On Naming the Unnamable—Trauma and Testimony in A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

Abstract: Through its indirect, experimental, and often surprising depictions, fiction approaches the gap between experience and survival and can shed light on the complexities of trauma. In this article, Annie Ernaux’s depictions of the narrativization process in her novel A Girl’s Story is used as a point of departure for reflections on how and under what circumstances it might be possible to find words for experiences that have neither been recognized by the person involved nor talked about before. Through close reading, and in dialogue with psychoanalytic theories on trauma, I discuss how we might understand the possibility of representing trauma symbolically and the different modes of such representation. The movement between an experiential and a more reflective mode is discussed as a feature of Ernaux’s narrative that might have enabled the integration of experiences into consciousness. I discuss how Ernaux’s literary project described as “making the personal universal” can be understood as a process aimed at constituting a reality that has been cut off from history: directed toward the possibility of establishing a present external, and hence more authentic, internal witness to past events.