Abstract
The documents added to the new edition of Ernaux's Retour à Yvetot (2013, 2022), written during her student years, represent the process and affects of class transition, without the benefits of hindsight, experience, and the readings in sociology, particularly of Bourdieu, that inform her literary texts. I analyse them here both in relation to Ernaux's published works, particularly La Honte and Mémoire de fille and to the letters I wrote at a similar period and phase of my life, as a first-generation student at St Hugh's College, Oxford in the early 70s. At the time, like Annie Duchesne, 1 I had no political or sociological understanding of my experience; reading Ernaux 20 years later in the early 90s was a literary epiphany, illuminating my trajectory from a working-class culture of origin to a middle-class life and career. My engagement with Ernaux over 30 years has also involved a continuous correspondence with the writer, which I draw on here, illustrating the blurred boundaries between intimacy and research discussed by Fraser and Puwar (2008). This mise en scène of my reading self is placed within the context of the wider communities of class migrant readers of Ernaux: the lay readers studied by myself and Isabelle Charpentier, Ernaux specialists in academe, and the younger writers discussed by Aurélie Adler in this special issue.
Introduction
My title is inspired by that of one of Annie Ernaux's twenty-first century books, Retour à Yvetot (2022), which will also be a major focus of my analysis in this article. The book is based on a talk Ernaux gave in her home town in Normandy in 2012, on the occasion of her first return there as a writer after 40 years as a published author. It is a return that took some courage: Yvetot being, as she explains, ‘la seule ville au monde où je ne pouvais pas aller’, as if such a return might break the spell of the indelible link between her memory of the place and her writing (Ernaux, 2022: 14). Ernaux published a new expanded edition of Retour à Yvetot in 2022, adding a number of documents from her personal archives: some of the letters she wrote to her friend Marie-Claude between 1957 and 1962, as well as a diary extract from 1963 and even a piece of school homework from 1953. In these documents, not originally intended for publication, and written long before Annie Ernaux was a published, and indeed celebrated author, we can observe the signs and symptoms of the process of changing class through education. They are of course unlike Ernaux's literary works, where this process is represented with the benefits of hindsight, of having read sociological works on class, particularly Bourdieu, and of all the clearly extraordinary literary skill and talent at her disposal; they therefore offer the possibility of casting new light on Ernaux's experience and trajectory as a class migrant, and on how the raw expression of that experience is transformed later in her literary works.
As my title suggests, my own return to St Hugh's College, at the University of Oxford (where I studied as an undergraduate from 1971 to 1975) for the conference Annie Ernaux: Writing, Politics, in June 2023, is reminiscent of a trajectory that has similarities in class terms with that of Ernaux. In returning to Oxford, I was reconnecting, not with the place of origin, the equivalent of Yvetot, but with the place of transition and the period of my life when, like Annie Duchesne in these recently published letters, I was studying not just French literature, but middle-class mores and codes. My analysis of documents published in Retour à Yvetot in relation to the themes of Ernaux's later literary writing allows me to delve into my own return through the letters I wrote at this period as a student at St Hugh's College. Having immersed myself in Ernaux's writing for around 30 years, becoming a specialist on the writer, how might I approach an understanding of the experience of that earlier self, as a working-class white girl arriving at Oxford aged just 18, in 1971? How has reading Ernaux changed my perspective on that time, generating perhaps a more political understanding of it?
Intimate readings
In weaving these questions into my discussion of Retour à Yvetot and other works by Ernaux, I am resuming the ‘personal criticism’ I attempted in the final chapter of my two books on Ernaux (Thomas, 1999 and 2005); in this enterprise I was, and am, inspired by the work of Nancy K. Miller, and her challenge to ‘blow the cover of the impersonal as masquerade of self-effacement’ (Miller, 1991: 24). Since from La Place (1983) onwards Ernaux herself has had the courage to write in the first person, 2 simultaneously declaring an ‘autobiographical pact’ (Lejeune, 1975), her writing seems to invite readers to tell their own story, as if the first person contains an implied question, ‘and you ?’: ‘Plus que tout autre écrit, un texte autobiographique implique le lecteur et l’oblige à se situer par rapport à ce qui est dit et à – pour schématiser – répondre « moi aussi » ou « moi jamais »’ (Ernaux, 1994: 27). Here I take up this invitation again, breaking the impersonal codes of academic writing. My research on Ernaux has encompassed not only critical analysis of Ernaux's texts, but also their reception, by academics, journalists and readers; it seems logical that my own relationship to Ernaux's writing should became part of this analysis, particularly since my decision to teach and write about Ernaux's texts in the 1990s was not neutral, but the result of deep resonances with my own life, and of their relevance to my largely working-class and ethnically diverse students at London Metropolitan University. Subjects that hitherto would not have been considered worthy of publication in a work of literature – scenes in supermarkets, trains, the metro, horoscopes, popular songs and magazines – have gained validity through Ernaux's writing, despite the persistent attempts of some critics to devalue her work on grounds of the inclusion of such material (Thomas, 1999: 144–155; Charpentier 1994). Ernaux's work thus demonstrates that everyday experience is worthy of literary expression, and it seemed to me, when beginning to write about Ernaux in the late 90s, that literary criticism could in this case also benefit from engagement with the critic's lived experience.
There is, however, nothing unusual in my response to Ernaux's work when the wider community of her lay readers is considered. My own study of readers’ letters from a cultural studies perspective, and Isabelle Charpentier's sociologically grounded analyses demonstrate that many readers respond to Ernaux's ‘invitation’ and are inspired to explore hitherto silenced aspects of their experience, as well as the social context and formation of that experience. In their letters, many readers recount scenes and stories from their own lives: ‘Le bonheur, tout d’abord de voir ressurgir du plus profond de mon enfance l’univers bas-normand de mes grands-parents. De les retrouver là, posés sur votre papier, sur la blancheur d’une édition « Folio »’ (Thomas, 2005: 207). The thrill described here, of finding the world of their humble grand-parents in a Folio edition, illustrates precisely the process of validation described above: Ernaux brings not only her own parents and milieu into literature, but the families and experience of her class migrant readers, resulting in a feeling of emotional release and in some cases in deeper social and political understanding. Similarly, Charpentier argues that for class migrants Ernaux's writing is particularly poignant and pertinent, given the cultural and social invisibility of their experience: Dans la mesure où l’exploration littéraire des blessures sociales à laquelle se livre Annie Ernaux rend publics des implicites sociaux, des situations et des sentiments éprouvés mais non dits, parfois même refoulés, la lecture des récits est parfois très clairement présentée comme vecteur d’auto-socio-analyse. Dans la mesure où il crée des résonances et des congruences révélant des solidarités de classe, l’effet cathartique qui en résulte […] est alors considéré comme remplaçant avantageusement une quête purement psychanalytique. (Charpentier, 2009: 24)
Like others also, I have had the privilege of dialogue and personal relationship with Annie Ernaux over a period of almost 30 years: this decades long conversation has also strengthened my resolve to write critically in the first person, and I resume that stance here in the light of that communication. In their introduction to a journal issue on intimacy in research Nirmal Puwar and Mariam Fraser express the aim to explore ‘how sensory, emotional and affective relations are central to the ways in which researchers engage with, produce, understand and translate what becomes “research”’ (Fraser and Puwar, 2008: 2). Nothing could be more apposite for my endeavour in this piece, resulting from a relationship between reader and writer, researcher and researched, which has long since outgrown those categories. It is a relationship which developed in part as a result of my first attempts at personal criticism: on our first meeting in 1997 I gave Annie Ernaux the draft of what would become the final chapter of my book. Later that year she wrote to me, confirming that my approach had resonated with her, echoing, in a modest way, her own literary project: Un chapitre est particulièrement beau, tout empreint de lucidité et de dignité, brisant le non-dit et l’hypocrisie du discours universitaire impersonnel : celui où vous exposez et expliquez les raisons de votre choix. Je dis « beau » parce que vous dépassez là les frontières établies, rassurantes, entre la critique et l’œuvre étudiée. Vous mettez au jour avec tranquillité, fermeté, le lien de classe qui unit votre texte et le mien : c’est un acte politique.
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Similarly in academic circles, Ernaux has devoted ‘scholar-fans’ (Hills, 2002), for whom, as in my case, reading Ernaux has been not just an academic project but an illumination of life experience.
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Christian Baudelot, for example, defines himself as ‘héritier’ rather than class migrant, but nonetheless is deeply affected by reading Ernaux: Ce livre (La Place) a énormément compté pour moi. […]. J’y ai aussi mieux compris – mieux senti, mieux ressenti plutôt – ce que pouvait représenter une violence symbolique en actes pour ceux qui la subissaient. Cette compréhension, plus affective que conceptuelle, n’allait pas non plus sans douleur ni culpabilité, puisqu’elle touchait directement la part d’héritier qui me définissait. (Baudelot, 2004 : 166)
Returns
Returning to her past selves, to past experiences and significant others is clearly at the heart of Ernaux's writing, but her writing process also sometimes involves physically returning to the places of her past, particularly those associated with trauma. The closing pages of L'Événement (2000) recount her return to the passage Cardinet in Paris, the back street where she underwent an illegal abortion in 1964. The return is described in detail, without commentary or emotion. The last line: ‘je me suis dit que j’étais revenue passage Cardinet en croyant qu’il allait m’arriver quelque chose’ (Ernaux 2000, republished 2011: 520–21) suggests that she had expected some kind of revelation and that none had occurred, the past remaining elusive, only attainable through the effort of writing. In Mémoire de fille (2016), a much earlier return is described: just 4 years after her traumatic sexual initiation and its humiliating sequel in the colonie de vacances at Sées, Annie Duchesne stopped there en route to Spain. Ernaux reflects on her younger self's motivation in making this visit: in this case, she was not expecting a Proustian revelation from the grey walls of the seventeenth-century building that had housed the colonie, but on the contrary wanted to manifest her new, reformed self in this place, to demonstrate that the lost girl of 1958 had been replaced by a brilliant literature student, thus avenging, not just her classed, but her gendered shame and humiliation. In the next paragraph, she surmises that there is perhaps an element of pilgrimage in this return: Une sorte de préalable nécessaire, bénéfique à l’écriture, de geste propitiatoire – le premier d’une série qui me fera plus tard retourner dans divers endroits – ou de prière, comme si le lieu pouvait être un obscur intercesseur entre la réalité passée et l’écriture. (Ernaux 2016: 149)
Clearly, my returns to Oxford over the years have been less fruitful than Ernaux's to Yvetot, Sées, or Rouen, but they are nonetheless also motivated by a desire to reconnect with the lost past, the lost girl of 1971, in itself a highly Ernausian project. And in my return to Oxford, perhaps there is also something of the return to Sées: ‘Au fond je revenais non pas pour que les lieux de 58 me « disent quelque chose » mais pour que, moi, je dise aux murs gris de la bâtisse du XVIIe siècle, à la petite fenêtre de ma chambre en haut de la façade, sous le toit, que je n’avais plus rien à voir avec la fille de 58’ (Ernaux, 2016: 149). Perhaps I also want to say to the walls of St Hugh's, red brick rather than grey, that I did something with my life, despite its not entirely promising beginnings. But first the girl of 1970–71 must make a brief appearance, as I weave the mode of autobiographical writing that I have pursued elsewhere
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into this article:
They ask me - has anyone in your family studied at Oxford or Cambridge?
I am nonplussed by this question, since no-one in my family has been to University, let alone Oxbridge, and my parents left school at 14. I answer in the negative. In the evening, kind St Hugh's students look after us interviewees. They take us down to Brasenose College for coffee. When I see Radcliffe Square in the moonlight I am overwhelmed by the beauty. Could I really come here? Could this be real? The conversation in Brasenose over cups of Nescafé does nothing to dispel this feeling of being transported to another, magical world. I can’t think of anything to say, but I listen, spellbound.
Later that month I wait anxiously for the result of my interview. No news. My teachers ask me if I would be willing to apply again next year (I am 17, in my A level year). I say no. I can’t bear the thought of staying behind in Wolverhampton while my friends go off to University. Then, suddenly, a telegram! ‘Vacancy offered you. Please reply’. I am ecstatic, and I remain so for the rest of that month. I take a holiday job delivering the Christmas post, and float around the local streets with my postbag, in a rosy dream of bliss, still scarcely able to believe that I am going to Oxford. I am, to use Bourdieu's term, ‘miraculée’, and this is exactly how it feels, touched by grace, saved by a miracle.
In 1972, Juliet Nicholson, the grand-daughter of Vita Sackville-West received a similar telegram, on the day of her debutante party, for which a special pudding ‘Bombe Juliette’ had been created by the chef at the Dorchester hotel. She writes: ‘I put the telegram in my pocket and went to the party’. Three days later she phoned her father ‘Oh and by the way I got into Oxford, but I’m not going’ (Nicholson, 2015: 254–255). The British class system is encapsulated in these two responses to Oxford. Juliet Nicholson's nonchalant ‘I’m not going’ (even though in the end her parents prevail and she does go) is built on centuries of privilege. Oxford is one of a range of possibilities before her, and it is her due, she is, again in Bourdieu's terminology, and in reality, une héritière, an heiress (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964). She can take it or leave it. I, on the other hand, am astounded to have this chance, I cannot believe my luck, and am haunted by the sense that at some point my tutors and the University must ‘find me out’ and return me to my town and class of origin.
Class migrant sensibilities and the divided habitus
Similar insecurities haunt the young Annie Duchesne. In Mémoire de fille, Annie Ernaux writes about her arrival at the lycée Jeanne d’Arc in Rouen in 1958, where she is to prepare the baccalauréat in philosophy. At her previous, private Catholic school in Yvetot her consistently good marks had – to some extent – compensated for the feelings of inferiority and shame of her parents and their home. At the Rouen lycée, however, she feels much less secure: ‘Elle se sent immergée dans une atmosphère de supériorité impalpable qui l’intimide, supériorité que, tout en l’acceptant comme naturelle, elle mettra vite en relation avec la profession des parents’ (Ernaux, 2016: 86). The academic work is more challenging, and her confidence wavers: the subject of the first philosophy essay throws her into a state of anguish, and the English lessons terrify her. She does not know the codes, has never heard of ‘Sciences Po’ or ‘hypokhâgne’. In February 1959, instead of the literature degree that she had previously aspired to, Annie Duchesne applies for a place at the École Normale d’Institutrices; primary school teaching, as she explains, being a more suitable profession for the gifted children of agricultural and factory workers, and small café owners: ‘les enfants doués des paysans, des ouvriers et des bistrotiers’ (Ernaux, 2016: 106).
Somehow, with the help of a very bad report on her teaching practice and her friend, R., she leaves teacher training after one term. After working in London as an au pair, the following Autumn she returns to Rouen to study literature. She is back on track, has even begun writing her first novel. Nonetheless, the sense of insecurity lingers, and we find a precise correlation between these anxieties as described in Mémoire de fille, and the letters of the period. In a letter of June 1962 to her friend Marie-Claude Annie Duchesne expresses anxiety about the results of recent exams: ‘Je suis assez drôlette actuellement, c’est un grand vide qui s’est abattu sur moi, je n’ai rien à faire et j’attends les résultats, alors que j’ai raté, me semble-t-il, à peu près toutes les épreuves’ (Ernaux, 2022: 71). And at the end of the letter, she repeats that she is sure to fail everything: ‘Horreur et damnation’ (Ernaux, 2022:72).
Anxiety and insecurity result from the sense of belonging to two incompatible worlds ‘le cul entre deux chaises’ as Ernaux's heroine Denise remarks memorably in Les Armoires vides (Ernaux, 1974: 181). This is expressed in more technical language, by Bourdieu's concept of the habitus clivé, which he applies to his own trajectory in the earlier version of Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (2001), published as the last chapter of Science de la science et réflexivité: Je voudrais en venir rapidement à ce qui me paraît aujourd’hui dans l’état de mon effort de réflexivité, comme l’essentiel, la coïncidence contradictoire de l’élection dans l’aristocratie scolaire et l’origine populaire et provinciale (j’aurais envie de dire particulièrement provinciale) a été au principe de la constitution d’un habitus clivé, générateur de toutes sortes de contradictions et de tensions. (Bourdieu, 2001: 214)
We find both of these extremes in Ernaux's first novel, where her heroine Denise gives full expression to disillusionment with the ‘armoires vides’ of educated culture, the rage at the humiliations which the school inflicts on her, and her delight in her intellectual superiority over her classmates: ‘Vous me faites chier, baisées les pétasses. D’autres dictées, d’autre soustractions commencent, je frémis, il ne faut pas qu’elles reprennent le dessus! Qu’elles se rapprochent sournoisement. Pour conserver ma supériorité, ma vengeance, je pénétrais dans le jeu léger de l’école’ (Ernaux, 1974: 71–2). In these lines, we might note the contrast between the violent and crude language of her rebellious narrator, and the more distanced and analytical tone of the last sentence, where the reference to the game of the education system suggests Bourdieu's influence.
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In the later version of Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, Bourdieu delves further into this phenomenon in his own experience – his troubled and at times violent behaviour at school, and in the final pages, his extreme distress on the occasion of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France: […] le sentiment d’être parfaitement indigne, de n’avoir rien à dire qui mérite d’être dit devant ce tribunal, sans doute le seul dont je reconnaisse le verdict, se double d’un sentiment de culpabilité par rapport à mon père qui vient de mourir d’une mort particulièrement tragique, comme un pauvre diable […]. Bien que je sache qu’il aurait été très fier et très heureux, je fais un lien magique entre sa mort et ce succès ainsi constitué en transgression-trahison. (Bourdieu, 2004: 137–8)
In La Honte, Ernaux systematically explores the experience of classed shame and the searing memory it leaves behind. She constructs three key scenes where her 11-year-old self fell from grace into shame: the opening act of violence by the father that seems to forever separate the family from normality, her return from a school trip, and a meal at a restaurant during her pilgrimage to Lourdes with her father in the same year. Nancy K. Miller (1999) has argued that the most poignant scene of shame in La Honte is the moment when Annie returns home after a school trip, and her mother comes to the door dishevelled and sleepy, wearing a stained and crumpled nightdress Mlle L. et les élèves, deux ou trois, se sont arrêtées de parler. Ma mère a bredouillé un bonsoir auquel personne n’a répondu. Je me suis engouffrée dans l’épicerie pour faire cesser la scène. Je venais de voir pour la première fois ma mère avec le regard de l’école privée. Dans mon souvenir, cette scène, qui n’a aucune commune mesure avec celle où mon père a voulu tuer ma mère, m’en paraît le prolongement. Comme si à travers l’exposition du corps sans gaine, relâché, et de la chemise douteuse de ma mère, c’est notre vraie nature et notre façon de vivre qui étaient révélées. (Ernaux, 1997, republished 2011:110)
Similarly, Loraine Day (2007) considers that this scene adds a new and still more disturbing dimension to the scene of the opening pages in that, unlike that secret moment of domestic violence, it exposes the child and the family to the public gaze.
Later in the narrative, it is Ernaux's father who shares her shame, in the third scene, which takes place during the return from Lourdes, in a restaurant in Tours. Annie's father was humiliated by bad service from the waiter: Plusieurs semaines après, il manifestait encore une hargne profonde vis-à-vis de ce dîner, avec la « patate à cochons ». Façon de dire sans dire – c’est peut-être là que j’ai commencé d’apprendre à le déchiffrer – toute l’offense subie, avoir été traité avec mépris parce que nous ne faisions pas partie de la clientèle chic « à la carte. » (Ernaux, 1997, republished 2011: 263)
There is no equivalent of these violent scenes of shame during my school days, though my primary school considered me ‘slow to grasp new ideas’, and I carried a lingering sense of failure during those years. At the Comprehensive I attended later, my achievements and experience improved, and the majority of pupils were from similar backgrounds to mine. At St Hugh's College I quickly made friends, mostly with grammar school girls, and was to some extent protected both by the friendly atmosphere of the women's college, my own naiveté, and perhaps whiteness: a white girl joining a predominantly white female community. I nonetheless had some vague awareness of my class difference. In May 1972 I wrote to my parents, forgetting that they may not be au fait with the Oxford slang – ‘tute’ for tutorial – and thus demonstrating that I had already moved into another world: My tute partner, G. and I are getting on well, surprisingly enough, in spite of the enormous difference in background (her parents live in the British Embassy in X, and she was educated in 13 different schools ranging from a madly expensive and academically outstanding girls’ school in England to Le couvent des Oiseaux in Vietnam!). We are about at the same standard workwise and we bluff our way through our tutorials quite well together.
As these instances suggest, both in my own life, and in Ernaux's writing, becoming middle class through education is not a smooth or simple process, but involves conflicting emotions, and considerable effort, all of which Ernaux's class migrant readers have recognised and identified with. In my book on Ernaux, published in English in 1999, I introduced psychoanalyst Joan Rivière's concept of femininity as compensatory masquerade, developed in the 1920s, and later espoused by feminist film theorists such as Mary Ann Doane (Rivière, 1929; Doane, 1982). In Ernaux's case, and in mine, the masquerade is not just of femininity, but also of class. In Ernaux's letters to her friend Marie-Claude, we can see this work of constructing a middle-class persona taking place. A passage on the novels of Françoise Sagan, perhaps less obviously part of the canon of French literature, indicates the transitional nature of this phase, as well as the need to discover a woman writer. It also illustrates how her friend, who has given her the Sagan novel, is opening a door into middle-class culture: ‘Je te remercie de tout mon cœur, de tout mon esprit pour le livre que tu m’as payé. J’aurais aimé que tu le dédicaces…Non tu ne peux t’imaginer combien j’étais heureuse; pour moi Dans un mois dans un an a une double valeur, valeur littéraire et surtout c’est un gage d’amitié’. And later: ‘Quelle veine tu as de pouvoir lire beaucoup’ (Ernaux, 2022: 64). In the talk that she gave at Yvetot Ernaux remembered being dazzled by the library of her friend's father: ‘Je n’imaginais pas qu’on puisse avoir une bibliothèque chez soi. Avoir autant de livres me semblait un privilège inouï’. The letters are peppered with references to high culture, including quotations from literary works by Pascal, Voltaire, Vigny, and a lengthy discussion of Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad, in which she compares the ambiance of the film to Verlaine's ‘Colloque sentimental’ and quotes the poem: ‘Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé, deux spectres ont tout à l’heure passé’ (Ernaux, 2022: 70). Similarly, in my letters to my first-year boyfriend, there are quotations from Flaubert, Shakespeare, and Mörike, which of course I omit from my letters to my parents, where on the contrary I mention going to see comedian and mimic Joyce Grenfell, and finding it ‘really funny, and a great relief from all the INTENSE CULTURE here!’.
The process of acting the middle-class part begins much earlier for Annie Duchesne as her two different worlds – school and home – collide in childhood and early adolescence. Denise, the heroine of Ernaux's first novel, indulges in a family romance where her parents are transformed: L’épicerie, mes parents n’étaient certainement pas vrais, j’allais un soir m’endormir et me réveiller au milieu d’une route, j’entrerais dans un château, un gong sonnerait, et je dirais « Bonjour Papa! » à un élégant monsieur servi par un maître d’hôtel stylé. (Ernaux, 1974: 80) Avec chaque produit vanté dans le magazine, je construisais mon corps et mon apparence, jolies dents (avec Gibbs), lèvres rouges et pulpeuses (rouge Baiser), silhouette fine (gaine X) etc. […] J’éprouvais une grande jouissance à me créer uniquement à partir de produits figurant dans le journal – règle respectée scrupuleusement – que je découvrais au fur et à mesure, lentement, prenant le temps de développer chaque « réclame », d’assembler les images entre elles et d’organiser le récit d’une journée idéale. (Ernaux, 1997, republished 2011: 265)
In this game, a variant on the Freudian family romance, it is not the parents, but ‘la petite D.’ herself who undergoes metamorphosis, becoming both sexually attractive – ‘lèvres rouges et pulpeuses, silhouette fine’, and middle-class. She imagines herself sleeping in a Lévitan bed, drinking Banania for breakfast, and studying by correspondence to become a nurse or social worker – two classic professions for a class migrant. The game seems to be a pleasurable rehearsal of the part the young Annie is learning to play at her private school.
It is also clearly an early sign of her vocation as a writer, memory and imagination being of course closely linked, and the game depending on careful structuring of her material and strict adherence to the rules, characteristics we find in most of the Ernaux texts from La Place onwards, and particularly in L’Usage de la photo (2005). The game of the ideal day can also be read as a precursor to what Gratton and Sheringham (2005) have called the art of the project, where willing acceptance of a set of constraints allows creativity to flourish, an art which perhaps reaches its apogee in the Ernausian œuvre in the latter text. In Retour à Yvetot we find perhaps the most striking manifestation of the masquerade of middle-class identity in the form of a homework Annie Duchesne submitted to her teacher in November 1953. Her teacher requires her to describe a room she likes and locate it in the house. The kitchen Annie D describes – with its shiny white tiles, ranges of cupboards, cooker, sink, reading corner, vase of roses on the table, and jazz playing – bears no relation to the reality – a cramped space under the stairs, between the café and the shop, with no running water or sink. Ernaux comments in the preface that the only touch of reality in the homework is the waxed cloth on the table, and that the real kitchen ‘n’avait pas droit à la dignité scolaire’ (Ernaux, 2022: 8).
The masquerade, however successful, has its costs in the form of feelings of inauthenticity, fear of being found out, and shame. When I began to read Ernaux, in the early 90s, I recognised all of this and found explanations for some troubling scenes of my past, including, and particularly, the Oxford years, which I had attributed to my own shyness or lack of ability, or as one of my acquaintances at Oxford helpfully diagnosed, an ‘inferiority complex’. By the time, I discovered Ernaux, I had read Bourdieu, so I had some intellectual understanding of my trajectory as a class migrant. Through Ernaux, however, I learnt to understand the affective dimensions of this process, particularly the pain of simultaneously loving and despising one's parents, and for this, and her beautiful, illuminating and uncompromising books I will forever be deeply grateful. In Le Vrai Lieu (2014), a set of essays based on Michelle Porte's film Les mots comme des pierres, Annie Ernaux écrivain (2013), Ernaux remarks: […] dans la littérature j’ai trouvé des choses pour moi. Dans Proust. Dans Georges Perec. Des choses qui font que l’on se dit, que l’inconscient dit « Moi aussi ». Et la lumière se fait en soi. C’est « la vie éclaircie » dont parle Proust. […] La littérature n’est pas la vie, elle est où devrait être l’éclaircissement de l’opacité de la vie. (Ernaux, 2014a : 74, 84)
Footnotes
Notes
Author biography
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