Annie Ernaux's Shameful Narration

In La Honte (1997), Annie Ernaux describes a painful childhood experience to which she makes no explicit reference in previous accounts of her youth. 1 In that "écriture plate" 2 which has been her signature style since 1984, she writes: "Mon père a voulu tuer ma mère un dimanche de juin, au début de l’après-midi" (13). It quickly becomes evident that this "scene," which Ernaux attempts to narrate in the first part of La Honte and to understand throughout the rest of it, left a deep impression on her. My project here is to explore this revelatory text, along with interviews with the writer, in order to understand why this scene was not included in the previous texts that meticulously narrate and re-narrate precisely the time period in which it took place. The most obvious answer is that Ernaux was ashamed of what happened that June day in 1952, as the title of her book suggests. Yet she is not a writer who shies away from personal revelation, having described elsewhere in her autobiographical work an illegal abortion (Les Armoires vides [1977]) and an obsessive passion for a married man (Passion simple [1991]). What, then, kept Ernaux, or rather her narrator, from narrating this important episode for over twenty years, and what desires or needs finally pushed her from silence to narration? What does she hope to accomplish by mining some very painful and deeply-buried memories and exposing her findings to the reader?