"Annie Ernaux, ethnographer of symbolic violence" by Gisèle Sapiro

October 10, 2022

News

The 2022 Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded for the first time to a French female author: Annie Ernaux. Since her first novel, Les Armoires vides (1974 / Cleaned Out 1990), Annie Ernaux has explored forms of symbolic violence that are experienced in daily life, first through fiction (in her first three autobiographical novels), then through what she has called “autosociobiography”. As a secondary school teacher from a modest family of grocers, Ernaux read Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction when it was published in 1970, and was struck by their sociological analysis of the symbolic violence exerted through education, which contributes to legitimize class domination.

Written as an interior monologue, Cleaned Out is the story of a little girl, Denise Lesur, who experiences shame and humiliation in a private Catholic school because of her social origins that are reflected in her “rude”, “vulgar”, and “disgusting” manners and way of speaking (what Bourdieu defines as habitus). The symbolic violence is performed when she interiorizes the bourgeois norms she learns in school and begins to judge and despise her parents – a typical experience for a class “transfuge”. Cleaned Out opens with an abortion at a time when abortion was illegal in France. Only in 1975, a year after the novel was released, did abortion become legal.

Ce qu’ils disent ou rien (1977 / Do What They Say or Else 2022) is the story of sixteen-year-old Anne, who rebels against her working-class parents and their narrow-minded lifestyle. In a summer camp, Anne meets a trainer with whom she has her first sexual experience. Although sexually and morally this is a violent experience, she accepts it as the natural law of the dominant.

Her third novel, La Femme gelée (1981 / The Frozen Woman 1995), closely analyzes the mechanisms of masculine domination in the life of a married woman who realizes that her efforts to rise socially through education led her to experience the “double burden” as a school teacher and mother, and to feel alienated in her new class status.

©Johanna Geron/Reuters

Afte

r The Frozen Woman, Ernaux turned from fiction to autosociobiography. Fiction had allowed her to lay bare the mechanisms of symbolic violence she experienced through class and gender relations. In the books that followed, dedicated to her father (La Place, 1983 / A Man’s Place, 1992) and mother (Une femme, 1987 / A Woman’s Story, 2003), she reconstructed like an ethnographer the values and beliefs of the world she comes from. Ernaux restored their meaning, without judging them from the standpoint of her present worldview and taste. She called this style “flat writing”, a minimalist language devoid of any ornam

ent and containing the violence present in her first three novels, a style that allowed her to delve into the world she was describing. This was her attempt to leave the cycle of symbolic violence she participated in as a class “transfuge”. A Woman’s Story echoes Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams that attempts to reconstruct his mother’s life story after she passed away, and Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death that narrates her mother’s physical decline during the short period before she died. Later on, Ernaux will also describe her mother’s decline due to Alzheimer’s in Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit (1987 / I Remain in Darkness, 1999).

Ernaux then turned to self-ethnography, exploring emotions such as passion, jealousy, shame, and humiliation, with the same sincerity and objectivity. Passion simple (1992 / Simple Passion) recounts her affair with a married younger Russian diplomat, a story that was turned into a movie in 2020. She also published Getting Lost, the diary of this story. L’Occupation (2002 / The Possession) deals with jealousy. La Honte (1997 / Shame 1998) focuses on the shame that she felt when, at age twelve, she saw her father almost kill her mother, something that radically changed her perception of her parents and provoked her critical judgement on their lifestyle.

Among the most dramatic episodes of Ernaux’s life is her experience of abortion in 1963 France that she depicted in L’Événement (2000 /

Happening 2001). More recently, in Mémoire de fille (2016 / A Girl’s Story 2020), she revisited the episode of her first sexual relation with a trainer, but in a non-fictional mode. Written in the context of #MeToo, this narrative opens with the question of consent and submission to the man’s will. By responding to the male gaze and desire, and by performing the ritual of possession, the girl accomplishes her destiny as a girl. While she still cannot call it rape (unlike Beauvoir who defines all first intercourse as rape), she feels retrospectively ashamed for having felt proud at the time of being an object of desire: “To have received the key to understanding shame does not give one the power to erase it”. Her shame stems from the pride that made her an accomplice to this act of possession by submitting her own desire to his, and accepting the humiliation he inflicted on her afterwards as natural, instead of feeling outraged. The complicity of the dominated is what characterizes symbolic violence for Bourdieu, and although Ernaux never uses his concept, her writing unveils the very mechanisms of its functioning.

Ernaux’s latest book, Le Jeune homme (2022 / The Young Man, not yet translated), is a response to this experience of shame by narrating an affair she had with a man thirty years younger in the late 1990s, a relationship she conducted openly, confronting the reproving glances of people in the street or in restaurants. This short book also responded to Camille Laurens’ splendid novel on the social and self-perception of ageing women, Celle que vous croyez (Who You Think I Am, 2017) about a 48-year-old divorced woman who has an online affair with a younger man, dissimulating her true identity and age behind a 24

-year-old avatar. Beyond its transgression of social norms, Le Jeune homme is a meditation about time, and a journey into the memories of her past brought back by the relationship with this young man, including the abortion she had in the hospital she could see from his apartment. One of her most critically acclaimed books is Les Années (2011 / The Years 2017), shortlisted in 2019 for the Man Booker International Prize. The Years is her life story told in the third person, in an impersonal mode, combining individual and collective memories through a collage of newspapers, photographs, and diary entries among others.

Annie Ernaux has invented a form of writing that became a model for other class “transfuges” including Didier Eribon and Edouard Louis, while her writing ethics is a standard for female authors like Camille Laurens or Virginie Despentes. Ernaux’s work is highly praised by the younger generation, in the context of the fourth feminist wave. A feminist herself, she is also a committed intellectual, taking a stand against inequalities, social injustice, and racism.

The publisher of Ernaux’s works in French is Gallimard, the most prestigious literary publishing house in France. In English, except for her first three novels that appeared with Dalkey Archive, Nebraska UP, and Four Walls Eight Windows respectively, Ernaux’s work has been brought out by Seven Stories Press, a small independent publisher (now distributed by Penguin Random House), at a time when large companies tended to pull back from translation. Since 2014, some titles are also published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Her diaristic reflection on the big-box superstore as a common experience that is not yet the province of fiction, as well as a place where social resignation is produced, will be released soon by Yale University Press.

Ernaux is the recipient of numerous distinguished prizes, including the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years. From its establishment in 1901 up to 1990, the Nobel Prize had been awarded to only six women, an inequality that the Swedish Academy has corrected since then. The eleventh laureate since 1990, Ernaux is thus the seventeenth woman (and the first woman of sixteen French Nobel laureates). Even now, it often seems that women have to wait longer to be rewarded. At 82 years old, Annie Ernaux is as sharp and as uncompromising as ever. Having heard the news on the radio, she received it with her usual grace and modesty. No, the author cannot be separated from the work. And, luckily, this is sometimes a reason to rejoice.