“I will avenge my race”, wrote the young Annie Ernaux in her diary in 1963, inspired by this sentence from Rimbaud: “I have been of an inferior race from all eternity. That of the dominated, according to the sociologist Bourdieu, who was of great influence in his career.
Posted at 2:58 p.m.
For a revenge, it’s quite one. At 82, Annie Ernaux receives the Nobel Prize for Literature, while her work has long been snubbed by critics in France who considered it “obscene and miserable”. Moreover, if she has already received the Renaudot prize in 1984 for The placeshe never received the Goncourt…
This supreme award of the planet of letters must be given during the lifetime of the author, which means that many writers who are deemed eligible for the Nobel Prize miss out on this prize because they have not lived long enough to receive (I’m thinking of Marie-Claire Blais, among others). The bettors were betting more on Michel Houellebecq than Annie Ernaux this year, but between you and me, if he had received it before her, I would have had a fit. I rather shouted with joy in my kitchen at the announcement of his victory on the radio. Annie Ernaux thus becomes the 16e French-born laureate to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, France being the most awarded country by this prize founded in 1901, but the first woman of this select group of laureates, and the 17e award-winning woman in the history of the award.
The Swedish Academy wanted to salute Annie Ernaux for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, the distances and the collective constraints of personal memory”. Couldn’t be better applied to his book Yearsthis masterpiece by which the general public discovered Annie Ernaux in 2008 and which made her known worldwide, where she recounted the crossing of a life, at the same time as the crossing of an entire society.
The coronation year
Definitely, the year 2022 is that of coronations for Annie Ernaux. As recently as last June, in an interview with her for the release of her book The young man, I pointed out to her how much she was everywhere. In Cannes for the documentary film The Super 8 yearsat the cinema with the adaptation by Audrey Diwan of her shocking book The event which described her abortion in the 1960s, a veritable manifesto updated at a time when women’s rights to decide for themselves were declining everywhere (particularly in the United States), and in bookstores with the arrival of a superb Cahier de l’ Herne dedicated to him.
It’s always a pleasure to interview Annie Ernaux, who is very kind and sincerely humble despite her undeniable aura. She said she never sought success. “I always wrote with what I felt was necessary, just, she said. I didn’t let the bad reviews get to me at all, especially since I knew where they were coming from. Often from a journalistic clan. I was for social justice, my books destroyed hierarchies, in ways of writing that bothered a certain milieu. »
By receiving the Nobel, she returned to this feeling of justice by responding to the Swedish media. The writer, who has always been committed to the left, believes that this reward comes with a great responsibility, that of continuing to bear witness to “a form of fairness, justice in relation to the world”. Inequalities are a theme that runs through all of her work, whether they come from social class, language or gender, with the result that at 82, Annie Ernaux is probably the living writer most connected to youth. activist. His influence is perhaps even greater among young authors than the writers who are his contemporaries. “It happens that through the themes, indeed, of class defectors, through a form of feminism too, yes, no doubt, I had an influence, she told me in June. But I would say it’s more by the writing itself. It was the novel or the essay, well separated, which were privileged in taste and literary criticism. I arrived with a way of describing which was autobiographical, in a refusal of the novel, but which was not centered on a pure and hard intimate. »
Annie Ernaux sees herself as an ethnologist of herself, who offers a look inside things and society, at a precise moment in history, which gives all its power and universality to her work. She thus discovered how much “to write about oneself is to write about others”. This Nobel Prize is not only a revenge of class defector for Annie Ernaux, born Duchesne in 1940 in a very modest family, where she grew up in the café-grocery store of her parents in Yvetot, in Haute-Normandie, before d to escape his condition through education and literature. It is also the revenge of women’s writing, which has always been underestimated because it often deals with the intimate, less “noble” subjects than the big guns of war, for example (a richly rewarded theme by literary prizes in general), because it offers the other vision of the world, which is nevertheless that of half of humanity.
I have twice rather than one the Quarto edition bringing together his most important titles (from Empty cupboards to Years Passing by Shame, The event, The frozen woman, The place Where easy passion), one that I leave at the chalet, the other in Montreal, to always have Annie Ernaux close to me. The title of this collection is “Writing Life”, which describes very well the extraordinary enterprise of the writer, who sums it up as follows: “I did not try to write myself, to do my life’s work: I used it, the generally ordinary events that went through it, the situations and feelings that I was given to know, as material to explore in order to grasp and bring to light something something of the order of a sensible truth. »
In doing so, she was writing the story of our lives, and this much-deserved Nobel Prize in Literature is quite simply the most wonderful news of the year, as far as I’m concerned.