[Last week, Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her
courage in interrogating France’s collective memory. Her work has
been concerned with the lives of working-class women, which her books
have treated with an uncommon dignity and respect. ]
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ANNIE ERNAUX’S WRITING HAS GIVEN DIGNITY TO THE LIVES OF THE
WORKING CLASS  
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Jess Cotton
October 12, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Last week, Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her
courage in interrogating France’s collective memory. Her work has
been concerned with the lives of working-class women, which her books
have treated with an uncommon dignity and respect. _

Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, speaks
with author Kate Zambreno at Albertine Books on October 10, 2022, in
New York City., (Eugene Gologursky / Getty Images for Albertine Books)


 

Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last
Thursday, was not on the other end of the telephone when the committee
rang to deliver the news. Last year, she received a prank text telling
her she had won the illustrious award, which might be one reason why
her first response when the committee did get through to her was
incredulous: “Are you sure?”

Unlike Philip Roth who sat on tenterhooks waiting for a call that
never came, Ernaux, at eighty-two, was never too fussed about prizes.
Certainly she didn’t wait in expectation of them. When she didn’t
win the Man Booker International in 2019, she went to see the Dorothea
Tanning show at the Tate Modern instead, had lunch with the view of
Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and drank in a pub frequented by Amy
Winehouse. She preferred her own company to the heavy, uncharming
world of prize culture. On receipt of the Nobel, Ernaux, however,
recognized the responsibility that came with it: to continue fighting
“everything that is a form of injustice against women.”

Jean-Luc Mélenchon congratulated Ernaux in a Tweet: “Annie Ernaux,
Literary Novelist. We are in tears with happiness. Francophone letters
speaks to the world in a delicate language which is not that of
money.” On other corners of the internet, fans responded by
celebrating a win for “girlies” and “hotties,” as if the
subject matter of Ernaux’s prose — the lives of women — was not
the most serious, universal subject of all. Hers is unmistakably a
victory for the working class, for whom prize culture has never been
particularly favorable.

Ernaux, who has written twenty-three books over a fifty-year span,
grew up Catholic and working class in the small town of Yvetot,
Normandy. Her parents were factory workers. Born to farmers, they had,
by the time Ernaux was young, saved up and bought a small shop, above
which the family lived and ran a grocery and café. Initially, this
enterprise was an auspicious one, but soon, the necessity of selling
on credit and later the encroachment of supermarkets left the family
small business little more favorable than factory work. Her father,
who often had to take on other work and was not part of a union,
“was both a worker and a shopkeeper,” Ernaux writes, “and, as
such, was doomed to a life of solitude and distrust.”

Socially Ascendant

In writing about her father in her fourth book, _A Man’s
Place_ (1983), Ernaux abandoned the conventional scaffolding of
fiction, which she saw as betraying the reality of his life, and
devised the style of writing for which she is now known. “In order
to tell the story of a life governed by necessity,” she cautions
herself in retrospect, “I have no right to adopt an artistic
approach.” Eschewing “lyrical reminiscence” and “triumphant
displays of irony,” Ernaux bypasses the lynchpins of middle-class
narrative, offering in its place a starkly honest representation of
the violent endurance of an ordinary, working life, which is also one
of the most devastating explorations of grief. Writing of the mixed
blessings of her class ascendence, she observed that her father’s
“great satisfaction, possibly even the _raison d’être_ of his
existence was the fact that [she] belonged to the world which had
scorned him.”

As her parents transitioned from manual laborers to small business
owners, Ernaux was able to continue attending school and later
university in Rouen and become a teacher. The postwar era was one of
welfare and social progress. In the subsidized world of French social
democracy, Ernaux had a place carved out for her that would safeguard
the young writer from her parents’ fear of falling. It was in this
space that she met her former husband Philippe, who belonged,
unambivalently, to the world of the middle class. He introduced her to
that class’s ironicized quips, which linger in the tight air of
family dinners, and the idea of Europe as home to a sophisticated
culture to which education granted her membership. The couple settled
in Cergy-Pontoise, a suburb forty kilometers to the north of Paris,
and started a family in the late ’60s there, a place, as she writes
in _Exteriors _(1993), which, like many suburban towns drawn from a
blank map, “sprung from nowhere” to cater for an emergent,
displaced, cosmopolitan middle class.

Initially, though, Ernaux dropped out of her teaching qualification
and went to live in London, at the height of the swinging ’60s,
“simply,” she writes, “because I wanted to be free.” As a
young woman from a working-class background, to live independently and
to write literature was to move on uncharted, risky ground. Novels —
Rosamund Lehmand’s _Dusty Answer_, Françoise Sagan’s _Bonjour
Tristesse_ — provided models, but those books were written by
middle-class women. In the first letter, from April 1963, in a
recently published edition of Ernaux’s work, she writes to her
friend, with the urgency of young desire overrun with expectancy, to
borrow her typewriter so that she might draft her first novel.

Writing as the feminist movement gathered momentum, Ernaux would
invent an entirely new language for speaking directly about women’s
lives and desires. Far from much of the 1970s strand of French
feminism, which sought to make sense of women’s experience by
appealing to the abstract language of philosophy or the turns of
phrase of so-called cultured literature, Ernaux kept her language
grounded in the everyday. In her later work _The
Years _(2008)_,_ she reflects on returning to her local dialect on
visits to her hometown: “The language that clung to the body, was
linked to slaps in the face, the Javel water smell of work coats,
baked apples all winter long, the sound of piss in the night bucket,
and the parents’ snoring.” It is not simply that she plumbs her
own life for material — what writer doesn’t? — but that she
radicalizes the genre of memoir by using it to link her own individual
experience with that of other members of her class, generation, and
sex. She shows how memoir, as the most direct expression of individual
subjectivity, is inextricable from the historical social formations
that it gives rise to.

In _A Woman’s Story _(1987), Ernaux writes that her mother
“spent all day selling milk and potatoes so that I could sit in a
lecture hall and learn about Plato.” In the book, which reads as a
strange mirror of _A Man’s Place_, Ernaux seeks to understand the
woman who raised her apart from her existence as a caregiver. Her aim
is to “capture the real woman, the one who existed independently
from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died
in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.” In _I
Remain in Darkness_ (1997), Ernaux returns to examine her mother’s
life, with the guilt that comes from writing about someone who is
intimate and the clarity of observing their life as a whole; the title
is the last words that her mother spoke.

In _A Girl’s Story_ (2016), Ernaux turns her attention to her
eighteen-year-old self — “the girl of ’58” — her burgeoning
desire, the violent expectancy of the world around her — and to the
first night that she spent with a man at a summer camp: her first trip
away from home. A moment that might have been an exhilarating sexual
and emotional awakening is contained by the power of the older man, a
head instructor at the camp. In the book, the sexual encounter unfolds
against a swiftly drawn portrait of the feeling of being young and
living through the newness of the history of the postwar years. This,
Ernaux tells us, was “the summer of De Gaulle’s return, the new
franc and the new Republic . . . and Dalida’s _Historie d’un
amour_.” It was also the summer when “thousands of servicemen left
France to restore order in Algeria.” Caught within the maelstrom of
history and desire, “the girl of ’58” finds herself abandoned
and left “with the real, for example a stained pair of underwear.”

What Is Remembered, What Remains

Ernaux seeks to draw her reader into the psychic space of someone
possessed both by their own desire and the violence of its
consequences. Unlike most French women of her generation, she has
declared herself fervently on the side of #MeToo — of the generation
of contemporary feminists who recognize the historic imbalance of
power between men and women that underlies the inadequacy of present
work and sex relations. In her writing, Ernaux gives free rein to
desire, taking it to its furthest limits, a self-shattering, ecstatic
desire that she sees as not incompatible with the necessity for
consent; it is in fact rather its precondition. Desire, a subject that
Ernaux returns to throughout her life, and speaks of with a disarming
clarity, as it is released from its historical prohibitions, is
wrenching, exhilarating, and transformative.

In _A Simple Passion _(1991), she chronicles the solipsistic
intensity of her feelings for a younger, married Russian diplomat,
whom she met in Leningrad in 1988. A decade later she returned to the
subject in diary form in _Getting Lost _(2001), which gives a more
explicit, unadulterated version of the throes of passion that eclipsed
the rest of her life for an eighteen-month period. The lover is
object, not subject, of the story: a stranger whose strangeness only
intensifies over time. Ernaux does not seek to contextualize or
moralize the affair; instead, she simply describes it. The persons
involved in the story of passion, the most individualizing of
experiences, seem merely incidental to its telling.

It would not have passed the Nobel Committee by that Ernaux has
written one of the greatest accounts of abortion in
literature. _Happening,_ published in 2000 in France and in England
the following year, was made into a film by Audrey Diwan earlier this
year. It is also one of the greatest accounts of writing: of
transforming an experience into writing and writing into an
experience. It was the first subject Ernaux wrote about in her 1974
novel, _Cleaned Out,_ and to which she continued to return, as the
focus of her writings shifted from fictionalized, personal,
clandestine female experience to history. The narrative, which centers
on her struggle to obtain an abortion, revolves around the difficulty
of leaving a class position and of making a life for oneself, as a
woman, in 1963. A decade later, French feminists would take to the
streets, publicizing their own abortions, forming a collective
narrative that paved the way for its legalization.

_The Years_, published in French in 2008 and in English in 2017, which
is widely recognized as Ernaux’s masterpiece, opens with an image of
a woman squatting, in Yvetot after the war, and charts the sounds,
sights, idioms, lyrics, and feeling of the middle decades of the
twentieth century. It asks the question of what will remain, what will
be carried forward, and what will be consigned to history. It shows
how memory lives at once inside and outside of us, at the interstices
of which the material texture of the quiet, suppressed dreams of
ordinary people are collectively felt. What is remembered: a first
kiss, a wall dividing Europe, _The Magic Roundabout,_ Saturday
shopping, monthly bills, Dr Spock, revolution. What remains: a
woman’s body, the same yet different, nothing like its
representation in pornographic and women’s magazines; workers
continuing to undertake the labor that makes writing possible; a
narrative of postwar progress that stutters and falters as it
approaches the present: “February half-term the steel workers . . .
who burned tyres on the train tracks, while she read _The Order of
Things_ in her seat on the immobilized TGV.” This ability to link
together her own personal memory and collective history is the most
radical aspect of Ernaux’s work. As _The Years_ moves toward its
closure, she resumes a first-person perspective, taking herself out of
the story, ceding space to the generation to come.

At a meeting of the Union Populaire in support of Mélenchon as a
presidential candidate in January 2022, Clémentine Autain, a member
of the left-wing political party La France Insoumise, launched in 2016
by Mélenchon, read from Ernaux’s 2013 book about her
hometown, _Return to Yvetot. _There Ernaux describes the shame she
experienced as a young girl when the smell of Javel water, which
marked her out as a belonging to the working class, was detected by an
optician’s daughter. Passages from Ernaux’s book were contained in
a collection of extracts that also included words from Angela Davis,
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean Jaurès, and Lola Lafon. Together these
insurgent voices were meant to articulate what a new movement directed
toward creating a more just world might look like. Ernaux declared
that she was supporting Mélenchon “because she’s ashamed of
seeing neoliberalism destroy individuals and their environment,
listening to messages of hate against a part of the population,
ashamed of saying nothing, doing nothing.”

As the twentieth century came to a close, many working-class
organizations also fragmented, taking with them the identities and
cultures that they had held together. Within this context, Ernaux’s
attentiveness to how members of the working class lived through these
long periods of decline has the effect of restoring agency to those
deprived of it. Writing of her grandfather, who worked on a farm from
the age of eight, she observes that “his meanness was the driving
force which helped him resist poverty and convince himself he was a
man. What really enraged him was to see one of the family read a
book.” By looking around her and giving space to “anonymous
figures glimpsed on a street corner or a crowded bus, unwittingly
bearing the stamp of success or failure,” Ernaux carves out a
language for collectivity at the heart of the self — a literature
that gives shape to the transmission of memory, the impossible choices
faced by individuals and political movements, and the desire to revive
the subdued feeling of revolt.

_Jess Cotton is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Cambridge
University._

* Annie Ernaux
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* Nobel Prize
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* Working Class Perspectives
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