Happening Again: Why an Abortion Story Matters
by: Beth Kearney , October 31, 2024
by: Beth Kearney , October 31, 2024
I was sitting in a long, curved row of women, our uncomfortably upright chairs facing in the same direction. I turned, snuck a glance around the room to a group of feminists gripping their armchairs. A few grimaced, others averted their gazes with a wince, the stoics raised their eyebrows. I exchanged a knowing glance with a woman I had not yet met, and we smiled at each other, maybe out of recognition that we were all, in a sense, sharing something. At a film screening for an academic conference, I sensed that my colleagues were jolted, too; that there was tension in the air.
I’ll tell you what was happening. We were gazing at a stern-faced woman crouched between a younger woman’s legs; limbs spread wide, her body was exposed. She was warned not to cry out. Instruments were being bent, and pushed inside her body. The young woman responded to the twists and shoves of the sharp objects inside her. Capturing this, the camera was perched somewhere behind the young woman’s shoulder, hovering like the absent friend she needed there. It was the scene of a clandestine abortion—a brutal one, but not pornographic. Rather than offer a penetrative or voyeuristic gaze, the film forces us to witness something a little closer to the young woman’s perspective.
Gazing at the cluster of women who had shown up for the screening, I noticed that each face reflected a different expression, a different kind of troubled-ness. But surely, I thought, we were all thinking something similar: like the protagonist, we all have bodies, and we all, presumably, have sex. We all, I assume, feel pain. This woman’s was a unique kind of pain. A piercing of the cervix. A sharp and violent penetration of the cervix was with us in that room. We let it penetrate our psyches, thrust us into foreign flesh.
We were, in a sense, ‘transported.’ Happening (2021), by French director Audrey Diwan, operates upon the premise that a moment of the past is never truly anchored there; time can bend, and though Diwan depicts a clandestine abortion in a world some sixty years ago, this circumstance can and does reoccur.
Set in France during the winter of 1963-64, the film follows Anne, a hardworking 23-year-old student of literature and sociology. She lives in the university halls of residence and sometimes frequents a local bar with friends. Anne lives in a world where sex is a freedom that many women her age long for, though it carries serious—even fatal—risks. The contraceptive pill would not be legal in France until 1967 and, until 1975 the act of performing, receiving, or aiding abortive procedures would be illegal and punishable by a fine, imprisonment or, for medical practitioners, loss of the right to continue practising. On 17 January 1975, France decriminalised abortion with the Veil Law, named after pioneering feminist and reproductive rights activist, Simone Veil. Diwan’s film captures the period prior to the Veil law; it depicts young women during their sexual awakenings, while foregrounding the risks associated with satisfying their desires—namely prison or death.
Diwan tracks Anne’s troubling discovery that she is pregnant and her desperate though determined search to abort. Dangerously approaching the three-month mark of her pregnancy, Anne eventually finds her faiseuse d’anges—her ‘angel-maker’ or abortionist—through a mutual friend. During the procedure, ‘Madame P-R.’ instals a probe in her uterus to induce the abortion. With the instrument still lodged inside her, Anne returns to her room at the university to await the expulsion. When she haemorrhages and is sent to hospital, she avoids imprisonment thanks only to the apparent goodwill of her doctor, who makes the merciful decision to diagnose a ‘miscarriage,’ rather than an ‘abortion.’ Despite her relatively good fortune, the experience brings Anne close to death. Audiences are not spared the ghastly details: we witness screams and moans, towels of blood, an umbilical cord dangling from Anne’s vagina—at its end, a fleshy, doll-like figure, its three-month-old eyes discernible. The abortion is a sacrificial gesture guaranteeing her the freedom to pursue her studies and escape her working-class origins.
Diwan’s camera creates a visceral proximity to Anne’s body and all it endures; this closeness produces an affective, sensory experience for the viewers. We are sheltered neither from the sharp and bloody realities of the back-alley abortion nor from the restrained though urgent suspense of desiring to be rid of an ever-growing foetus inside. This is ‘haptic’ cinema, where the act of viewing a film becomes an activity experienced with the body. As Laura U. Marks (2014) writes, this filmmaking style has the effect of closing the distance between the spectator and the film’s diegetic space.
Anne’s body is penetrated in both pleasurable and painful ways—she has sex, attempts to pierce her own cervix with knitting needles, and has two back-alley abortions (the first is unsuccessful). Through all this, there is indeed an intimacy between the spectator and the protagonist, as the camera follows Anne through the university halls of residence or hovers beside her while she examines her growing belly in a mirror. Audiences witness her body bobbing and swaying in a bar, fighting—in a scene of unembellished nudity—with girls in overcrowded dormitory showers, glaring at the lack of blood on her plain white underpants, rolling on a blood-soaked mattress. These scenes bring the viewers into intense proximity to Anne’s lived reality. Alexandra Pugh (2022) similarly writes on the sensory experience that Diwan creates, highlighting visceral proximity in even the most subdued moments of the film: in a casual gesture of female intimacy, Anne’s friend passes her used chewing gum on which she has been contentedly munching, a scene evoking ‘the wetness of exchanged saliva, the fading minty flavour of the used gum.’ Following Marks (2002: xi), then, Diwan’s film transforms the moving image into a ‘connective tissue’ bridging the spectator, the representing image, and the represented thing.
The affective and haptic qualities of the film produce empathy among its spectators, positioning them not only to experience the film with their bodies, but to confront their own embodied memories. My own response to the film took me back to my time in the gynaecological stirrups. Paradoxically, this was a caring experience; my procedure hurt, but I was surrounded by supportive, female professionals in the business of reproductive health. Though I came to the film with my own unique history, cinematic devices rendered the screening a sensory experience—one that ultimately forced a rapprochement between my own bodily experience and that of the protagonist.
This is not to say that all spectators of Happening experience it according to their sex or gender. It is true that the film stages a female body grappling with the consequences of a regressive policy that specifically targets women. Yet it portrays a circumstance that is viscerally troubling regardless of one’s sex or gender. Assuming that the spectator is a fleshy, affective, and affectable person, s/he is positioned to connect with experiences of sexual passion or bodily pain, as well as with emotions such as fear of losing one’s autonomy or desire for control over the trajectory of one’s life.
Further, the film’s haptic qualities do more than erode a sensory distinction between spectator and film: they also suck up a temporal distance. The moment of the film’s 2021 release was a post-Veil era; women in France could—depending on their unique circumstances—access abortion services. In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v Wade, a shattering event for pro-choice advocates across the world. Even for those of us who do have access to abortion services, this event underscored the enduring challenges faced by women seeking abortion. More broadly, it shows us that the things that we may consider as fundamental human rights are, in large part, out of our control: the conditions surrounding our bodily autonomy often lie in the hands of government and medical bodies. The overturning of Roe v Wade reminds us that there are forces in society that can and would undermine our reproductive rights.
Given this recent history, there is more than one way to unpack the viewing experience triggered by Happening. Annette Kuhn distinguishes between the viewer as ‘spectator’ and as a member of a ‘social audience.’ A spectator is the viewing subject whose experience is governed by the film itself. In the case of Diwan’s film, haptic qualities trigger an affective, embodied response from the spectator. By contrast, Kuhn’s notion of a social audience assumes that the viewer is conditioned by social, cultural, political, or economic contexts beyond the film (1994 [1982]: 185).
Kuhn does not suggest that the spectator and the social audience are binary or mutually exclusive positions. Rather, she proposes that these terms assist the film critic in determining precisely where cinematic meaning is derived. On the one hand, the notion of the spectator assumes that meaning flows directly from the internal operations of the film. On the other hand, the concept of the social audience highlights the ways that meaning is created beyond the film itself and, further, that it can shift according to context.
In other words, the member of a social audience brings to their viewing experience the inevitable baggage of context: what year is it? where in the world is s/he? and what cultural, social, or political diktats govern this person’s heart, mind, body, sense of self? The concept of a social audience rests upon the assumption that a film’s meaning is always dynamic—it is never fixed in the space of the film (Kuhn 1994 [1982]: 172).
In a post-Roe v Wade world—vastly different to the one just a year prior—a person’s experience of Happening shifts according to the altered social, cultural, and political context. While the film itself primes its spectators to experience Anne’s ordeal through the lens of their own embodied memories, the recent and mighty victory of pro-life advocates conditions the viewing experience as well. Because ‘meanings are produced at the point of reception,’ ‘new audiences’ emerge from a shifted or shifting sociopolitical context (Kuhn 1994 [1982]: 180 and 185).
Could it be that, in the 2023 film screening of which I write above, the tension in the air was not only a result of Diwan’s positioning of us as spectators, where the film’s affective qualities make us squirm in our seats, turn our gaze, squeeze the knuckles of our viewing companions? In the post-Roe v Wade era of Diwan’s film, there is a slippage between the spectator and the social audience, according to the terminological framework that Kuhn implies: as a social audience, we are also witnessing what it would mean to live beneath a judicial framework that has cast away a progressive vision of reproductive rights.
*
Diwan’s film is an adaptation of a 2000 memoir by French author Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate. Based on the author’s experience during her university days, the memoir does the important work of painting a ghastly, though stylistically restrained, portrait that we ought not forget: Ernaux depicts a world in which women’s bodies are, in a sense, no longer private things governed by women themselves. In other words, the choice to abort does not, in the slightest measure, belong to the pregnant woman herself. Rather, the decision falls under public jurisdiction, a punishing and alien entity that often struggles to account for the nuances of lived experience.
But stories can, by contrast, grapple with such complexities. Stories can thrust us into an unfamiliar body, invite us to imagine existence in another’s skin. More pressingly, stories can immerse us in a world of problematic diktats, show the tightening of societal mores as they squeeze the waists of women like corsets.
While Diwan’s film asks us to imagine ourselves alongside, and in solidarity with, her protagonist, the original memoir brings history forward a little differently. Ernaux, reaffirming her hallmark ‘flat’ writing style (‘écriture plate’), is not nearly as affective in her literary portrayal of the abortion as Diwan.[1] Yet her text does, like the film, evince a deep concern for shrinking the distance between the present and the past.
Throughout Ernaux’s text, she pairs past and present alongside one another. The central narrative focuses on her student self during the period from conception to abortion—from 1963-64. Interspersed throughout this, she includes long passages in parentheses to describe her thoughts and feelings while writing Happening between February and October 1999, a moment in France when abortion was ‘no longer outlawed’ (Ernaux 2000: 19). In this way, the memoir positions the subjectivity of a young woman whose bodily autonomy is suddenly, viscerally threatened, alongside that of a woman unearthing this experience from the rubble of time.
In shifting between past and present, the memoir shows that a momentous event such as a clandestine abortion can never really be forgotten. The narrator explains that, in the decades since her abortion, the popular songs of the 1960s echo in her mind, and the faces she passes in the streets remind her of those of the past, their names similarly etched into her memory. People appear in the present as simulacra from the past, and the narrator has ‘trouble distinguishing the copy from the original’ (2000: 57). Since her abortion, life appears to be a series of haunting returns. Memories of the winter of 1963-64 generate a folding and flexing of time; the abortion is not an event buried in the past, but one that stretches to the present moment.
This is where the title of the English text, translated by Tanya Leslie in 2001, succeeds in ways that the original French title does not. The event is ‘happening’—it occurs then and now, the present participle suggesting that the event continues to unfold. This is threatening: beyond suggesting that the abortion endures in Ernaux’s mind, this title also reminds us that history often repeats. We know very well that Anne’s abortion is much more than a nightmarish snapshot of the past, as the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade shockingly illustrated.
But ‘happening’ has another meaning. As suggested in the original French title, L’Événement, this story is about ‘The Event.’ An event is something that ruptures the banal cycle of the everyday, altering the flow of actions that succeed it. Once Anne discovers that she is pregnant, her life is no longer the same: ‘Time ceased to be a series of meaningless days punctuated by university talks and lectures, afternoons spent in cafés and the library … [i]t became a shapeless entity growing inside me which had to be destroyed at all costs … I was living in a different world. There were the other girls, with their empty bellies, and there was me’ (2000: 22). For the narrator, abortion was a life-shifting event that wrenched her away from her own mother’s body and from her childhood, thrusting her into her womanly body—a body whose insides were exhumed during the abortion, after which she haemorrhaged and, later in the hospital, was curetted. The event is portrayed as being more momentous than perhaps the most recognizable moment of 1963, President Kennedy’s assassination. The president’s death pales in comparison to the narrator’s own experience of 1963, a year during which she risked her life to defend her bodily autonomy.
Martine Delvaux (2002: 131-148) writes that the clandestine abortion is not the only event staged in Happening. She points out that there are two ‘happenings:’ the 1964 abortion and its 1999 chronicling. Such an argument is based upon the premise that writing about an abortion is, in itself, a momentous occasion. The act of writing transforms a memory—conceptual and intangible—into something material. This is important because, before 1975 in France, abortion was absent from the collective mind and parlance. Happening portrays a 1960s France in which the word ‘abortion’ was neither uttered out loud, nor available in written form. Ernaux specifies that medical practitioners, and even university peers, refused to use the word, and there were no books that could explain—in personal, fictional, historical, or medical terms—what an abortion actually involved (2000: 27). This gap in societal knowledge was one that the narrator desperately needed to be plugged when she fell pregnant, simply because she lacked both guidance and company, and to such an extent that she looked to the victims of the holocaust as her predecessors. They were, like her, individuals whose bodily autonomy was radically compromised due to a deep prejudice toward their identity.
A further parallel between the event of 1964 (abortion) and that of 1999 (writing) emerges: Ernaux’s book was, itself, almost aborted. Reflecting on her experience of writing Happening, the narrator explains that she almost gave the whole thing up: ‘Last night I dreamed that I was back in 1963, desperately trying to get an abortion. When I woke up, I realized the dream had plunged me into the same state of despondency and helplessness I had experienced at the time. Then it struck me that the book I was writing was a doomed enterprise … [b]ut now that impression is gone, the urge to write is all the more pressing since it has been justified by my dream’ (2000: 39). In this context, abortion is a metaphor expressing a transformation: an intangible and bodiless thing becomes concrete and real. A pregnancy can radically shift the course of a young woman’s life—it is a visceral, urgent experience. Words, too, can elevate something from the apparently inconsequential (a foetus, a memory, an anecdote from the past) to a more tangible reality, either positive or negative. Words can help women to find safe solutions to pregnancies.
Furthermore, the act of writing fastens personal experience to history because, as Ernaux tells us, ‘writing invariably raises the issue of proof: apart from my diary and my journal, I have no sure indication of what I thought and felt back then because of the abstract, evanescent nature of what goes through our minds … [t]rue memory has to be material’ (2000: 47). She writes that in the 1960s abortion was, by dint of its prohibition, rendered invisible, intangible and for many, unthinkable. Not only were the women who endured illegal procedures voiceless, but abortion was repressed in the minds of pregnant women, whispered in the corridors of university halls, hurried behind the locked doors of clandestine abortionists, and thus collectively rendered invisible. By not exposing her story, the narrator feels that she risks preserving ‘the same veil of secrecy as before’ (2000: 19-20), repressing a common experience that should not be blotted out: ‘if I failed to go through with this undertaking. I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by the patriarchy’ (2000: 38). Silence does more than oppress the victims of a law prohibiting abortions; it threatens to erase important experiences from the collective consciousness, to allow society to forget that the past can resurface. Thus the act of writing is a means of recasting the abstract memory of a past event into the concrete space of a book, in turn fastening personal experience to history.
In 2022, Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.’ With a career spanning over four decades, Ernaux is applauded by a worldwide community of readers who recognise her unique wielding of intimate experience, as she obscures the threshold between the individual and the collective. Happening navigates this tension, showing that one person’s experience can mean something for the rest of us: ‘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’ (2000: 75).
This same objective appears to be realised in Diwan’s film, though this is achieved through a visceral cinematic language. Yet film critic Beatrice Loayza (2022) laments what she considers Diwan’s hackneyed concern for immersive cinema. For Loayza, Diwan’s approach strips away Ernaux’s more subtle reckoning with the ways that personal memory intersects with history; where Diwan strives for the urgency of sensory experience, Ernaux opts for the sophistication of ‘stark, measured language’ (Loayza 2022).
However different, both approaches elide the distance between past and present—between citizens of the 21st century and women of the 1960s. In defence of Diwan’s delivery, her film harnesses cinema’s purportedly mimetic and indexical capabilities not as devices that can faithfully and authentically capture the real. Rather, she strives to portray a more subjective reality of the event and, following Marks (2014), she does so by creating a visceral proximity to the represented thing. In contrast to what is usually deemed possible in literature, Diwan uses cinema to brush up against the event itself, in turn inviting the viewer to create their own meaning—to bring their own embodied memories to the viewing experience.
At the film screening during the conference, when the credits appeared and the lights flickered on, the room started to hum; we began the ‘so-what-did-you-think’ conversation. Not all women in the room had had an abortion, but many knew the poke of an intrauterine device—how deep the cervix is, how narrow the opening. One woman was pregnant, carrying with her the life-shifting knowledge of what it means to have a life growing inside you. Other women were happily and voluntarily childless. But, in response to the film, everyone expressed that they were palpably jolted. Happening is a story that triggers the terror of what it means to live in a society that prohibits abortion. This is a good thing: such a story should provoke a visceral kind of fear.
Notes:
[1] Since publishing La Place (1983)—in English, A Man’s Place (2020 [1983])—Ernaux writes in a clinical, straightforward, or, as she phrases it ‘flat’ style (Ernaux 2003: 32; Ernaux 1983: 24). Avoiding metaphorical or overly literary turns of phrases that tend to embellish writing, Ernaux expresses that her writing style flows from her ideological conviction that, if she were to do otherwise, she would further distance herself from her working-class origins. Her pared-back style is, in this way, an approach that resists the linguistic pretension of the bourgeois class—‘the language of the enemy’ (2003: 33, my translation). The writer finds that this literary style brings her close to the pure reality of her experience: she strives to write from the facts of her lived reality and thus reconstitutes embodied experience in what she finds to be the most truthful manner possible (Ernaux 2003: 34).
REFERENCES
Delvaux, Martine (2002), ‘Annie Ernaux: Écrire L’Événement,’ French Forum, Vol. 27, No.2, pp. 131-148.
Ernaux, Annie (2020 [1982]). A Man’s Place. Trans. Tanya Leslie, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Ernaux, Annie (2003), L’Écriture comme un couteau, Paris: Stock.
Ernaux, Annie (2001 [2000]), Happening. Trans. Tanya Leslie, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Ernaux, Annie (1983). La Place, Paris: Gallimard.
L’Événement (2021), dir. Audrey Diwan.
Kuhn, Annette (1994 [1983]), Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, London: Verso.
Loayza, Beatrice (2022), ‘Happening,’ 5 June 2022, https://4columns.org/loayza-beatrice/happening (last accessed 16 December 2023).
Marks, Laura (2002), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Marks, Laura (2014), ‘Haptic Aesthetics,’ in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, New York: Oxford University Press.
Pugh, Alexandra (2022), ‘Can You Feel It? ‘Happening’ and Sensory Cinema,’ 19 August 2022, https://www.publicbooks.org/audrey-diwan-happening-sensory-cinema-abortion/#fnref-49865-3 (last accessed 15 December 2023).
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