(Paris) The writer Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday, has produced, through an essentially autobiographical work, a remarkable radiography of the intimacy of a woman who has evolved according to the upheavals of French society since the post-war period.
Posted at 7:53 a.m.
Renaudot Prize in 1984 for The place and finalist for the prestigious international Booker Prize in 2019, this professor of literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise has written around twenty stories in which she dissects the weight of class domination and love passion, two themes that have marked her itinerary. of a woman torn because of her popular origins.
An asserted left-wing writer, Annie Ernaux feeds on Bourdieusian sociology, the discovery of which in the 1970s enabled her to identify the “social malaise” that gnaws at her as soon as she enters a private school in the 1950s.
Born in 1940, she lived until she was 18 in her parents’ “dirty, filthy, ugly, disgusting” café-grocery store in Yvetot in Haute-Normandie, from which she will extract herself thanks to an aggregation of modern letters obtained by dint of intense intellectual work.
Of the Empty cupboards (1974) to Years (2008), this tall and beautiful blonde woman will follow a writing trajectory that leads her from a harsh and violent first little novel to this generous historical autobiography.
In The empty cupboardsher heroine describes with rage the two incompatible worlds in which she evolves during her adolescence: on the one hand, ignorance, filth, the vulgarity of drunken customers, the petty little habits of her parents’ grocers and the another “the facility, the lightness of the girls of the free school” from the petty bourgeoisie.
“Flat Writing”
Over the stories all published by Gallimard, the author will repair the betrayal that she considers to have committed towards her parents by devoting to them a reconciled portrait in The place and A woman (1988).
His clinical style, devoid of any lyricism, is the subject of numerous theses. Through this “flat writing”, she summons the universal into the singular story of her existence. Very quickly abandoning the novel, she renews the story of filiation and invents the “impersonal autobiography”.
With Years, she evokes her life to trace the novel of a whole generation, that of the children of the war marked by existentialism in the 1950s and sexual liberation. Through the allusion to objects, words, songs, television programs, she restores a truth of her time.
In 2022, she takes up this story with dozens of family films shot by her former husband between 1972 and 1981. The super 8 years are presented at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes.
“I see myself very little as a singular being, but as a sum of experiences, of determinations also, social, historical, sexual, of languages and continually in dialogue with the world (past and present)”, she writes in writing like a knife.
From then on, writing became a means of attaining and expressing with authenticity the intimate experience of her feminine condition modeled by Simone de Beauvoir: her failed deflowering in Shame (1997) then in girls memory (2018), her illegal abortion lived in 1963 as a social emancipation in The event (2000), the failure of her marriage in The frozen woman (1981) or her breast cancer in The use of photography (2005).
Judged by her detractors as an obscene and miserable writer, she shocks by the crude description of amorous alienation in easy passion (1992).
“A woman who writes”
Installed since 1977 in Cergy-Pontoise, she has devoted many writings to this new town in the Parisian suburbs describing the life of her fellows whom she meets in supermarkets or the RER. In The outside newspaper (1993), outdoor life (2000) or Look at the lights my love (2014), she introduces banal subjects into literature, always with the same ethnographic rigor. In 2021, she appears in I liked living therea documentary film dedicated to Cergy.
Octogenarian, she knows a strong media exposure with the adaptation to the cinema of The event (Lumières and Golden Lion Prize in Venice) and easy passion.
This author of the XXe century which claimed in 2022 to “feel a little illegitimate in the literary field” remains a reference for a whole new generation of artists and intellectuals. A true feminist icon for several generations, Annie Ernaux told AFP in May that she simply feels “woman. A woman who writes, that’s all”.