Lecture 3: écriture e(s)t trahison
This lecture is a discussion of the theme of betrayal. Its title -
`Écriture e(s)t trahison' - contains an ambiguity that is pertinent to our
understanding of Ernaux's work and it is this ambiguity that I want to
discuss in some detail.
Ernaux's work has, of course, always been about the theme of betrayal. To
a greater or lesser degree she has always written about betrayal.
Typically, since Ernaux's work has been consistently preoccupied with
class, the theme of betrayal has always been linked to the theme of class
transition. The young female characters of Ernaux's books all travel
across social boundaries. More importantly, such social mobility generates
complex feelings of anger, confusion and - most important of all - guilt
at having betrayed.
As I discussed in lecture 1, the principal means by which Ernaux's
heroines move up the social hierarchy is 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. Far from being a
wholly positive liberation, their experience of education is more a matter
of accumulating and reproducing what Pierre Bourdieu has called `le
capital culturel' (cultural capital) and of erasing or effacing all traces
of their own culture. In order to make progress at school, the various
female characters of Ernaux's works must betray the class of their parents
and learn to despise their values. It is not so much the case that the
young heroines move away from their parents because of their educational
success. Rather, in order to achieve that success they must actively
strive to distance themselves. 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 Ernaux's heroines feel in all the
works.
The theme of betrayal then, has been one of the themes about which Ernaux
has written in all of her books. With La Place however, the theme
becomes central. Indeed, La Place is the book which offers the
fullest exploration of the theme of betrayal.
The recognition of having committed an act of betrayal, an injustice is at
the forefront of La Place. The text takes as its epigraph a
statement made by the writer Jean Genet in a television interview:
Now, we can interpret the betrayal suggested by the epigraph in terms of
one woman's rejection of the class from which she has originated and who
is no longer concerned with the lives she has left behind on the `other
side'. We can also interpret the theme of betrayal in more personal terms
- in terms of a daughter's rejection of her own father and of his way of
life.
Briefly summarized, La Place as a book about one woman's reflexion
on her father's life and obliquely through it on her own life. The story
the narrator tells begins in 1899 with her father's birth and ends with
his death in 1967. The text of La Place neither starts nor ends at
those two points but is `framed' as it were by scenes from the narrator's
own life. The discrepancies between the order of events in real life and
the order of events as they are arranged or sequenced in the text are
significant.
It is interesting to note that the scenes that `frame' the story pertain
to the professional status of the narrator. At the beginning of La
Place, in or near 1967, the narrator passes her CAPES - a competitive
teaching exam - which marks the beginning of her career as a professional.
At the end of La Place in October 1982 the narrator relates her
encounter with a former pupil working as a check- out girl in a
supermarket. The narrator is unable to remember why she had been sent to
technical school nor what stream she was put in. She reveals an attitude
of what we could describe - not unfairly I think - as indifference to the
life opportunities of a young woman from a less privileged background. A
background not dissimilar to her own in fact. The narrator has become an
accomplice in a system which perpetuates social divisions and
inequalities. She has made it but does nothing to help those who are
disadvantaged within the school system. She has become a traitor.
The `framing scenes' then, placed at the beginning and at the end of La
Place position the narrator as a kind of traitor to her own class. The
function of both the opening and the closing scenes of the text is to
stress the narrator's difference or distance from her originating milieu.
She has passed, as the narrator claims on p.106 of a later book, Une
Femme, from `un milieu dominé' to `le monde dominant des mots et des
idées' (Une Femme p.106). She is now in a position of
dominance and authority, able to wield power over those with none. The
narrator's new position engenders feelings of guilt - a guilt connected
with her indifference toward a class of which she once belonged. The very
structure of La Place then, serves to emphasize the narrator's
separation from and betrayal of the milieu from which she had originated.
There is another important dimension to the epigraph placed at the
beginning of La Place that I have not mentioned so far. In the
quotation from Genet writing is conceived as `le dernier recours quand on
a trahi/the ultimate recourse for those who have betrayed'. Writing in
short is not simply about exploring the theme of betrayal it is also about
making amends for betrayal. It is possible to read La Place as a
book about a writer whose earlier works have committed an injustice and
which seeks to make good that past wrong. It is possible to read La
Place as a book which Ernaux seeks to correct or redress the
injustices committed in her earlier works.
Let me explain. Ernaux's first three works - all of them novels - focused
on the narrator-protagonists' movement away from their background and the
conflict between it and their new milieu. The first three works are
fictions of escape and flight which fail to engage with the continuing
conditions of adult working-class life. Despite Ernaux's preoccupation
with a working-class experience which has been condemned to neglect or
secondariness, her early work actually colludes with its marginalization.
Descriptions of the parents' lives are focalized via the dominant
subjectivities of the young female narrators. The depiction of the
parents' lives tends to be fragmentary and reductive and the figures of
both the mother and of the father are only ever seen as figures in the
landscape of the young women's subjectivity and never accorded any complex
subjectivity or emotional life of their own. The mother and father are
denied emotional complexity - they are static, objectified figures in a
frozen landscape.
La Place attempts to do justice to the complexities of the lives of
the parents - recovering forgotten voices. This idea is particularly
important in La Place since it was the father's life which was
subject to the greater neglect. As Ernaux claimed in an interview
reproduced in part in P.M. Wetherill's introduction to the La
Place:
Il a réussi à savoir lire et écrire sans faute. Il aimait apprendre.
(...) Dessiner aussi, des têtes, les animaux. A douze ans, il se trouvait
dans la classe du certificat. Mon grand-père l'a retiré de l'école pour le
placer dans la même ferme que lui. On ne pouvait plus le nourrir à rien
faire. (La Place Routledge p.60/Folio pp.29-30)
II:
... un tableau du livre d'histoire, on dirait mon père (Les Armoires
vides p.115)
Pour manger, il ne se servait que de son Opinel. Il coupait le pain en
petits cubes, déposés près de son assiette pour y piquer des bouts de
fromage, de charcuterie, et saucer. Me voir laisser de la nourriture dans
l'assiette lui faisait deuil. On aurait pu ranger la sienne sans la laver.
Le repas fini, il essuyait son couteau contre son bleu. S'il avait mangé
du hareng, il l'enfouissait dans la terre pour lui enlever l'odeur.
Jusqu'à la fin des années cinquante, il a mangé de la soupe le matin,
après il s'est mis au café au lait avec réticence, comme s'il sacrifiait à
une délicatesse féminine. Il le buvait cuillère par cuillère, en aspirant,
comme de la soupe. A cinq heures, il se faisait sa collation, des oeufs,
des radis, des pommes cuites et se contentait le soir d'un potage. La
mayonnaise, les sauces compliquées, les gâteaux, le dégoûtaient.
Il dormait toujours avec sa chemise et son tricot de corps. Pour se raser,
trois fois par semaine, dans l'évier de la cuisine surmonté d'une glace,
il déboutonnait son col, je voyais sa peau très blanche à partir du cou.
Les salles de bains, signe de richesse, commençaient à se répandre après
la guerre, ma mère a fait installer un cabinet de toilette à l'étage, il
ne s'en est jamais servi, continuant de se débarbouiller dans la
cuisine.
Dans la cour, l'hiver, il crachait et il éternuait avec plaisir.
Ce portrait, j'aurais pu le faire autrefois, en rédaction, à l'école, si
la description de ce que je connaissais n'avais pas été interdite. Un
jour, une fille, en classe de CM2, a fait s'envoler son cahier par un
splendide atchoum. La maîtresse au tableau s'est retournée: (La
Place pp.80-81/pp.68-9)
In the second pair of quotations the father's peasant habits are
described. The first description both describes and dismisses the father
in a single sentence; `, un tableau du livre d'histoire, on dirait mon
père'. Once again, it is an ironic voice that characterizes the father. In
the extract from La Place however, all traces of irony are
studiously banished in favour of a more neutral and non- judgemental mode
of description. P.M. Wetherill in his introduction (pages 16 and 26) has
described the writing style of La Place as a "flat style" - the
so-called `ton de constat' (La Place p.91/p.90) or `écriture plate'
(La Place pp.57-8/p.24). It is a style which distances itself from
the irony and thinly veiled contempt of her early fiction.
[A
I quote these few examples because they illustrate well the ways in which
Ernaux's later work is a critical re-writing of her past which corrects
the reductive depiction of the parents and of working-class life and
culture in general of the `early' works. Ernaux's later texts undertake a
critical and corrective re-writing of the earlier novels' reductive and
hostile depiction of the mother and father. Both La Place and the
later Une Femme are books about restoring or recovering a sense of
complexity to the parents' lives.
In Ernaux's later books, writing becomes a form of righting - a way of
setting the record straight. There is a new scrupulousness as regards the
depiction of the parents. The narrative is frequently interrupted by
passages which comment explicitly on the act of writing itself. The
narrator struggles to render the complexity of her father's life and to
keep her distance from sentimental nostalgia or derision. This is
expressed very clearly on page 69 of La Place p.69 (page 46 in the
Folio edition):
On pages 73 of La Place (page 54 in the Folio edition) the
narrator uses the phrase:
The attention to the `paroles ordinaires' and `pratiques ordinaires' of
the father's life seeks to render visible what Luce Giard has called
`l'invisible quotidien' (quoted by Brian Rigby in Popular Culture in
Modern France: A Study of Cultural Discourse, London, Routledge 1991
p.28) - reaffirming the importance of formerly suppressed or silenced
knowledge and cultural practices. Ernaux speaks of `la réalité oubliée'
(La Place Routledge p.97/Folio p.101) of her father's condition - a
reality which she herself had once suppressed or denied.
Ernaux's later writing rejects the necessity of fitting into any neat pre-
established category or genre of writing. Her later works are generic
hybrids which hesitate between fiction, biography, autobiography,
sociology, history, ethnography. Ernaux mixes narrative with analysis and
sociological observation. She collapses the distinction between biography
and the novel as well as the boundary between biography and autobiography.
Writing of self involves writing of others. The narrator of Une
Femme writes on page 23 of of her desire moreover, to remain below
literature:
Ernaux's later works are more reflexive and self-aware. There is a
preoccupation with the problems of writing. The later works raise
questions about the nature of writing: they adopt deliberately uncertain
and self-exploratory mode of writing which both tells a story but also
reflects on its telling, mixing fragments of narrative with passages of an
analytical or metatextual character. When I use the term `metatextual' it
is to describe all passages which refer not to anything outside the text
but to the text itself - to the scene of writing as it were. A good
example of this is found in Une Femme at the bottom of page 43
continuing at the top of page 44:
There is in La Place and Une Femme a new attempt to find a
perspective on experience which expresses other voices. Ronald Frazer,
the author of an interesting autobiographical work entitled In Search
of a Past: The Manor House, Amnersfield, 1933-1945 describes such a
perspective as "multi-vocal reality" (Ronald Fraser - `In Search of a
Past: A Dialogue with Ronald Fraser' in History Workshop Journal
No.20 p.182). Ernaux wants to avoid simple seeing - she wants complex
seeing instead. There is an attention in La Place and Une
Femme to other voices, to other stories. Whereas Ernaux's early
fiction concentrated on the experiences and perceptions of the young
female narrators which one may read, with a degree of justification, as
thinly disguised doubles of Ernaux herself, La Place and Une
Femme attempt to give voice to both the father and the mother
respectively. Although in both texts the `je' of the narrator dominates,
there is nonetheless a sensitivity towards the perspectives, emotions, and
subjectivities of the parents. La Place and Une Femme are
about writing her parents into history, a point made explicit at the end
of Une Femme on page 106:
I'd like to bring my lectures on Ernaux to a close by reading a poem by
Tony Harrison, a Leeds poet whose own `parcours social' was close to that
undertaken by Ernaux and whose own work often engages with similar issues:
That summer it was Ibsen, Marx and Gide
I got one of his you-stuck-up-bugger looks:
ah sometimes think you read too many books.
Good read! I bet! Your programme at United!
I've come round to your position on `the Arts'
These poems about you, dad, should make good reads
once I'm writing I can't put you down!
If you would like some bibliographical references click on Selected Further Reading.
Writing and Betrayal
Betrayal and La Place
"Je hasarde une explication: écrire, c'est le dernier recours quand on a
trahi." (La Place Routledge p.49/Folio p.9)
Now, an epigraph is a short quotation placed at the beginning of a book or
poem or sometimes of a chapter of a book which is suggestive of that
book's, poem's or chapter's main theme. The epigraph functions as a sort
of signpost pointing to the direction we, as readers, should take in our
encounter with the text. The quotation from Genet - `Writing is sole
recourse for those who have betrayed' - immediately sensitizes us to the
theme of betrayal and injustice. We, as readers, are invited to consider
the whole text in relation to or in the light of the sentiments expressed
in the epigraph.
Writing as Betrayal
L'image du père dans La Place est très positive. Alors que mes
trois premiers livres sont écrits `contre'. La Place n'est plus un
monologue intérieur. (La Place p.37)
The first three works were all interior monologues as Ernaux put it and
were all characterized by an ironic complicity between narrator and
reader. The narrator provided the implied and presumably middle- class
reader with stereotypical and negative negative images of working-class
life over the head of her father. In the early novels there is an
unpleasant, sneering tone to descriptions of the father's life. Compare
for example these descriptions of the father from, respectively Ce
qu'ils disent ou rien, Les Armoires vides and La Place:
I:
La lecture, c'est pas son fort, juste Paris-Normandie, un peu
France-Soir. Quelquefois, quand il ne fait pas attention, ses
lèvres bougent en lisant. (Ce qu'ils disent ou rien p.11)
In all four extracts, the father is described by his daughter. The first
pair of quotations underline the father's lack of cultural credentials -
in particular his lack of facility with the written word. In the first
extract; `La lecture, c'est pas son fort, juste Paris-Normandie,
un peu France-Soir ... quand il ne fait pas attention, ses lèvres
bougent en lisant' the narrator establishes a complicity with the reader
over the head of her father as it were. The later text however engages
antagonistically with such a description. The description from La
Place defines her father's behaviour and literacy in terms of class,
region and educational experience. He is no longer abstracted from history
but `placed' within a specific historical setting. His depiction is thus a
fuller and more sympathetic one that in the earlier novel.
Writing as Righting
Naturellement, aucun bonheur d'écrire, dans cette entreprise où je me
tiens au plus près des mots et des phrases entendues, les soulignant
parfois par des italiques. Non pour indiquer un double sens au lecteur et
lui offrir le plaisir d'une complicité, que je refuse sous toutes ses
formes, nostalgie, pathétique ou dérision. Simplement parce que ces mots
et ces phrases disent les limites et la couleur du monde où vécut mon
père, où j'ai vécu aussi. Et l'on n'y prenait jamais un mot pour un autre.
(La Place Routledge p.69/Folio p.46)
Moreover, La Place attends to the problem of how to remember a
class from the outside - from the now of a more privileged present. This
difficulty is expressed towards the beginning of the text on pages 57-8 of
La Place (page 24 in the Folio edition):
Par la suite, j'ai commencé un roman dont il [son père] était le
personnage principal. Sensation de dégoût au milieu du récit.
In Ernaux's later work writing is regarded as an act of recovery of ways
of life not validated within dominant literary/cultural forms. It is an
act of recovery for a particular social situation which is perceived to no
longer exist. For example, on page 26 of Une Femme, the narrator
describes herself as the archivist of now redundant knowledge and skills:
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)
Moreover, in an interview with Loraine Day and Tony Jones Ernaux claimed
that:
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 ...
Writing is seen as a way of correcting the neglect to which certain
experiences have been condemned. It is about reaffirming the importance of
formerly suppressed or silenced knowledge and cultural practices. Writing
becomes the place in which the record is finally put straight.
Annie
Ernaux quoted in Loraine Day & Tony Jones, Ernaux: La Place/Une
Femme 1990)
... la réhabilitation d'un mode de vie considéré comme
inférieur" (La Place Routledge p.73/Folio p.54)
This phrase is central to our understanding of the book since La
Place is about the rehabilitation of the marginal, that is to say, to
confering value on experience that has been derogated or condemned to
secondariness. Ernaux is interested, in part, in redressing the neglect or
secondariness to which both working-class and petit- bourgeois life has
been condemned. Ernaux wants to reaffirm the importance of formerly
marginalized or silenced ways of life. (`Réhabilitation = Le fait de
restituer ou de regagner l'estime, la considération perdues' - Le Petit
Robert and `Rehabilitation = To restore by formal act or declaration
(a person degraded or attainted) to former privileges, rank and
possessions; to re-establish the character or reputation' - Shorter
OED)
Trangression of Genre Boundaries
Ce que j'espère écrire de plus juste se situe sans doute à la jointure du
familiale et du social, du mythe et de l'histoire. Mon projet est de
nature littéraire, puisqu'il s'agit de chercher une vérité sur ma mère qui
ne peut être atteinte que par des mots. (C'est-à-dire que ni les photos,
ni mes souvenirs, ni les témoignages de la famille ne peuvent me donner
cette vérité.) Mais je souhaite rester, d'une certaine façon au-dessous de
la littérature. (Une Femme p.23)
Ernaux struggles to articulate an oppositional writing practice that does
not ratify or endorse dominant definitions of what literary texts should
be. She cannot or will not play the game of writing by the rules laid down
by a dominant culture which she considers indifferent to the kind of
experiences she wants to write about.
The Problems of Writing
Au début, je croyais que j'écrirais vite. En fait je passe beaucoup de
temps à m'intérroger sur l'ordre des choses à dire, le choix et
l'agencement des mots, comme s'il existait un ordre idéal, seul capable de
rendre une vérité concernant ma mère - mais je ne sais en quoi elle
consiste - et rien d'autre ne compte pour moi, au moment où j'écris, que
la découverte de cet ordre- là. (Une Femme p.43-44)
Questions about the accuracy of what has been written are constantly
raised. The narrators frequently make clear their deeply ambivalent
feelings towards both their parents and to the very act of writing about
them. There are also constant references in both works to the unresolved
tension the narrators experience when trying to describe both particular
individuals and the social and historical context of which they are
products. A nice example of this is found in Une Femme on page 52:
J'essaie de ne pas considérer la violence, les débordements de tendresse,
les reproches de ma mère comme seulement des traits personnels de
caractère, mais de les situer aussi dans son histoire et sa condition
sociale. Cette façon d'écrire, qui me semble aller dans le sens de la
vérité, m'aide à sortir de la solitude et de l'obscurité du souvenir
individuel, par la découverte d'une signification plus générale. Mais je
sens quelque chose en moi résiste, voudrait conserver de ma mère des
images purement affectives, chaleur ou larmes, sans leur donner de sens.
(Une Femme p.52)
There's another interesting one in La Place:
J'écris lentement. En m'efforçant de révéler la trame significative d'une
vie dans un ensemble de faits et de choix, j'ai l'impression de perdre au
fur et à mesure la figure particulière de mon père. L'épure tend à prendre
toute la place, l'idée à courir toute seule. Si au contraire je laisse
glisser les images du souvenir, je le revois tel qu'il était, son rire, sa
démarche, il me conduit par la main à la foire et les manèges me
terrifient, tous les signes d'une condition partagée avec d'autres me
deviennent indifférents. A chaque fois, je m'arrache du piège de
l'individuel. (La Place Routledge p.69/Folio p.45)
Moreover, there is a greater awareness in La Place and Une
Femme of what Simon Denith and Philip Dodd have called the `rhetorical
situation' within which her work is produced and received (`The Uses of
Autobiography' in Literature and History, Vol.14 1988 pp.17-18).
The later works negociate the problems of not just how to write but also
with how the writings will be read. There is an awareness of the distance
between social milieu she is writing about and the potential middle-class
audience that will read the works, interested in them precisely because of
their otherness. (See Philippe Lejeune, Je est un autre:
l'autobiographie, de la littérature aux médias, Paris, Seuil 1980
pp.207-209). There is then, a concern with the potential meanings
generated by the circumstances of its reception. Ernaux is aware of the
dangers of a kind of cultural voyeurism by middle-class readership.
Multi-Vocal Reality
Il fallait que ma mère, née dans un milieu dominé, dont elle a voulu
sortir, devienne histoire ... (Une Femme p.106)
Conclusion
There is, in the Harrison poem, a pun on the phrasal verb `put down'
meaning: 1) to transcribe, to put down in writing; 2) to put aside, to
discard like a book one has got bored of; and 3) to denigrate or talk
disparagingly of. Now, it seems to me that the three meanings of this verb
are applicable to Ernaux's work which is concerned with the difficulty of
putting her parents down on paper, with her fascination with their lives
and which seeks to produce a truthful but non- condescending portrait of
them. There is in Ernaux's La Place and Une Femme, as well
as in Tony Harrison's poem, a recognition of the richness of the lives of
her parents, a richness hitherto absent from Literature with a capital
`L', from the `high culture' both Harrison and Ernaux have acquired. Both
La Place and Une Femme affirm this richness by turning the
lives of her parents into books. But the final similarity between the
Harrison poem and Ernaux's work is that both see writing as the locus of
reconciliation, the site in which differences are resolved, broken ties
are mended and penance paid for past betrayals.
ah nivver 'ad much time for a good read.
The labels on your whisky or your beer!
You'd never get unbearably excited
poring over Kafka or King Lear.
The only score you'd bother with's your darts,
or fucking football ...
but put it down in poems, that's the bind.
for the bus you took from Beeston into town
for people with no time like you in Leeds -