Anna R. Gamburd — Harvard College, Class of 2027.
Annie Ernaux is a Nobel Prize-winning French author known for her autobiographical works that blend personal memory with collective history. Notable works include Les Années and Une femme.
A Note from Annie Ernaux
Anna’s work offers a thoughtful exploration of two central threads in my writing: the desire to understand and the impulse to preserve. The latter, I would say, is the driving force—perhaps even the sole purpose—behind Les Années. I was particularly moved by the reference to Stefan Zweig.
On that note, I should clarify that, like him, I have always drawn solely from my own memory, never from external sources. The notes I have gathered over the years are, in truth, fragments of personal memory and imagery.
I trust Anna Gamburd will not take issue with this clarification, offered in the spirit of authenticity—a pursuit that, as she herself so perceptively illustrates, lies at the heart of my work. Her decision to place this pursuit within the broader histories of cinema and theatre is both original and invigorating.
My message is a simple one: heartfelt thanks to Anna for casting new light on my writing.
Annie Ernaux
Stefan Zweig writes in The World of Yesterday: “It is not so much the course of my own destiny that I relate, but that of an entire generation, the generation of our time, which was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history.”1 Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, makes a similar statement of intent in Les Années (2008): “By recovering the memory of the collective memory in an individual memory, to render the lived dimension of History.”2 As Zweig finds the impetus to write in the destruction of the world in which his story unfolded, Ernaux’s project, as formulated in Les Années, is to “save something of the time in which we will never be again.” The question at the heart of Ernaux’s writing is: how does one depict the past, in its individual and collective dimensions, authentically?
The notion of “saving” something of the past is central to Ernaux’s work. In Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit (1997), the author notes that “I do not know how to make books which are not this, this desire to save, to understand, but to save first.”3 Zweig too is animated by a desire to “save” the memory of a world which is disappearing. His account relies entirely on his memory, deprived as he is of access to other sources by his exile: “I write [these recollections] in the midst of war, in a foreign country, and without the least aids to my memory […] Nowhere can I seek information, for in the whole world the mails from country to country have been disrupted or hampered by censorship.”4 Ernaux’s reconstruction of the past, in contrast, is centered on the incorporation of external aids to her memory. In her books and in her journaux d’écriture, she repeatedly describes the “recherche” which goes into her writing. This research does not refer to a figurative “recherche du temps perdu” along Proustian lines but rather an endeavor of the kind undertaken by historians—one which revolves around the collection of tangible traces of the past to reconstruct a narrative. These include photographs, which serve as the underlying structural elements for a number of Ernaux’s books, such as Les Années, L’usage de la photo (2005) or L’autre fille (2011). These pictures are discussed in connection with writing in other novels : for instance, in Journal du dehors, she wrote that “I sought to practice a kind of photographic writing of reality.”5 But she also links photographs to diaries—of which Ernaux notes that “I considered them to be historical documents”—or letters; and, in her later works (Mémoire de fille, 2016), the internet.
The centrality of sources in Ernaux’s reconstruction of the past is motivated by a desire to transcend memory in search of an objectivity rooted in subjectivity, creating what Ernaux calls an “impersonal autobiography” [autobiographie impersonnelle]. Describing her attempt to tell her mother’s story in Une femme (1988), Ernaux notes that resorting exclusively to her own recollections would have limited her to “recovering in this way the woman of my imagination,” whereas her real goal lay in “grasping also the woman who existed outside of me, the real woman […] to remain, in a certain way, below literature.”6
In La place (1983), the book in which the author depicts the life of her late father and which marks Ernaux’s definitive shift away from fiction, Ernaux motivates her quest for objectivity with reference to her desire to do justice to her father’s experience. She writes: “I know that the novel is impossible. To give an account of a life subjected to necessity, I do not have the right to take the side of art first, nor to try to do something ‘exciting’ or ‘moving.’”7 In L’atelier noir (2011), Ernaux notes that “it is the staging that horrifies me most”—one of many instances in which the author expresses her tormented obsession with ensuring the authenticity of her work.8
Important to an understanding of Ernaux’s preoccupation with authenticity is the author’s recurrent mention of the guilt she feels at having surpassed the social milieu in which she was raised as a transfuge de classe. Ernaux experiences the act of writing about her milieu as a form of domination which provokes in her a “sensation of disgust.” It feels indecent, immoral, to create fiction out of true suffering—a theme which emerges again in the context of her mother’s death in Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit: “the first time I wrote ‘mom is dead.’ The horror. I will never be able to write these words in fiction.”9
Ernaux experiences the act of writing about her milieu as a form of domination which provokes in her a ‘sensation of disgust.’
Ernaux’s preoccupation with doing justice to suffering through the downplaying of emotion finds its analogue in post-war French cinema. The films of François Truffaut, Robert Bresson, and Jean Rouch all reflect an aversion to the artificial recreation of suffering. Like Ernaux, these three filmmakers attempt to answer the question of how one can represent suffering in an authentic way. Truffaut and Bresson depict suffering through an amortization of emotion: in Les quatre cents coups, for instance, the protagonist’s emotions are conveyed through actions (silent crying, intense gazes, the closing escape scene).10 Meanwhile, in line with Bresson’s overarching theory, Au hasard Balthazar seeks to get as close to reality as possible by forsaking professional actors in favor of nonprofessionals explicitly instructed to eliminate emotion from the recitation of their lines.11 Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été goes one step further than both Truffaut and Bresson, eliminating acting altogether.12
Truffaut, Bresson, and Rouch get at authenticity through successive approximations—the minimization (Truffaut) and then the elimination (Bresson) of emotion in acting, then finally the elimination of acting itself (Rouch). The shared striving for objectivity can be accounted for the shadow of the Second World War, which looms over these three filmmakers and Ernaux alike. In a historical moment marred by the scars of real suffering, the beautification of pain through art is profane, vandalous, absurd.
Three of Ernaux’s published diaries, which were centered on the exploration of public spaces—i.e Journal du dehors (1993), La vie extérieure (2000) and Regarde les lumières mon amour (2016)—are evocative of the theater of the absurd, an alternative artistic response to the Second World War. Ernaux notes her impressions and observations of the public spaces in which she finds herself, immortalizing scenes which she happens to observe, in an attempt to “reach the reality of an era [atteindre la réalité d’une époque].”13 There is no particular connection between the scenes which Ernaux chooses to immortalize in these diaries: what emerges from these fragmented renderings of society is precisely their peculiar absence of unity of purpose. Like an Ionesco play, things happen for no apparent reason, and one would be at a loss to try to make sense of them.
Then again, Ernaux strives not to understand but to save something of the past. The question of meaning (sens) is answered in another diary, not one of those which documents Ernaux’s impressions of society, but one which serves as a repository of her interiority, specifically her passionate relationship with a Soviet Diplomat. In Se perdre (2001), Ernaux writes of “the line, the great line of the secret meaning of my life. The same loss, not yet fully elucidated, that only writing can really elucidate.”14 The “secret meaning” of Ernaux’s life (and here she does not generalize: it is of “ma” and not “la” vie which she writes) consists of that loss—of her father,15 mother,16 sister,17 lover,18 virginity,19 and ultimately of her epoch20—which kindles the desire to “save” through writing.
1. Stefan Zweig, “The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European”, University of Nebraska Press, 2013, p. 472.
2. Annie Ernaux, “Les Années”, Gallimard, 2010, p. 256.
3. Annie Ernaux, “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit”, Gallimard, 1997, p. 115.
4. Stefan Zweig, supra note 1.
5. Annie Ernaux, “Journal du dehors”, Gallimard, 1993, p. 106.
6. Annie Ernaux, “Une femme”, Gallimard, 1988, p. 112.
7. Annie Ernaux, “La place”, Gallimard, 1983, p. 113.
8. Annie Ernaux, “L’atelier noir”, Gallimard, 2011, p. 210.
9. Annie Ernaux, supra note 3.
10. François Truffaut, Les Quatre Cents Coups, Les Films du Carrosse, SEDIF Productions, 1959, 99’.
11. Robert Bresson, Au Hasard Balthazar, Parc Films, Athos Films, Argos Films, Institut Suédois du Film, 1966, 95’.
12. Edgar Morin et Jean Rouch, Chronique d’un été, Argos Films, 1961, 86’.
13. Annie Ernaux, supra note 5.
14. Annie Ernaux, “Se perdre”, Gallimard, 2001, p. 294.
15. Annie Ernaux, supra note 7.
16. Annie Ernaux, supra note 6.
17. Annie Ernaux, “L’autre fille”, Gallimard, 2011, p. 80.
18. Annie Ernaux, supra note 14.
19. Annie Ernaux, “Mémoire de fille”, Gallimard, 2016, p. 165
20. Annie Ernaux, supra note 2.
NB: All the translations from French to English were made by Anna R. Gamburd.