Journey to the East of France

On the limitations of literature to addressing the teenage experience of incest.

“I had one last option: Make do. Which is to say: Abandon the person I was, accept becoming someone different. That was my last possibility. It lay at the bottom of my mind in case of failure. If the others didn’t work. And if there wasn’t any other escape. Accept not having a life, having a failed life, adapting to it. I would tell myself it’s not so serious. That was a final possibility. To continue to live if the other courses failed. It was not the solution I liked best. It was the solution of despair. But it wasn’t suicide. It wasn’t death. It implied a radical change of vision with respect to what I had imagined for my person and my future, but it wasn’t the end. It allowed me to wait.”

Since the 1990s, the French writer Christine Angot has written with provocative insistence about relationships surrounding, and disrupted by, incest. When she published her first book on the subject, Incest, in 1999, the audience was polarized and she quickly became the center of public controversy regarding discussions of sexual violence. In Journey to the East of France, the third of Angot’s books to be translated into English following Incest and then Impossible Love (2015), she returns to the place where her father imposed his first incestuous relationship on her. Angot writes about the site—a Strasbourg hotel—with haunting precision, recalling the rooms’ light sources, the color of the wallpaper, the hotel’s entrances and exits. The psychic suffocation and mental strain required to stay sane become apparent as she describes her experience at age thirteen. Angot writes, “To distort the reality—on one side, a total blackout, on the other, an excessive illumination—cost me a lot of effort. I had to ignore whole swaths of reality, cast a light on the positive points, pretend to have forgotten certain scenes, keep a level of pride afloat.” Journey to the East of France continues Angot’s project of encountering this disturbing subject again and again in writing. Each time she wrestles with limitations of literature as the form to address her experience. Beyond an account of trauma, her work meticulously describes the power structures that produce such sexual violence with an ever-frenzied rage.