Telling Anxiety: Anxious Narration in the Work of Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hébert

270 Pages·2007·2.2 MB·English

by  Jennifer Willging

TELLING ANXIETY: ANXIOUS NARRATION IN THE
WORK OF MARGUERITE DURAS, ANNIE ERNAUX,
NATHALIE SARRAUTE, AND ANNE HÉBERT
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JENNIFER WILLGING
Telling Anxiety
Anxious Narration in the Work of
Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux,
Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hébert
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9276-2
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Willging, Jennifer
Telling anxiety : anxious narration in the work of Marguerite Duras,
Annie Ernaux, Nathalie Sarraute, and Anne Hébert / Jennifer Willging.
(University of Toronto romance series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9276-2
1. Duras, Marguerite – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Ernaux, Annie,
1940– – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Sarraute, Nathalie – Criticism and
interpretation. 4. Hébert, Anne, 1916–2000 – Criticism and interpretation.
5. Narration (Rhetoric) – History – 20th century. 6. Anxiety in literature.
I. Title. II. Series.
PQ673.W54 2007 843.00923 C2007-900814-3
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Narrative Anxiety, Narrative Desire 3
PART ONE: NARRATING THE SELF, NARRATING THE OTHER
1 ‘Truth’ in Memory and Narrative: Marguerite Duras’s ‘Monsieur X.
dit ici Pierre Rabier’ 27
2 Shame in Memory and Narrative: Annie Ernaux’s La honte 73
PART TWO: NARRATING LIFE, NARRATING DEATH
3 The Anxiety of Influence and the Urge to Originate:
Nathalie Sarraute’s Entre la vie et la mort 117
4 The Sound of the Semiotic: Anne Hébert’s Les fous de Bassan 154
Conclusion 188
Notes 197
Bibliography 239
Index 251
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the College of Humanities and the Department of French
and Italian at the Ohio State University for their generous support of my
research. They have provided me with the leaves from teaching and the
funding necessary to complete this book. I thank Diane Birckbichler and
Debra Moddelmog in particular for going above and beyond their duties
to help me bring this project to fruition. I am also indebted to Judith
Mayne, who has been a wise and inspirational mentor to me over the past
six years. Her multiple readings of the manuscript throughout its evolu-
tion have unquestionably strengthened the final product (although I
take exclusive responsibility for its shortcomings). Mary Jean Green’s
excellent suggestions for revision, and her enthusiasm, have also been of
invaluable aid to me. I thank Karlis Racevskis and Eugene Holland for
their help with various sections of the manuscript, as well as for their
warm collegiality. Two crucial mentors and readers of the earliest versions
of the manuscript were Mireille Rosello and Gerald Mead. I am grateful
to them for their expertise, kindness, and steadfast encouragement.
At the University of Toronto Press, several anonymous readers contrib-
uted to the improvement of the manuscript, and I thank them, however
impersonally. Matthew Kudelka has been a talented and meticulous copy
editor, leaving not a single American spelling or misused relative pro-
noun unaltered. Most importantly, I extend my sincere appreciation to
Jill McConkey, my editor. Her guidance, praise, and constant good cheer
have brightened my days throughout this process.
On a more personal note, I owe a debt of gratitude to my father,
Ronald Willging, for his scrupulous and unpaid editing, and to both him
and my mother, Joy Willging, for their confidence in me and for their
love. I am very lucky to be their daughter. Finally, I wish to express my
viii Acknowledgments
deepest gratitude to my husband and my own personal coach, Andrew
Teitelbaum, whose ‘tough love’ during the writing of this rather autobio-
graphical book on anxiety made its completion possible. I am so glad I
was wrong.
Earlier versions of sections of chapters 1 and 2 have been published as
‘“True Down to the Last Detail”: Narrative and Memory in Marguerite
Duras’s “Monsieur X.”’ in Twentieth Century Literature 46 (2001): 369–86;
and ‘Annie Ernaux’s Shameful Narration’ in French Forum 26 (2001): 83–
103. I thank the editors of these journals for allowing me to reprint mate-
rial from these articles.
TELLING ANXIETY: ANXIOUS NARRATION IN THE
WORK OF MARGUERITE DURAS, ANNIE ERNAUX,
NATHALIE SARRAUTE, AND ANNE HÉBERT