There are beings who are overwhelmd by the reality of others, their way of speaking, of crossing their legs, of lighting a cigarette. They become mired in the presence of others.
After Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, five of her books quickly found their way onto my TBR.
When I first saw the white Fitzcarraldo Editions covers (white for non-fiction, blue for fiction) I was not impressed. White covers are notorious in bookshops for how easily they become marked and scuffed. They pick up colours from other books and they collect dust and smudges on the shelf and whenever handled. But they also have French flaps, one of my favourite book design features. With the passing of time though, I have come to love the look and feel of them.
Annie Ernaux née Annie Thérèse Blanche Duchesne was born on the 1st September 1940 in Lillebonne, France. She grew up in nearby Yvetot, which is where she was still living with her parents at the beginning of A Girl’s Story.
Last year, on the 6th October, Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize 2022 for Literature. The judges stated that their motivation for awarding her the prize was “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory“. They went on to say,
In her writing, Annie Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class. Her path to authorship was long and arduous. Among her novels are ‘A Man’s Place’, ‘A Woman’s Story’ and ‘Years’. Ernaux’s work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring.
Ernaux is the first French woman to ever win the Nobel Prize in Literature and the 17th woman (among 119 Nobel Prize Laureates) to win the Nobel Prize in Literature since the founding of the awards in 1901. Her work has been described as ‘sociological’. ‘autofiction’ and ‘memoir’. She was influenced by the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Pierre Bourdieu.
Although A Girl’s Story is one of Ernaux’s more recent books (first published in French in 2016) I decided to start my Ernaux journey here, at the beginning, with her childhood memories. Or more specifically the summer of 1958 when she was seventeen going on eighteen, working and living away from home for the very first time at a summer camp.
She had just completed her baccalauréat at the convent school where she had been a star pupil. Her home life was safe, protected and cosseted, “her mother has always kept her away from boys, as from Satan in person. The girl has dreamed about them constantly since the age of thirteen but doesn’t know how to talk to them.” As she heads out into the adult world on her own for the very first time, seventeen year old Annie is innocent and ripe for the experience of life.
It was a summer with no distinguishing meteorological features, the summer of de Gaulle’s return, the new franc and the New Republic, of Pelé, champion of world soccer, of Charly Gaul, winner of the Tour de France, and Dalida’s Mon histoire est une histoire d’amour.
A summer as immense as they all are until one is twenty-five, when they shrink into little summers that flit by more and more quickly, their order blurred in memory until all that remains are the ones that cause a sensation, the summers of drought and blazing heat.
The summer of 1958.
This summer haunts the adult, ageing Ernaux.
Almost fifty years later, her journal entries and notes regularly refer to ‘girl of ’58’. But it isn’t until 2003 that she finally sits down to write about what happened to her. She records a ‘stream of words and images’ that aims at ‘purging the interval of forty-five years’, but after fifty pages she stops. It takes another decade and Ernaux’s growing awareness that time is passing quickly, she is getting older and at risk of dying ‘without ever having written about the girl of ’58.‘
What is it about this girl of ’58 that it is so compelling, so disturbing, that it haunts an adult woman her entire life?
Afterwardsness is a psychological term that I came across in my late twenties when I contemplated briefly going back to uni to study psychotherapy. Freud described it as a “mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events“, or more simply, our tendency to reassess our earlier memories in light of later experiences. This is what Ernaux explores so precisely in A Girl’s Story.
Firstly she tries to recapture the events as experienced by her seventeen year old self. “I am not constructing a fictional character but deconstructing the girl I was”.
We feel her awkwardness, her excitement, her desire to belong, to be seen as grown-up, to have experiences. She is determined to experience falling madly in love, first kisses and sex. It’s painful reading. Young Annie is so unaware, so naive and so willing. She crushes on one of the older leaders (he is twenty-two, a gym teacher in a technical college and engaged to be married) until they eventual have a sexual experience, totally unsatisfactory and unloving. But one that Annie turns into a full-on romance in her head.
Her submission is not to him but to an indisputable, universal law, that of a savagery in the male to which she would have had to be subjected, sooner or later. That this law is brutal and dirty is just the way things are.
When he ignores her and begins another relationship with one of the female camp leaders, she pines for his attention but decides to embrace the nightly parties that take place in “someone’s darkened room“. Dancing, drinking, singing, “dares and double-dares“. She has more sex-like experiences with other boys at the camp, quickly gaining a bad reputation. She is convinced she is happy as “she floats in the lightness of being cut loose from her mother’s watchful gaze“.
Older, more mature Annie is not so convinced.
I think I have come as close as possible to the reality of it, which was neither horror nor shame, only an obedience to what was happening, the lack of meaning in the things that happened.
Fifty years later, Ernaux is attempting to integrate this (rather clueless) girl of ’58 with her adult self. To do so she explores all the factors that played into the events of 1958. Class, religion and the politics of the time. She explores the impact of power and masculinity and shame, “a girl’s shame….It is a different kind of shame from that of being the daughter of shop-and-café keepers. It is the shame of having once been proud of being an object of desire“.
The story continues with her studies at the Lycée Jeanne-d’Arc in Rouen and her year in London working as an au pair in 1960, when she decides to “make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday”.
This philosophy is at the heart of Ernaux’s writing. A philosophy that tries to give meaning to everyday experiences that simply happen and unfold in real time. A way to bridge the gulf between what happened and how we remember it with the passing of time.
As a lover of stories about memory, meaning and revisionism, Ernaux’s work was almost designed just for me.
Ernaux was awarded the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work.
Title: A Girl's Story | Mémoire de fille Author: Annie Ernaux Translator: Alison L. Strayer ISBN: 9781913097158 Imprint: Fitzcarraldo Published: 2022 (originally published 2016) Pages: 143 Format: Paperback with flaps Origin: TBR Dates Read: 9th - 14th July 2023
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