The 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday, October 6, to the French writer Annie Ernaux, 82 years old. A reward, endowed with 8 million crowns (approximately 990,000 Canadian dollars), which underlines according to the Swedish Academy “the courage and the clinical acuity with which the writer reveals the roots, the remoteness and the collective constraints of the personal memory. »
If it is 16e French Nobel laureate for literature – Anatole France, Gide and Camus, Claude Simon, Le Clézio and Modiano notably obtained it – Annie Ernaux is the very first French writer to receive the prestigious award.
A major figure in literature in France, today translated into 39 languages, his work for nearly fifty years, with around twenty books, shines and meets new readers. The writer, committed to the extreme left, defends the freedom of women and the dignity of the working classes.
Since Empty Cabinets (1974) until girl memory (2016) and The young man (2022) via The place (1983, Renaudot Prize), easy passion (1992) or Years (2010), the realistic and ineffectual writing of this “social novelist” is put to the service of a work in which the intimate and the political merge in an authentic quest for truth.
“It represents for me something immense,” she declared, joyfully and a little incredulous, during a press conference held in Paris in the offices of her publisher, Gallimard. “Receiving the Nobel is for me a responsibility to continue and to be generally open to the march of the world, to the desire for peace that has always animated me, since I am a daughter of war”, a- she also recalled, alluding to the events that are shaking Europe today.
Referring to the responsibility that is hers, the laureate promised to “continue the fight against injustice” in all their forms.
write life
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux (née Duchesne) grew up in the village of Yvetot in Normandy. His parents, from a modest social background, ran a grocery store there. After university studies in Rouen and Bordeaux, she quickly entered secondary education and, from 1977 to 2000, worked at the National Center for Distance Education (Cned) while pursuing her career as a writer.
Earlier this year, she was seen performing at the Cannes Film Festival The Super 8 years, a documentary produced by her son from the family archives and written by her. Adapted from one of his books, the film The Eventby Audrey Diwan, had received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021. The release of this film has revived interest in her work and in particular for this book, which had received little response to its release in 2000.
She recounted her clandestine abortion (The Event), recounts his devouring passion for a married man (easy passion), chronicled his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease (“I didn’t go out of my night”). Each time, it is for her to question her condition as a woman, to take the measure of her trajectory as a class defector or to think about her individual history.
Recognition came with the Renaudot prize in 1983 for The placesound 4e book, in which she recounted the agony and death of her father.
Influenced by the thought of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, author of The distinction (1979), a book which is for her “a total and revolutionary work”, Annie Ernaux has often maintained that there was no fiction in her books. The title given to the volume of the “Quarto” collection published in 2011 which brings together in more than 1000 pages the essential of his work, testifies to this quest which animates him: write life. “Not my life, nor his life, nor even a life, she specified in the preface. Life, with its contents which are the same for everyone but which we experience individually: the body, education, belonging to others, illness, bereavement. »
Area of influence
There are countless writers that Annie Ernaux has inspired. Muse of “transclasses”, often considered the mother of contemporary sociological autofiction, this woman born in 1940 also speaks to a new generation of writers and intellectuals. From the feminist filmmaker Céline Sciamma to the writer Édouard Louis, there are many today who claim it.
For Nicolas Mathieu (2018 Goncourt Prize with Their children after them, Actes Sud), the work of Annie Ernaux is resolutely political. The 44-year-old novelist explained this earlier this year in a text published in the volume of Editions de l’Herne devoted to the writer. “These books were political, he writes, insofar as they articulated in a way that I had never before seen intimacy and history, the economy and the body, the social and sex, the personal and the collective, the memory and the order of the world, the feelings of childhood and the class war. “At 20, he added, what Annie Ernaux’s books offered me was this painful science of general enslavement, and therefore the possibility of getting out of it. »
The reactions were not long in coming. “It’s the first time I’ve felt anything when I learn the name of a Nobel Prize winner in literature,” said author Virginie Despentes, while Édouard Louis spoke of a “great day for literature. of fight “. For the French President, Emmanuel Macron, “his voice is that of the freedom of women and the forgotten of the century. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, headliner of La France insoumise, which the writer had publicly supported during the 2022 presidential election, was happy to point out that “French-speaking literature speaks to the world a delicate language which is not that money. »
“Beyond all the social or psychological reasons that I can find for what I experienced, there is one of which I am more sure than anything: things have happened to me so that I can account for them”, wrote Annie Ernaux in The Event. Before adding: “And the real purpose of my life is perhaps only this: that my body, my sensations, my thoughts become writing, that is to say something intelligible and of general, my existence completely dissolved in the head and the life of the others. »