【2022 Nobel Prize in Literature】Writing is the creation of death and life──Anne. Aino "Happening"

( The original text was published in Function Words Intangible )

Text | Huang Baixi

one,

“I want to become immersed in that part of my life once again and learn what can be found there. This investigation must be seen in the context of a narrative, the only genre able to transcribe an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me." (19)

This is Annie. A sentence written by Annie Ernaux in the preface of the novel "Happening" (L'événement, Chinese translation: "Memory is nothing but everything seen thoroughly"). A semi-autobiographical novel, a book of memories, she is not just talking about memory, but research and investigation, as if her past life and her past self are mysteries to be solved, and her alienation from herself. When I read the word "nothing", I don't know why I feel particularly sad inside. I suddenly feel empty. Or maybe there is a word in front of me but when I read it out inside, I feel a kind of nothingness. What she calls "time". The so-called trauma is that time is not a linear or quantifiable gesture, but rolls back and forth in a person's body. The meaning is always undecided inside and outside the event frame. When it comes to words, it is always a long story. Know where to start.

Just like when you stare at me with eyes full of affection, I hear the sound of the wind slamming against the window, but I dare not look directly. Or when I look straight, it has to be at the expense of the body. Re-exploring the past must be an adventure with life as the carrier, the foundation of your existence, which must withstand pain and the possibility of complete reversal.

two,

I came back to read Aino's original novel after watching the film adaptation that won the award at the Venice Film Festival. Apart from some plot changes, perhaps due to dramatic considerations, the film is more like a "complete" story than the novel. It revolves around dramatic development, sound and shadow, camera scheduling and character construction, providing a complete narrative structure. The process of ending. The novel, as Aino said, is writing with the purpose of "narrative", so that the process of memory and recollection-including all hesitations and inner struggles-can be nakedly presented. Naked means that it is always distracted and divided. One side is narrating the past in a calm tone, while the other side is analyzing the meaning and impossibility of memories to itself, suddenly stopping and starting again.

I do not intend to compare the presentation techniques of the movie and the novel here, nor do I want to compare them. What I mean is that the two are originally based on completely different purposes, so they have different manifestations. I would describe it this way: Aino's writing in the novel is a kind of pure writing, or a kind of transgressive writing; she writes not to cater to any story structure or external gaze, but has to write, in the context of secrets and taboos. In front of the barrier, one has to go beyond. Only by shaping it into words can the existence of the body be confirmed, and only then can one caress or touch the self buried inside.

Words here become a material existence like the body. You have to speak to be there.

three,

What body? A body that is prohibited by patriarchal laws and that prohibits abortion, causing women to alienate themselves into objects within themselves. In a world where laws that strictly control abortion are rekindled from the ashes of history at any time, I almost tremble as I write this sentence.

Outside the controlled body, there are women who preceded or followed her one after another in Aino's works, one after another who tried to terminate their pregnancies through different methods. The narrator in the novel is not the first, nor will he be the last (─ Time is not a linear or quantifiable gesture, it comes back, and comes back again).

I remember that the scenes in the movie adaptation often follow the female body of the protagonist Anne at a close distance. For example, the mother uses her body to measure her body temperature. For example, I saw the marks left by the bra straps several times, such as in the shower room. The distance and mutual evidence between naked female bodies, or the masturbation and erotic exploration in the room. The movie never leaves Anne, nor does it leave the body. All pain and pleasure come from here. As a woman, the body is both a place of giving and a place of depression.

The novel also writes about the body, her desires and fears. Aino wrote in the novel, "When I made love and climaxed, I felt that my body was basically no different from that of a man." (16), the fullness of sexual desire is like an Eden without distinction or language. But the unexpected pregnancy made her see the fate of a woman, or women as a whole. If the pregnancy had not been terminated, what kind of woman would she have become amid the fear of working-class background, young pregnancy and social stigma- ─Perhaps a housewife who puts her children to sleep in one room and serves dinner to her guests in another room. Yes, we still have to revisit Simon. A famous quote by Simone de Beauvoir. She did not live in her sexual desire, but "became" a woman in the midst of law and fear.

Four,

So she writes. Writing is sometimes an inverted process. Only by writing the words engraved on the body upside down can one own himself, or at least take out a little space. Destruction is a kind of creation.

She will write about the words she wrote in her diary in the past, if the words preserve a self in material form that needs to be explored. She said that when she re-read her diary, she found that in the past she would only call the things in her belly "it" or "that thing", and only once wrote "pregnant". She felt no need to name something that was not going to happen in the future and that she was desperate to get out of. She also wrote that during a meeting with a male doctor (that time she wanted him to help her terminate the pregnancy), the word "abortion" was not mentioned at all during the entire conversation. As if it had no place in language at all.

──If language is not just a mechanical operating principle, but can become invisible or nameless according to the will of the user. If language expands into a black hole between us because of taboos. So you write, so you write.

Aino quotes the surrealist writer Michel Leiris on the front page of the book: "I wish for two things: that happening turn to writing. And that writing be happening." If writing is not just the use of language, but the creation of language. Only through writing can people reach themselves. Rather than saying that "Happening" is about a woman who bravely faced the world and realized herself in an era when abortion was prohibited, it would be better to say that novel writing itself is a process of "becoming." Writing is always "happening", not that there is a complete truth waiting in front of her first, no promised land, no flowing milk and honey, but time and time again, through memories, through collisions with words (unintentionally) broken), I get to be me, have me, kiss me. To write is to surrender your entire body, to create, to retell yourself.

Or in other words, to write is the material condition for freedom to be realized, the sacred moment when nothing is exchanged for a gift. "I" exists because of writing.

five,

What is wrapped up in the novel "Happening" is actually an inversion of life and death, or a transformation of word meanings.

One of the arguments against abortion that is still prevalent today is that terminating a pregnancy is equivalent to taking away life. In the novel, when Aino writes about the older woman who secretly performs an abortion on her, inserting a cold medical instrument between her legs, she describes it as "is giving birth to me" (53). Surgery, which is equated with murder, is turned into an opportunity for rebirth in her writing. She then wrote, "At that point I killed my own mother inside me." Directly appropriating a controversial word, but flipping the entire meaning.

The meaning of "mother" has not been confirmed in her writing, as if the word has multiple meanings that are yet to be understood. Who is "my mother"? Her mother, who was born in the pre-war years and grew up in a repressive and shameful sexual culture? Or is it the image of a mother who centers on childbirth and is responsible for giving love and care? Or a whole gender matrix that replicated her, and now she can leave her past behind and reinvent herself? She didn't specify that she left a code that can be deciphered here. She simply mentioned repeatedly that she felt that the woman who operated on her was very much like her mother, a feminine connection that created possibilities for the woman herself, outside of the bloodline.

To connect is to create.

Later, she would write about cutting the umbilical cord with another girl in her university dormitory room, and being sent to the hospital bleeding profusely. She would once again appropriate the language of life and death, describing her room, her own room, "I had given birth to both life and death" (69). In this way, she concludes her memories, writes her book, and tells herself about herself, because her life is unfolded and reborn because of writing. Taboos are no longer taboos, death is turned into rebirth, patriarchal laws are rewritten/rewritten in female narratives, the sovereignty of life or language can be reconstructed, and changes occur in the moment. As she wrote in the novel, terminating her pregnancy made her understand better that torture and sacrifice are the necessary price to pay for childbirth, because only with better understanding can she make responsible decisions. From "choosing to terminate" to giving birth to the possibility of "accepting childbirth", it is also a kind of possibility after all. convert.

Everything begins with writing, ends with writing, and is tied to writing.

all possible.

six,

Before finding out she was pregnant, she had an unfinished college thesis on the role of women in surreal writing. At the end of the novel, she mentions that the experience of terminating her pregnancy—an experience that traversed life and death, time, law, morality, taboo, and even the body—brought her closer to the subject of her thesis than ever before. But her experience cannot be converted into a complete idea or a theoretical dialectic, but a dream-like perspective, a concept without shape, a kind of "wordless intelligence", or unknown or undiscovered language. In a culture of taboo and exploitation, isn't it in line with the revolutionary and innovative spirit of surrealism to try to express those transcendent experiences?

In other words, it is to build the body itself. It means that any writing is ultimately a kind of life writing, a manifestation and entrustment of will. Only in the narrative like the waves can the self be revealed (unfolded). This kind of self is not a self-absorbed personality, but a way to show or foresee the possibility of life through self-examination; as Aino mentioned in the last few times, she seems to have reached the forefront of women, and future generations will Go further than her.

I really like the sentence she wrote at the end of the novel, it is to remember──

“Among all the social and psychological reasons that may account for my past, of one I am certain: these things happened to me so that I might recount them. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.” (75)

參考書目： Ernaux, Annie, and Tanya Leslie. Happening. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022.

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