VU Experts Help Understand: Collective-Literary Memory of One Woman’s Body

On 6 October, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the French writer Annie Ernaux for her courage and clinical acuity in digging into the roots of memory, alienation and collective constraints.

Ernaux is the most important innovator of autobiography genre in the second half of the 20th century, who turned the genre of autofiction into an artistic tool of social criticism of the highest quality. Her work's main reference points are memory, social class, women's bodies, and changing gender roles in French society.

The important topic of gender

Ernaux started her career as a writer in 1974 with the novel Les Armoires vides (Empty Cabinets), in which a young girl, who has just survived an illegal abortion, reflects on the critical turning point in her life and identity after she leaves the home of her parents, small-town storekeepers, and joins the social milieu of wealthy Parisian students. Several other novels of her youth depict the lives of her parents and the social milieu that shaped them. Therefore, Annie Ernaux entered the field of literature as a writer who subtly, insightfully and critically reveals the relations between social classes in 20th-century France, as well as their differences and tensions. Two of her novels translated into Lithuanian belong to this period – A Frozen Woman and A Man’s Place (Ernaux, A., 1994, A Frozen Woman, translated from French by V. Vitkauskienė, Vilnius, Žaltvykslė).

However, the theme of gender, i.e. social gender relations, forms an important, in my opinion – even the most important, part of Ernaux's work. Her narrators are constantly negotiating and debating with personal and public gender/gender models, rethinking them again and again from the ever-changing perspective of the social gender order. After the publication of her first novel in 1974, the legalisation of abortion in France was the hottest topic of public debate, and in 1975 it was finally legalised. Therefore, the novel only hints at it, not even directly naming it. In contrast, the novel of the year 2000, i.e. L'événement (Happening), describes the same experience in detail, graphically and with "clinical precision". Last year, an excellent film based on this novel directed by Audrey Diwan came out. The same can be said about the first sexual experience and the eating disorder, which Ernaux described succinctly and enigmatically in young people’s novels, and in 2016, with the wave of #Metoo rolling through the world, in detail and chillingly.

Memory-based (anti)diaries

As a representative of the second wave of feminism, Ernaux writes throughout her life in the rich spirit of écriture féminine. Her own body experiences, her own struggle with what is allowed for women's bodies, and what is socially acceptable for women and what is not are the natural material of her work.

A lifelong school teacher of French literature, Ernaux is an avid reader and lover of Marcel Proust – in her own words – she knows Proust by heart. Therefore, it is not surprising that memory is the essential aspect of her work, most impressively revealed in the novel Les Années (The Years), which is currently being translated into Lithuanian. It is a kind of autobiography of an entire generation, a diary of an era – although the only researcher of this writer in Lithuania, Inga Litvinavičienė calls her work anti-diaries – which reflects how people's attitudes towards themselves, towards others, towards themselves through the eyes of others and through all the long years of re-enacting social roles have changed.

Eglė Kačkutė, Associate Professor, Department of French Philology, Vilnius University