Nobel Prize in Literature 2022: Annie Ernaux excavates history and memory

French author Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. (Book cover images via Amazon.in and author photo by 2cordevocali via Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

Once again, Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o hasn’t won the Literature Nobel. On the other hand, they haven’t given it to Haruki Murakami either, so at least there’s that. The chances of Salman Rushdie winning it this year were always slim, given that the Swedish Academy maintains that the criterion is literary excellence and not a personal attack, however brutal and condemnable. It could well be that in years to come, Rushdie will step up to a podium in Stockholm to receive the medal. One can only wait and watch.

The 82-year-old Annie Ernaux, though, is entirely deserving. She’s won the 2022 prize for, in the words of the Academy, “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. From the beginning, her work has directly drawn from her own life – a forerunner, you could say, of what is today called autofiction.

Her 1974 debut work, Les Armoires Vides, translated into English as Cleaned Out, was about an illegal abortion and reckoning with a working class childhood. The others that followed mined her claustrophobic relationships with her family, coming of age in the French village of Yvetot, and then moving away to deal with independence, ardour, heartbreak, broken marriages and the loss of her parents.

The titles of some of her works in English are themselves enough to convey her writing concerns. Among them are Do What They Say or Else, A Woman's Story, A Frozen Woman, A Man's Place, and Simple Passion.

What sets her writing apart from other autobiographical narratives of living and loving, as Madeleine Schwartz pointed out in the New Yorker, is that Ernaux distrusts her memory. “She writes in the first person, and then abruptly switches and speaks about herself from a distance, calling past selves ‘the girl of ’58’ or ‘the girl of S’. At times, it seems as though she were looking at herself in an old photograph or a scene in a movie.”

This means that Ernaux does not claim any sort of authoritative or comprehensive access to the past, however personal it may be. Instead, she excavates, unpacks, and searches for meaning. As she says: “What is the point of writing if not to unearth things?”

The work for which she is perhaps most acclaimed is 2008’s Les Années, translated into English by Alison L. Strayer as The Years. It’s an account of the period from 1940, when she was born, till 2006. An admiring Edmund White notably described it as “a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism”.

The book is a staggering blend of personal memoir and public history, narrated in the collective “we”, and encompassing pop culture artefacts such as songs, radio, TV, and advertising, as well as photos, diary entries and personal notes. The accumulation of events and objects owes something to Georges Perec, whom Ernaux has cited as an influence on her writing. The task of The Years, which she accomplishes with élan, is to demonstrate how “family narrative and social narrative are one and the same”.

Women’s control over their own bodies and identities, following on from de Beauvoir, is another issue that is vitally important to Ernaux. She specifically addresses this in 2000’s slim L’Evénement, translated into English by Tanya Leslie as Happening. The book starts with a present-day visit to an AIDS clinic and circles back to the back-alley abortion she dealt with in her first novel.

Parts of it are graphic, parts ironic, and all of it necessary. As she writes: “I realise this account may exasperate or repel some readers; it may also be branded as distasteful. I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled. There is no such thing as a lesser truth. Moreover, if I failed to go through with this undertaking, I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy.”

Notions of shame, desire, and the construction of identity by shoring up fragments of memory: these, then, are the threads that run through Ernaux’s work. In her narration, she strives for balance between feeling and reporting, as Lauren Elkin has noted, “writing with almost sociological objectivity”.

In a 2020 interview with the Financial Times, Ernaux had said: “I never feel legitimate and at the same time I persevere…Women need more strength to write.” Her impressive body of work, and now the Nobel Prize, are a fitting testament to her perseverance, strength and skill.