The hype about the nature and value of intimate, self-fictional writing may now die down with the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to French author Annie Ernaux. The news appears to shock some media practitioners and other social media influencers. Ernaux is an intimate writer, did she really deserve it? we say to ourselves. Ernaux certainly does not hold the first rank of nationalist writers whose works abound in libraries all over the world, and she does not compete with bestsellers notorious. And yet.
Although she was appreciated by critics and rewarded in France by the Prix de la langue française and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize for all of her work, Annie Ernaux remained on the fringes of the national literary milieu as a novelist of the self-fiction. This is undoubtedly a mark of distinction, but it does not elevate the writer to the rank of writers of great literature (eg Victor Hugo), to use an expression of Milan Kundera.
The worldwide recognition of Ernaux’s work therefore comes as the crowning achievement of several decades of assiduous work, far from the limelight, at the heart of the most important act, the act of writing. It is also the recognition of a margin in no way separated from the body, that of a revolutionary minority which lives and produces within and against the overwhelming majority. His blinking question “Who am I?” gives way to the question: “Who am I in the world?” », question of the non-partisan left par excellence, the left concerned with human rights and freedoms everywhere in the world, and beyond all borders.
By asking this question, Annie Ernaux destabilized the great temple of world literature in the twentiethe century with diligence and perseverance. Born in 1940, she is the heir to resistance literature and committed literature theorized by Sartre and others, which has become synonymous with Literature. Ernaux timidly published his first autobiographical novel in 1974, The empty cupboardsafterwards The frozen woman (1981), and The place (1983, Renaudot Prize in 1984) in which she dwells on her childhood and youth between 1940 and 1960. Her ideological or militant claims pass through a subtle, feminine, simple writing.
She returns to these themes in Years (2008), while she is an established writer who knows how to manipulate the reader’s voyeurism as well as the flaws in history. She contemplates photo albums, films, press clippings, political movements and the “I” which becomes a “we” conscious of its cosmic individuality. His work is located on the edge of autobiography, memoirs, diary, essay and collective imagination. In the heart and on the edge, behind and in front of the camera, outside on the big stage and in the depths of self-awareness.
In easy passion (1992), the heroine falls in love with a married man. Like Proust, it is a writing devoid of moral judgments, struck by irony and introspection. But unlike Proust, Ernaux relies on a simple initial event through which she weaves a rich and complex inner world, especially regarding feelings of jealousy, expectation and anticipation. His minimalist approach to writing develops through short, frugal, stripped-down sentences. His writing accumulates details and does not drown in them, expands the world from an infinitesimal point and gives way to fantasies with acuity and subtlety.
Ernaux was born far from the center and lived her life outside of Paris. She writes from her intimate life, but she also draws on the readings that have marked her, in history, popular culture and literature. Inspired by this sentence of Brecht: “He thought in others, and the others thought in him”, she says in writing like a knife (2003): “Basically, the final goal of writing, the ideal to which I aspire, is to think and feel in others, as others — writers, but not only — have thought and felt in me. This book sheds light on and reveals Annie Ernaux’s writing profession and her belonging to the left.
Beyond borders, Ernaux tried to expand the space of oneself and others, whether real or imaginary, political or literary. His writing is an act of liberation from models, including those of the novel itself, liberation from partisan affiliation, national consciousness and reductive identity determinants. For her, writing is an act of freedom, while all freedom begins with a self aware of its place in the world, and that this place in the world is that of everyone here and in the distance.