What a fantastic decision! For literature, for all its readers and those who will become readers – and of course for the Nobel Prize winner for literature Annie Ernaux herself, who on Thursday, when the Swedish Academy called, did not at first answer the phone, but always had it hear ringing. Cameras then filmed the French writer as she left her home in Cergy-Pontoise. In a dark cloak and a pink scarf around her neck, she went to meet those who were waiting for her. And her face betrayed that mixture of deep seriousness, shyness and pride that gives her an inimitable aura and greatness – and that is exactly what you find in her books.
Because Annie Ernaux’ books tell about Annie Ernaux: direct, clear, direct, radical. In a way that the author has invented herself since she started writing in the mid-1970s: as an “ethnologist of herself” she looks at herself from the outside and reflects on the social conditions under which she grew up. She writes at the interface of literature and sociology, transforming private memories into a social narrative – so she always opens up the space of autofiction for as many others as possible when she speaks of herself: Annie Thérèse Blanche Ernaux, née Duchèsne, born on 1 January September 1940 in Lillebonne. Her parents – the father originally worked as a farmhand – had a shop and café in Yvetot in Normandy, Annie attended a girls’ boarding school and was the first in her family to study at a university. Shame became a formative feeling for her. shame for their humble origins.
“I don’t really feel like I’m brave”
And language offered her the opportunity to escape this origin – or at least to try: “When I tried to express myself better as a child, I always had the feeling that I was throwing myself into an abyss,” she writes. Even at school she no longer spoke a dialect like her parents, but learned “proper French”. This often caused arguments at home, and language as a means of distinction also became a weapon in the never-ending struggle to break away.
When the double doors opened in her publishing house Gallimard in Paris on Thursday and the Nobel Prize winner entered the press conference room, the bystanders cheered. And she also cheered, rejoiced. “I’m very moved,” said the 82-year-old. “You should know that this is something really big for me. The Nobel Prize doesn’t seem quite real to me yet, but it’s true that I feel a new responsibility.” It’s about continuing to fight, “in relation to women and in relation to the ruled,” even if literature isn’t necessarily have “an immediate effect” to change things. Of course, her literature is political.
“But I don’t really have the impression of being brave,” said Ernaux in Paris, it wasn’t about courage at all, but about necessity. A woman like the French politician and Holocaust survivor Simone Veil, who brought the law decriminalizing abortion to a vote in 1975, was courageous for her.
