In this lecture I want to introduce you to Ernaux's work in general and to
the themes she explores within it.I want to provide you with an some sort
of general overview to Ernaux's work as a whole and to pin-point the main
preoccupations of her writing. I want to do this by looking at some of the
statements Ernaux has made in interviews and the like about the aims and
function of her work and also by taking a quick look at her very first
book - the novel entitled Les Armoires vides.
But first, a few details about Ernaux. She was born in 1940 in Normandy.
She grew up in the small town of Yvetot and went to Rouen University. She
qualified as a secondary-school literature teacher and taught at Annecy
for ten years and then outside Paris. At present she works at the Centre
National d'Enseignement par Correspondance and lives near Paris. To date
she has published nine books:
To get some idea of what Ernaux is about as a writer I'd like to draw your
attention to a statement she made in an interview with the literary
journal La Quinzaine littéraire in May 1989 regarding her aims and
her influences as a writer:
As a writer Ernaux feels that she is, to use Sartrean terminology `en
situation dans son époque' and as such, cannot but engage with the issues
of the day. As a writer she will not, indeed cannot, inhabit an ivory
tower. Her world is `le monde du hard-rock, ... des villes nouvelles, ...
des vieux quartiers parisiens ou rouennais, etc.'. Ernaux is a citizen of
contemporary France - a modern industrial society with deep racial, social
and economic divisions (`de la richesse ... et de la nouvelle pauvreté').
This is accepted as `un état de fait' that cannot be avoided.
I don't want to give you the misleading impression here that Ernaux is a
terribly up-to-the-minute writer. Some of the most important issues facing
France today - increasing ethnic polorization, the rise of right-wing
parties, unemployment etc. - are hardly touched upon at all. However, she
does address a number of issues that are important to our understanding of
post-war France. She writes of social inequality, power relations between
the sexes, female sexuality and sexual freedom, the educational system
etc. - and a whole range of issues that touch the lives of many French
people.
Ernaux is what the French would propbably call `un écrivain du
ressassement'. That's a neat way of saying that she's a writer whose work
repeats itself. The books Ernaux has published to date, with the exception
of Passion simple and Journal du dehors, tell essentially
the same story. The principal characters of all Ernaux's works are women.
They all relate their own experiences of growing-up and their difficult
encounters at school, university and within marriage. The experience of
social mobility - of moving from one class to another - is central to all
of the texts. All of the characters are `passeur[s] entre deux rives' as
Ernaux puts it in La Place (Routledge p.103/Gallimard p.112),
moving backwards and forwards across the boundaries of class, language and
culture. Rural or semi-rural Normandy is the unchanging landscape against
which their stories take place.
The stories told in all Ernaux's work bear a strong ressemblance to the
details of Ernaux's own life. Hre works are, as you might have guessed if
you've read them, all autobiographical. Indeed, it is possible to argue
that Ernaux's entire oeuvre is a vast projet
autobiographique. Anyway, I don't want to talk about autobiography
too much today as I'll be discussing it in more detail in lecture 3.
Moreover, besides the superficial similarities in story, setting and
characterization, Ernaux's writings turn compulsively and obsessively
around a central core of issues and preoccupations. Ernaux's writings
are, if you will, variations or modulations on a common set of themes.
Ernaux's first book, the novel entitled Les Armoires vides is
perhaps the clearest example of her preoccupations as a writer containing
in embryo all the themes Ernaux will pursue in her later work. Its
narrator is a young woman called Denise Lesur who is a second-year
literature student. An unplanned pregnancy has led her to a back-street
abortion clinic and it is there that she decides to relate the story of
her life so far. Denise's story is, typically, one of migration from a
social class (uneducated rural lower middle-class) to another (educated
urban bourgeoisie) and of the confusions engendered by this shift. She
describes herself as: `Baisée de tous les côtés' (Les Armoires
vides p.17), and the story she tells is her attempt to understand the
alienation she feels at sea between two different worlds.
Denise's parents own and run a `café-épicerie' in small-town Normandy
just like the parents in La Place and Une Femme. She enjoys
a carefree childhood with them and the other children from the
neighbourhood until she reaches school-age. Her parents who themselves
have experienced social mobility, moving from the peasantry to the lower
middle- classes, are anxious that she too should do well and send her to
the local fee-paying school, the école libre. It is at the école
libre that Denise's feelings of estrangement begin. Denise soon
becomes aware of the social differences which set her apart from the other
children and of her own inferiority: `Je me sentais lourde, poisseuse,
face à leur aisance, à leur facilité, les filles de l'école libre' (Les
Armoires vides p.61).
In order to feel more at home in her new world Denise is obliged to erase
all traces of her own culture. She learns to modify her behaviour and
tastes by adopting those of her middle-class fellow students. She begins
to detest: `le bal musette avec accordéon, le petit coup de blanc, les
films de Fernandel, les concerts de l'harmonie municipale, tout ce que
l'on aime chez moi' (Les Armoires vides p.130) and aspires to: `le
monde des surboums, des blue-jeans, du coca-cola' (Les Armoires
vides p.130) of her classmates. Her identification with this milieu
continues throughout school and university. As she grows older and becomes
more sexually aware she begins to see relationships with middle-class boys
as a way of strengthening her sense of belonging to this milieu. Her sense
of truly having arrived occurs one day when: `un garçon du collège a dit
de moi , ça m'a fait cent fois plus de plaisir qu'un vingt sur vingt en
math' (Les Armoires vides p.127). Later, at university her sense of
having escaped her origins is crushed when she meets Marc, a law student
of impeccable cultural credentials. She feels that she is: `une arriviste
de la culture ... Rien qu'une fille de cafetier qui veut s'en sortir'
(Les Armoires vides p.168). Her sense of failure is compounded when
she discovers she is pregnant and that Marc is unwilling to stand by her.
At the end of her story, Denise has come to an understanding of the
alienation and the feelings of anger she has experienced for so much of
her life:
As I mentionned earlier, if we look at Les Armoires vides we can
see in embryonic form many of the themes Ernaux pursues in all her
writings and in La Place and Une Femme in particular. What
exactly are the themes of Les Armoires vides and Ernaux's work in
general though? Well, we'll be discussing them in greater depth later on
but for the moment let me briefly introduce what I think the most
important themes are. By the way, I've ordered these themes en vrac
without any hierarchy or order of preference. No theme is necessarily more
important than another. To a large extent, they overlap and interlock but
five main themes can be identified:
Firstly there is an attention to literature and to the ways in which
literature or at least the institutionalized dissemination of literature
has silenced or neglected certain experiences - the experiences of women
and of working-class people in particular. Les Armoires vides opens
with Denise having an abortion - an abortion described in violently
physical terms (Les Armoires vides p.12). Denise, who is a student
of literature, describes her feelings toward literature immediately after
her abortion:
Écrire, c'est un recours, c'est faire quelque chose dans le sens de la
réparation ... A travers mon père, j'avais l'impression de parler pour
d'autres gens aussi, (pour) tous ceux qui continuent de vivre au-dessous
de la littérature et dont on parle très peu. Donc c'était une sorte de
devoir, je n'en ai jamais douté, pas plus que pour ma mère ...
In Une Femme, she describes herself as the archivist of now
redundant knowledge and skills:
Social mobility or class transition is a theme central to Ernaux's
oeuvre. Leaving one class for another is the common experience of
all of Ernaux's characters. They often occupy the role of both insider and
outsider, moving back and forth across class divisions, on the margins of
the petit-bourgeois culture and community in which they have their roots
and the more cultivated middle-class milieu to which they have migrated.
In fact Ernaux doesn't use such terms as working-class or middle-class.
Like the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, she prefers the terms:
classe dominante - those in possession of capital, formal education
and social status and classe dominée - those in possession of
little or no capital, formal education and social status. In all her
writings social mobility - moving from a milieu dominé to a
milieu dominant - is experienced in terms of both liberation and
loss: liberation in the sense of the new perspectives opened up by
education and by encounters with different people; loss in the sense of
being expelled from an embracing sense of community, of no longer being
`at home' anywhere, of having no stable identity. Social mobility in
Ernaux's work is seen as inevitably creating a kind of wound - a wound to
be healed by the act of writing perhaps - but of this more later.
In her first three novels the theme of social mobility is explored via the
experiences of her young female characters in the context of post-war
France. In La Place and Une Femme however, the theme of
social mobility is explored via the experiences of the parents in the
1920s and 1930s. The focus in these two texts is very much on the
difficulties and contradictions the parents experience as former peasants
who have clawed their way up to the property-owning lower middle-class.
The parents are both beneficiaries of and refugees from the historical
chnges that took place in France in the early twentieth century - I'm
talking here about France's shift from being a largely agrarian,
agricultural, rural society to being a, industrialized, technological and
urban society.
Ernaux uses the theme of social mobility to explore the nuances of class
distinction and the power relations between classes. Ernaux's later work
in particular - I'm talking about both La Place and Une
Femme here - is about the lack of understanding between social
classes, what Arlette Farge called `cette dépréciation invivable et
destructrice'. Ernaux is concerned to expose the ways in which
working-class life and cultural preferences have been systematically
denigrated and denied validity. Ernaux contests the idea that middle-
class culture is the legitimate culture, that middle-class
savoir-vivre is the only one of any value. There are two quotes
from La Place which illustrate this nicely:
J'ai fini de mettre au jour l'héritage que j'ai dû déposer au seuil du
monde bourgeois et cultivé quand j'y suis entrée (La Place,
Routledge p.102/Folio p.111)
Closely linked to the theme of class transition is that of education. For
all of the characters in Ernaux's work, education is the means by which
social mobility is attained. It is through success at school that the
various characters move away from their milieu d'origine.
Because of the educational success of Ernaux herself and of her various
heroines we should not assume that Ernaux's considers the educational
system in France as either a liberating or a democratic force within
society. Nothing could be further from the truth in fact. Ernaux sees the
school and university system in France as colluding with social injustice
and reinforcing existing class divisions. Those children from less
priviledged backgrounds who are successful within the educational system
are rare and such success is acheived at considerable personal cost.
Ernaux's representation of the French educational system in her works is
consistent with the theories of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. To
put it crudely, Bourdieu's writings on the educational system argue that
schools and universities reproduce and reinforce social inequalities.
Bourdieu theorizes the relationship between the educational system and
social reproduction, that is to say, the ways in which bourgeois
capitalist society `reproduces' the citizens it needs to maintains the
status quo, to perpetuate that system. The educational system plays
a major role in `reproducing' good little citizens who will perpetuate the
divisions of bourgeois capitalist society. The educational system is thus,
in Bourdieu's opinion, the central pillar in the edifice of an unequal
society.
This goes against the grain of writings by philosophers and
educationalists since the French Revolution - one could cite Condorcet
here - for whom education is the `royal road' to greater social equality
and human dignity. Education allows individuals to fully realize
themselves, their potential as human beings. This is also, I suppose, the
reason why many of you are sat here today.
Now, although this ideal is laudable, it does not take stock of the way in
which the educational system actually functions within our society. Rather
than encourage or nurture intelligence and imagination, the French school
system recognises only a narrow and class specific form of intelligence.
Schooling is more a matter of accumulating and reproducing what Bourdieu
calls `le capital culturel' (cultural capital). Cultural capital can be
defined as a whole series of codes, social and linguistic, which teachers
and, later on, others in authority expect `good' pupils to know. The
educational system is thus more to do with the maintenance of a certain
kind of ethos and exclusivity than anything else. Those especially
excluded are working-class children, in particular those from rural areas,
because they are not yet in possession of the sort of culture endorsed and
valued by the educational institutions themselves. The educational system
covertly colludes in the exclusion of working-class children by upholding
a certain set of values which devalue all others.
The story Denise Lesur tells in Les Armoires vides is a good
example of what Bourdieu is getting at. The `le dépaysement complet'
(Les Armoires vides p.53) Denise describes at school is engendered
by her exposure to a pedagogic experience which does not recognise the
kind of knowledge she possesses as a child of parents who were once
peasants and who have had limited access to formal education. Denise
learns the importance of acquiring the requisite cultural capital,
mastering what she calls: `un système de mots de passe pour entrer dans un
autre milieu' (Les Armoires vides p.78). She also learns the
importance of rejecting own cultural background. In order to achieve
educational success she must actively distance herself from her parents,
effacing or erasing all traces of her own culture. In order to make
progess at school she must be betray her class, despise and spit upon its
values.
Hence the emotional damage and the complex feelings of guilt and
self-disgust at colluding (of being a good little swot and being rewarded
for it) that Denise feels in Les Armoires vides.
Another major theme in Ernaux's work is the French language. I should of
course correct myself here since there is no such thing as the French
language. It is simply the name we give to a certain language amongst
a number of other smaller systems or discourses; dialects, patois,
professional jargons, slang, technical languages etc which exist alongside
one another. Not all of these systems have the same value in society: some
are more powerful than others. Ernaux's work attends to the ways in which
language carries cultural meanings and values and relates to specific
social interests, to the ways in which power in society is linked to one's
control over language.
Michèle Bernstein identifies language as the major theme of La
Place which is, for her, a book about two people who, both literally
and metaphorically do not speak the same language:
The language we speak often embodies and reinforces relationships of
power, of dominance and subordination. There is an emphasis on language as
the site of struggle - on the ways in which language is used to put people
down or to deny the validity of what they have to say. Ernaux's work is
about understanding the power relations between speakers, the subtle and
innumerable strategies by which words can be usedas instruments of
coercion and control, as tools of intimidation and abuse, as signs of
politeness, condescenion or contempt.
The theme of family relationships is every bit as important as that of
social mobility. Ernaux's writings address the dynamics of family
relationships - more specifically - of the intensity of emotional ties
between parents and children. Relationships between parents and children
are often fraught with ambivalence. This ambivalence is not a negative
feature of such relationships. Rather, it is a sign of the depth and
complexity of our feelings towards those who are central to our lives.
Ernaux is interested above all in the dynamics of family relationships,
that is to say, in the ways in which our feelings and behaviour towards
our family change and are transformed through time. It is in the evolving
tensions between mothers and daughters in particular that Ernaux is most
interested. Ernaux's first two works; Les Armoires vides and Ce
qu'ils disent ou rien take this as one of their major themes, as of
course does Une Femme which we shall examine in a later lecture.
Ernaux's books return to the same story again and again, working and
re-working a number of common situations and problems. Now, we often tend
to think that writers are interesting because of the wide range of issues
they approach in their writings. With Ernaux however, the reverse is true.
The strength of her works and the distinctiveness of her voice as a writer
derive from the persistence with which she has pursued a limited range of
issues.
If you are ready for a more detailed reading of La Place click on
Lecture 2. For bibliographical details click on Selected Further Reading.
The first three works earned Ernaux a certain `succès d'estime' or
moderate critical acclaim. Ernaux continued to remain relatively unknown
however, until the publication of La Place in 1983. La Place
was awarded the Prix Renaudot - probably the most important literary award
in France after the Prix Goncourt - and inevitably brought Ernaux to the
attention of a wider public. The publication of Une Femme in 1987 -
a work that is in very much the same mould as La Place -
consolidated that success. Ernaux is today a relatively well- known
literary figure in France. She has made a number of appearances on
television and her books frequently figure in the bestseller lists.
Ernaux's Aims as a Writer
Parmi mes admirations succéssives, y a-t-il quelqu'un que je sente
vraiment comme un ancêtre? Je préfère parler de fraternité.
C'est-à-dire, sentir quelque chose de commun non dans le style mais dans
les motivations de l'écriture ou dans la recherche ... Je m'intéresse à la
philosophie, plus encore à la sociologie, aux sciences humaines en
général, et ma préférence, en littérature, va aux écrivains qui me donnent
le sentiment que leur démarche littéraire est aussi `action' sur le monde,
témoignage (Christa Wolf, Ferdinando Camon), mise en question du réel
(j'ai beaucoup aimé On frappe à la porte de Guerassimov) ... La
notion de `contemporanéité' n'as pas beaucoup de contenu pour moi: c'est
un état de fait. Je suis dans le monde du hard-rock, des tours de la
Défense et des villes nouvelles, mais aussi des vieux quartiers parisiens
ou rouennais, de la richesse de Neuilly et de la `nouvelle pauvreté',
c'est surtout cela qui est important.
What emerges in the statement is a portrait of a writer who is not solely
interested in literature per se. Indeed, it is a profile of a writer who
rejects the idea of some sort of `pure' literature that is outside
history, politics and society. Ernaux claims to be concerned with other
academic disciplines such as philosophy and, more importantly, sociology.
These other interests influence her own writing and inform her literary
preferences which tend to favour those writers whose work is a combination
of three things:
Annie Ernaux, `Réponses à
quelques questions' in La Quinzaine littéraire, No.532, 16-31 May
1989
Ernaux is of course writing of qualities which she finds desirable in the
works of others, yet those very qualities are prominent in her own
writings as well. Her own writings too may be described as: `action sur le
monde', `témoignage' and `mise en question du réel'. Ernaux conceives of
her own writing as a form of cultural intervention, that is to say, a way
of entering into debates on a broad range of social and political issues.
Ernaux: un écrivain du ressassement
Les Armoires vides
J'ai été coupée en deux, c'est ça ... Le cul entre deux chaises, ça pousse
à la haine. (Les Armoires vides p.181).
She has understood that the pejorative estimation placed on the
working-class culture of her parents has obliged her to distance herself
from it. She is aware, however, of the irreconciliable differences which
forever set her apart from the middle-class milieu to which she
aspires.
The Themes of Les Armoires vides / Ernaux's
Work
1) Literature
Il n'y a rien pour moi là-dedans sur ma situation, pas un passage pour
décrire ce que je sens maintenant, m'aider à passer mes sales moments ...
Les bouquins sont muets là- dessus (Les Armoires vides p.12).
There is a deep and fundamental conflict between her own experience as a
young woman and literary culture. Ernaux's writings can be seen as an
attempt to correct or put right the gap between the experiences of
ordinary people and literature. Ernaux sees her own writing as a kind of
corrective, as a way of doing something about the neglect to which certain
forms of experience (women's, working-class people's etc.) have been
condemned:
Que peut écrire un écrivain qui a appartenu au monde dominé quand il
arrive finalement dans le monde bourgeois et surtout dans une
littérature
qui est en France essentiellement bourgeoise à 80%? Donc tous mes livres
tournent un petit peu autour de ça ...
Ernaux's work also concentrates on the condition of women in France. I
should point out here that the work of Simone de Beauvoir was and remains
still the principal influence on Ernaux's own work and that, like de
Beauvoir, Ernaux is interested in experiences which are specific to women.
Annie Ernaux quoted in Loraine Day and Tony Jones, Ernaux: La
Place/Une Femme (Glasgow: Glasgow Introductory Guides to French
Literature, 1990)
Annie Ernaux quoted in Loraine Day and Tony Jones, Ernaux: La
Place/Une Femme (Glasgow: Glasgow Introductory Guides to French
Literature, 1990)
Mon livre [La Femme gelée] ne s'inscrit pas dans un schéma
préétabli. Je me contente d'apporter ma pierre, en écrivant mon expérience
de femme. Bien que je n'y milite plus, les mouvements féministes me
semblent nécessaires. Ils font avancer les choses. J'ai moi-même participé
au MLAC et me suis battue pour la reconnaissance de l'avortement. Mais il
ne faut pas séparer l'évolution de la femme de politique. Tout est
lié.
Denise Lesur, the angry young woman of Les Armoires vides, Anne,
the rebellious adolescent heroine of Ce qu'ils disent ou rien and
the anonymous mal-mariée of La Femme gelée are all women struggling
to come to terms with the contradictions they experience as daughters, as
wives and as mothers. The principal characters of these three novels are
engaged in a struggle to free themselves from the alientaing models of
femininity that have been imposed on them and to assert their freedom to
live their lives in the way they choose. Ernaux's first novel, Les
Armoires vides, for example, was published in 1974 at a time when
arguements on the legalisation of abortion and on free access to
contraception were being fiercely debated and is the sympathetic portrayal
of a young woman who seeks to control her own sexuality. For Ernaux,
writing is above all a form of témoignage - a bearing witness to
experience that has been marginalized.
Annie Ernaux, `Une Femme dans l'engrenage' [interview] in
Combat, 13 March 1981
Elle tenait bien sa maison, c'est-à-dire qu'avec le minimum d'argent elle
arrivait à nourrir et habiller sa famille, alignant à la messe des enfants
sans trous ni taches, et ainsi s'approchait d'une dignité permettant de
vivre sans se sentir des manants. Elle retournait les cols et les poignets
de chemises pour qu'elles fassent double usage. Elle gardait tout, la peau
du lait, le pain rassis, pour faire des gâteaux, la cendre de bois pour la
lessive, la chaleur du poêle éteint pour sécher les prunes ou les
torchons, l'eau du débarbouillage matinal pour se laver les mains dans la
journée. Connaissant tous les gestes qui accomodent la pauvreté. Ce
savoir, transmis de mère en fille pendant des siècles, s'arrête à moi qui
n'en suis plus que l'archiviste. (Une Femme p.26)
2) Social Mobility
Je me suis pliée au désir du monde où je vis, qui s'efforce de vous faire
oublier les souvenirs du monde d'en bas comme si c'était quelque chose de
mauvais goût. (La Place, Routledge p.83/Folio p.72-3)
3) Education
4) Language
Annie qui va au pensionnat, au lycée, à l'université, accède au discours
de la culture, de la bourgeoisie (c'est l'amalgame le plus douloureux).
Elle est mal à l'aise comme une qui a trahi: elle a changé de langage.
In Les Armoires vides the theme of language is central. Denise is
acutely sensitive for example, to differences of language, the differences
of register between between her teacher's speech `' and her mother's `'
(Les Armoires vides p.53). Denise lays the blame of the humiliation
she feels at school on her parents' language:
Michèle Bernstein, `Annie Ernaux. Souvenirs d'en Normandie' [review of
La Place] in Libération, 1 March 1984
La faute, c'est leur langage à eux, malgré mes précautions, ma barrière
entre l'école et la maison, il finit par traverser, se glisser dans un
devoir, une réponse (Les Armoires vides p.115)
Language here is linked to social status, to educational success and to
power. Language is seen as an instrument of domination, as one of the ways
in which human beings control one another.
5) Family Relationships
Conclusion
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