L’Occupation
Annie Ernaux’s The Possession heralds a period of realistic literature where modern accounts of subaltern experiences are deemed “not literature.” Ernaux proves these critics wrong, writing a “stereotypical” crazy girlfriend into canonical literature. I am not saying this masterpiece is canonical yet, but that it should be!
This is a great first read for the syllabus. For one, I enjoyed the Durassian fragmentation, the exploration of a Self and an Other, the Older self reminiscing on the younger self. For two, the candidness of language is amazing. The narrator protagonist has just ended a relationship, her ex-boyfriend now finds a new partner. She speaks her mind, no filter.
The ex-boyfriend is still in contact with the narrator, doesn’t tell of the other woman. Ernaux charts the actions we are agents of, the extremities of seeking an elusive truth. In the immensities of Being and possessing qualities Ernaux uses obsession to explore what separates the Self from the Other: what does the other woman possess that the narrator does not? And what does it mean for the Self to discover that another person desires someone other than her?
As for the Durassian fragments, is each fragment a memory? Then Ernaux’s The Possession also explores memory-narration. As novelist, Viet Than Nguyen’s describes Marguerite Duras as “exploiting the most fundamental tricky parts of our recall- do we seek out a memory or does it find us?”. Ernaux, heavily inspired by Duras’ fragmented form seems to adapt philosophy to explore memory.
The novella starts with the older-narrator self confessing:
I have always wanted to write as if I would be gone when the book was published. To write as if I were about to die— no more judges. Even if it’s an illusion, perhaps, to believe that truth comes only by way of death. (6)
Writing as memory-recall. That seems another theme Ernaux explores in this slim but dense novella. Writing as a means to explore the self, to self-understand, self-mythologize.
It is interesting that the narrator-protagonist seeks to stalk and be obsessed with the other woman as opposed to the man who just left her.
I caught glimpses of all the acts I would have been capable of if society hadn’t constrained my impulses; for example, instead of simply looking up the name of this woman on the Internet, shooting her with a revolver while screaming “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” Something I had done at times, at the top of my voice, without the revolver. My suffering, at base, was about not being able to kill her. And I envied the primitive morals of brutish societies whereby one would kidnap the person or even assassinate her, resolving the situation in minutes and avoiding the prolongation—which appeared to me endless—of suffering. Suddenly I understood the leniency of the courts toward so-called crimes of passion, their loathing to apply a law that tells us to punish murderers, a law derived from reason and necessity but which runs counter to another more visceral one: the right to eliminate the man or woman who has taken over your body and your mind. Their desire, at base, not to condemn the final act of a person who is prey to an intolerable suffering, the act of Othello and of Roxanne. (19)
For a slim novella (memoir?), this fragment not only explores jealously, but also social contract theory and civilization theory. It is a self constructing a self through societal learned expectations — such as social contract, behaving civilized to avoid punishment in society. In this way, the mind is possessed by an ideological, generational and imperative way of living.
Question: What do you make of the rage the narrator has towards the other woman and not W.?
C’est Tout.
Apparitions by Margo Glantz – Another Charco press classic. Interwoven fragments of the body as vessel for seeking enlightenment, seeking understanding. Fragments of two nuns in their pious ways of being, religious ecstasy, whipping body for sacrament as contrasted by another’s character sexual and non-sexual rendezvous with her lover, on the reflection of writing. Seeking a state of being. This novel questions seeking mindsets in hopes to trigger creative writing outbursts, Apparitions that come and go.