Obsessed with passing time, Annie Ernaux conceives the act of writing as a way to hold on to her memories, which are bound to disappear. (Source: TheNobelPrize/Twitter)
Emmanuel Lenain writes: Annie Ernaux uses personal events as a way to speak about broader social issues such as class differences, patriarchy, and social injustices.
Written by Emmanuel Lenain
With sixteen laureates to date, France is the country with the highest number of Nobel Prizes in Literature. Yet, Annie Ernaux is the first French woman to win the prestigious prize, succeeding Patrick Modiano (2014) and JMG Le Clézio (2008).
Born in 1940 in Normandy, France, Annie Ernaux was raised in a modest family. Her parents ran a grocery store that doubled as a bar and café, which was frequented by the working class. Encouraged to study hard by her mother, she shone at university and went on to become a teacher. Subsequently, the idea of being a “class defector” would haunt most of her literary work. She has spoken a great deal about her parents, her social milieu, and the shame she used to feel about it. In Ernaux’s work, life and personal events are a way to speak about broader social issues such as class differences, patriarchy, and social injustices.
Her debut novel, Les Armoires Vides, was published in 1974, but it was A Man’s Place (La Place, Gallimard, 1983) that won her recognition. Written shortly after her father’s demise, it speaks about her childhood growing up in the café run by her parents. She later wrote a mirror novel, A Woman’s Story (Une femme, Gallimard, 1987) about her mother. Her autobiographical narratives, intertwining historical and individual memories, culminated in The Years (Les Années, Gallimard, 2010), which brought her international fame after being translated into English and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Written in the third person, it narrates the ups and downs of a woman from the 1940s to the 1990s. Using old photographs and later movies as prompts, she recalls her past — from her childhood years to motherhood.
About life in the 1960s, she writes “we were continually amazed by the amount of time we saved with instant powdered soup, Presto pressure cookers and mayonnaise in tubes. Canned was preferred to fresh, peas from tins instead of garden-picked. It was considered more chic to serve pears in syrup than ripe from the tree… We marvelled at inventions that erased centuries of gestures and effort. Soon would come a time, so it was said, when there’d be nothing left for us to do”. When speaking about 1967 and the legalisation of contraceptive pills, she recalls “We felt that with the Pill, life would change drastically; we were to become so free with our body that it was frightening. As free as a man”.
Upon hearing the news, President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “For the past fifty years, Annie Ernaux has been writing the novel of our country’s collective and intimate memory. Her voice is that of the liberation of women and the forgotten. With this accolade, she enters the great Nobel circle of French literature”. While French literature enjoys a great reputation globally, contemporary French fiction is yet to gain traction in the Indian market, which prefers classics. Contemporary writings are often deemed as difficult to access, be it because of themes foreign to current Indian preoccupations or because of a style judged too elitist and convoluted. Annie Ernaux’s work stands as a brilliant counter-example. Her style is clear, her “writing sharp as a knife” (this was the title of her essay published by Stock in 2003) and her stories could be anyone’s stories. Her struggles are those of a generation of women who fought for having control over their bodies and to exist as women alongside men equally. From the account of her abortion at a time when it was illegal in France (L’Évènement, Gallimard, 2000) – which was recently adapted into an eponymous movie by Audrey Diwan and won the Golden Lion in 2021 at the Venice Film Festival – the observation of social injustice from the perspective of a supermarket (Regarde les lumières, mon amour, Seuil, 2014), to her latest account of her relationship with a man 30 years her junior (Jeune Homme, Gallimard, 2022), Ernaux does not hide anything. At the intersection of literature, sociology and history, she is indeed the voice of the forgotten and the silenced.
There is much of the Proustian heritage in Ernaux’s work. Obsessed with passing time, she conceives the act of writing as a way to hold on to her memories, which are bound to disappear. She writes: “Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me… In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation”, unless someone puts it down on paper. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spoke about “the excess of memory of the stigmatised” to express that very vivid memories, such as shame, cannot be forgotten. Not surprisingly, this became the central subject of her book, Shame (La Honte, 1997). She is no stranger to the works of certain Indian Dalit writers, such as Omprakash Valmiki’s magisterial autobiography, Joothan: An Untouchable Life, which was recently translated into French, or the writings of Mulk Raj Anand, to name just two.
From Virgine Despentes to Emmanuel Carrère, Nicolas Mathieu, Marie Darrieussecq, or emerging authors like Pauline Delabroy-Allard – many express the profound influence Ernaux had on their work. Her Nobel Prize comes just ahead of the next New Delhi World Book Fair, where France will be the Guest of Honour and bring a delegation of more than 20 French authors. We hope this will result in more translations from French to Indian languages, with the support of two of our literary programmes: The publication assistance programme PAP Tagore, and the Romain Rolland Award for best translation (in partnership with Apeejay Oxford Bookstores) which, incidentally, were both named after two Nobel Prize winners, Rabindranath Tagore (1913) and Romain Rolland (1915).
The writer is Ambassador of France to India
Source: Indian Express