Crossing the Arid “I”: A Study of Annie Ernaux's Feminist Autobiography Shame

In her essay, “The Universal Subject, Female Embodiment, and the Consolidation of Autobiography,” Sidonie Smith uses the Isak Dinesen short story “The Blank Page” to illustrate the notion that female autobiography can interrupt the expectations of traditional normative masculinity in (western) autobiographical practice. The setting of the Dinesen story is a Spanish convent. Stained with the shed blood of lost virginity, framed wedding night sheets from aristocratic marriages, line the corridors of the convent. Row after row of the sheets tells the same story until one framed sheet appears that is missing blood-it is blank and white. Smith explains the scene thus, “one autobiographical sheet breaks the narrative pattern in its silence in its refusal to be framed the same way.” (3) The sheet, in its silence, interrupts the narrative of female embodiment by not telling the expected story of the wedding night.
Annie Ernaux's Shame, an autobiographical exploration of her childhood and the effect of one traumatic event on her perception of self, interrupts the assumptions of (western) autobiographical practice in the same way as the blank, white sheet interrupts the narrative of female embodiment on the convent walls. Ernaux resists the assumption of an individual self unshaped by environment as well as the elevation of the disembodied 'I' in favor of an “ethnological study of the self” (33) that acknowledges female embodiment as well as the role of societal influence on the formation of self-identity.
The tyranny of the arid “I” is a phrase coined by Sidonie Smith who-inspired by a passage from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own- describes the way the encompassing assumptions of the “I” in (western )autobiographical practice leaves no room for those who do not fit the normative masculinity of that “I.” The tyranny is in the assumption of what and who the “I” is that leaves no room for anyone outside of the normative masculine individuality. The arid “I” is derived from the concept of the disembodied “I,” a notion that began in the Renaissance when the concepts of the individual and of a universal human subject grew in stature. The dominance of the idea of the self-defining individual expanded with the 18th and 19th centuries, until a standing universal subject became a common assumption of intellectual and philosophical discourse
The assumption of a disembodied “I” rests on the belief that the self is an independent entity that develops from an ahistorical or transcendent site of knowledge. It is a self that is rational and unswayed by the influences of race, culture or class status.
Ernaux challenges the idea of the “disembodied I” as well as the dream of “unimbedded selfhood,” in the very structure of her autobiography Shame. In fact, much of the autobiography centers on the way Ernaux was shaped by her environment, class status, material desires and familial/social issues. and how this shaping led to the way she dealt with the traumatic instance when her father tried to kill her mother. She describes Shame as an “ethnological study of the myself.”(33) Ernaux states that she is not going to write a traditional narrative in which certain aspects of reality are assumed to be true.
Naturally I shall not opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead
of searching for it. Neither shall I content myself with merely picking out and
transcribing the images I remember; I shall process them like documents, examining
them from different angles to give them meaning. In other words, I shall carry out
an ethnological study of myself. (33)
The author completes a study of the self by documenting and listing the rules and behavior expectations by which she lived in a small Normandy town. The lists are detailed and distanced, written in a vaguely scientific tone. She explicates painfully tiny details concerning how a twelve year old girl in 1952 was expected to behave at home, in public, in the workplace and at school. She describes the songs that formed her yearnings and the clothing that stoked her material desires. Ernaux looks to these daily informers as the definition of self, saying “At the age of twelve I was living by the rules and codes of this world; it never occurred to me that there might be others.” (51) It is clear that Ernaux resists the idea of the disembodied “I” because sees her twelve-year old self as completely formed by her gender, societal and class status.
To convey what my life was like in those days, the only reliable method I have
is to explore the laws, rites, beliefs and references that defined the circles in
which I was caught up-school, family, small-town life-and which governed my
existence. (32)
Ernaux resists, contradicts and outright rejects the idea of a free and autonomous soul, able to exist above and outside of the demands of society. Rather, she takes it down to the minutest levels of society to explain her reactions to the traumatic events that occurred and from which she was not able to recover. From the rules of the church (No holding the handrail, no chapel during recess) to the successive stages of existence (Do one's military service, get married and have kids), Ernaux leaves little ground uncovered.
The act of crossing and doublecrossing the line of the “I” occurs when Ernaux challenges the assumption of a self with a hard core at the center, a core that is able to access some pure idea of truth. She does this by questioning what she has learned from the experience of writing about her own life. Instead of winding down her autobiographical study with a pat explanation of what she learned from her experiences, Ernaux instead questions her own thought processes and even her own capabililty of learning anything from the examination.
After evoking the images I have of that summer, I feel inclined to write “then I discovered
that” or “then I realized that,” words implying a clear perception of the events one
has lived through. But in my case there is no understanding, only this feeling of shame
that has fossilized the images and stripped them of meaning.” (104)
By refusing to make meaning from the experience, Ernaux resists the assumption that the goal of autobiography is to travel to that true center of self where the stable referent lies. In doing so, she creates a space for the idea that there is no stable referent. The self is constructed of so many different influence that it is impossible to strip an experience down to a core meaning. It is the images, material possessions and random experiences of life that defines one, not a solid core from whence identity arises like a tall building out of the fog. The author does not see the act of writing down the journey of the self as a way to find a solid answer about her identity. In fact, Ernaux would not describe the act of autobiography as a journey at all. She would more likely describe it as a series of images that add up to only one emotion: Shame.
Smith argues that the assumption of a Universal subject, of unimbedded selfhood “obscures through a gray and shapeless mist everything colorful that lies within it's vision,” (4) meaning that the assumption of a Universal subject is only defined by those things that lie outside of the accepted definition of self. In order to have a concept of self, there must be something that is identified as not the self. In this case, traditional normative masculinity is what has been defined as the stable referent since the Renaissance, meaning that certain groups such as women, people of color and homosexuals are identified as the other, and in turn marginalized and forced to live in the shadow of the looming black line of the Universal I. Smith argues, “Founded on exclusionary practices, this democratic self positions on its border all that is termed the “colorful,” that is, that which becomes identified culturally as other, exotic, unruly, irrational, uncivilized, regional, or paradoxically unnatural.” (9) In other words, in order to be a disembodied “I,”there must be something that is considered embodied. Something identified as unruly and irrational.
The act of crossing and double-crossing the “I” continues as Ernaux creates a space in her autobiography for those who are deemed “colorful” in the definition of the democratic self. She identifies herself and her family as those who live on the margins, who are not considered part of upstanding French society. One scene in particular illustrates this point. The twelve-year old Ernaux and her father are in a restaurant during a bus trip to Lourdes. The author watches as a wealthy father and daughter eat at a table near them. She cannot help but compare herself and her father to the others. It is during this comparison that Ernaux realizes her “otherness” as a working-class person.
The restaurant scene in Tours is by far the most vivid. When I was writing a book
about my father's life and roots, it would haunt me relentlessly, proof that
there existed two separate worlds and that we would always belong to the
one down below. (105)
The text acts as a reversal of accepted historical autobiographical practice in that Ernaux represents the other traditionally excluded from the narrative. Ernaux is clear that she is the other. She is the colorful force that must interrupt the accepted narrative to make space for her own version of the story. Her story is representative of the “colorful,” the other, and documents the story of those who are forced to live in the shadow of the “tyranny of the arid I.” Through her fragmented tale, Ernaux brings the colorful out of the shadows and into the light of historical narrative.
In challenging the assumptions of (western) autobiographical practice, Annie Ernaux creates a space of resistance wherein the accepted narrative is questioned, and in its place a space for those who have traditionally been “embodied” or assigned the definition of “colorful.” Like the blank white sheet on the wall of the convent, Ernaux resists the tale told before. By implicity resisting the idea of a disembodied “I,”Ernaux defeats the tyranny as described by Sidonie Smith and Virginia Woolf, creating a space of illumination within shadow, and a way to tell a story of self that is authentic while still being fragmented and non-conclusive. Ironically, though Ernaux doesn't feel that she is able to discover a core identity, her interruption of accepted narratives manages to seem to be even more authentic and truthful than those written from the location of a stable, Universal self.