La Place Pb

Annie Ernaux, P.M. Wetherill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781136749766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

La Place looks at a daughter's relationship with her father. In a fragmented and retrospective way the narrator describes her feelings of separation and betrayal that arise when education and marriage place her in a social class with different values, language, tastes and behaviour. She explores the ways in which individual experience is related to class and group attitudes and at the same time tells us a great deal about French society in general since the turn of the century. It is a concentrated text, cut through with irony and may be read in different ways. La Place will be an accessible and exciting addition to French studies courses.

INTRODUCTION¹

La Place is a concentrated text which raises a wide variety of problems in a book of barely 50 pages.

The narrator looks at a daughter’s relationship with her father. In a fragmented text which owes much to the workings of memory, she describes the sense of separation and betrayal which arises when education and marriage place her in a social class which has different values, language, tastes and behaviour. She explores historically the ways in which individual experience is related to class and group attitudes.

The book has multiple values. It is cut through with irony and may be read in a variety of ways. It tells of an individual case and the difficulties involved in the telling, but it is not restricted to one person’s experience. It tells us a great deal about French society in general since the turn of the century. But it is not only about French society: there are many familiar echoes which show that it relates to all western societies.

In addition, La Place looks at the problems of writing about such experiences: the kinds of language which are appropriate and which are not, and the effect of ordering material in different ways.

The manner in which Annie Ernaux worked out the meaning of her book is especially interesting. If one follows the different stages of its composition, one realizes how useless are such terms as ‘inspiration’ and ‘genius’. All art is hard work and calculation. Composition involves the conscious attempt to organize thinking about attitudes and events into a coherent whole. Whilst fiction may contain autobiographical material, this soon ceases to be relevant. A book’s meaning comes from the way in which lived experience may be distorted, reworked and combined with impersonal and purely invented elements.

THE WIDER SOCIAL CONTEXT

La Place covers the period from about 1890 to 1970: a time of enormous change all over the western world. Very different social structures were evolving for a variety of interlocking reasons: the accelerated drift from the land to the cities and the rapid dwindling of the servant class; compulsory education and a rising school-leaving age which improved the level of literacy, increasing class mobility and opportunities for self-advancement; universal suffrage combined with the rising influence of the trade unions producing new forms of political power; a decline in religious faith; mechanization, new means of transport and the accelerated growth of technology created a whole new dimension of existence: physical mobility matched social mobility.

These social changes were paralleled by equally massive political events: the 1914–18 war decimated a whole generation and destroyed many traditional values; the Russian Revolution (1917) was for at least twenty years to inspire all those who wished for a radical change to much greater social equality; the Front Populaire of 1936 brought a right to congés payés (a fortnight’s annual holiday with pay) and many other advantages; the Second World War further undermined values, behaviour and class structures.

Such details need to be looked into in greater depth and detail if La Place is to be properly appreciated.² Annie Ernaux’s book makes frequent allusions which French readers will instinctively understand from their own personal background, but which we cannot – for example, 1936, the German invasion in 1940 and the reconstruction of France in 1945.

La Place offers a view of events which is not so much abstract social history as the lived experience of that history. It is limited to one particular part of France, Normandy, not far from the Channel coast, and to one particular class. More precisely still, it is social history based on the family – and especially on the relationship between daughter and father.³

The narrator of La Place concentrates on an account of her father’s life, but emphasizes its typicality. As a result, she mentions many major social changes in France since the turn of the century and the progressive social diversification they have led to (p. 63).

So a basic theme of the novel is that of the general and the particular: general social history as seen through the father’s experience. Thus the industrial activity mentioned is necessarily typical – filatures and petrol refineries (p. 66 and 68) – as are political attitudes: her father votes for Poujade, as did many non-communist artisans in the early 1960s.

However, the narrator is anxious to achieve representativity without loss of personality. This raises a stylistic problem which becomes one of the book’s themes: how detail and overall impression may be given equal emphasis. The narrator, attempting to recreate her father and his world, speaks of the conflict between ‘l’épure [qui] tend à prendre toute la place’ (p. 69) emphasizing his whole class and culture, and the ‘piège de l’individuel’ (p. 69) which over-isolates him. At the same time, ‘tous les signes d’une condition partagée avec d’autres me deviennent indifférents.’ Similarly, once she has left her parents she becomes aware how unreally schematic they have become; she uses the same word, ‘épuré’ to characterize it (p. 95) – as if the alternatives could never really combine.

The world described is to say the least complex. It is full of décalages and tensions. Many things are out of phase. For example, antiquated and highly sophisticated, ‘modern’ behaviour exist side by side. Thus the father is contemporaneous with Proust and Mauriac, although ‘son cadre à lui c’est le Moyen Âge’ (p. 60).

SOCIAL THEMES

Over and above such complexities, the descriptions of social conditions strongly emphasize the time to which they belong, and therefore the fact that the parents’ living conditions are different from those of their children.

A central theme of La Place is that of constant social change. If its most dramatic aspect is the one which leads the narrator to ‘betray’ her family, the process concerns every episode in the book. The father’s experience is equally one of social change, influenced by widely varying phenomena: industrialization, the cinema, yoyos, wine and slang (P. 63).

Change for the narrator’s father and people like him was essentially material and economic: ‘On avait tout ce qu’il faut’ (p. 74 et seq.). The post-war development of Y … (p. 71) is described as something which directly affects their well-being.

Social change is constant. Modernity itself evolves all the time. The final scene, with its indifference and forgetfulness on the narrator’s part, points to new social relationships, new kinds of work and prospects and even new forms of failure. The narrator’s attitude to the dead-end, mechanical job of a former pupil she no longer remembers indicates that she cannot really sympathize with the changes which are affecting people younger than herself. Many details of the narrator’s adolescence show her to be old-fashioned in relation to a teenager in the mid-1980s. People are always very different from their parents. Their sense of social change is different too as is symbolized by their attitude to the past. Betrayal concerns relationships between all generations. The way the narrator’s parents redecorate their house, hiding it under layers of formica, destroying its traditional Norman appearance, demonstrates that social progression for them may be equated with destroying the past (p. 75).

For the daughter, social change is quite different. It is linked to the cult of the past: classical music, great writers, historical monuments and tradition.⁴ Later, she decorates her house with hessian wall covering and antique furniture (pp. 95–6) in a way which shows how much change of class has become for her a change in culture. It is linked with the desire actually to revive the past. The material disappearance of the parents’ house finalizes the cultural break and the idea of change (p. 102). This all points to a second aspect of social change: it creates new social groups and splits up old ones.

La Place shows how social groups slowly become more diversified at Y… and how this creates gaps between people. In the context of the family, this may even be expressed spatially: groups break up because of increased physical mobility. There are also many divisions within classes. Hence: ‘L’épouse d’un entrepreneur voisin a été refoulée’, etc. (p. 55). The narrator lives in increasing geographical separation from her parents and their milieu: she goes to boarding school (not as rare or middle-class in France as in England: many teacher-training colleges are boarding schools; but the daughter’s departure to one of these is nevertheless a break and a new thing for her parents), she spends some time in London, and finally settles in a very different part of France.

The process is not a passive or a neutral one. As Richard Hoggart has shown in The Uses of Literacy (see Bibliography; Annie Ernaux has said that this work greatly impressed her), intense emotions are involved. One of the novel’s themes is the idea of revolt and betrayal. At an early point in the book, we hear of one of the father’s sisters who runs away from home (p. 61) and of the hostility felt by country people towards those who move to the town and work in factories (p. 64).⁵

In exploring the theme of change, La Place continually returns to notions of what is supposedly up to date and what is not. It situates people by reference to the material ways in which their surroundings evolve. Common objects serve as markers of time and place: makes of car, pop stars, clothes, the use of aftershave, corner shops and supermarkets.

As people move in relation to society, and society to people, their relationship with their own basic personality is strained and distorted. The daughter’s breaking with her roots makes her realize that she can no longer say ‘nous’ about her experience and that of her parents (p. 77). She has rejected these things: ‘J’émigre doucement vers le monde petit-bourgeois’. As a result she becomes alienated from herself: ‘C’est le temps où tout ce qui me touche de près m’est étranger’ (p. 86).

In a striking way, her father abdicates his personality for that of his daughter (p. 83): he invests his own arrested ambitions in her. But even this ambition is distorted and divided for he feels ‘la peur OU PEUT-ÊTRE LE DÉSIR’ that she might fail (p. 86). Self-improvement is both a goal and a threat.

More simply, the parents’ own modest success illustrates the breakdown of family structures: they are ‘obligés d’être en froid avec les frères et soeurs’ (p. 66); ‘dans leur dos, ils étaient traités de riches, l’injure’ (p. 68).

Enough has been said so far to show that the author was anxious to give her work a very special bias. One of the book’s original tentative titles was: ‘Eléments pour une ethnologie familiale’.⁶ The documentary intention is clear. In addition, Annie Ernaux is quite adamant that she finally wrote something that was not a novel, but rather a fictionalized study of family relations based on her own experience and centred on the way she reacted to the death of her father.

It is especially her father’s illness and death which transform her. These events together with her success at the highly competitive Capes exam make her aware of what is happening to her, her sense of loss both as an individual and a member of a class: ‘«maintenant, je suis vraiment une bourgeoise»’ (p. 57); ‘«je suis donc bien grande que je fais cela»’ (p. 101).

Here is the motivation to write the book.

CLASS DOMINANCE

La Place is, however, not merely about class change. It is also about traditions and permanence. The middle class maintains its dominance throughout the book. This is clear from the uncompromising self-confidence of the daughter’s middle-class friends and of her fiancé’s family. They make no concessions when they have a stranger in their midst.

Class dominance breeds arrogance. It is suggested that the middle classes lack both sincerity and concern for others (p. 83), very different from the efforts the father makes when the narrator brings friends home (p. 93).

Through the father, working-class vulnerability and isolation in the face of real or supposed bourgeois values are underlined. The parents seem to have no contact with their son-in-law (appropriately tanned, a mark of his physical difference from them (p. 55)) – and inde...