The Right to Desire: Annie Ernaux’s Happening, & The Young Man

The French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature last week. Instantaneously, she used her platform on a global stage to talk about women’s right to “choose to be a mother or not.” (You can watch the footage of her ‘acceptance speech’ here.) As an elder who lived through young womanhood before legal abortion — France legalized abortion in 1973; Ernaux had a clandestine abortion in 1963 — she is not only a voice of the past, but one for the present. Her literary oeuvre is a testament to the existential nature of women’s reproductive freedom: as an artist with working-class roots, her abortion as a student made her life’s work — her genius — possible.

I haven’t yet read L’Evènement, her 2000 novel based on that abortion story, but I did just watch the film adaptation, in English called Happening. It’s taken me some time to come around to this translation of the title. I thought maybe “The Incident” would have been better — more dramatic, suggestive, definitive. An “incident” is momentous, connoted with drama and a kind of criminality. But maybe that’s why it’s too strong. We need a word for a thing that happens, neutrally — that happens to you, or in which you take part, but which itself is outside of you. I can see how Happening captures this sense of passivity, of things happening around you that rob you of your agency. I can also see the unspeakability still held in the word, the euphemism of it; it’s that thing to which we refer, but fear to speak its name.

When Anne, the protagonist, alludes to the unspeakable topic of her desire for an abortion, those around her repeat a particular phrase time and again: ça me regarde pas. Ça nous regarde pas. It means what it sounds like: That doesn’t regard us. That’s not our business. That’s none of my business. Characters say it to Anne because of the chilling stories they’ve heard around town: namely, of girls and their accomplices ending up in prison. (Somehow, prison is more unthinkably terrifying than bodily harm or death, perhaps because an anti-abortion worldview manages to erase the pregnant body from its scope.) In a trenchant moment of reclamation, though, Anne gets to use the phrase herself, in the form of an interrogative: ça te regarde?, she says sharply to the young man who impregnated her, when he starts to offer his opinion on the matter. Is that your business?

There’s a scene early in the film when Anne, three weeks past her missed period, steals away to a corner of the library where she can surreptitiously examine images of pregnancy in an anatomy textbook. She is a university student, at least twenty years old. It is not hyperbolic to say that for a 21st century audience, the information desert Anne is navigating is the first unimaginable part of her story. It is also what definitively situates her abortion narrative in the past. Not because of her lack of sex ed, which we know continues not to be formally taught across the US and France alike, but because rather than terrorize women with a lack of education about their own bodies, these places now terrorize them with a glut of information biased in favor of fetal tissue. 

This is not a film for the faint of heart, but at the same time, should any of us be faint of heart on this issue anymore? There’s something about these at best qualmish, at worst faux-pious young adults in the early-sixties that makes you want to be part of a generation with a backbone. Actress Annamaria Vortolomei, our lead, looks like she’s seen a ghost for the majority of the movie, but her wide-eyed stupor should not be confused with paralysis; her private struggle requires a kind of constant laser-focus, and a fierce kind of self care. For this commitment to herself, she will be punished by not only her terrified classmates, but also her teachers and parents, who, ignorant of the pregnancy, see only this bright working-class student drifting without explanation and proceed to project their own insecurities onto her.

I am still thinking about this film and will likely be haunted by it for a while. I don’t know that I particularly needed this film right now, this year, with this midterm election approaching, where so few candidates have made reproductive justice a keystone issue for their platform despite recent events. (NARAL Pro-Choice America has only endorsed 17 candidates running for U.S. Senate, 11 of whom are current Senators.)

What I mean is, I don’t know that the dangerous lengths women in the 60s went to for themselves and their futures feel politically resonant for me, for us, today. They feel historically resonant, and I am so glad we have this intimate and horrific document from Ernaux. But politically, we do not need vintage horror stories; we need modern ones.

*** 

I also want to write about Ernaux’s prose — in particular, the slim volume of hers that I picked up this summer, which had just been published: a 40-page memoir called Le Jeune Homme, or The Young Man. 

It reads in one sitting, like a languorous and low-lit meal with an old friend. Except most friends can’t achieve the kind of intimacy and clarity that Ernaux offers us on the page. At the end of these brief, incisive pages, Ernaux does more than disclose about an unorthodox affair; she untethers us from many of our myths about romantic relationships. And, in her own kind of seemingly apolitical manner, she illuminates the cobwebby corners of patriarchal double standards that feast on those myths. 

Le Jeune Homme recounts a love affair of Ernaux’s that took place in the mid-1990s. She wrote this reflection a few years later, but it is only being published now, another two decades after the fact. Her lover is called simply “A.” He’s described as a “student” who “wrote to her for a year” before she agrees to go out with him. He is, it turns out, more than thirty years younger than she. They begin a passionate romance. “He devoted himself to me with a fervor that, at 54 years of age, I had not ever experienced from a lover,” she writes.

A is living with another woman, one his own age, when they meet. “The two of them, swept up in the habits of a hasty cohabitation and worries about exams, had never imagined that sex could be something other than the mechanical satisfaction of desire.” With Annie, lovemaking is otherwise. A leaves his girlfriend. 

But this is not a story about A, nor is it a sordid love affair à la française. The few details about A do not distract us from the true subject of this treatise: Ernaux’s deepened relationship with herself, with time, and ultimately, with writing.

She opens the book with a kind of foreshadowing of this fact:

Often, I would make love in order to force myself to write. I sought, in the derelict exhaustion after sex, a reason to want nothing more from life. I hoped that the most violent ending there is — that is, an orgasm — would prove to me once and for all that there’s no greater pleasure than that of writing a book.

It would seem that the choice at any given time lies between living and writing; the two can’t really coexist, but nor can one be meaningful without the other. “The main reason I had wanted to continue to play out this love story was that it had, in a sense, already happened, and in it I was a fictional character.” To relive the passion of youth through A’s eyes was thrilling, but it also created a distance between thought and action: the kind that is perfect for a writer. “Unlike back when I was 18 or 25 years old, where I was completely present in what was happening to me, without any sense of the past or the future, in Rouen with A, I had the impression that I was replaying scenes and gestures that had already taken place long ago.”  

The affair with A opens up a new space in her life, a new kind of seeing. She begins to understand a lesser-known reason why older men date younger women: because they wish to see a mirror of a youth they’ve lost. She loves to gaze on A’s youth “...so as not to have to see before me the marked face of a man my own age, the face of my own aging.” But rather than an expression of shame about aging, Ernaux is clear that the only people feeling shame about her relationship are the public around them. She calls it the “regard lourdement réprobateur” — the heavy look of reproach — and she and A catch it left and right. “It wasn’t us they saw; it was, confusingly, incest.” (What she implies, of course, is that no one sees incest when they see an older man with a younger woman.)

For Ernaux, this reproachful regard is not a hindrance to the connection she shares with A. The eventual hindrance, the distance between them, is endemic to her own self, and her identity as a writer. For indeed, once she finds her pen again, the affair must end. “What I found [in the affair] was the sweetness of my own position [la douceur de ma propre durée — doesn’t translate easily] and the identity of my desire.” To imagine one’s own desire as having an identity, one that is not contingent on the other but exists above and beyond the age or status of the body — this is the most radical idea I found in this short text.

In the murky waters between what some might nastily call “shameless” and what I’d instead call “self-possessed,” Ernaux wades all the way in, without fear. She knows it is fear that makes a home for shame.

All translations of Le Jeune Homme are my own; as my friend Céline said when I told her I planned to try to translate some excerpts, “Her prose is deceptively simple.” Translation: Good luck…