Annie Ernaux : Beyond a Nobel Laureate

 “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

― Annie Ernaux, Happening

The 82 year old Annie Ernaux,the first French woman to win the prestigious accolade of world literature identifies her not as a novelist or writer but rather an ethnologist of her own life. Her writing justifies this statement by being a mirror of her life and the ways she lived her life. Her life has been turned into the history of the land she lived, the history of her culture, the history of Normandy, the place where she hails from. This narrative strategy made her the pioneer of French autofiction, the approach of combining fictional autobiography or fictional accounts inspired from their own life stories. She persistently denies belonging to any genre “ I reject belonging to a specific genre, be it novel or even autobiography. Autofiction doesn’t suit me either. The I that I use seems to me an impersonal form, barely gendered, sometimes even a word belonging more to “the other '' than to “me”: a transpersonal form, in short. It’s not a way of building an identity for myself, through a text, of autofictionalizing myself, but a way of grasping, within my experience, the signs of a family, social or passionate reality. I believe that the two approaches, really, are diametrically opposed.``  

The readers find the life of the author relatable to themselves and the reflections of the times they lived, magnify the value of text as a historical and cultural account of an era. The finest examples of this literary account of lived realities from Ernauxs’ oeuvre includes Happening, Simple Passion, A Man’s Place, I Remain in Darkness and The Years.

The Years published in 2008 was shortlisted for Booker prize in 2019 and grabbed world wide acclaim beyond France. The Years tells the story of six decades of social and personal history, beginning with Ernaux's working-class childhood in wartime and postwar Normandy (she was born in 1940), continuing through the 1968 student uprisings, the initial excitement and later disillusionment of François Mitterand's protracted presidency in the 1980s and 1990s, and into the new millennium. It covers a wide range of topics, including politics, literature, music, television, education, marriage, divorce, ads, and catchphrases, all of which are related by a narrator who never once employs the pronoun "I.". The work, which concluded in 2006, was hailed as a contemporary In Search of Lost Time in France. She shares the flamboyant style of Marcel Proust in her works. The narrations are reflective, intimate but also impersonal and detached. 

 Writing is a political act to Ernaux. She uses it as a knife to free herself and demand her dissent to all the shackles of society put on a working class woman. The Ernauxian corpus inspires all the women or all the humans to raise their voices and claim life for themselves rather than being a prey to societal norms. 

Athira Hanna, Asst. Prof. of English, Al Shifa College of Arts and Science, Kizhattoor, Perinthalmanna