The triumph of the literary female ego: Annie Ernaux’s daughters

Thirty years later, in the 1980s, a good reader from Beauvoir, a young teenager Anne Ernaux, the same accreditation medal that the king of Sweden will receive this Saturday The Nobel Prize in Literature 2022 (same distinction as Mauriac, what things are) began writing his books, using himself as the subject of fiction, often placing his own body and passions as literary objects. Then, Mauriac’s old sensibilities that fueled his reasoning came back into play, and the author was favored by his male peers. a little writer – Ah, that concise and direct prose, very little French, that is, very little flowery – and, above all, because of the obscenity of showing what has hitherto not been shown, especially if this exhibition functions as an exhibition. not as an object of personal inquiry and male pleasure. This assessment of Ernaux was not transformed until the 21st century.

write as revenge

Not surprisingly, Ernaux’s acceptance speech on Wednesday, writing intended as revenge. There are reasons. Several open fronts for revenge. It fulfills the old adage that the personal is political, having had to earn respect among university colleagues from the humble and illiterate social class to which he belongs, paving the way for many writers who are now oiling confessional literature. “My Nobel is a sign of justice and hope for all women writers,” the author said.

probably a lot It’s risky to say Ernaux is zero miles on this trend. A writer from France at the turn of the 20th century and still as respected as he is today colettewas also rejected by the ‘intelligentsia’ for daring to construct personal experiences—’The Vagrant’, ‘My learning’, or ‘Pure and impure’—that had little to do with the stereotype of the desired woman of the time. Despite her notoriety, the author of ‘Gigi’ was repeatedly denied entry to the French Academy.

Today, the floodgates of female confessional writing, whether in autobiography, diary or autofiction mode, have overflowed and there are legions of writers who practice it. in France, Christine Angot Y Vanessa Springora, survivors of abuse in their childhood and adolescence described this painful experience as a form of knowledge. The abuse her mother was subjected to in this incident is also a masterpiece. delphine de vigan In his work “Nothing can be against the night”. experiences Deborah LeviYY rachel cusk , two great British writers focus more on the miseries of marriage and in the latter the miseries of motherhood, devoid of all sensuality. And in the United States, we must not forget the wonderful ladies like us. Vivian Gornik anyone Joan Didion.

many names

Ernaux’s path has many followers in Spain and Latin America. Made rosa montero ‘The absurd idea of ​​not seeing you again’ or, lately, ‘The danger of being sane’. Peruvian did this especially Gabriela Wiener Thanks to the recently republished ‘Sexographies’, which made his private life the object of his highly provocative and interesting books, he was able, like Ernaux, to say, “I write to avenge my race”. they did it too cross Aixa, with the famous ‘Change Your Mind’, which describes the awakening of many women to a ‘structural violence’ in which they act without question, as well as Almudena Sanchez He describes his depressive picture in ‘Fármaco’.

There are many more examples. Anna Pacheco (31 years old) in 2029 Vivian Gornik published ‘Listas, guapas, limpias’, a novel in which she did not accept the term autofiction, despite accepting the mood of intergenerational times that reevaluated veteran writers like Joan. Didion or Annie Ernaux. “They are writers who have masterfully refined and aestheticized the creation from an ‘I’. It is a deliberately constructed self with a multitude of ethical and aesthetic decisions. They are, but they are not. And actually, it just can’t be them because then it wouldn’t be interesting.” It might seem easier to write in the first person, but for the Barcelona writer it’s not at all: “Sometimes you finish a book by Annie Ernaux and you’re like, ‘How can this be?! It could have been written by me! Thoughts seem to come naturally! And I think it’s kind of a success.” He argues that the danger is also there: “It’s all too easy to fail to write about your own life.”

search for truth

If there is a narrator who has used autofiction weapons in all his works, it is Chilean. Nana Fernandez (51 years old) has just released ‘Space Invaders’, a new flavor in his personal memoirs. Fernández didn’t read Ernaux until she won the Formentor Award in 2019 shortly after declaring herself an unconditional fan of the author: “I was interested in her thoughts on the problems of feminism, working with memory, writing with material from literature, memory, and the relentless search for a way to do it. I remember quoting Marx from a quote Perec used in ‘Las cosas’: “The tool, the search for form is part of the search for truth.” Also because of the state of reality in writing, its quality as a philosopher’s working stone, but always conditioned to the form of expression. For the Chilean, the French Nobel laureate’s self-editing work is “an excuse to talk about the human, collective experiences we can all see ourselves reflecting on.”

Another writer who travels almost without a mask on the path of autobiographical writing. Martha Sanz (55 years). ‘Clavícula’, for example, is an intimate reflection on the body and pain. The author believes that although this type of writing has been practiced by both men and women, it probably has a more liberating character in this latter case: liberating, especially for women whose voices have been silenced. And this cultural and political, ethical and aesthetic problem deals with the realm of privacy, a specific area of ​​privacy closely related to the body, very closely in literature. The writing of the female self and the writing of the body go hand in hand, expanding the canon, causing a very healthy friction within it and questioning the forms of language.

Nor does Sanz believe that gender-conscious writers should be relegated to the realm of the intimate self: “We can also write epic novels and play with the masks of fiction and creative learning from our female point of view.”

Fortunately, the land to be covered has no boundaries. The challenge, however, is to obtain recognition for this candid writing, for example, a Nobel, for the same reasons that led to its rejection decades ago. Revenge has been taken.