Yes, awarding the Nobel Prize in literature to Ernaux, a chronicler of illegal abortion, is a political move. But it's also a victory for literature
not just the memoir as a form but also the very question of memory and identity. “Maybe the true purpose of my life,” she observes in “Happening,” “is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing.”
All these memories, all these experiences, swirl around each other in her imagination. “Trace it all back,” she writes in “Cleaned Out,” “call it all up, fit it all together, an assembly line, one thing after another. Explain why I am shut up here in a crummy dorm room, terrified of dying and of what’s going to happen. Figure it out, get to the bottom of it all between contractions. Find out where the whole mess began.
A similar conundrum motivates “A Woman’s Story,” which unlike “A Man’s Place” unfolds almost entirely in real time. One of the ways Ernaux develops this book is to circle back, more than once, to the opening sentence, using it as a kind of echo that punctuates the narrative. “Tomorrow, it will be three weeks since the funeral,” she writes at one point.
Still, even as the author has been severed, her history — her memory — lingers. What to do about that? In “The Years” , Ernaux addresses the issue head on, seeking out “a language no one knows.” The solution she enacts explodes our preconceptions of voice and person, sliding between the singular and plural, using pronouns such as “we” and “she” while eschewing the memoir’s defining posture: “I.”
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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