French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century

The Return to the Story

Simon Kemp

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781783164158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

The French novel's "return to the story" in the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is has been widely acknowledged in literary scholarship. But is this assessment accurate? With French Fiction in the Twenty-First Century, Simon Kemp looks at the work of five contemporary writers—Annie Ernaux, Pascal Quignard, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz, and Patrick Modiano—in the context of the current French literary scene, and examines how far they pursue the innovations of their predecessors and just how far they have turned their backs on the era of experiment.

Chapter One

Annie Ernaux and the Narrating of Time

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Since her first publication in 1974, Annie Ernaux (b.1940) has garnered increasing success and critical controversy with each stage of her oeuvre. To date she has published sixteen texts, which divide into four distinct categories. There are the three semi-autobiographical novels with which she began her career, Les Armoires vides (1974), Ce qu’ils disent ou rien (1977) and La Femme gelée (1981), first-person narratives dealing with issues of class and gender as the characters become distanced from their working-class origins through education, and experience oppression in social and domestic spheres. There are then the seven non-fiction texts on which her reputation largely rests, all of which share the ‘flat writing’ which has become her signature style as they explore her own or her parents’ lives in an attempt to reach broader truths of society or psychology which transcend the personal subject matter.1 La Place (1983) and Une femme (1987) are posthumous reconstructions of the lives of her father and mother respectively, territory revisited in La Honte (1997), which explores the rules and discourses which governed her twelve-year-old self in an attempt to understand the effects of her father’s act of violence against her mother. L’Événement (2000) tells of Ernaux’s illegal abortion in 1964, recasting the fictional account from Les Armoires vides as avowed autobiography with explicitly political purpose. Two of her most controversial texts, Passion simple (1991) and L’Occupation (2002), explore the obsessive nature of love and jealousy during and in the aftermath of two love affairs. Les Années (2008), her most recent book, encompasses aspects of all the previous texts as it attempts to use Ernaux’s own biography to tell the story of all those in her generation who share with her a social class, a sex, a milieu, a marital history or a political affiliation. The third category of texts is the diary, of which Ernaux has published four volumes. ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ (1997) and Se perdre (2001) are extracts from her private diary, not originally intended for publication, which deal with her mother’s decline and death in 1983–6 and an affair with a married man in 1988–90, the events of which coincide with the previously published récits, Une femme and Passion simple. Journal du dehors (1993) and La Vie extérieure (2000) are two volumes of a single project, a fragmentary diary of things seen and heard in public spaces or occasionally in the media from 1985 to 1989, intended for publication from its inception. Lastly, Ernaux has published two collaborative volumes. One is an email interview on her work conducted with Frédéric-Yves Jeannet over the course of a year, entitled L’Écriture comme un couteau (2003); the other, L’Usage de la photo (2005), is a series of parallel commentaries by Ernaux and her lover, Marc Marie, on photographs of their discarded clothing, in which they discuss their relationship and Ernaux’s experience of treatment for breast cancer.

Ernaux is an immensely popular writer with the reading public, her books invariably reaching the best-seller lists. Passion simple remained there for eight months; La Place has sold half a million copies, and been translated into sixteen languages.2 For some of these readers, Ernaux’s auto-socio-biographies have a profound emotional importance. Lyn Thomas, in a reader-response analysis of more than three hundred readers’ letters sent to Ernaux, notes the strong sense of identification many of the readers feel with the writer, thanking her for ‘finding the words to express their experience’ or using the texts as ‘“turning points” in their own life-histories’.3

Critical reception of Ernaux’s work has been more mixed. Isabelle Charpentier notes that her most controversial work, Passion simple, divided critics along gender lines, with female critics saluting Ernaux’s courage, and male critics attacking the text as banal or obscene, while revising downward the esteem granted to the writer since the Renaudot-winning Une femme in 1987.4 Charpentier also comments on the ad hominem nature of the most vituperative attacks on Ernaux, something the writer herself claims she has reluctantly become accustomed to: ‘a type of criticism – which cannot be called polemical, as it is so lacking in ideas and arguments which brings up the writer’s body, her lifestyle, her social origins and the fact she is a woman to nullify her book’.5

The brevity of most of Ernaux’s texts, their tendency to revisit earlier material and their frank discussion of both sexual activity and emotional vulnerability, have all been used against her by newspaper critics. She incurs the risk of literary marginalization by centring her work on her working-class origins and female identity, as well as through her dialogue with (but never adoption of) the discourses of romance and pornography. She also dispossesses critics of their prerogative by including her own critical commentary within the text, a commentary which often dictates how the text is to be interpreted (‘These pages are in no way to be read as an objective report on the “long stay” in a nursing home, even less as a denunciation’), or denies the right of readers to judge her by literary criteria at all, as with her declarations in Une femme to remain ‘beneath literature’, and to be producing ‘something between literature, sociology and history’.6 Her unadorned style can also seem a challenge to aesthetic judgements. Warren Motte suggests that such minimalism is ‘antagonistically in opposition’ to conventional art, creating a kind of ‘antiliterature’.7

For a long time Ernaux’s fortunes with academic criticism were also marked by a split: this time between strong interest in anglo-phone criticism, particularly British and American feminist criticism, and indifference in French academia. Fabrice Thumerel comments in his introduction to the proceedings of a 2002 conference on Ernaux that francophone publications on her work have increased ‘exponentially’ in recent years, particularly with the increasing prominence of studies into autobiography.8 In secondary education too, Ernaux has made an impression, with two of her texts reissued by Gallimard in a commented edition for lycée students.9 The negative assessments of the literary press are largely absent from the work of academic critics (for whom value judgements on the text are often a less central concern), but not entirely so. Chloë Taylor Merleau takes Ernaux’s generalizing to task for imposing her personal feelings as universal female truths; Siobhán McIlvanney accuses her of setting up a ‘regressive developmental paradigm’ through her self-definition as Other, fixing her identity through the social structures she decries.10

Narrative form in Ernaux is, according to the author, determined by the subject matter of the text rather than being an area of independent concern:

It’s always what I have to say which determines the way to say it, which deter-mines the writing, and the structure of the text as well… I couldn’t really claim that I’m trying to renew narrative form; rather I try to find the form that suits what I see vaguely before me – what I have to write – and this form is never given in advance.11

The sociological nature of her projects often requires a complicated structure. In the autobiographical récits, retrospective narration of events is interspersed with other recalled or researched voices from the past. At the same time, Ernaux’s ‘existentialist’ conviction that her writing should not be an end in itself, but rather a means to effect change in society, tends towards extreme self-consciousness, whereby the narrative is constantly interrupted by the writer’s own reflections on her text, questioning its meaning, purpose and possible reception, or broadening its scope from the personal to wider issues of class and gender.12 In several cases, the levels of polyphony and commentary are such that classifying the texts as narratives at all becomes doubtful. The interruptions become fragmentation, temporal progression is replaced by synchronic meditations. Ernaux herself remarks on this: Passion simple, La Honte and Journal du dehors all contain denials that they are narratives, for different reasons which we will encounter later.

Ernaux situates her writing very much within a heritage of twentieth-century French literature, with numerous references to Proust, Beauvoir and Camus in her texts.13 Her attitude to the post-war experimenters is ambivalent. Her early, unpublished work, Du soleil à cinq heures, written in 1962, bore the clear imprint of the literary zeitgeist: ‘I had a solipsistic, antisocial, ...