Hello Gentle Reader,
Annie Ernaux’s literary language is a focal point of discussion for both readers and critics. Ernaux’s language operates in complete contrast to her subject matter, which is often excruciatingly personal, bordering on the voyeuristically testimonial. It is Ernaux’s literary language which ultimately saves her work from being tarnished or decreed as tabloid sensationalism and oriented to solicit shock value reactions. By maintaining a language of neutrality, an otherwise blanche prose style, Ernaux is able to write candidly about intrapersonal and interpersonal affairs, including those of an otherwise intensly personal and private nature, be it sexual/extra-martial affairs or botched abortions. The dissociative tone employed ensures the language is bleached, starched and ironed. Then processed further and refined into a state where all the sentimentality, sensationalism, and expressionism are blanched into a state of colourlessness. This is aptly described as “clinical acuity,” as referenced in the Swedish Academy’s citation when awarding Annie Ernaux, the Nobel Prize in Literature. The rendering of exhumed and examined personal experience, relationships, and observations into a state of placid neutrality are the hallmarks of Annie Ernaux’s literary career, and are the defining features of her style and literary language. In describing her literary career, Ernaux described herself as a personal-ethnographer, and her association with sociological thought and analysis is deeply rooted in her examinations of the personal in relation to the greater social narrative, historical positioning and collective memory.
Ernaux’s Nobel Lecture is titled and styled: “I Will Write to Avenge My People,” where Ernaux invokes Rimbaud both through the prayer and the anthem:
“I am of an inferior race for all eternity.”
This affirms Annie Ernaux as not just a writer of purely literary interest, but a writer of sociological observation, documentation, analysis and engagement, which inevitably means it will swerve into political dimensions. Literature and political thought and opinion are not mutually exclusive. Literature is equal parts weapon, vehicle and tool of political ideologies. In return, literature is equal critic and agitator, a space of intellectual inspiration and safe haven of freedom of speech. In short: public enemy number one, for those who seek to wield unlimited political power. The words: “I Will Write to Avenge My People,” were first written in a diary of a young Annie Ernaux, affirming to the author that her literary output will be intensely focused on the inadequacies, inequalities, and perceived injustices that were leveraged against her heritage. This clearly can be reviewed in one of her monumental analysis’s: “A Man’s Place,” a short examination of her father’s life, including the prescribed social disadvantages that were leveraged against him and his struggle to alleviate himself of his circumstances and fashion himself and his subsequent family a better life.
What separates Annie Ernaux from the classic French poet Rimbaud in his statement: “I am of an inferior race for all eternity,”— is that Ernaux does not employ language as an imaginative response to transfigure and elevate situations, circumstances, and experiences into a new reality; instead, Ernaux uses language as the necessary surgical instruments and implements to dispel the fog and uncertainties of memory. All the implanted pleasantries and falsities are plucked, pulled, and weeded out. After surgical removal, begins the process of autopsy, examining the intricacies of a life deprived of sentimentality and preferable treatment. All that matters is austere honesty. As Ernaux confess, when first seeking to write a novel regarding her father as the main character, it ultimately failed due to the artistic licensing that betrayed the genuine life that her father lived and experienced. Instead Ernaux concluded, the only way she would be able to treat her father as a literary subject would be to:
“[…] If I wish to tell the story of life governed be necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach, or attempt to produce something “moving” or “gripping.” I shall collate my fathers’ words, tastes and mannerisms, as well as the main events of his life. In short, all the external evidence of his existence, an existence which I too shared.
“No lyrical reminisces, no triumphant displays of irony. The neutral way of writing comes to me naturally. It was the same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news.”
What follows is a succinct portrait of a man whose life was incubated in shade, shame, and adversity, and a quiet singular ambitious goal to rise out of pre-established social classes and predestined circumstances fitting of the time, and make a respectable life. Ernaux’s father was born at the turn of the century (1899) to a carter (farm labourer), who resisted his conditions of his social stature by exerting his masculinity. To no surprise he was a man of limited education and illiterate, and would fly into a rage if he found (or caught) his children reading. The home is described as having an earth floor and thatched roof. What today might be called a proper rustic cottage. Ernaux’s father was pulled from school at the age of 12 to begin earning his keep, working on the same farm as his father. Though the job provided minimal money (at once point described as pocket change) his position provided lodging and food (he would sleep above the stables), and his laundry would be done for him once a week. Unlike his own father, however, Ernaux’s own father was not illiterate. Regardless, pastoral farmhand life came to an abrupt end as industrialization took hold of the nation and the first World War I broke out and ended. In this time, he worked in a rope factory and would meet his future wife:
“When he came back, he never wanted to go back to “culture.” That’s how he called farming. The other meaning of culture, the spiritual one, did no good to him.”
What follows is the definitively personal caught up in the waves of the historical. The economic fallout of 1929, the Second World War and the post-war economic boom. Throughout it at all, Ernaux traces her fathers upwelling social movements, moving out of the social class of indentured farmhand and factory worker into a property owner and grocer-café owner. Despite elevating himself into a state of entry level middle class, Ernaux examines how her father’s early life of culture that is labour oriented work and its lacking manners and refined language, still dodge him and maintain his anchorage in a lower social circle. Her father’s work is not without benefit or success, as it afforded and facilitated Annie Ernaux’s own social upwelling into more sustainable economic and social classes, while granting her further opportunity to study and continue her education. Ernaux confirms through her academic aptitude and excellence is key to moving into gentrified circles. This also becomes a point of division, which ultimately emancipates herself from her father, who despite fixing a better life for himself and establishing a foundation for his daughter to move into more professional careers and obtain a proper bourgeoise marriage, she is ultimately separated from her father, loosing common ground and a sense of equality. This can clearly be seen in Annie Ernaux’s first marriage, where her husband (a man from an established bourgeoise family) does not visit her family in their small grocery-café in Normandy, as referenced and mulled over in the biting realization of the polar opposites of their worlds:
“What could a man brought up in middle-class circles—where people got degrees and cultivated the art of irony—possibly have to say to honest, hard-working people like my parents? Although he acknowledged their kindness, in his yes it would never replace a lively, witty conversation, sadly lacking in their case. In his family, for instance, if someone broke a glass, one would immediately cry out: “Touch it not, for it is broken!” a quote from Sully Prudhomme’s poem Le Vase Brisé).”
In writing “A Man’s Place,” Annie Ernaux does not remediate her father’s life, turning it into a literary feast of lyricism or poignant reminisces. It is however an account of one man’s life from hardship to eventual enjoyment, even if it takes into considerable suffering and estrangement along the way. Ernaux’s completely colourless prose is what makes “A Man’s Place,” a successful review of one’s life. By eschewing sentimentality, forced lyricism, and creating any fictional review of the life, Ernaux encapsulates her father as a complex man who rose from an era that is forgotten and limitedly documented. In one telling anecdote regarding her father’s upbringing, Annie Ernaux recounts the stark contrast between the vision and world of her father’s time as described in books to that of his own account:
“When I read Proust or Mauriac, I don’t think that they write about the time when my father was a child. His background, it was the Middle Ages.”
“A Man’s Place,” shows Annie Ernaux at her best, her literary endeavour to capture the sociological and ethnographic of the times, to examine memory without nostalgia or infused with sentimentality, but provide context, narrative, and understanding of the times. Writing about her father, provided acute observation of her father’s life and its trajectory, one that was completely different and alien to her own, but is also intrinsically woven within her character, and a part of her personal history, but also a component of the entire history of French society, but is just conveniently overlooked. In writing about her father, Annie Ernaux has reconciled the man and the memory with herself, while bring to light the class divisions and social neglect within French society, and their realities melting away in the post-war years, as more and more individuals found further and further opportunity outside of their working-class upbringing. But the question that lingers afterwards is, who is left behind?
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
M. Mary
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