Uday Kumar Varma

Annie Earneaux of France wins the Nobel for Literature this year. Swedish Academy in its announcement of the Prize, highlighted ” the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. Her work stands out as a memoir sublimated and transposed to collective consciousness. Ruthlessly honest and clinically precise, her dissection of the most humiliating, private and scandalous moments of her personal life, including her abortion and a passionate love affair, characterise her unique and exceptional writing. This piece discusses aspects of her unconventional and boldly confessional oeuvre.

The French writer Annie Therese Blanche Erneaux nee Duchesne gets the coveted Nobel for literature for 2022. It’s a culmination of a remarkable journey of life-long creativity, often of exceptionally introspective and astoundingly candid experiences. Her works are autobiographical and poignantly merge personal memory with collective third party memory. The other dominant strain of her work is social inequality.

Making the announcement the Swedish Academy explained, Enreaux wins the Prize for ‘the courage and clinical acuity’ in her largely autobiographical books examining personal memory and social inequality.

The Academy said, Erneaux ‘consistently and from different angles examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class’.

Erneaux is the first French woman to win the Nobel for literature. Between 1901, when the prize was launched and 2022, France have bagged the highest number of Prizes including the very first, given to a French -Sully Prudhomme. French language laureates (16) rank next only to their English (32) counterparts. The last time a French won the prize was in 2014 when Patrick Modiano got it.

Her struggle to retain her working class background while adopting the codes and habits of the French Bourgeoisie reflects strongly in all her works bringing out the inner conflicts and often exposing her disenchantment. She was born in a modest family of grocers in Normandy, Northern France but never was willing to forsake this modest origin even while gaining recognition and popularity.

Merging Personal Memory with Collective Experience

Cited as a fine example of coalescing personal and collective memory, her book “Les Annes” (The Years) is rated as her most ambitious project remarkable for substituting ‘the spontaneous memory of self with the third person of collective memory’. She writes about herself as ‘elle’ (‘she’ in English) The book published in 2008 but translated in English in 2017, got her ‘an international reputation and a raft of followers and literary disciples’, the Academy announcement said of the book.

Her debut novel was however, “les Armoires Vides” that came out in 1974. Since then she has produced a rich crop of books (more than 20), each one distinguished for its utter honesty of conviction and a rare courage of confession. The last one, ‘Getting Lost’ whose English translation was published as late as two days before she won the prize.

Ruthlessly Honest

Among her books, ‘A Woman’s Story, A Man’s Place, Simple Passion, ‘I remain in darkness’ and ‘The Possessions” have earned recognition by either getting prestigious prizes or named for them. Each one of them bringing out the personal experiences of self or persons close to her. ‘Simple Passion’, for example, is an honest unalloyed account of a passionate affair with a Russian diplomat who was married while she was divorced.  

‘Happening’– another outstanding and searing book is about her experiences of having an abortion when it was still illegal in France. The trauma of her experience, so movingly and agonizingly conveyed, was hailed as a ‘clinically restrained narrative’. In their announcement, the Academy said, “It is a ruthlessly honest text, where in parentheses she adds reflections in a vitally lucid voice, addressing herself and the reader in one and the same flow.”  

A Lingering Vulnerability

The recognition of her oeuvre is also a reluctant admission of the continuing vulnerability of women as a gender and a member of the family and society. The impression that affluence, education, awareness and freedom ensures the women an equal status in society is disturbingly challenged in her books. Women are vulnerable and prejudices against them perpetuate irrespective of their economic or social status, notwithstanding their individual merit even if exceptional and unusual. It presents a paradigm that needs deeper examination and analysis. It may be cynical to suggest that such is the scheme of things crafted by nature. But the evidence is far too strong to dismiss this unconventional argument.

Recognition- a Badge

Emmanuel Macron, the French President exultantly called her ‘the voice of freedom of women and of the forgotten’.

But her own reaction to the news of her getting the Nobel was typical Erneaux. She said the honour was ‘immense, ‘a great honour’ and ‘a great responsibility’. And yet she called it a mixed bag. Speaking to the Press at her publisher Gallimard’s office, she said,’ I always said that I did not want to get the Nobel prize, because once you get it, afterwards you always have that badge attached to your name, and I fear that it could mean one no longer evolves once one’s status is made.”

Calling herself ‘an ethnologist of herself’, this outstanding memoirist, brings her experiences of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the the death of close ones, to a sublime literary style, finding few parallels in the contemporary literature.

What a remarkable distillation of experiences and experiments over a life spanning over four score years!