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I “know” the French writer Annie Ernaux about a year ago. At that time, while reading the October 2021 issue of the London Review of Books, I read a brief introduction to Anne Ernault’s work by chance, and fell in love with her at once. Her novel, “La Place,” published in 1986, is a book about the most prosaic and deep-rooted family relationships in memory of her father. After my father passed away, I’ve always wanted to write a book about him, but I’ve never been able to do it. Ernault’s work really caught my eye. However, I was also “horrified” by her words, after writing her book about her mother, “Une femme”, she said: “The publication of a book means that the mother is really dead, because when While I was writing, I was reliving the times and places we spent together when my mother was alive.”
Like her words, Ernault’s words were simple and plain, but full of mighty power. It’s been a long time since I read such a direct-to-the-heart text, so it’s no surprise that she won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Anne Ernault was born into a working-class family in Normandy in 1940. Her parents were originally workers and later opened a small cafe. Before Erno, her parents had another daughter, but the girl died of diphtheria when she was 6 years old. Ernault was sent to a private Catholic school with excellent grades. She later studied in a normal school, but gave up her studies because she was always distracted. After that, she spent half a year as an “au pair” in the Finchley area near London (living in a local family, learning their language and culture, and taking care of the other family’s children in exchange), before going to Bordeaux, France to study Bo, studying the French 18th-century classical comedy master Marivaux. Ernault had an abortion when he was a student, which was illegal at the time. She met Philippe Ernault in college, and they married and had children. Ernault later returned to teaching, working for 23 years at an Open University-like school in France. After that, the family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a new town on the northwestern outskirts of Paris. Ernault started writing when he was done teaching, doing housework, and the kids were asleep.
Ernault aspired to be a writer when she was in college, but her first novel was deemed “too ambitious” by the publishers. When she tried writing again, she completed her autobiographical novel Les Armoires vides, published in 1974, without telling anyone. At that time, Ernault’s husband was very angry and said to Ernault: “If you have the ability to write a book secretly, then you have the ability to deceive me.” The relationship between the two deteriorated. Ernault’s third book, The Frozen Woman, was published in 1981, at a time when divorce was imminent. Ernault, who was back to being single, started writing with real freedom.
Hernault’s upbringing has influenced all of her works, from “Empty” to “Do as They Say” (Ce qu’ils disent ou rien), from “It’s Happening” (L’événement) to “A Girl’s Memory” (Mémoire de Fille), etc. But first, that person who had a big influence on her was her mother. The mother has a strong character, is not comfortable working as a worker all her life, and does not accept the so-called inferiority complex. She broke free from the curse of fate and has her own coffee grocery store. Her experience is an exception in her social class. Not only that, but this mother loves to read, even though she dropped out of school at 12, she is a voracious reader who needs to wash her hands before opening a book, and she believes that books and learning are the ticket to a different future. It’s not actually easy for Ernault to leave the past behind and say goodbye to his past self in a way. Ernault has said that to do this, someone needs to be encouraged all the time, someone needs to say: “Go on, dance!” And the person who has been encouraging her is her mother.
At one point, Ernault recalled in an interview: “In our village, I had many friends whose mothers often said: ‘We don’t have much way out’, but this only made the child more and more timid. I My mother had never done anything like this. She always said, ‘You deserve it.’ I remember one time, at a country dance, I danced a lot with a boy whose parents owned a great family in town. Upscale cafe. On the way back, another mother said to my mother: ‘That boy is too high for you guys.’ My mother got very angry and said: ‘Sorry, my daughter has graduated from high school Now! She’s going to get a higher diploma in the future and definitely deserves that guy!'”
The unwritten rule of “don’t risk going beyond your life class” fills the world of factories and farm workers where Erno grew up, and Erno eventually makes the “class leap” to another “place.” However, the past seems to remain in Erno’s body. She recalled: “My parents lived with what they called the fear of going back to work in a factory, which was a bigger, older, more visceral fear… In some cases, I felt… not , it’s not timidity or discomfort, but, as if I’m not in the right place…”, “I don’t feel very comfortable in certain circles to this day. I don’t seem to be where I should be, so to speak. When I’m walking through Paris – for example, through Saint-Germain-des-Prés, past all the luxury stores – this is not my world. I like nature, I like quiet. I don’t feel that I have anything to do with this complex world Infatuation, I just don’t care about that.”
If education was Erno’s ticket to a higher class, what prompted her to write? are two books. One is The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. This book gave Ernault an epiphany: Feminism is necessary. The second book is “Separation” by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. This book is about the cultural differences between people in a certain class and those who make progress. The book makes Erno realize that there is a huge gap between her and the original environment, but she will never really belong to the new environment.
So Ernault knew she had to pick up a pen and write. In addition to this, reading also influences the way Ernault writes. For example, Germaine Greer’s “The Eunuch”, Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Disgusting”, Virginia Woolf and other works all influenced Ernault’s work. writing.
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“Necessity, not pleasure” takes Erno back to her past, which she dissects like a forensic expert examining a crime scene. Among her many works, “It’s Happening,” about her own experience with illegal abortion in the 1960s, is one of her masterpieces, and the film based on this autobiographical novel won the Golden Lion at the 78th Venice International Film Festival in 2021 prize.
The story, set in 1963, centers on Annie, a literature student from a working-class background. The semester is coming to an end, but Annie, who is preparing for the exam, finds out that she is pregnant unexpectedly. This will affect her studies and disappoint her parents who expect her to excel. Annie wanted to continue her studies and did not want to have the child, so she turned to the doctor for help. As a result, the doctor said nothing about abortion, but gave her a birth control pill. In France at the time, in a conservative country that was deeply Catholic, abortion was not legalized until 1975, and anyone who helped a woman get an abortion—a doctor, a friend—could go to jail.
In the book, the text of the story travels between 1963 and the 1990s, and Ernault thinks it’s important to write about it because “these things happened to me so I can retell it,” Ernault said in an interview. Shi also said: “I wanted to document what it feels like to be a woman who has no right to self-determination. You can no longer imagine what it was like when abortion was illegal. No one was going to help you – not a doctor, a friend, or your family. They all looked the other way. It was a huge sense of loneliness. It was like a brick wall suddenly stood in front of me, and it was like the law was saying to me: stop there, don’t go any further After all, I’m not like those rich girls who can go to Switzerland (for an abortion).”
It’s a feeling of being “abandoned,” Ernault said. In addition to loneliness, there is fear. Ernault recalls: “When you were trying to get out of your old social class, like I did by constantly trying to learn, you often asked yourself: What’s going to trip me up? What’s going to stop me? When I found out I was pregnant, It dawned on me: it’s my body, it’s what’s holding me back. Back then, the unwed pregnant woman was the epitome of poverty. You’ll never be free. It’s all over.” Before, pregnancy was an earth-shattering event and a cruel one for women: she could herald a certain fate for women.
“There are thousands of people who have had clandestine abortions, and I want to recreate the truth. When this happened to me in 1963, doctors wouldn’t even mention that word. I can’t imagine that abortion would one day be allowed. .” Ernault said that all of his writing came from “a sense of urgency to save something.” She wants to preserve the memories so that they will not be forgotten and disappear. She said: “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, needs to be recorded. There is no unimportant truth. Also, if I fail to do this work, I will be relegated to being a silent woman and condoning patriarchy. ashamed to rule.”
Ernault argues that while the work was written in the years when abortion was legalized, that did not diminish the importance of talking about women’s reproductive rights. She said: “Paradoxically, when a law to abolish discrimination is passed, previous victims tend to keep silent on the grounds that ‘it’s all over now’. Everything that happens is kept secret as it was in the past. Surrounded by a veil.” She wrote in the book, “I wrote ‘It’s Happening’ to preserve the memory of the brutality suffered by millions of girls and women.”
“Maybe the real meaning of my life is to make my body, my feelings, and my mind into words, in other words, into something intelligible, universal, that integrates my existence into other people’s lives and mind,” she said. At this point, Ernault turns himself into a “literary object”, observes himself, and says to himself: “Everything is available”. It seemed cruel, but Ernault said: “I never regret anything, I believe everything that happened to me was doomed.”
“It’s Happening” and Erno’s other works all confirm the Swedish Academy’s comment on her: “With courage and calm acumen, she reveals the roots of personal memory, estrangement and collective bondage”.
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Since her first work, The Empty, came out in 1974, Ernault has redefined the form of memoir. Ernault’s work focuses on the different stages of her life—from her working-class childhood in Normandy, to her college days, to her becoming a teacher, to the death of her parents—in these works, The current Erno and the past Erno continue to have a dialogue. Moreover, these constant re-encounters with the self are not just personal experiences, but multiple perspectives—her texts reflect the changing times. In France, Ernault is even regarded as the greatest “chronographer” of French society for the past 50 years.
So, should Ernault’s work be classified as fiction, or non-fiction? Her work over the past three decades has been written from observation and memory of real events; everything is accurate and true, including the words of the era, the lyrics, the colors of the clothes of the time, etc. Some people regard these works as the author’s memoirs. Ernault’s answer was clear and firm: “I write fiction.” She immersed herself in a certain era and told a story there, which she believes is “recreated and reconstructed from words and emotions.” The behavior is obviously a literary behavior. “
Likewise, Ernault considers himself a “novelist”. “It’s a novelist’s job to tell the truth,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t know what truth I’m looking for, but I’m always looking for the truth.” She added that I wanted “to find a fact, a fact that no longer exists. An obvious fact, a fact that I have to discover.”
The work “Long Time” is Ernault’s representative work. The work tells the story of France from 1941 to the present, based on the life story of a woman. It describes Ernault’s youth in Ivito, Normandy, conversations she overheard between World War I and World War II soldiers as a child in her mother’s café, followed by protests in May 1968, among others. This work accurately presents the slogans, language habits, consumption habits and diets of each era. Irish writer John Banville commented that “Old Years” “integrates memories, dreams, facts and contemplation, and is a unique echo of our past and present lives”.
In this work, Ernault created “an autobiography”, that is to say, the first person “I” is not used throughout the book, but “one”, “we”, “she” or ” They” etc. Even for an impersonal autobiographical work, this style of writing is quite unusual. Eleanor explained: “Looking back on my life, I see the story of my childhood to the present, but I can’t separate it from the world I live in; my story with the story of my generation and the events that have happened to us Mixed together. In the autobiographical tradition, we talk about ourselves, and events are just background. My work has turned that upside down. It’s a story of events and social progress, and everything that has changed during the sixty years of an individual’s existence , needs to be expressed through ‘us’ and ‘them’. The events in my book belong to everyone, to history, and to sociology. This is obviously personal life, my life, and the history I remember. I pass my Feelings and memories to tell this collective history. The protagonist is time and its passage, which takes everything, including our lives.”
“I wanted to write a story about a woman who lived through an era, but I didn’t want that woman in the book — if I took her out of the book entirely, it would be History books. There needs to be some kind of awareness in the books. So, I started collecting images and memories that were both personal and impersonal, as well as movies, books, lyrics, etc., without attributing them to anyone…it’s not about someone experience, but about this history of France and the history of these village people, workers and past.”
Ernault said her main motivation for writing was an urge to “witness her presence.” She said: “These are the books that I really need to write. When I’m struggling, when the work is long, like ‘Long Time,’ it hurts. But I have this idea that this Not to show my arrogance, it’s ‘only I can write something like this’.”
(Note: This article only represents the author’s point of view. The words of Anne Ernault quoted in the article are from the interviews with her by mainstream English media in the past two years. The cover picture of the article is in 2020, when Anne Ernault was interviewed by FT. Photographs taken in the garden, photography: Elliott Verdier. Editing email: [email protected])