When it is difficult to talk to one another, writing can be a mediation.
In 1984, Annie Ernaux is awarded the Renaudot Prize for one of her autobiographical texts, A Man’s Place[1], the one of her father. The one she is ashamed of in regards to the social ascent that has separated them. The writing takes eight months, some time to find the tone. “I started writing a novel in which he was the main character”[2], “I have no right to adopt an artistic approach […] No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally.”[3] During the TV programme “Apostrophes” of the 6 of April 1984, A. Ernaux says it would have been a treason to write about her father as in a novel. “Neutral writing is the writing of assessment.” “I probably write because we had nothing to say to each other.”[4] In 2022, as she receives the Nobel Prize for Literature, she explains: “I had to break with ‘writing well’, the beautiful sentences, […] to root out, display and understand the rift running through me.”[5]
A. Ernaux, with her writing, describes. The sentences are short, making the paternal language echoing, which is plain, harsh, efficient but cautious in society: “patois was something that was old and ugly, a sign of inferiority.”[6] “He was chatty with the customers and within his family but in front of educated people, he would remain quiet […] indescribably terrified of using the wrong word”[7]. Here is a father who can be cheerful, joking, sometimes bawdy, liking games, the circus, fireworks[8]. He wears overalls, has an Opinel clasp-knife, cultivates his garden, gazes at the sky, knows every bird species. He has a taste for “cultivation”, with A. Ernaux’s clarification: “which was what he called the world of farming. The other meaning of the word and its spiritual implications, held no interest for him.” [9]
Between modesty and crudeness, the emotion is discreet, transient, barely tangible: never let go!
The father’s pride can be perceived through a newspaper’s cutting in the deceased man’s wallet: it shows Annie among the best candidates to the teacher training college. He encouraged her to study, to learn well at school, “learn”, not “work”: real work is handwork. A. Ernaux narrates a visit, with him, to the library, and evokes: “maybe his greatest pride or even his raison d’être of his existence: that I belong to the world which had scorned him” [10], “the hope that I would be better than him” [11].
An element of affect is present, throughout the whole text, and will become the title of A. Ernaux’s 1997 book: Shame “became a new way of living […] Up to the point that I was no longer perceiving it, it was part of my own body”[12].
To one of Bernard Pivot’s question: “Are you paying back a debt?”, A. Ernaux answers with a few evocative signifiers: repairing, rehabilitating, describing gestures and postures, showing there is there nothing despicable in the matter. A father who “was looking to hold his status”[13].
References from the author:
[1] Ernaux A., A Man’s Place, our translation.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] “La Place d’Annie Ernaux”, Apostrophes, TV programme of 6th April 1984, available on the web: https://enseignants.lumni.fr/fiche-media/00000001595/la-place-d-annie-ernaux.html. Our translation.
[5] Ernaux A., “Nobel Conference”, available on the web: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2022/ernaux/lecture/.
[6] Ernaux A., A Man’s Place, op. cit.
[7] Cf. ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ernaux A., Shame, our translation.
[12] Ernaux A., A Man’s Place, op. cit.
[13] Ibid.
Translation: Sébastien Dauguet
Proofreading: Tracy Hoijer-Favre
Picture : © Elena Madera
