Starting from oneself to talk about the world. Drawing on the facts that make us up to explore the humanity to which we relate. And make writing a gesture consubstantial with life, without which “Things did not go to completion”, as she writes in the epigraph of her last text. Through her work on style, structure, tonality, Annie Ernaux has managed to solve a problem that resembles squaring the circle: talking about yourself without narcissism, reviving your past without complacency, and upsetting readers with economic details, bodily, sociological which carry the smell of the past.
« There is no lower truth »believes Annie Ernaux, which has often led her to put herself in danger, and to consciously expose herself to scandal – particularly in The Eventwhere she told, starting from her life, what could be a clandestine abortion in the 1960s. The placewhich talks about his father, social shame and language separation, girl memory, Years…
The texts of Annie Ernaux form a literary genre on their own, on which many useless labels have been placed. As on his last short, dense and beautiful novel, The young man, about two lovers separated by thirty years. He is a student, she is a celebrated novelist, he would like a child from her, she knows that they have no future, but these truths do not prevent their love: they are part of it. And they are part of a time which is, for him, that of erotic discovery and exploration, for her, that of a repetition of youth which also takes the form of a reminder of death. Here again, without taking the traditional paths of amorous discourse, Annie Ernaux touches us deeply.
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Regularly cited on the Nobel lists, Annie Ernaux does not like sums or mausoleum compilations that seem to close a work during the author’s lifetime. To celebrate her, the Cahiers de L’Herne have therefore prepared a cheerfully open issue, rich in unpublished texts (excerpts from her diary, letters, interviews), in which numerous writers intervene. We find above all the intelligence of the author, and the extreme singularity of her writing, always turned towards the universal. A really inclusive writing, in a way, in a world that is not at all.
« If I don’t write them, things haven’t come to an end, they have only been lived », can we read in The young man, your latest novel. For you, something is fully experienced only when it is written?
Oh yes ! When I’m not writing, I feel like things aren’t really real and they’re going to fade away. There is a kind of imperative. Obviously, not all realities are affected by the same urgency or the same necessity, but those that persist, as if they were asking to be written down, are. Sometimes it’s extremely large and complex things, like what I’ve undertaken with Years ; other times it will result in short texts like The place.
Why did you decide to tell the story of Young man only now ?
Simply because before it was not finished [rires]. It was written for the most part from 1998 to 2000. I did not see the need to continue this text and so I stopped in 2000. Obviously, it was not written and took the form of disparate pages, but I knew what intention I had at the start. It was shortly before confinement, when I started to classify my writings, that I was seized: it needed to be completed! Having interrupted another text I was writing, I wanted to finish this one. At the same time, I reviewed unpublished texts for the Notebooks of the Herne. Basically, I wouldn’t have had the desire to finish it if there hadn’t been all this work around the Notebooks.
In easy passion, you write about the lover: “He did not choose to appear in this book but only in my existence. « Don’t you do the same in The young man ?
Absolutely. I don’t want us to start tracking [rires]. I really wanted a broad anonymity even if the places remain indicated. Rouen holds an important part.
We have the impression that this book draws a loop: you find the places you have known through the eyes of your lover, which offers a double look.
All of this collides. I studied in Rouen for six years, until 1964. This youth that infuses me gives me the feeling of living twice. And the second time is never like the first…
You even speak of “fiction” as if you were rewriting, through gestures, something you have already written…
It’s the whole idea of fiction or even theater. It’s about playing the role of the girl I used to be.
The role of the scandalous girl that you are obviously very happy to find!
[Rires] Yes ! She has always been there.
This time, you say you are in the role of the bourgeois…
Yes, because there is this difference in age and social status, this » poverty « young man who is attractive: I want to be the one who can give a lot of things. Everyone knows that to give is to take. The economic side counts a lot and I even wanted to accentuate it by listing everything I did to, not attach it, but restore order.
Often, when we talk about love, we forget the economic side. You remember that economy and domination are part of the love relationship.
It’s an aspect of dominance that is due to my age, because I didn’t have any money either. [rires]. This domination makes his life easier but I also consider the advantages. When he’s not working, he gives me his time: I pay him for that.
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You say, moreover, with humor, that it is a good…