Annie Ernaux, champion excavator of memory, wins the Nobel Prize

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the 82-year-old French writer Annie Ernaux last week, “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. It’s notable that the Nobel citation talks about her nonfiction, her autobiographical work and not the novels she began her career with in the 1970s. Pretty early on in her career, Ernaux made the shift from fiction to a specific mode of nonfiction—short, intense books that drew from her own experiences but which gently unfurled to become much stranger beasts; books that are at once deeply personal and undoubtedly universal. A great early example is her 1984 masterpiece La Place (translated into English as A Man’s Place by Tanya Leslie in 1992).

Very early on in the book (which is just 70-odd pages lengthwise) Ernaux confesses something to the reader: that she had tried to tell her father’s life story—he was a workaholic shop-owner who remained emotionally distant till the end—through fiction but gave up on the enterprise soon because she felt “disgusted” with the results. This is a raw and powerful admission for a writer to make, especially somebody writing about their own family.

“A while later I started writing a novel in which my father was the main character. Halfway through the book I began to experience feelings of disgust. I realize now that a novel is out of the question. If I wish to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach, or attempt to produce something “moving” or “gripping.” I shall collate my father’s 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.”

This passage could be used to describe a lot of Ernaux’s signature strengths as a writer— self-awareness, psychological depth, a certain journalistic rigour and. While Ernaux often analyses a situation or a person calmly and without emotion, she is just as attuned to the emotional logic that governs so much of our lives.

A writer’s writer

Ernaux is a writer’s writer, by which I mean that one of the recurring themes in her work is the impact that a life of reading and writing has on the way writers process emotions, make life choices—and yes, occasionally suffer the consequences of those choices. In Passion simple (translated into English in 2003 by Tanya Leslie as Simple Passion), for example, Ernaux writes about an years-long relationship she had with a married man. It’s the kind of unequal love that’s both unrequited and not—the odd in-betweenness of it forms the meat of the book. In the passage below, Ernaux describes how the fact of being a bookish person influenced how she saw her own relationship.

“In the same way, when I was reading, the sentences that made me pause were those concerning a relationship between a man and a woman. I felt that they could teach me something about A and that they lent credibility to the things I wished to believe. For instance, reading in Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate that “people in love kiss with their eyes closed” led me to believe that A loved me since that was the way he kissed me. After that passage, the rest of the book returned to being what everything else had been to me for a whole year—a means of filling in time between two meetings.”

Allow me to describe one of the central paradoxes of autobiographical literature (both fiction and nonfiction, really, but especially the latter): at some level, we’re all writing to process pain and trauma, trauma that may well be rekindled by the act of remembering intensely. But without intense remembrance, there’s no honesty and therefore no literature worthy of anybody’s attention. Look at how beautifully Ernaux demonstrates this paradox in this passage from Simple Passion.

“The past tense used in the first part of the book suggests endless repetition and conveys the belief that “life was better in those days.” It also generated a pain that was to replace the past trauma of waiting for his phone calls and visits. (Even now, rereading those first pages has the same distressing nature as seeing and touching the toweling bathrobe he used to slip on at my place, and take off just before he got dressed to leave. There is one difference, though: these pages will always mean something to me, to others too maybe, whereas the bathrobe—which matters only to me—will lose all significance one day and will be added to a bundle of rags. By writing this, I may also be wanting to save the bathrobe from oblivion.)”
The bathrobe is a reminder that’s both painful and yet, worthy of preserving as the act of writing about it proves.

Writing as a chorus

Arguably Ernaux’s strongest work yet is the impressively unclassifiable The Years (2008; translated into English by Alison L. Strayer). It’s billed as an ‘autobiographical novel’ but it could just as easily have been marketed as non-fiction. Ernaux attempts nothing less than a comprehensive account of her generation’s coming-of-age (she was born in 1940), maturity and eventually, of course, relationship with ageing. It’s the writerly equivalent of an orchestral chorus.

One of the many stylistic conceits—some more subtle than others—on display here is the fact that while Ernaux refers to herself in the third-person throughout, the book becomes decidedly more ‘individual’ in the last one-third part. We see Ernaux as a divorced woman in the late 90s and early 2000s, learning to negotiate the vagaries of the Internet and still making up her mind about society’s freefall into untrammelled consumerism.
In the following passage, for example, Ernaux describes the onslaught of end-of-century lists towards the end of the year 1999. It was as though we were closing the books on an entire century, as though we had a century’s worth of accounting to catch up on, with a ticking clock timing every step.

“The year 2000 was on the horizon. We could not believe our luck in being there to see it arrive. What a shame, we thought, when someone died in the weeks before. We couldn’t imagine that it could proceed without a hitch. There were rumors of a Y2K computer bug, a planetary malfunction, some kind of black hole portending the end of the world and a return to the savagery of instinct. The twentieth century closed behind us in a pitiless succession of end-of-millennium reviews. Everything was listed, classified, and assessed, from works of art and literature to wars and ideologies, as if the twenty-first century could only be entered with our memories wiped clean.”

Memory, for Ernaux, is captured not just in moments but also in ‘movements’, sequences of human behavior guided by what we can only call retrospective emotions. We are forever changing our minds about how we feel about certain interactions, regardless of whether the engagement was with a stranger or someone within our inner circle—close friends, family, even. This is because a person’s ‘character’ very often is nothing more than a sum total of cultivated habits, habits that have been shaped by a complex interplay of nature and nurture, cultural influences and political affiliations. As we grow and evolve, we often re-assess our views about others because we are now privy to more information about why they did what they did.

As Ernaux writes, “Memory was transmitted not only through the stories but through the ways of walking, sitting, talking, laughing, eating, hailing someone, grabbing hold of objects. It passed body to body, over the years, from the remotest countrysides of France and other parts of Europe: a heritage unseen in the photos, lying beyond individual difference and the gaps between the goodness of some and the wickedness of others. It united family members, neighbors, and all those of whom one said “They’re people like us,” a repertory of habits and gestures shaped by childhoods in the fields and teen years in workshops, preceded by other childhoods, all the way back to oblivion.”

One of the many pleasures of reading nonfiction—especially the kind of interdisciplinary nonfiction Ernaux writes—is the awareness that in the hands of a skilled writer, the personal and the universal converge in increasingly surprising ways. It’s the kind of thing that leads you to think about yourself and your place in the universe and at the end of the day, that has always been one of literature’s big draws.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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