Annie Ernaux - Die Scham - Der Riss in der Kindheit
Es war ein Sonntag im Juni 1952. Fast hätte der Vater die Mutter erschlagen. Um dieses Ereignis herum dekonstruiert Annie Ernaux ein Milieu und eine Kindheit im sozialen Abseits. Ein faszinierendes Erzählgewebe aus Erinnerung und Reflexion.
Over 20 years after its first French release, Annie Ernaux's volume “Die Scham” is finally available in German translation. And thus another piece of the mosaic in a work that basically consists of a single narrative, the ethnographic search for traces of the social and gender-related nature of individual existence. More precisely, Ernaux's existence, located in the French working class.
Shame as a central issue
Whether in “La Place”, the book about the father, or in “Une Femme”, her book about the mother - shame has always played a central role. The shame about the shame suffered, to come from a lower, educationally deprived class. But also the shame of having committed "class betrayal" through her ascent into the intellectual milieu of France, as she says. Out of this turmoil a fascinating narrative fabric of memory and reflection has grown in almost 40 years. Ernaux thus constituted something like his own genre of autofictional exploration, which quickly caught on in France - a deconstructive, exploratory narrative in deliberately sparse language that was freed from all embellishments.
If shame was always present in the books by Annie Ernaux we know, what new things can we expect from this text, explicitly titled “Die Scham”? The very first sentence comes with a bang:
"On a June Sunday in the early afternoon my father wanted to kill my mother."
What happened? The parents, owners of a bar with adjoining living space in a working-class district of Y., as the place between Le Havre and Rouen is called, had got into an argument. The dominant mother provoked the rather reserved father - until he exploded.
“All of a sudden he began to tremble and gasp convulsively. He got up and I saw how he grabbed my mother, dragged her into the bar and screamed in a rough, strange voice. (...) In the poorly lit pantry, my father had grabbed my mother by the shoulder or neck with one hand. In the other he held the ax that he had torn from the log. "
Bringing up the drama
It didn't come to an end. The parents made up again. But for the almost twelve-year-old Annie, as the author sees it decades later, this scene was not only a fatal rift in childhood, but also formed the source of her shame. A glowing core around which further rings of shameful feelings could be placed. “This is the first time I am writing the scene,” she notes, only to find out shortly afterwards that it does not want to fit into a sequence of words. Images and an atmosphere remain in the memory. But words? How can you bring up a drama that has never been talked about? How do you approach the twelve-year-old she once was but in whom she no longer recognizes herself?
“I want to set the scene, frozen for years, in motion so that it is no longer something sacred in me, an icon (proof of this is, for example, the belief that it is it that makes me write that all my books her based). "
Master of ethnographic deep drilling
And with this, the French author once again proves herself to be a master of this ethnographic deep drilling. Ernaux first specifies the date of the family drama: "It was June 15, 1952." Then she circles the event - as she writes - "material traces" that have remained: photos of herself from communion, postcards from the pilgrimage site of Lourdes , a missal, newspapers in an archive, school utensils, “sources that say something”, says Ernaux, but still do not create reality. Around these artefacts, the author reconstructs a lifeworld that cannot result in a coherent whole and yet makes it possible to understand shame as a lifelong dominant flaw.
“In order to achieve the reality of my life at that time, there is only one reliable possibility, I have to visualize the laws and rites, the beliefs and values of the various milieus, school, family, province, in which I was trapped and those without me would have been aware of their contradictions, ruled my life. "
And this is how Annie Ernaux describes the topography of her hometown, its division into good and bad quarters, in milieus that speak good and bad French. She meticulously records the everyday life of her family, structured by religiosity and fixed processes, the narrowness of the small town in which everyone observes everyone; the mother's dogged will to appear "better" - which also includes sending the daughter to a Catholic private school.
The exposure
This chapter about an educational establishment in which religious rites degrade knowledge transfer and humane pedagogy to a minor issue is one of the strongest in this narrow book. It culminates in a shameful exposure. A teacher brings the girl home late at night after a party. For the first time, the teacher and other students see the parents' house and the mother. She stands in the doorway with a stained nightgown, with which, it is said, she always wipes off her urine at night.
“I had just seen my mother through the eyes of the private school for the first time. In my memory, this scene, which is in no way comparable to the other in which my father tried to kill my mother, is its continuation. "
According to Annie Ernaux, shame has become her “way of being”. "She became part of my body". And - it should be added: to move your writing. With her texts she strives, as she once said, to find a collective memory in the individual memory. In times of increasing social tension, this is an important claim that Annie Ernaux fulfills impressively - without any confusion or cynicism.
