Annie Ernaux’s Nobel prize celebrates a uniquely resonant voice in French literature

Issued on: 07/10/2022 – 14:23

Ernaux “consistently and from different angles examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class”, said the Swedish Academy, explaining its choice of the 82-year-old author – the 16th Nobel laureate to write in French. 

In more than 20 books published over five decades, Ernaux has delved fearlessly into life’s most intimate moments, including sexual encounters, illness, ageing and death. A film adaptation of her 2000 novel “Happening” (“L’événement”), about her experience of having an abortion when it was still illegal in France, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. 

“I did not imagine at the time that 22 years later, the right to abortion would be challenged,” Ernaux, who touched on the same topic in her first book back in 1974, told reporters in Paris. “Until my last breath, I will fight for women’s right to choose whether they want to be a mother or not.” 

FRANCE 24 spoke to Dr. Elise Hugueny-Leger, a senior lecturer at the University of St Andrews who has published extensively on Annie Ernaux, about the French author’s distinctive style and why her deeply personal work resonates with so many readers. 

F24: In praising Ernaux’s work, the Nobel literature committee said she “writes about things that no one else writes about”. What is so specific about her books? 

Elise Hugueny-Leger: Ernaux’s originality stems both from the themes she has chosen and the style with which she has explored them. She has stuck to the same line of writing from the very beginning, since the 1970s. The idea was to lean on her own experience in order to delve as close as possible to the human experience. Over time she turned her back on fiction to dig ever deeper into the specificities of life’s toughest experiences, both physical and emotional, from the loss of loved ones to bodily experiences such as her clandestine abortion. In the process, she has consistently succeeded in making her own experiences resonate with the world in which they unfolded.  

Her books offer deeply personal accounts, including socioeconomic details of her family’s working-class background. Can you tell us a bit more about that in the context of the French literary establishment? 

Annie Ernaux comes from a fairly modest working-class background. She probably wasn’t meant to become an established writer, but her parents strongly encouraged her to keep on studying instead of giving up school to start work. She has been writing about this social milieu that she came from (…). Popular speech is incorporated into her writing, by way of citations and hearsay. Hers is a polyphonic speech that borrows from the words of others, the ‘forgotten people’ in particular. 

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She could have chosen to turn away from [this milieu] and only talk about her current life experience. But, in her mind, writing comes with a sense of responsibility. Having the privilege of being part of this establishment also means using this privilege to challenge the establishment, to try to shift boundaries, by including some uncomfortable topics, including those of social domination. We know Ernaux was heavily influenced by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu [editor’s note: an influential theorist of power dynamics in society]. These are topics the establishment is perhaps not always willing to hear. 

Ernaux speaks candidly about abortion, sex and relationships. She’s often called a writer of women’s experience. Can you tell us a bit more about the feminist nature of her work? 

Feminism was there from the very beginning. Her first book [“Les armoires vides”, published in English as “Cleaned Out”] was a fictionalised account of her abortion, it was published in 1974, when abortion had not been legalised yet. We didn’t know at the time that it was autobiographical (…). The feminist dimension is found in the exploration of the body and the specific experiences that women go through, but also in the experiences that are linked to the way society places you. We constantly navigate between the most private sphere – the body, menstruation, ageing, illness – and at the same time we are never very far from the way women evolve in society. And we can see how this work crosses 40 to 50 years of history. 

Over the years Ernaux has used her experience and status to make strong statements not just in her books but also outside her work, in articles written for prominent newspapers for instance. She has taken an active stance in support of women’s rights. 

The author has enjoyed plenty of success of late, both in print and in film, but she is perhaps not so well known outside France. How will this prize change things? 

She has been translated into many languages for several decades now, but it is true that outside academia and a small number of readers she wasn’t that well known. Things started to change quite considerably with “The Years” (Les années), which took a while to be translated – it was published in 2008 and was only translated in 2017 – but gave her some international prominence and recognition. Now with some of her books being adapted into film and, of course, this highly prestigious prize we’re going to see even more international interest in her work. And partly because her work has such a strong resonance outside the French-speaking world. Almost anyone can identify with some of the topics in her books.