By Arup Chakraborty
“I shall avenge my race,” wrote the young author Annie Ernaux in a journal when she was 23. The 82-year-old French author Ernaux has been honoured with this year’s Nobel Prize in literature. Nineteenth century French poet Arthur Rimbaud has highly influenced Ernaux’s thoughts. Her famous quote, “I shall avenge my race,” has originated from Rimbaud who said, “It’s obvious to me I’ve always belonged to an inferior race. I don’t understand rebellion. My race never rose up except to pillage, like wolves round a beast, they haven’t killed.” Well-known sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, too, has a great influence on her.
Ernaux is the sixteenth French author to have received the Nobel Prize in literature, though she is the first French woman to have been crowned with the most coveted literary award in the world. She has succeeded Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah who received this award last year.
French author Simon de Bouvier, the pioneer of feminism, has also influenced Ernaux. After Ernaux’s name was announced for the prize, French President Emmanuel Macron wrote in a tweet: The voice of women’s liberation and of the century’s forgotten ones.
A writer who barely rests
She tells the tale of sensations and of common emotions. In trying to depict the real human conditions, she creates phrases after phrases and writes books after books. Such is the power that Ernaux possesses to continue with this exercise. The author has generously accepted the comments in the course of various interviews “entre la litterature, la sociologie et l’histoire” (In the midst of literature, sociology and history).
From A Few Empty Cupboards published in 1974 to the Memory of a Woman in 2016 or still Regarde les Lumieres, Mon Amour published in 2014, Ernaux has become a litterateur engage (a committed writer), an extreme leftist. She has worked to cross the literary order as she has wished to make the social order tremble. She has written in the same way about the objects considered socially marginal. The author also discards an ornamental vision, for she prefers to go for a lot of trouble to remain lucid. Ernaux is an author who creates beauty in each sentence.
The works of Annie Ernaux, a native of Lillebonne (seine-Maritime), has been intensely attached to her life, which limn her time. The café-epicerie, which her working-class parents had in Yvetot to earn a living, has always found a place in her works. Ernaux, who never gave up struggle and continued with her studies, became a teacher of the French language.
The latest work of Ernaux, Young Man, has been published in France this year. It has been widely read and admired by the critics and the public, but her most important novel is The Years (Les Années). She writes: “All the images will disappear. They will vanish all at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandparents and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.” Annie Ernaux’s writing consists of a universal mourning inside a private haunting.
