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Feeding and Reading Ambivalence: Incorporating Difference in Annie Ernaux’s Les Armoires vides/Cleaned Out

Ruth Cruickshank

in Leftovers: Eating, Drinking and Re-thinking with Case Studies from Post-war French Fiction

Les Armoiresvides/Cleaned Out (1974) is the first of Ernaux’s many texts exploring how gender and class have indelible leftovers. Enduring traces of the working-class rural café-épicerie of narrator ... More

Les Armoiresvides/Cleaned Out (1974) is the first of Ernaux’s many texts exploring how gender and class have indelible leftovers. Enduring traces of the working-class rural café-épicerie of narrator Denise’s childhood with its ambivalent desires and constraints are explored in terms of abjection and of her ambivalent incorporation of the discourses of the Church, education and the patriarchy which affects her senses of value, shame and sexual appetite. The analysis supplements understandings of how class difference may be perpetuated through the (food) ‘choices’ which are effectively determined. Secret eating brings arousal but also (along with poor diet and alcohol in excess) offers insights into the traumatic effects of post-war modernization, as well as the Second World and Algerian Wars. Eating whilst reading offers solace and fuels the narrative with intertexts, but also evokes the transformative dangers of (inter)textual ‘eating on the sly’. Representations of eating and drinking raise questions of the politics of both narrative and sexual reproduction. Indeed, food and drink are bound up with psychological and embodied remainders of gendered prejudice which counter conventional feminist perspectives, and the narrator reads and consumes in bad faith, lacks freedom over her reproductive future and cannot escape inevitable remainders.Less

Annie Ernaux: The Place of the Diary in Modern Life-Writing

Sam Ferguson

in Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-Century French Writing

This chapter examines the place of the diary in the context of considerable growth in all forms of life-writing since the 1970s, through a reading of diaries published by Annie Ernaux. The diary has ... More

This chapter examines the place of the diary in the context of considerable growth in all forms of life-writing since the 1970s, through a reading of diaries published by Annie Ernaux. The diary has shared in the broader success of life-writing, but also remained marginal. This marginality is apparent within Ernaux’s overall writing project, broadly associated with the aims of autobiography, and even inimical to the diary. Her first diary publication, Journal du dehors, is positioned as an alternative to the journal intime by its focus on strangers and the outside world, but still points cautiously towards a diaristic authorial posture. Ernaux’s later publications of actual journaux intimes (including “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit”) establish a complex relationship with Ernaux’s autobiographical works, acting as a supplement. L’Atelier noir, Ernaux’s writing diary (journal d’écriture), again acts as a supplement to her volume of complete works Écrire la vie.Less

Voix Blanche?: Annie Ernaux, French Feminisms and the Challenge of Intersectionality

Lyn Thomas

in Making Waves: French Feminisms and their Legacies 1975-2015

One of the most important ‘nouvelle vérités’ that has challenged 1970s feminisms in the Anglophone world is intersectionality, and particularly the need to address race and ethnicity as constantly ... More

One of the most important ‘nouvelle vérités’ that has challenged 1970s feminisms in the Anglophone world is intersectionality, and particularly the need to address race and ethnicity as constantly interacting with gender, sexuality, class and other variables; This chapter provides some general reflections on the extent to which a similar crisis and trajectory are present in French feminist histories and narratives, but its main focus is a case-study of Annie Ernaux’s work in this regard, considering questions that have rarely been asked in Ernaux criticism to date: to what extent does Ernaux engage with race and ethnicity as well as class and gender in her writing? If she is an unusually intersectional writer in terms of gender, sexuality and class, and in more recent years one might add age and ageing, does this approach and the strong influence of sociology on Ernaux’s writing lead to awareness of dimensions of oppression that she herself as a white French woman has not personally experienced? How does Ernaux write her own whiteness? Is the ‘I’ of Ernaux’s texts, whether fictional or autobiographical, ‘unevoix blanche’, adopting the cloak of universal whiteness?Less

Introduction: Con/textualising the Corpus

in Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the works of French author Annie Ernau, and provides a close reading of several of her works including Les Armoires vides, ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the works of French author Annie Ernau, and provides a close reading of several of her works including Les Armoires vides, Ce qu'ils disent ou rien, and L'Evénement. It suggests that Ernaux's writing points up a number of important areas in contemporary critical thought including particularly fluid manifestations in the realm of autobiography, and that while her works are auto/biographical, they do not constitute autobiographies but posit a metonymic relationship between narrator and author.Less

The Adult Woman: Female Behaviour Paradigms in La Femme gelée and Passion simple

in Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins

This chapter examines the portrayal of the adult woman and female behaviour paradigms in Annie Ernaux's La Femme gelée and Passion simple. It evaluates the interpretation of these works as feminist ... More

This chapter examines the portrayal of the adult woman and female behaviour paradigms in Annie Ernaux's La Femme gelée and Passion simple. It evaluates the interpretation of these works as feminist and suggests that such an interpretation is based more on politically aware use of rhetoric than on the events they portray. The chapter explains that feminist interpretation of these works is focused on the narrator's sexually voracious attitude to her lover and on the frank portrayal of sexual desire from the perspective of a middle-aged female.Less

The Time of Our Lives: Repetition, Variation and Fragmentation in French Women’s Life Writing

Shirley Jordan

in What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st- Century French Literature and Thought

This chapter explores some of the formal devices elaborated in recent contemporary women’s life writing to convey a sense of time and of being in the world. It focuses on the intimate and the ... More

This chapter explores some of the formal devices elaborated in recent contemporary women’s life writing to convey a sense of time and of being in the world. It focuses on the intimate and the everyday and on the units, flows, categories and organization of time in recent experimental works by Annie Ernaux, Camille Laurens and Chantal Akerman. The chapter is grounded in theory about female-authored self-narrative, returns to gendered ideas of a hierarchy of time and builds upon the problematizing of linear time in what Julia Kristeva famously referred to as ‘women’s time’ (1979). It analyses in particular the functions of repetition, variation and fragmentation as forces that drive and shape the works in question, asking how such repetition might be read as specifically gendered, and examining the impact this might have on the experience of reading. The chapter explores the temporal architecture of three selected works which, I argue, are ‘time rich’ and ‘time sensitive’ and which loop back into each author’s previous life writing experimentation. These are Ernaux’s total life-narrative Les Années (2008), Laurens’s autofictional essay Encore et jamais: variations (2013) and Akerman’s final experiment in life writing, Ma mère rit (2013).Less

Self/representation through the M/other in the Diaries of ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’, Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure

in Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins

This chapter examines the issue of self-representation through the mothers in the diary-form writing of Annie Ernaux, which are Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit, Journal du dehors, and La Vie ... More

This chapter examines the issue of self-representation through the mothers in the diary-form writing of Annie Ernaux, which are Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit, Journal du dehors, and La Vie extérieure. It suggests that her use of the diary form points to her belief in the fundamental contiguity of self and Other, and that all three texts were driven by the desire to reinforce the connection between self and familiar Other. The chapter also contends that the diary in these texts constitutes a means of promoting the self/Other fusion by transforming the typically monologic discourse of diary writing into a form of dialogic exchange.Less

The Return to Origins: La Honte and L'Evénement

in Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins

This chapter examines Annie Ernaux's La Honte and L'Evénement, which represent a culmination of the many ‘Ernausian’ themes and techniques found in her previous works. It suggests that the narrative ... More

This chapter examines Annie Ernaux's La Honte and L'Evénement, which represent a culmination of the many ‘Ernausian’ themes and techniques found in her previous works. It suggests that the narrative structure of Ernaux's texts is typically circular and that all of her concentric narrative circles are firmly rooted in the pivotal period of childhood. The chapter also mentions that Ernaux's narrators repeatedly expose the naturalised inferiority of the marginalised and contends that the social significance of cultural indicators in her writing is dictated by existent cultural hierarchies.Less

Writing the Auto/biographical Legacies of La Place and Une femme

in Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins

This chapter analyses the issue of auto/biographical legacies in Annie Ernaux's La Place and Une femme. It suggests that the instances of metacommentary first used by Ernaux in La Femme gelée became ... More

This chapter analyses the issue of auto/biographical legacies in Annie Ernaux's La Place and Une femme. It suggests that the instances of metacommentary first used by Ernaux in La Femme gelée became more prominent in La Place and Une femme both in their typographical separation from the main narrative and in their explicatory function of the narrator's perception of the role of writing and language generally. The chapter also contends that the auto/biographical and ethnographical elements of these works point to their endemic generic instability.Less

The Early Years: Classifying Sexuality in Les Armoires vides and Ce qu'ils disent ou rien

in Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins

This chapter examines the issue of sexuality in Annie Ernaux's Les Armoires vides and Ce qu'ils disent ou rien. It suggests that the vacillating sense of Denise in Les Armoires vides is aggravated by ... More

This chapter examines the issue of sexuality in Annie Ernaux's Les Armoires vides and Ce qu'ils disent ou rien. It suggests that the vacillating sense of Denise in Les Armoires vides is aggravated by her increasingly cross-cultural locus and uncertainty as to the precise components of her future, while the isolation of Anne in Ce qu'ils disent ou rien foregrounds the class, generational, and gender bias that infuses linguistic exchanges. The chapter argues that both narrators straddle a cross-cultural position and consequently embrace multilingualism.Less

Epilogue: Documents in the Digital Age

Alison James

in The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature: Writing with Facts

This closing reflection reconsiders the book’s argument retrospectively, from the point of view of the current obsession with facts. It offers evidence that a number of contemporary writers (Annie ... More

This closing reflection reconsiders the book’s argument retrospectively, from the point of view of the current obsession with facts. It offers evidence that a number of contemporary writers (Annie Ernaux, François Bon, Emmanuel Carrère) directly repudiate fiction in the 1980s and 1990s and turn to experiments with documentary or factual narration. The writers associated with the Inculte group (Maylis de Kerangal, Emmanuelle Pireyre) privilege documentary investigation without rejecting fiction, while Éric Vuillard, Yannick Haenel, or Laurent Binet mobilize the historical archive in documentary or docufictional works. This proliferation of documentary forms reconnects with and expands the earlier documentary practices studied in this book, while also responding to the omnipresence of data and information in the digital age.Less