#ernaux

Annie Ernaux

L'écriture est suspension pour moi de toutes les sensations autres que celles qu'elle fait naître, qu'elle travaille.

- Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory, declared the Nobel communication committee when awarding the Prize. Her work, which is mostly autobiographical, turned her in a prominent French literary figure from the unassuming teacher in literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise. She wrote about 20 novels all around the theme of “impersonal biography”. Ernaux is 82 years old and has been publishing for nearly 50 years. She has long been feted in France, where she is one of the few female authors to appear on school curriculums. The extraordinary thing is how long it has taken the anglophone world to catch up. Despite a flurry of translations around the turn of the millennium, it was only in 2019, when her masterpiece The Years (Les Années) was shortlisted for the International Booker prize, that she began to be widely noticed. Ernaux began writing - in secret, without her then-husband’s knowledge - in the French tradition of auto-fiction, a term now bandied about beyond recognition. Les armoires vides (1974) and the two books that followed were novels based on her own life, written in a conventional form. The last of these, La femme gelée (1981) was about a married mother of two who has been “frozen” by domestic life. It offered a view of women in society that would preoccupy her for decades and led readers to assume she was talking about herself. At that point, she made an emphatic switch from fiction to fact: “No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony,” she resolved. She wanted to write about her late father, who had run a cafe in Normandy and from whom she had become distanced partly as a result of her education. Halfway through writing the novel she began to feel “disgust”. A novel, she later explained, was “out of the question. In order to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach.” Instead, she would “collate” her father’s words, tastes, mannerisms, and give an account not just of the man but of his generation and class.

It’s important to understand this about Ernaux’s work: though it is written in memoir form, she features largely as an observer or as a conduit to a shared emotion.

Despite their modesty and precision (many of her volumes run to fewer than 80 pages), the books aim to show something broader than any given self, which is why she is sometimes thought of as an ethnographer or sociologist. In the book she eventually wrote about her father, La place (1983), later translated as A Man’s Place, she admonishes herself: “If I indulge in personal reminiscences… I forget about everything that ties him to his social class… I have to tear myself from the subjective point of view.”

This viewpoint was combined with an extreme attentiveness to, and an erudite knowledge of, literary style. “This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally,” she said. “It is the very same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news.” La place was the first of her books that she felt was not “false”, and it marked the beginning of a life’s work.

Other volumes were borne of, among other things, terror (her mother’s descent into dementia), desire (a love affair with a married man), physical pain (an illegal abortion), familial pain (the death of an older sister Ernaux never knew), shame, grief and guilt (should she be setting any of this down at all?). “Literature is so powerless,” she writes. And, in Passion simple: “Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things.”