By winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Annie Ernaux saw a dream she had never had. She says it, speaking clearly, her verb willingly cutting through bad language. Awards and homages never interested her. She had never expected to receive any. In 2000, she stated that she could not imagine that she could “have an international grand prix, even the Goncourt, which [l]’indifferent anyway’. In 1984, she won the Renaudot prize for The place.
His thoughts are elsewhere than in honors. “What I want is impossible, is to relive things. The desire to write lives in him, again and again. The project of her life is there, entirely, although she has never ceased to love, to commit herself, to maintain her work as a teacher, with the gripping feeling that she had to, whatever he arrives, making sure to “be useful” in society, on a daily basis, as his mother recommended to him.
D’Annie Ernaux appears on the screens The Super 8 years, a montage of family films made between 1972 and 1981. It is an intimate story, based on these films left aside over the years. The images, sewn together following a chronological framework, are accompanied by a narration carried by the voice of the writer herself. Annie Ernaux reflects, in this text, on these images that parade like a reflection of her life, that of her loved ones.
The project was born on the initiative of his youngest son. David Ernaux-Briot, science journalist, in his late fifties, wanted to watch these forgotten reels with his family, which contain part of his childhood. During an intimate viewing in 2016, he recorded his mother’s comments, later asking her to write about it.
Annie Ernaux, née Duchesne, had married Philippe Ernaux in 1964. Along the way, she discovered that her relationship to the world, under the great social demands imposed by marriage and its conveniences, took her too far away from herself. She wanted to write.
Like many men of his generation, Philippe Ernaux had wanted to protect his view of the world by placing it behind the viewfinder of a cinematographic camera. Armed with a Bell & Howell camera and reels of color film, he became the home maker of family memories fixed forever in the gelatin of a fragile emulsion, thus giving a new duration to life together. “Filming represents a way of intervening in the world, if not at least of being a reporter”, says Annie Ernaux in the always lucid commentary which is juxtaposed with the unfolding of these images.
The Ernaux couple collapsed, like so many others. From the particularity of this story that no projected image of happiness can quite redeem, Annie Ernaux has been able to draw universal materials to reconstruct her world, to unfold before our eyes the new horizons, offered by this very fact to all. This gave, among other books, Years, Shame, The frozen womanjust as well as The young manthis simple and disturbing little book published just before his coronation by the Nobel.
New pictures
Indeed, the prospect of seeing The Super 8 years, animated images of the private life of Annie Ernaux, did not delight me at all. I even postponed viewing it unconsciously. Why ? After all, it threatened to substitute a new light, that of the writer’s reality, for the images that had patiently built themselves up in me over the years of frequenting her work. So much so that I was not at all certain that I wanted to undergo a transposition of what had been created in me through reading. I was wrong. The look of Annie Ernaux in The Super 8 years proves to be commensurate with his work itself: remarkable, sensitive, exemplary.
Here are projected fragments of her existence in Chile, at the beginning of the 1970s, where she went to meet the country of Salvador Allende until she met him. Here is the snow-capped mountain where her family goes to ski, when she has nothing to do with winter sports, these resort areas where it is understood that you have to be happy, because the holidays demand it. Here are her children growing up, her suburban home, where she still lives. An armchair with a strange sinuosity sits in the middle of his living room from the 1970s. hectic.
What else do these family films show? Here are the holidays, the beautiful travel season, his mother who lives with them, people who talk but whose exact words are forever lost in the silence of the images. Here, beyond the images themselves, are the dreams projected into the idealization both of the countryside and of Albania, this stillborn political project of a new society, crushed under a theater of disturbing pretenses that Annie Ernaux had gone to visit.
All these images, captured by the Super 8 camera, blown up to be presented on today’s screens, are carried by a long text that Annie Ernaux reads in one go, by way of narration, in a voice calm, poised and somehow reassuring. The writer says there, as in some of her books, the feeling of suffocation that overcomes her and swells within this life as a couple, while the images nevertheless show the smooth and deceptive forms that the illusion sometimes takes on. of shared happiness.
Change the world
In looking at the whole of society through the examination of her own life, Annie Ernaux has often been accused by disgruntled minds, those who often have not really read her, of being too committed and of displease for this reason. In 1989, however, she clearly explained that “writing, whatever one does, ‘engages’, conveying, in a very complex way, through fiction, a vision that consents rather to the social order or, on the contrary, denounces it. “. In other words, pretending in literature to be nowhere constitutes a deception in the face of which history nevertheless restores the truth. “If the writer and his readers are not aware of this, posterity is not mistaken. There is no apoliticism with regard to literary history. »
Annie Ernaux said more than once that she was sensitive to the teachings of sociology, as she testified to on the death of Pierre Bourdieu. Sociology, through its thoughtful analyses, makes it possible to modify the vision we have of ourselves and of others. It always seemed to him that by “bringing to light the hidden mechanisms of social reproduction, by objectifying the beliefs and processes of domination internalized by individuals without their knowledge, Bourdieu’s critical sociology de-fatalizes existence”. What she does, basically, in her novels, in her own way, by focusing on a very factual world.
In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the writer affirms that “silence, at certain moments in history, is not appropriate”. How can we be surprised to see her denounce, in writing with a scalpel, the abuses taking place in our societies? We are increasingly experiencing the rise of an ideology of withdrawal and closure, she says. Currents based “on the exclusion of foreigners and immigrants, the abandonment of the economically weak, on the surveillance of women’s bodies”. This situation imposes “always and everywhere, a duty of vigilance”, especially at a time when the “weight of the rescue of the planet, largely destroyed by the appetite of the economic powers”, cannot weigh, “as it is to be feared, on those who are already destitute”. Literature, for Annie Ernaux, has always been political.