicenter whose
extreme aftershocks mark indelibly everything that follows; the resolve to
confront directly what is unpalatable or traumatic; the desire to access an
inexperienced, pre-writing self; and the determination to find a viable textual
form to convey the impact of sex as it was felt by a naïve and susceptible
female subject. The tenor of this writing about sex experienced without under-
standing is striking in part because it feels so sharply at odds with the domi-
nant emphasis on what Melanie Waters refers to as “the third wave’s emphatic
valorization of female sexual pleasure”4 and the guilt-free search for jouis-
sance held out as a possibility by a raft of French women writers—Catherine
Millet, Anna Rozen, Catherine Cusset, Régine Desforges, Alina Reyes, and
many others besides—from the 1990s onwards. While both works explore the
multiple crossings of boundaries that are entailed in sex itself, and in the dif-
ferently complicated act of writing about it, they are little concerned with

© L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 59, No. 2 (2019), pp. 5–18

 L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR

pleasure. The “awakening” in my title is, then, a willfully ironic and anachro-
nistic term, one that overlays the transition from innocence to experience with
romantic overtones and that lingers around, yet is a poor fit for, the experi-
ences explored. The texts elaborate instead vulnerability, coercion, abuse, and
objectification. Both writers spend years skirting around yet avoiding the
challenge of putting the particular intensity of this early experience center
stage. For Ernaux this experience constitutes “le texte toujours manquant.
Toujours remis. Le trou inqualifiable” (Mémoire 17), “trou” signifying a
lacuna, missing piece or perhaps tear in the author’s œuvre and psyche; for
Angot it is similarly repressed yet violently present. Critically, these early
traumatic experiences are seen by both writers as integral to the process pre-
cisely of becoming a writer.
Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille covers formative experiences undergone
between the ages of eighteen and twenty, starting with the momentous summer
of 1958 when she leaves her sheltered family home in Yvetot to be monitrice
in a colonie de vacances and is catapulted into a permissive environment that
she is ill-equipped to navigate. Here she develops a romantic obsession with a
moniteur, H, in whose bed she spends two nights. Rejected by him, she hooks
up with a series of other boys and becomes in the eyes of her peers a figure of
mockery and the butt of jokes: “il n’y a pas à se gêner avec elle, putain sur les
bords” (Mémoire 65). The narrative arc traces this period of disappointment
and numb promiscuity as well as the subsequent eating disorder and cessation
of the girl’s periods that the author views as a bodily reaction to inassimilable
experience. The text explores overtly its own attempts to apprehend the ongo-
ing presence of the past, being focalized by the mature author and repeatedly
looping back in time to examine various former selves categorized as la fille
de 58, la fille de 59, la fille de Londres, and so forth.
Christine Angot’s work conversely covers a single week and focuses unre-
lentingly and graphically on the formative sexual experiences to which the fif-
teen-year-old female protagonist is subjected by her father when the pair take
a holiday together. Here we find no meta-textual dimension, no to and fro
between the adult writer and the child subject, but an unbearably immersive
present. If in 2007 Victoria Best and Martin Crowley felt able to claim that
“the incest that is so repeatedly evoked by Angot is never dealt with in a trans-
parent way”5 and that it is predominantly a trope, a device for getting at some-
thing else about contemporary cultures of transparency, visibility, and inti-
macy, Une semaine de vacances makes this claim impossible to sustain.
In this article I analyze each work in its own right, but also draw parallels
between them, using as bridging material ideas elaborated in Judith Butler’s

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Giving an Account of Oneself 6 and Senses of the Subject.7 Butler’s ethically-

driven investigation of responsibility, address, and mutual investment in
accounts of the self, her interest in the conditions of emergence and formation
of the subject as “already interrupted by the other and […] embedded within
prior social structures,”8 her affirmation of the inevitable failure of attempts
to give a coherent and summative account of the self, as well as the persistent
physicality implied in the term “senses,” can help to illuminate both Ernaux
and Angot whose writings are eloquent on the instability and porousness of
the subject and on life-writing as heuristic. Most notably, Butler encapsulates
the position and ethos of overstepping boundaries in both writers when she
speaks not of the construction of the self but rather of a “willingness to
become undone in relation to others,” a concession to subjective fraying, frag-
mentation, and vulnerability that entails “[vacating] the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a
kind of possession” (Butler, Giving an Account 136). In Ernaux and Angot
alike this vacating is connected to what Butler calls “belatedness,” a temporal
disjuncture that throws the personal pronoun into doubt when we try to trace
our own formation: “I am speaking much later,” Butler says, “than the process
I seek to describe. In fact, my retrospective position casts doubt on whether or
not I can describe this situation at all, since strictly speaking, I was not present
for the process, and I myself seem to be one of its various effects” (Butler,
Senses 2). My reading of Ernaux and Angot through Butler in the current arti-
cle demonstrates the potential of her thinking not only to crystallize some of
the more slippery features of their writing, but more particularly to illuminate
narratives related specifically to sexually abusive experience, which disturbs
the emerging ‘I’—significantly a feminine (and therefore, I would argue, a
distinctively and especially porous) ‘I’—and renders the subject voiceless, at
least for a time.

Mémoire de fille
How, then, does Ernaux vacate and undo the ‘I’ as she attempts to cross the
boundaries between the writing self and the fille de 58 who has “une présence
cachée, irréductible en moi” (Mémoire 22) such that this former subject, “qui
n’est pas moi mais […] n’est pas une fiction” (Mémoire 20), is capable of
engendering momentary psychic collapse, “une débâcle intérieure” (Mémoire
22) in the seventy-four-year-old writer? How does she situate herself with
regard to this brutal awakening for which she was, yet was not, present?
Ernaux’s writing of the formative experience of sex around which
Mémoire de fille is organized is fraught with anachronism and caught up in
what she refers to as the “piège historique” (Mémoire 62) of life-writing. She

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could consider it, she notes, “avec le regard d’aujourd’hui où, hormis l’inceste
et le viol, rien de sexuel n’est condamnable” (Mémoire 57), in other words
from a perspective that concedes that there are few sexual boundaries left to
overstep, or alternatively from the point of view of French society in 1958,
that internalized by her former ‘self,’ “qui faisait tenir toute la valeur d’une
fille dans sa ‘conduite’” (Mémoire 57). In the end her account is snagged pro-
ductively between the two, inevitably so for many contemporary readers since
the list of the girl’s “ignorances sociales” (Mémoire 26), resulting from both
historical period and social class, separates her so sharply from us.
If Ernaux’s explicit, notational accounts of the physicality of sex feel con-
temporary in mode, they nonetheless set up a traumatic mismatch between the
female subject and the activity in which she is involved. The textual mechan-
ics are blunt, clipped, and perfunctory, and the sexual awakening with the man
that the fille de 58 naively designates as her “lover,” as well as her subsequent
sexual forays, are dispatched with functional haste and read as so many (tex-
tual) assaults: “Trois minutes entre les cuisses, toujours” (Mémoire 60); “Il
force. Elle a mal. Elle dit qu’elle est vierge” (Ernaux, Mémoire 43); “Il n’y a
pas eu de caresses préliminaires” (Mémoire 72); “Aucun orgasme jamais”
(Mémoire 60). The paragraph describing the culmination of her first “nuit
d’amour” (Mémoire 46), as the girl chooses against all the evidence to think
of it, perhaps gives the best sense of this spare writing of the newness of sex,
echoing as it does the opening of Ernaux’s earlier Passion simple.9 That text,
we remember, begins with the author transfixed by an extreme close-up focus
on penetrative heterosexual sex in a film on the pay channel Canal +, seen
without a decoder. The spectacle holds her between diverging socio-cultural
perceptions: what in the past “on ne pouvait regarder sans presque mourir”
has become “aussi facile à voir qu’un serrement de mains” (Passion simple
12). Readers of Mémoire de fille are similarly held between different ‘takes’
on the sexual activity described:

La suite se déroule comme un film X où la partenaire de l’homme est à contretemps, ne

sait pas quoi faire parce qu’elle ne connaît pas la suite. Lui seul en est le maître. Il a tou-
jours un temps d’avance. Il la fait glisser au bas de son ventre, la bouche sur sa queue.
Elle reçoit aussitôt la déflagration d’un flot gras de sperme qui l’éclabousse jusque dans
les narines. Il n’y a pas plus de cinq minutes qu’ils sont entrés dans la chambre.
(Mémoire 44)

It is not that la fille de 58 does not experience desire herself: her own undeni-
able desire is “brut, simple—chimiquement pur—aussi forcené que celui d’un
viol” (Mémoire 71)—the latter a surprising assertion in tune with, for

8 FALL 2019
 SHIRLEY JORDAN

instance, the energetic, somewhat aggressive desire to which Cusset gives

expression in Jouir.10 But what the youngster seeks above all is less physical
pleasure than repeated proof of her desirability such that “[s]on besoin de H,
de le laisser maître de son corps la rend étrangère a tout sentiment de dignité”
(Mémoire 54). Her crude forays into what was then the adult world of sex are
filtered and processed by a particularly inadequate imaginary and by fantasies
forged by romantic love plots. For the fille de 58 “[s]euls les mots mystiques”
can account for the experience of being “déflorée,” a process that in her mind
makes of H “son amant de toute éternité” (Mémoire 73). She speaks of
“[j]oie,” “paix,” “don de soi” (Mémoire 73), and she edges towards the kind
of account of women’s sexual experience that stresses the momentous and
irreversible boundary crossing that was (is?) the loss of virginity, accounts of
seismic personal and societal change that are now buried in “des romans deve-
nus illisibles, des feuilletons féminins des années 50” (Mémoire 73). And if
something of the girl’s indiscriminate sleeping around makes of her, as
Ernaux later notes, a Bardot avant la lettre (Mémoire 60), this is no help to her
at the time. The text skillfully evokes a tissue of chaotic feelings, sensations,
motivations, and desires as well as a distinct anaesthetization, an (emotional)
vacating of the self even as the other is given unfettered access to it. Thus in
the midst of the girl’s first experience of a man’s body, we are told, “[e]lle ne
ressent rien” (Mémoire 43).
If the sex itself is rapidly dispatched in this text, its repercussions—social,
psychological, and physical—endure. We are taken through the ensuing
period marked by alimentary disarray including tendencies both anorexic and
bulimic. We also witness the discursive formation of the impressionable fille
de 58, who is subject to the derision of her peers in the colonie and who car-
ries a legacy of shame. Ernaux, whose ambivalent reaction to her former self
leads her to write with some cruelty here, stokes the opprobrium, making it
live once more by creating a list of the “railleries grasses,” “quolibets,” and
“insultes déguisées en mots d’esprit” with which the moniteurs constructed
her as an object of distaste and inferiority (Mémoire 62), a position further
reinforced in the following year when her reputation disqualifies her from a
second summer in the colonie.
We learn a little later in Mémoire de fille that in April 1959 the girl reads
Le deuxième sexe, and Ernaux gives us a powerful two-page account of her
engagement with Beauvoir, a new kind of awakening that provided her with
a retrospective understanding that she had colluded in her own objectification
and which offered “les clés pour comprendre la honte,” if not “le pouvoir de
l’effacer” (Mémoire 110). Notably la fille de 59 deliberates whether Beau-

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voir’s proposition that “la première pénétration est toujours un viol” applies
to her own experience with H, although on balance she thinks perhaps not
(Mémoire 110). We are also told, and this is key to the positioning of Mémoire
de fille in Ernaux’s entire œuvre, that the beginning of the author’s self-real-
ization through writing is rooted in the traumatic sexual awakening that this
work explores. The text describes a moment that will become iconic: a
Sunday afternoon on a warm late-summer day in 1960, when the girl sits on
a bench in a garden near Woodside Park station in London and makes her
inaugural gesture towards a writing life / towards life writing: “comme si tout
ce qui a eu lieu depuis la nuit de la colonie aboutissait, de chute en chute, à ce
geste inaugural. Ce récit serait donc celui d’une traversée périlleuse, jusqu’au
port de l’écriture” (Mémoire 144); and in a diary entry of 1988 we read, “Ces
deux années, 58-60, m’ont ‘rendue’ écrivain, je crois.”11
The formative experiences of sex undergone by the young protagonist of
Une semaine de vacances lead Angot to describe a precisely similar moment,
one on which her text closes, positing that the need to write emerges from the
multiple boundary crossings and confusion of the (susceptible) subject
entailed in the incestuous relationship that her narrative has just detailed.
Before moving on to discuss Angot, and mindful of the objections that might
be raised by my aligning her life-writing with that of Ernaux, I wish briefly to
signal the striking similarities in focus, interests, and goals that lead me to
draw together these two works. Many of the meta-textual comments that
Ernaux makes about her own evolving text constitute remarkably accurate
descriptions of Une semaine de vacances. These involve, inter alia: observa-
tions on consent, responsibility, and collaboration (Ernaux hesitates between
“se résigner,” “consentir à,” and “collaborer” when she speaks of losing her
virginity [Mémoire 45]); descriptions of sex as orchestrated by a powerful
male partner who abruptly abandons the protagonist, a partner whom Ernaux
capitalizes—indeed generalizes—in her preface as “le Maître”; the female
subject’s inability to make sense of what is happening to her; the deliberations
about how to get at this problematic subject matter. The most powerful com-
monality between the works lies in Ernaux’s insistence on trying to render
something that is paradoxically inaccessible given what Butler would term the
‘belatedness’ of writing: “l’incompréhension de ce qu’on vit au moment où on
le vit, cette opacité du présent qui devrait trouer chaque phrase, chaque asser-
tion” (Mémoire 115). This accessing of the inaccessible is arguably what
drives Angot in her own narrative of damaging sex, and also the very feat that
she achieves. It aligns her with Ernaux’s observation in Mémoire de fille about
the necessity of what she calls “la douleur de la forme” (Mémoire 18), by

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 SHIRLEY JORDAN

which I understand not simply the text’s controlled provision of an account of

painful experience, but the effort to lend the text a performative quality that
crystallizes, gives enduring shape to, and rekindles what was most sharply
experienced: the brutal urgency of her partner’s desire and the unknowability
of his designs; the numbness of her response; the despair that goes hand-in-
hand with abandonment; and ultimately, on the part of the writer, the sense of
urgency about a writing project born out of a moment of rupture, which is
nonetheless repeatedly deferred.

Une semaine de vacances

Une semaine de vacances is an extraordinarily unsettling work. It troubles in
very particular ways the already complex arena of boundary testing that is in
play in women’s writing about sex and furthers Angot’s ongoing preoccupa-
tion with the violent harnessing of children to adult agendas. It concerns a
father who takes control of his daughter’s body and seeks to engineer in her a
sexual awakening on his own terms. Like all incest narratives it explodes the
boundaries of silence that help to make incest possible, but it differs from
most other accounts in its unrelenting concentration on the abusive sex, and
also in the excision of this sex from a more extensive life narrative that would
set it in context and focus on its repercussions in later years. It is not, overtly
at least, a survivor story. Instead it focuses on a single week, a ‘privileged
period’ during which the daughter is permanently available to her father and
their incestuous relationship goes uninterrupted. The narrative is unique for
the unrelieved intensity and proximity of father-daughter relations in which it
entraps us, and for its temporal and spatial concentration. Further, it is not
organized formally around the irretrievable memories, silences, and textual
gaps that, as Kathryn Robson remarks in a study of Béatrice de Jurquet, tend
to characterize abuse testimony12: on the contrary it is utterly immersive, and
thus substantively different from the dispersal of incest memory throughout
Angot’s other writings. It offers no conceptual reflection on its own aversive
matter, no chapter divisions, and few paragraph breaks. It is a present-tense
account of the minutiae of a protracted sexual encounter that seldom comes
up for air. I shall comment here on two facets of the work: its insistence on
the father’s molding and penetrating of his daughter not just as the satisfaction
of his sexual desire but as a still more insidiously formative process; and
Angot’s intelligent choices of form and focalization.
Every bit as much as Mémoire de fille, even if the context is very different,
Une semaine de vacances constitutes an intensive depiction of the formation
of an impressionable girl by a barrage of externally imposed codes with which

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she is, at the point of the narrative, unfamiliar. The text speaks to us of the
impact on the subject made by a ‘higher’ authority and focuses on how the girl
is perpetually assessed and condemned or praised. We trace the unopposed
construction of her from the outside at a time in her life when she lacks the
resources to articulate what is happening to her and to wrest from the other
the experience that is so profoundly changing her. The text affords glimpses
of how the father seeks to educate and socialize his daughter outside the bed-
room, directing and validating her behavior and taste according to his more
privileged norms, but most of it focuses on the way in which he constructs for
her a vision of feminine sexuality, casts her as a Lolita figure, and seeks to
dictate the terms of her pleasure in order to legitimize his exploitation of her.
This induction into his decidedly male-centered view of women’s bodies and
sexuality is in itself a form of ideological abuse, consistent with Butler’s (Fou-
cauldian) contention that externally imposed norms “require and intensify our
impressionability” (Butler, Senses 5).
Angot’s text charts in minute detail a sequence of sensations and interpen-
etrations experienced by the fifteen-year-old girl. In some of these it is hard
to disentangle ordinary fatherly love from incestuous love: take for instance
the moment during a forest walk when the pair hold hands, a moment that
slides from the normative to the queasily transgressive, keeping us alert to the
question of what separates one kind of love from another as well as offering
a mise en abyme of the text’s overstepping of boundaries, pointing precisely
as it does so to the slipperiness of incest and the difficulty of detecting what
is going on:

Ils se donnent la main, avancent lentement dans l’allée. Il croise ses doigts dans les
siens, bien au fond des jointures, puis les fait glisser comme pour s’en detacher, tout
doucement, puis les reprend, avant de recommencer à s’en detacher. Ou il joue avec ses
doigts dans sa paume. (Angot, Semaine 60–61)

More frequently the father’s overly penetrative, consuming desire takes explic-
itly sexual form. From the outset the emphasis is repeatedly placed on the girl’s
malleability as a source of his pleasure. The text’s opening scene, an extended
description of a sexual ritual that is referred to more cursorily elsewhere in
Angot, conforms to the imperative formulated by Ernaux for her own writings
of a “début qui crève la page—et place ma voix.”13 It entails among other
things a ‘game’ in which the father asks his daughter to take with her teeth, and
then eat, strips of ham or segments of mandarin orange that he has placed on
his erect penis. As she kneels before him he kneads her breasts and launches
the cycle of explaining, naming, narrating, and eliciting that will accompany

12 FALL 2019
 SHIRLEY JORDAN

his sexual experimentation throughout the book as he persistently dresses up

sex as education and requires from her evidence of a pleasure that she does not
feel. Angot insists in these opening paragraphs on the daughter’s plasticity, on
her body and, implicitly, her mind too, as so much modelling clay:

[il] s’amuse de sa matière mobile, de son élasticité, sa main semble avoir le pouvoir d’en
modifier le dessin, le modelé, la densité, en pressant le dessus, le dessous, le côté, à
volonté, de les faire paraître gonflés, dégonflés, par un côté ou par un autre, comme les
deux têtes d’un sablier qu’on peut retourner, comme s’il jouait avec une balle de pâte à
modeler d’une souplesse exceptionnelle, qui se prête comme rien d’autre à son désir de
triturer (Angot, Semaine 111–12)

The present-tense persistence of the narrative reproduces the immersive expe-

rience of being formed by the father, and filled by him, in a kind of vacancy to
the self. What we have here is less narrative than evidence: evidence of the
abuser seeking to condition the sexuality of a victim who is without agency
beyond the imperative of obedience. In her psychoanalytic approach to the
problem of domination Jessica Benjamin notes, “If the other […] is so far
above me that nothing I do can alter his attitude toward me, I can only submit.
My desire and agency can find no outlet, except in the form of obedience.”14
This repression of desire and agency, this trap of obedience and powerlessness,
is not openly articulated in Une semaine de vacances but instead is cleverly
conveyed by the text’s formal properties. I shall focus briefly on two of these:
its focalization and the highly visual, almost cinematic nature of its fragments.
First, let us consider the combined effects of the text’s third-person narra-
tion, its focalization through the daughter, and its emotionally anaesthetized
quality. Not only is there none of the rage, hurt, indignation, and revulsion that
come along with the recognition of experiences of abuse, not only are no emo-
tions or reactions on the part of the daughter articulated, but she has in fact no
voice at all. As Angot notes, she is not in a situation where she would be capa-
ble of producing “une parole sociale”15 and does not know that what she is
experiencing has a name. Remembering her own silence and incomprehen-
sion in the face of her father’s advances, the author observes, “Moi, quand j’ai
eu à vivre cette chose-là, quand je l’ai rencontrée, et que j’avais treize ans, je
n’ai pas pu parler. Je ne vois pas par quelle fiction mensongère j’aurais pu
faire dire ‘je’ au personage de mon livre.”16 Instead the daughter—and after
her the mature author—vacates the subject position (hence the ironic
“vacances” of Angot’s title), constituting an extreme instance of Butler’s vul-
nerable, undone, vacated ‘I’ discussed in my introduction and affording a
striking example of how the personal pronoun may be destabilized as we try

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to trace our own formation (Butler, Senses 2). This text’s recourse to pure
description and its associated affective numbness demonstrate a kind of
avoidance, an unwillingness to acknowledge what is happening and a shutting
down of the self so that while the focalization is manifestly that of the daugh-
ter, it does not go beyond the act of recording: the daughter merely lists what
her father did, touched, said. In this, Angot endows the notational neutrality
that characterized Millet’s now notorious accounts of sex17 with a new ration-
ale that comes to assume its own intense condemnatory power. We are not
confronted here with the narrative voice that has become one of Angot’s hall-
marks, that anxiously uncontrollable first-person rush—objectionable to some
readers, pleasurable to others—that loops back on itself, borders on neurosis,
evades containment, and strays unfettered into areas of consciousness and
imagination that are deeply transgressive. Here the narration belongs instead
to some blank area of consciousness, recording as if from outside the self. If,
as Best and Crowley put it in a discussion of explicit sex in recent French fic-
tion and film, the trauma of child abuse “can neither be mentally contained
nor symbolically processed,”18 Angot’s book accordingly seeks to do neither,
offering only thick description and refraining from commenting on, let alone
condemning, its own content.
As she seeks what Ernaux refers to as “la forme la plus apte à saisir la
vérité” (Ernaux, L’atelier noir 73), Angot seizes on the fragment and takes a
lead from a visual medium. While Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille works with the
idea of stills from a film to be explored one by one, Angot’s formal solution
involves a series of short, pornographic sequences that are dominated by a
mobile, camera-like gaze. These visual tactics suggest a process of splitting
whereby the self is detached from the activities in question. At one point in Une
semaine de vacances the father buys a book by Alain Robbe-Grillet as a gift
for his daughter. We instantly understand this as a glancing reference to this
text’s own mechanisms: Robbe-Grillet’s insistence on the roving and probing
eye, his obsessions (at least the sexual ones) and his returns to the same motif
are also at work in Angot’s pages. In particular, one thinks of the claustropho-
bic atmosphere, the unarticulated sexual tension, the short-circuiting of affect,
and the camera-like gaze that afford some insight into the protagonist’s psyche
in the 1957 novel La jalousie. Such techniques are adapted here by Angot to
extremely troubling effect. We are witness, for example, to moments when the
daughter’s gaze gives us a small purchase on her inner world: she follows with
her eyes the direction of the clean T-shirt that she has just put on and that her
father sends scudding over the dirty floor as he undresses her; she glances over
at her book lying unread on the bedside table because her father’s sexual

14 FALL 2019
 SHIRLEY JORDAN

demands have not left her the opportunity to pick it up (the reading matter, we
note, is Les cinq compagnons, a work from the Bibliothèque verte destined for
pre-adolescents); she gazes at an orange towel flapping on the washing line
rather than attend to what her body is called to be involved in. And throughout
there is no comment on the daughter’s sensations or reactions as pleasure—the
pleasure into which her father seeks to induct her—but instead a litany of ‘nec-
essary’ sufferance: the painful sensation of the tips of her wet hair whipping her
face as she pleasures him; the discomfort in her jaw as she does the same; the
difficulty or unpleasantness of certain physical positions. Here we intuit the
daughter’s perspective, but it remains unformulated, shadowy, and no contest
at all for the father’s overbearing certainties.
Angot explained when questioned about her motivation for writing this
work that the word ‘incest’ is an abstraction, that its two fleeting syllables
cover over the very concrete sexual dimension that it designates but that is too
complicated to think about, and that she wanted resolutely to exchange
abstraction for embodied experience.19 It is notable that whereas the word
incest is blazoned on the cover of the novel L’inceste published thirteen years
earlier, that particular text holds back its unspeakable matter until its final
pages. Conversely, Une semaine de vacances gives us uninterrupted access to
the unhealthy huis clos of incestuous sex yet does not name what is happening
at all. Philippe Forest has neatly situated the two as companion texts, pointing
out that “l’un des romans est comme l’envers de l’autre, le second retournant
le premier comme un gant afin de mieux faire voir la matière même dont
celui-ci était fait.”20
Unsurprisingly, the critical reception of Une semaine de vacances was
polarized: while Libération hailed it as “Le chef d’œuvre de la rentrée,”
Ludovic Barbiéri, writing in Chronic’Art, argued that the book, which begins
with a description of sex in a toilet, deserved no better than to be flushed away
down one.21 What is misunderstood by critics such as Barbiéri is the real pur-
pose of Angot’s text: to reproduce, so that we may look at it in fine-grained
detail, the mechanisms of a persistent sexual coercion that we seldom see in
action. Without doubt the most heinous misreading of Une semaine de
vacances was that undertaken by the selection committee of the Prix Sade
which, in 2012, awarded the prize to Angot’s text, thus further complicating
the history of its reception and confirming its deliberately invidious openness
to the wrong kind of reading, precisely because it is as yet uncontained by the
discourses that should condemn it. Angot unsurprisingly set the record
straight, quashing this attempt to reward the work by aligning it with the
father and refusing both the prize and its implications.22

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Conclusion
“I am letting you know,” says Judith Butler, “that when I say ‘I’, I mean you”
(Butler, Senses 1). I conclude with some thoughts about the collective value
of the autobiographical ‘I’, a sense of the subject that characterizes the life-
writing of Ernaux and Angot alike, since both forge a convincing alliance
between the personal and the transpersonal and press for the creation of inti-
mate accounts that dislodge writer and reader from familiar positions.
At the outset of this article I observed that the tenor of sexual experience
in the texts I set out to discuss feels out of step with the emphasis on women’s
sexual desire, agency, and guilt-free pleasure in the raft of female-authored
experimental writings about sex that have become, since the late 1990s, an
established phenomenon in the cultural landscape in and beyond France. And
yet, as feminist theorist Ashley Tauchert notes, the new context set for modes
of human behavior by today’s almost ubiquitously hypersexualized culture
comes with its own insidious pressures: a catalogue of ‘prescriptions’ rather
than ‘proscriptions’ that “increasingly demand an extraordinary level of
sexual performance by women in the name of liberation.”23 Pinpointing
notably the popular confessional mode of sexually explicit writing by
women—that found on the Erotic Literature stand of high-street book
stores—she notes that these contemporary substitutes for romance privilege
“bodily over spiritual states of ecstasy” and suggest that ‘liberation’ for a
single woman “hang[s] by a thread on the performance of her ‘right’ to ‘sleep
around’” (Tauchert ).
I should like to argue that, while they return us to adolescent and teenage
experiences of respectively sixty and forty years ago, Mémoire de fille and
Une semaine de vacances are nonetheless timely and resonate very forcefully
with concerns about the formative sexual experiences of young women in the
current decade, especially through their emphasis on being impressionable,
molded, and subject to coercion. One could list these concerns: the practice of
sexting now normalized even in school environments; the influence on early
exploratory sex of widely available, misogynistic hard porn; widespread
experiences of self-harm and depression that are a consequence—especially
for young women—of pressures to conform; the epidemic of nude selfie-
taking, and the way in which it is the girls who figure in them, not those who
circulate them, who are blamed, shamed, and ridiculed (we might see here a
digital up-dating of a particularly humiliating episode in Mémoire de fille
where the draft of a love letter written by the teenage Ernaux was fished from
the waste bin and pinned up on a communal notice board); the fact that the
frequently coercive nature of online sexual experiences that are now inte-

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grated into the development of young people’s sexuality can, if studies are to
be believed, be even more traumatic than being coerced into physical sex; and
the difficulty of processing such traumatic experiences—of giving an account
of their relation to and influence on the self—both at the time and in hindsight.
One might also detect a special prescience of such emphases given the recent
#balance ton porc and #me too campaigns that have raged in the wake of the
2017 Harvey Weinstein allegations.
It is in their courageous narration of early sexual experiences that are char-
acterized by varying degrees of abuse, bullying, and grooming, that show an
apprenticeship in becoming a sexual object, and that illustrate the conditions
upon which may hang a subsequent entrapment into silence, powerlessness,
or self-harm, that Mémoire de fille and Une semaine de vacances overstep
sexual/textual boundaries. Both show female protagonists faced with experi-
ences they are not equipped to process and that make this trauma not just leg-
ible, but newly, sharply accessible even as the authors’ narratives—to return
to Butler—mark “the paradoxical condition of trying to relate something
about [their] formation that is prior to [their] own narrative capacity and that,
in fact, brings that narrative capacity about” (Senses 2). Both raise afresh
questions of how young women are sexualized, how they make themselves
available sexually, how they process ideas of sex, how they talk about and
share their experiences of it, and what they say about the boundaries between
coercion and consent. The insistence of both authors on what Ernaux refers to
as “l’obéissance à ce qui arrive” accompanied by “l’absence de signification
de ce qui arrive” (Mémoire 46) remains a common experience for adolescents
and teenagers even in today’s sexually saturated culture. It is the harm, not the
pleasures, of sex that both Ernaux and Angot are in their own ways exploring.
And it is this, along with their constructive determination to tease out the
terms and conditions of shaming and disturbing episodes of their teenage
years—“breaking with what breaks you” as Butler might put it (Butler, Senses
9)—that makes their respective ‘awakenings’ vital reading matter in the cur-
rent climate.

Newcastle University

Notes

 1. Ellen Rooney, “A Semiprivate Room,” in Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Bound-
aries of the Private Sphere, Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates, eds. (Urbana: U of Illinois P,
2004), 333.
 2. Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille (Paris: Gallimard, 2016).
 3. Christine Angot, Une semaine de vacances (Paris: Flammarion, 2012).

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 4. Melanie Waters, “Sexing It Up? Women, Pornography and Third Wave Feminism,” in Third
Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, Stacy Gills, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford,
eds. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 252.
 5. Victoria Best and Martin Crowley, The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French
Fiction and Film (Manchester: Manchester U P, 2012), 224.
 6. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham U P, 2005).
 7. Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham U P, 2015).
 8. J. Aaron Simmons, “Giving an Account of Oneself,” JCRT, 7:2 (2006): 85.
 9. Annie Ernaux, Passion simple (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).
10. Catherine Cusset, Jouir (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
11. Annie Ernaux: Écrire la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 44.
12. Kathryn Robson, “Falling into an Abyss: Remembering and Writing Sexual Abuse in Béa-
trice de Jurquet’s La traversée des lignes,” Journal of Romance Studies, 2:1 (2002): 79–90.
13. Annie Ernaux, L’atelier noir (Paris: Éditions des Busclats, 2011), 63.
14. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Dom-
ination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 53.
15. “L’inceste est une affaire sociale,” interview with Sylvain Bourmeau, Libération (Sept. 3,
2012), https://z.umn.edu/49r7.
16. “L’inceste est une affaire sociale.”
17. In La vie sexuelle de Catherine M (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
18. Best and Crowley, The New Pornographies, 212.
19. See “L’inceste est une affaire sociale.”
20. “Implacable: Une semaine de vacances de Christine Angot,” Le monde des livres (Aug. 21,
2012), https://z.umn.edu/49r9.
21. See Éric Loret, “Un zeste de polémique,” Libération (Sept. 3, 2012), https://z.umn.edu/49rb.
22. Laurent David Samama, “Christine Angot et le Prix Sade: Les raisons d’un refus,” La règle
du jeu (Jan. 24, 2013), https://z.umn.edu/49re.
23. Ashley Tauchert, Against Transgression (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 103.

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