‘The first thing I did after waking up was grab his cock – stiff with sleep – and hold still, as if hanging on to a branch.’
The opening of Annie Ernaux’s essay might suggest that the ‘possession’ of the title is of a husband’s penis. But after our nameless protagonist leaves ‘W’, her husband of 18 years, it is with his new woman that she becomes obsessed – possessed with a ‘primordial savagery’. She is maraboutée, or bewitched. Ernaux writes not in the heat of desire but in retrospect. The translation by Anna Moschovakis is chicly austere. Like concrete poetry, small paragraphs sit adrift on the page; the text is as unmoored as our protagonist.
Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, and her hybrid memoir The Years has been adapted into a staggeringly powerful stage production. The Possession is a microcosmic analysis of jealousy and agony. Our heroine becomes an ‘echo chamber for all pain everywhere’. She goes on a ‘tortuous and relentless search’ through the internet to find the lover and fantasises about committing ‘crimes of passion’, reflecting that one is more likely to cave into murderous impulses in the evening, much like scoffing chocolate. For the French, the only thing worse than murder is getting fat.
What makes her possession possible is the ex-husband. The couple ‘maintain a painful bond’ as W drip-feeds her information about the ‘new woman’. His reasons are especially murky when he gives her a birthday present of a bra and g-string. While she dances on the edge of insanity, she revels in the pain of feeling alive.
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