The Nobel Prize for Literature crowned Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux and the “courage” of her autobiographical work on Thursday, making this feminist figure of popular origin the first French woman to win the prize.
The 82-year-old author of around twenty books is rewarded for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, the distances and the collective constraints of personal memory”, explained the jury. Nobel.
She becomes the 17e woman to win the Nobel in Literature since the famous awards were founded in 1901, and the 16e French winners, eight years after Patrick Modiano.
By adding herself to the prize list with the famous names of Anatole France, Albert Camus or even Jean-Paul Sartre – who refused the prize – she became above all the first Frenchwoman crowned by the most prestigious of literary prizes.
The writer told Swedish television that she felt “a great responsibility” to continue to bear witness to “a form of fairness, justice, in relation to the world”.
With her crystalline prose, Annie Ernaux had long been a favorite in literary circles, but she said it came as a big “surprise” to her.
“His work is uncompromising and written in simple, clean language,” said Swedish Academician Anders Olsson.
“When she brings to light, with courage and clinical acumen, the contradictions of social experience, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or the inability to see who one is, she accomplishes something admirable. and which is long term,” he added.
For the Swedish Academy, “despite a consciously playful literary style, she declares that she is, I quote, ‘ethnologist of herself’ rather than a writer of fiction”.
“Continue the fight against injustice”
During a press conference on Thursday afternoon at the premises of her publisher Gallimard, Annie Ernaux promised to “continue the fight against injustice” in all its forms.
The prize creates a “responsibility” to continue to fight against injustice “in relation to women and in relation to the dominated”, even if literature does not necessarily have “immediate action” to change things, she said. .
Returning to the beginnings of her career, she explained that she had “happened to say that I wanted to avenge my race. At the time, it was a wish a little in the air, ”said the author who has always defended and written about her modest origins.
Being read by younger generations shows “that what I write is still alive, that they find an echo in it, it is certainly of all the gratifications that I can have as a writer one of the most important”, has she added, confident that she still had “a book in the works”.
She underlined the renewed importance of the feminist fight, including the right to abortion for which she will fight “until the last breath”. “It does not seem to me that we, women, would have become equal in freedom and power” to men, “there is always this domination”, she continued.
Asked about the situation in Iran, she said she was “completely in favor of women rebelling against this absolute constraint” which is the compulsory wearing of the veil, while specifying that she “advocates the freedom to wear the veil in France”, where the “context” is different. In France, “it’s not the same context, nobody constrains (women who wear a veil), it’s a choice. Not wanting to recognize this choice is a mistake in France”.
“I don’t really feel like I’m brave, it’s not courage, it’s necessity,” commented Annie Ernaux, referring to the explanations of the Nobel jury. She praised the courage of political figures like Simone Veil, or anonymous caregivers, and adding that she did not yet know what she would do with the sum allocated with the prize.
The intimate novel of the woman of the twentieth century
Prix Renaudot in 1984 for “La Place” and finalist for the prestigious international Booker Prize in 2019, Annie Ernaux 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 avowed left-wing writer, the literature professor at the University of Cergy-Pontoise feeds on Bourdieusian sociology, the discovery of which in the 1970s allows 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.
From “The Empty Cabinets” (1974) to “The Years” (2008), this tall, 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 “Empty Cabinets”, her 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 grocers of parents and on the other “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 she believes to have committed towards her parents by devoting a reconciled portrait to them in “La Place” and “Une femme” (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 “The 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 Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes.
“I consider 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 “L ‘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 “La Honte” (1997) then in “Mémoire de filles” ( 2018), her illegal abortion experienced in 1963 as a social emancipation in “L’Événement” (2000), the failure of her marriage in “La femme gelée” (1981) or her breast cancer in “L’usage de the picture” (2005).
Judged by her detractors as an obscene and miserable writer, she shocked by the crude description of amorous alienation in “Simple 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 newspaper from outside” (1993), “The outside life” (2000) or “Look at the lights my love” (2014), she brings banal subjects into literature, always with the same ethnographic rigor. In 2021, she appeared in “I liked living there”, a documentary film dedicated to Cergy.
Octogenarian, she knows a strong media exposure with the adaptation to the cinema of “The Event” (Prix Lumières and Golden Lion in Venice) and “Simple 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”.