Nobel Prize in Literature

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Shame (1997) by Annie Ernaux, tr. Tanya Leslie

In her 2022 nobel prize lecture, I Will Write to Avenge My People, Annie Ernaux shares her motivation for writing in the particular way that is unique to her, telling us how it is at odds with the way she taught.

I had to break with ‘writing well’ and beautiful sentences – the very kind I taught my students to write – to root out, display and understand the rift running through me.

So it with this understanding, that I picked up Simple Passion (my review here) and now Shame, works of non-fiction that explore how certain pivotal events in her life affected her, by noticing her actions and reactions, how her own behaviour or perception changed.

The Origin of Shame

The book opens with a quote from Paul Auster‘s The Invention of Solitude:

Language is not truth.

It is the way we exist in the world.

The opening line begins with the pivotal event, shortly before her 12th birthday:

My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.

and then describes everything she remembers about that day in a page of detail.

It was 15 June 1952. The first date I remember with unerring accuracy from my childhood. Before that, the days and dates inscribed on the blackboard and in my workbooks seemed just to drift by.

These words were written 45 years later, around 1997, when this book was first published in French, words that she tells the reader were impossible to write about, even in a personal diary, before then.

Silence Esteemed, The Seed of Unworthiness

I considered writing about it to be a forbidden act that would call for punishment. Not being able to write anything else afterwards for instance. (I felt a kind of relief just now when I saw that I could go on writing, that nothing terrible had happened). In fact, now that I have finally committed it to paper, I feel that it is an ordinary incident, far more common among families than I had originally thought. It may be that narrative, any kind of narrative, lends normality to people’s deeds, including the most dramatic ones.

Ernaux looks back at the origin of her experience of shame, awakened to it by certain moments, exploring the change(s) as she is made to feel them, in the many areas of her life within which it dwelt, sometimes just hidden behind a door, always at risk of being discovered by others.

From then on, that Sunday was like a veil that came between me and everything I did. I would play, I would read, I would behave normally but somehow I wasn’t there.

Beginning with that traumatic event, she observes the lingering effect it had on her, the strong presence it maintained, despite the fact that no one ever talked (to her) about it.

She revisits photos and news archives from that day, that time, trying to find something.

Writing an Ethnological Study of Self

While she rejects the idea of traditional therapy, it could be said that she has created her own form of it, by bringing her deepest shame to the page, as if in doing so, she is somehow sending it away, banishing it to readers.

I expect nothing from psychoanalysis or therapy, whose rudimentary conclusions became clear to me a long time ago – a domineering mother, a father whose submissiveness is shattered with a murderous gesture. To state it’s ‘childhood trauma’ or ‘that day the idols of childhood were knocked off their pedestal’ does nothing to explain a scene which could only be conveyed by the expression that came to me at the time: ‘gagner malheur‘, to breathe disaster. Here abstract speech fails to reach me.

Photo Pavel Danilyuk @ Pexels.com

This text she describes as carrying out an ethnological study of herself.

Like Simple Passion, written in short fragments, it is an engaging read that centres around the year 1952, living by the rules and codes of her world, which usually required unquestioning obedience, without any knowledge that there may be others.

The more I retrace this world of the past, the more terrified I am by its coherence and its strength. Yet I am sure I was perfectly happy there and could aspire to nothing better. For its laws were lost in the sweet, pervasive smells of food and wax polish floating upstairs, the distant shouts coming from the playground and the morning silence shattered by the tinkling of a piano – a girl practicing scales with her music teacher.

A brilliant depiction of a shattering of illusion and the origins of one girls perception of unworthiness.

As the book closes, and the year 1952 ends, her attention is caught by a film/book release.

In his novel, Fires on the Plain, published in 1952, the Japanese author Shōhei Ōoka writes: ‘All this may just be an illusion but all the same I cannot question the things I have experienced. Memories too belong in that category’.

Highly Recommended.

Author, Annie Ernaux

Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux (née Duchesne) was born in Lillebonne and grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, where her parents ran a café-grocery store in the spinning mill district.

She was educated at a private Catholic secondary school, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time.

After a brief stint in Finchley, London, cleaning houses all morning and reading from the library all afternoon, she returned to France to study at the University of Rouen. Obtaining a degree in modern literature, she became a school teacher. From 1977 to 2000 she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance.

Her books, in particular A Man’s Place (La Place) and A Woman’s Story (Une femme) have become contemporary classics in France. These books marked a break from the definitive novelistic form, she would continue teaching in order to never depend on commercial success.

One of France’s most respected authors, she has won multiple awards for her books, including the Prix Renaudot (2008) for The Years (Les Années) and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize (2017) for her entire body of work. The English translation of The Years (2019) was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize International and won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (2019).

The main themes threaded through her work over more than four decades are: the body and sexuality; intimate relationships; social inequality and the experience of changing class through education; time and memory; and the overarching question of how to write these life experiences.

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Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux translated by Tanya Leslie

After reading Annie Ernaux’s Nobel Prize Lecture I Will Write to Avenge My People, I decide to read the slim titles Simple Passion (48 pages) and next I will read Shame (86 pages). I have already read A Man’s Place, and eventually I will get to her more lengthy masterpiece The Years.

Simple Passion was the #1 national bestseller in France for over three months when it was first published in 1991, and a celebrated scandal even in France’s liberal society. It was followed up ten years later by a second book Se Perdre (2001) (Getting Lost), which explores the affair through a series of diary notes.

In this book, Annie Ernaux observes herself throughout the life-cycle of an affair, the in-between moments of a conditional relationship, describing how that passion drew her in and ruled her, even when she took herself away from it.

She writes of this encounter with hindsight, as if observing something external to her, like a work of art, looking for some kind of truth or meaning behind the physical and mental experience, now that she has some distance from it. Her interest in writing is not to focus on the man (who could be any man) but on the obsession itself.

A Simple Passion Reveals a More Complex Humanity

The man, referred to as A, is from another country, he is married; the 18 months he is in her life, this ‘simple passion’ is depicted like an illness or a condition, she is able to see how it changes her. She studies it.

I am not giving the account of a liaison, I am not telling a story (half of which escapes me) based on a precise – ‘he came on 11 November’ – or an approximate chronology – ‘weeks went by’. As far as I was concerned, that notion did not enter the relationship. I could experience only absence or presence. I am merely listing the signs of a passion, wavering between ‘one day’ and ‘every day’, as if this inventory could allow me to grasp the reality of my passion.

A Life Suspended, Waiting for a Man

Photo by A.Piacquadio Pexels.com

She observes this condition, though she is virtually powerless to overcome or stop it, it will run its course and she will create an honest, transparent account of it, documenting the range of emotions, behaviours and instinct that run through her.

She observes how this desire becomes the lens through which she sees everything around her, how she spends her time endlessly waiting; waiting for him to call, waiting for him to arrive, waiting for the inevitable end of their association.

This endless wait reduces every other experience, as if they were lived by someone else, while magnifying the space in her mind given to thinking about him, of their time together – amid brief lucid moments of realising the insignificance of him, of the exaggerated importance she has temporarily given him.

I often wondered what these moments of lovemaking meant to him. Probably nothing more than just that, making love. There was no point looking for other reasons. I would only ever be certain of one thing: his desire or lack of desire. The only undeniable truth could be glimpsed by looking at his penis.

Fulfilling Life’s Purpose, Finding Meaning

The passion passes through a cycle from its beginning, middle, near-end and end, passing through excitement, anticipation, acceptance, moving on, overcoming towards finding meaning.

Yet it is that surreal, almost non-existent last visit that gives my passion its true meaning, which is precisely to be meaningless, and to have been for two years the most violent and unaccountable reality ever.

Written in short fragments, paragraphs, it is a hypnotic read. I have never read anything quite like it, an introspective interrogation of the self, she is able to set aside society’s judgments and write in a way that is as intimate as a journal, but in a short succinct way that has her own purpose, to better understand the human condition.

I discovered what people are capable of, in other words, anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myself turned to them. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world.

The author presses forward towards fulfilling that promise made to her 22 year old self, as we learned of in her novel lecture, to interrogate her own actions, her own mind in the life she has created, having ventured far from humble beginnings. In writing to avenge her people, she writes to avenge all.

He had said, ‘You won’t write a book about me.’ But I haven’t written a book about him, neither have I written a book about myself. All I have done is translate into words – words he will probably never read, which are not intended for him – the way in which his existence has affected my life. An offering of a sort, bequeathed to others.