Two Annies

By Patrick Autréaux (tr. Tobias Ryan).

The Event, the headline of a major daily ran. The reference, a book about a clandestine abortion written by Annie Ernaux. This event, the first time the Nobel Prize for Literature had been won by a French woman. An event, a writer, a defector from their class, reaching the heights of literary recognition. An event born by the present moment and responding to it. When I heard the news, I was walking in the street with a friend, a young poet. Texts and social media posts had his phone buzzing. As it was blowing up, he looked at it and said: Fuck, Ernaux Nobel. All the excitement of the literary world and beyond immediately channelled through him, the overwhelming emotion and everything that followed: the surge of joy from the left, of hatred from the extreme right, reflexive polarisation, the rehashing of every criticism made of the author in the last forty years. It had done something to us, undeniably.

My immediate reaction was a wave of anger, and I couldn’t really understand why. It seemed to be made up of several differing elements. I knew that it wasn’t like the anger of those who disagreed with her politically, nor of the champions of “good writing” — which no one really knows how to define. First of all, I could recognise my fatigue when faced with the sham of literary prizes and the influence of the big publishing groups. We all know that winners are produced like saints (more rapidly, but with just the right degree of uncertainty to make you believe in the process still). Remember, prizes of that size — as well as the commercial stakes — are also rites of institution, rites of consecration. As Bourdieu said, they tend to cause an arbitrary limit to be dismissed as arbitrary and recognised as legitimate (1). Without knowing all the details of what had gone on in backrooms in the months prior to the awarding of the trophy, I had no doubt that some sort of strategy had been deployed. Strategies are not enough on their own, but without them there would have been no prize. That is also the case with canonisations. But anyway, Annie Ernaux was not undeserving of that kind of honour. What, then, had fed my initial reaction? The wave of anger passed, and what remained was the impression of having been betrayed. Betrayed by her? Her, which is to say, the somewhat chimerical silhouette that is forged of an author, comprised, certainly, from their books, portraits of them, their written voice, but also of their social image, which sometimes crystallizes into an obligatory reference to what they have become. 

Nevertheless, there was every reason to rejoice in this prize-giving. Even if I don’t know Annie Ernaux personally, I am rather fond of her. I share her political commitments; I have often signed the same petitions as her. Having come from the same background, I followed a comparable enough path of class defection. Surrounded by sociologists, I am steeped in the human sciences. I have sent some of my books to her, she being one of those rare contemporaries who generously reads others. In one book, I wrote about the debt I owe to her, but also of the ways I have distanced myself from her approach, of how her choices seemed, to the writer I sought to become, somewhat mutilating routes. A work is made up of choices; hers are not mine. And though I’m not an unconditional fan, I have no scores to settle in writing this. I think it’s necessary to specify that, having heard the choir of hateful and partisan voices. 

In the days that followed the announcement of the Nobel, I had the impression of having been crushed. The media din and excessively violent attacks prevented me from understanding the dash of betrayal that persisted within. Putting those with whom we feel affiliated on a pedestal, contrary to what people in power extol, can delude or limit those who don’t turn out to be exceptions, who conform to the rules, even further: the rule in this case being the glass ceiling for class defectors. 

When a work that wants to appear emancipatory achieves such institutional recognition, a great deal of discernment is required of the bearer to uphold the evacuating tempo of their voice. That men and women of the people have a voice at all is not because we have given it to them. We understand well that it is granted through the capital of the notoriety they have acquired, and which is often born of a misunderstanding on the part of, or of complicity with, what in society is dominant. This capital is the motor of its own fructification: being recognized, if not for an accident or act of self-scuttling, you will become even more so. Far from being emancipatory, notoriety thus participates in a system wherein freedom of expression is proclaimed, but where being heard is only a possibility for the few. 

This Nobel, just like others that have produced polemics, was also a means of conceding to the social demands of the time. No need to say more about that. In that it heralds a political commitment, we need say no more of either. In that it rewards the spearheading of a literary current, we need say no more. In that it celebrates a woman of the people, we need say no more. Nevertheless, if this prize is to be brandished as a victory, it is also a sign of the all-powerful against which we might hope to fight: the suffocation of the publishing ecosystem by a couple of houses, the rending invisible of an incalculable number of authors, institutional recuperation, and the awkward assimilation of a body of work that, given its already significant recognition, we would have liked to have been far more anti-establishment.

Of course, as with the books written by saints, one has to return to the reading. And it can be argued that any incompatibility between the work and the public condemns it to dissent and obscurity. But as the number of tribunes and print-runs increase, will we soon be seeing Annie Ernaux t-shirts, Annie Ernaux merch? So many biopics hove into view! And, no doubt, a new industry of glosses and other derivative products (this article, not least)? If there were ever to be a secular miracle in the town of Cergy, it would be that the first woman to win the Nobel — though I wish her good health for a long time to come — would claim her place in the Pantheon. It’s certainly a bit more exciting than ending up the first woman admitted to the Académie française, like Marguerite  — the other one, as Duras would have said. 

And it is precisely another one which I’d like to take as an example.

Although she is the same age, comes from a similar background, and has an important literary and critical body of work, she is far from being some kind of double. Just as there were two Marguerites (Yourcenar and Duras, opposed in every way), can we not say that there are two Annies?

Annie Ernaux and Annie Le Brun seem to represent two irreducible currents and approaches: one of the institutionalised left, a left that always holds power in the cultural milieu, and the other issuing from a left recalcitrant, something closer to anarchism but without claiming any label, and which, in fact, abhors them.  

Le Brun grates and whips, without getting on her high horse; she isn’t outraged in the same tones as Ernaux, nor does she feel invested with a project of denunciation, even one that does not extend to the branch on which it is believed to rest: she clearly understands that indignation is an element of the system, and one which keeps it afloat. She is a feminist critical of every doctrinaire position, unsparing of the institution, similar, in her intransigence to Ernaux, but bearing a discourse that it is difficult to recuperate. A thorn in one’s thoughts: an Annie who never would have won the Nobel, and who, in any case, would have let it be known that she didn’t want it anyway.

Ernaux freed me from certain shames, and opened intimate paths from which I have strayed, not least from a narrative perspective. She pushed me to confront my background from something other than a psychological angle, as someone other than a nostalgic or complaisant dreamer. Her method, however, would quickly be revealed as a route that sterilised my imagination. Because if she had opened the gates, she had also established a search and sweep system à la française, and aimed at a truth, though doubtless emancipatory, which while wholly conscious of its own limits, proved restrictive. She reduces, somewhat, the complexity of the creation of a person, avoiding the vagabond trails that diverge from one’s private path and, paradoxically, curtailing the lucidity to which she aspires. Nonetheless, she wrote: Theres is something immense to experience, which requires questioning without end (2). It is this promise that she has not always achieved. And, for me, it was exactly that which I quickly found lacking in her books.

Le Brun opens no obvious gates, but with her we can flee toward the forest, the mental space which remains disquieting, and which also resists every caricatured simplification of the human person (3). She reopens the desire for the infinite and confronts the landscape of the abyss. Reading her spreads wings that ruffle method, that shake the confinements of every system, that propel us toward overflow, to sabotage, thus inventing, through a tenacity which attempts to hold everything together, opposites and forces, creating other dimensions. If she is sometimes imprecatory, she carves a demanding path which does not exclude reason, but which overwhelms it. In doing so, she constantly opens loopholes. 

If I am grateful to the books that have liberated me, like those of Ernaux, I cherish those which have set me free. Le Brun has liberated me less than she has left me free to welcome the je ne sais quoi from the shadows within, and to feel no fear.

Both, however, are great authors, and could be said to be anti-great-writers. But one of them, let it be understood, has taken revenge, exorcised the atavistic anguish of a low social position, and accomplished the conformist aspirations of the dominant milieu; the other, meanwhile, has mauled the notion of conformism, and developed a challenging body of work which is difficult to integrate, and resists all attempts at being absorbed.  

The qualms that I have described here regarding Ernaux, are not, I believe, the cause of the wave of anger I felt, nor the only explanation for the impression I had of betrayal, from which it sprang. The answer lies elsewhere: in that place where the process of institutionalisation is accomplished, where the process of assimilating thought is achieved. 

As one of Annie Ernaux’s devotees recently said: only art that is part of the world can change it, not art from the margins, but art from within, an active art, art that has entered into the system. Any other position is one of arrested or naïve romanticism, complacent in its passivity. Could it be that that is what I am? Could it be that the awarding of that prize, that recognition, was reflected back at me? Could the betrayal I felt be nothing more than an explicit symptom of having deluded myself from the beginning? Of having remained an adolescent idealist?

I was raised by my grandfather, who came from a milieu similar to Ernaux’s father, and was encouraged and aided by him to escape the humble ranks among which birth had put me. But as I have aged, I have noticed that an inextinguishable anger remains in me, a cry that is quick to rekindle, an unquenchable desire for lucidity. I have also noticed that I have never been able to assimilate any lasting institutional connections. However, like Annie Ernaux’s parents, like many parents who want to see their child climb the social ladder, my grandfather was driven by a strong, contrary desire for social conformity, spurred by an ambition that he attempted to pass onto me: succeed and have good position. And if I have followed that line, which apparently accorded to his wishes, something has often acted within me, of which I wasn’t conscious until much later, derailing me just as I was close to achievement, or deliberately refusing to forge a career. What is it that acted? This ferment — boredom, perhaps — that said No?

And yet, I’m told to say Yes! But an uncompromising rhythm emerges: a muffled No stiffens me. I’m afraid of being haughty; I’m afraid to go against. It is stronger than me, this something saying No. And if I ever get backlash, a little child rises up within, the same, perhaps, who stood up to his mother when, having acted out one day, she set about correcting him: a first smack, to which he responded Not bad; a second and so on. Finally it was the mother who stopped slapping the child, who, in floods of tears, still gritted his teeth and said: Not bad.

Well, I can still recognise that stubborn little guy, who can be reduced to powder when burning with love or joy, but resists like a diamond anything that puts a screen between him and what’s real, who knows how to shatter, and applies himself to so doing, the glass that makes us think that we see clearly, when it is always a question of being suspicious of the hidden workings of the world and self. What also remains in me is this almost instinctive movement of resistance, which knows how to throw caution to the wind, lucid about its powerlessness, aware also that the world is not a mother who knows when to stop hitting. 

People will tell me that the suppression of peoples is without precedent in the West in decades, and that they’re not going to quibble over the state of my soul. People will tell me about the good this Nobel has done, invoking the effect works of art and symbols can have. And I understand all that well, but it doesn’t stop me feeling betrayed. With all the impeccable gratitude I have for Annie Ernaux, what power it would have had if she had said: what a load of shit! By thanking the Academy, has she not defused what could have made her work even more explosive? Has she not introduced a suspicion? That, at the moment when she had the largest audience, from a place where free expression is most widely broadcast, nothing was rattled, not even by the leaving of an empty chair, seems to me a sign that Ernaux’s approach was ultimately more domesticated than it appeared. I’m afraid even her speech did nothing to change that. It was no longer a question of words. 

I am exaggerating, of course. A refusal would have been a pose, and even a half-refusal, like Dylan’s, a meek symbol. Gestures of refusal can only be unique (or incessantly repeated, which the institution knows well, only rarely serving the dish more than once) and still feed the need our era has for scandal. And what choice did she really have? Wouldn’t she have betrayed others less fortunate than me? Perhaps I don’t understand her and am projecting immature expectations onto her or my misunderstanding of her approach? Could she not be more stoic than I had imagined? Or simply delighted, her battles being fought elsewhere? What would I, who have the comfort of saying No without consequences, have done? And Duras, to take a comparable example, did she refuse such institutional compromise — the Goncourt, for example? The time of haughty refusals has passed, the loners of Port-Royal, like Pascal, the recluses of the Pays de Loire, like Gracq — all those who renounced and could afford to, one might say. Have I inherited a dated imagination? An old-fashioned ideal from a social class other than the one from which I come?

The case thus poses a recurrent problem, one to which, I believe, there is no one definitive, satisfying response: in a time of blind spotlights and the extinction of fireflies, how do we make our Nos active? How do we prevent them dulling, and ensure they are heard with their full force? How can we avoid being reduced to a product?

We often talk about revenge. Familial, perhaps. Wider and less personal, I’m not so sure. Ernaux has always been seen, read, and published by a house that dominates the French publishing landscape; critiqued certainly, violently and unjustly often, but constantly present, she has also become, in my eyes — and no doubt unwillingly — a face of the prism that is our society, and by no means a hidden face suddenly made visible through this consecration. How can we know if our work will resonate or come to represent a social group? And how can we not doubt — I do at least — that in writing we might represent no one but ourselves? We may never even get to know what we have done. 

Annie Ernaux has had the privilege of believing that her work is supported by a large class, by an era which, logically enough, has acclaimed her. Even though her political engagement has put her on the red side, Ernaux opposes without clashing, which the diverse social backgrounds of her apparent laudators attests. And if she has suffered violent attacks, as a woman, as an author or for her commitments, we would sometimes like to shout at her: Keep going!

Le Brun occupies a position more in the margins, the offshoot of a restive vein that won’t be brought into line: she resists all solubility. Even if she is far from being a cursed author, her irreducible singularity is in opposition to her work being capitalised on or made subject to the logic of the market. Not Nobelizable, then. She clashes without even looking to oppose: she is already beyond combat, bearing a voice which knows that opposition is consubstantial with that she would refute. To shake things up, you have to reach further, elsewhere. 

Both are fighting political battles which, for the moment, have been lost, and risk being lost entirely, given a glimpse of what’s to come. One, however, I think, blithely reassures us. Her consecration establishes hers as voice which, unfortunately, drowns out those of many other dissidents. The other Annie disquiets us, and reawakens within us the strength and desire to remain unassimilable. Their institutional situation is, it seems to me, a reflection of what is borne in their work. 

To resist is not only to fight. Fighting is sometimes nothing more than the result of conformity. And if, in my view, we cannot detach any authentic approach to literature from a form of combat, rare are the works that know how to resist beyond the point of conformity to their author’s milieu (by birth or adoption). But it is there that works which manage to protect the wayward face of the human being, and thus its irreducible and ambivalent beauty, are revealed. 

I will always be on the side of the intransigent Annies. But I will give a crown — wreathed in thistles — to those who achieve that which unsettles without concession; to whose who, on the edge of vertigo before the hole that lucidity begets, know how to remain as unmarketable as they are definitively out of reach (4).

(1) Pierre Bourdieu, Les rites comme actes …

(2) Annie Ernaux, Le vrai…

(3) Annie Le Brun, Ailleurs et…

(4) Annie Le Brun, Ailleurs et…

This essay first appeared in French in lundimatin #384.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Autréaux (above) is the author of dozens of books and articles in French (mainly published by Gallimard and Verdier). His essay ‘A School of Life’ appeared in Socrates on the Beach (issue 9) and ‘New Prose’, taken from his book Se suvivre (Verdier), was published by Asymptote. Recently, Pussyboy (Verdier), a novel about an erotic passion, was translated in Spanish at Canta Mares (Mexico). He lives between Paris and Cambridge, MA.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Tobias Ryan lives in Paris, France, where he works as an English teacher and translator. He is also Co-Editor-in-Chief of minor literature[s]. Twitter: @TobiasvRyan