"When the unspeakable comes to light, it's political"

"I write to avenge my race." Annie Ernaux did not have to search long to find the sentence that, in its "complete clarity, its succinct, irrefutable brutality" was at the center of her life, her work and therefore also her Nobel Prize speech had to stand, with which she thanked her for the highest literary award on Wednesday afternoon in Stockholm, before she was presented with the Nobel Prize for Literature in a festive ceremony on Saturday.

It was a speech resembling hers, an unexcited self-inquiry 60 years after she made that promise to herself. Avenge your own race? By race Ernaux - and of course the poet Arthur Rimbaud to whom she referred at the time - does not mean the anthropological category, no classification of people by skin color or appearance. For Ernaux, race stands for her social class, for her sex, for her clan. She wanted to write to avenge the conditions of a young, underclass woman in post-war France. But it was also a revenge for the mother, for the grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

"I imagined, somewhat haughtily and naively, that after a long line of landless peasants, laborers, and small shopkeepers despised for their manners, accent, and lack of culture, to write books and become a writer would be enough to repair the social injustice of birth.” As Ernaux said in Stockholm, an “individual victory” is enough to “wipe out centuries of domination and exploitation”.

No, books cannot right wrongs. And yet Ernaux has managed to keep her promise and to make something universal and universal out of quiet literature, introspection, female sexuality, social disadvantage and the insignificant life of a provincial French woman. Because Ernaux feels less honored by her readers than by the Nobel Prize in Literature: her work has been translated into 37 languages ​​and her books in French had sold millions even before the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced. Ernaux is now breaking all records. Your publisher Gallimard just had to reprint 900,000 copies of "A Girl's Remembrance", which was originally published in 2016 under the title "Mémoire d'une fille".

The Stockholm Academy's justification states that Ernaux was honored for her "courage and clinical acuity" with which she revealed the collective constraints of her biography. Ernaux finds another justification for the peculiarity of her mode of expression. In her first three novels, like an inner migrant, she entered a language that was not hers, but that of the “culturally privileged” writers and readers. A narrative perspective of dominance that she left behind when she decided to write not only about herself, but about her own father: "To thwart this view of my father, who for him, I felt clearly, was unbearable, yes would have been a betrayal, from my fourth book I adopted a neutral, objective, flat style that contained no more metaphors and no trace of emotion. The violence," added Ernaux, "was no longer on display, it came from the facts themselves, not from the language. Finding the words that simultaneously contain reality, but also the feelings that reality arouses, should be my constant effort in writing from that point in time and until now.”

Ernaux took stock with exactly the sober honesty that one knows from her books and, despite all modesty, named her literary merit. Her speech was similar to her in that she did not develop steep theories and yet presented in simple terms a clever analysis of cultural production and the subtle differences in writing and reading, as if she wanted to make the work of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu understandable for all.

Between the lines, Ernaux said that at this moment of supreme honor, more than half a century after the oath of vengeance, there is still the poison of doubt, the feeling of inferiority, shame, even "shame on shame". report word. As if the lower-class woman she was didn't deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature, as if the struggle to overcome social complexes and to have to sue for her rights as a woman never stopped. The phrase "I write to avenge my race" is "a kind of key" to her work. But he also helped Ernaux on Wednesday "take her place," "not tremble," "not be blinded" by a glare that the Nobel Prize in Literature sheds on a writer who views her writing as one in "loneliness and doubt." practiced search characterizes.

In Stockholm, 82-year-old Ernaux made a declaration of faith in literature and its liberating power when she said, "Faith became certainty that a book can help transform an individual's life, break the loneliness of things suffered and buried, and... to think differently. When the unspeakable comes to light, that's political.”

As expected, Ernaux did not address the allegations of anti-Semitism against her on Wednesday. She simply said that she belonged to a generation of writers for whom political commitment and participation in social struggles came naturally. Today, due to the fast pace of the world and the speed of the images, it is tempting to “close” and concentrate on art. But in view of the war in Europe, the exploitation of the planet by "greedy economic forces", the consequences of which once again weighed heavily on the socially disadvantaged, silence is not an option for them.

"The light doesn't blind me," says Ernaux, who doesn't see the prize as an individual victory. “It is neither pride nor humility to think that this victory is in some way a collective one. I share that pride with all those who, in their own way, wish for more freedom, more equality, more dignity for all people, no matter what gender, color or culture they are.”

With her work and this honor, Ernaux gave her ancestors, from whom she inherited sufficient "power and fury", a permanent "place in the confusion of voices". As a “class defector”, as she describes herself, she changed literature and turned it into a haven of emancipation. Nevertheless, she wants to leave the verdict on whether she has kept her promise to the millions and millions of readers who are able to read something universally valid in the memories from the French provinces. As if the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature did not have the last word, but rather the lower-class child from Normandy. A critic of the conservative Figaro judged a “speech without feeling and without soul” as if it needed further proof of how relevant Ernaux’s analysis of male dominance is to this day.