In this lecture I want to introduce you to Ernaux's work in general and to the themes she explores within it.I want to provide you with an some sort of general overview to Ernaux's work as a whole and to pin-point the main preoccupations of her writing. I want to do this by looking at some of the statements Ernaux has made in interviews and the like about the aims and function of her work and also by taking a quick look at her very first book - the novel entitled Les Armoires vides.

But first, a few details about Ernaux. She was born in 1940 in Normandy. She grew up in the small town of Yvetot and went to Rouen University. She qualified as a secondary-school literature teacher and taught at Annecy for ten years and then outside Paris. At present she works at the Centre National d'Enseignement par Correspondance and lives near Paris. To date she has published nine books:

Les Armoires vides (1974)

Ce qu'ils disent ou rien (1977)

La Femme gelée (1981)

La Place (1983)

Une Femme (1987)

Passion simple (1991)

Journal du dehors (1993)

Je ne me suis pas encore sortie de ma nuit (1997)

La Honte (1997)

To get some idea of what Ernaux is about as a writer I'd like to draw your attention to a statement she made in an interview with the literary journal La Quinzaine littéraire in May 1989 regarding her aims and her influences as a writer:

Parmi mes admirations succéssives, y a-t-il quelqu'un que je sente vraiment comme un ancêtre? Je préfère parler de fraternité. C'est-à-dire, sentir quelque chose de commun non dans le style mais dans les motivations de l'écriture ou dans la recherche ... Je m'intéresse à la philosophie, plus encore à la sociologie, aux sciences humaines en général, et ma préférence, en littérature, va aux écrivains qui me donnent le sentiment que leur démarche littéraire est aussi `action' sur le monde, témoignage (Christa Wolf, Ferdinando Camon), mise en question du réel (j'ai beaucoup aimé On frappe à la porte de Guerassimov) ... La notion de `contemporanéité' n'as pas beaucoup de contenu pour moi: c'est un état de fait. Je suis dans le monde du hard-rock, des tours de la Défense et des villes nouvelles, mais aussi des vieux quartiers parisiens ou rouennais, de la richesse de Neuilly et de la 'nouvelle pauvreté', c'est surtout cela qui est important.
Annie Ernaux, `Réponses à quelques questions' in La Quinzaine littéraire, No.532, 16-31 May 1989

a form of direct engagement with real-world issues (`action' sur le monde)

a bearing witness to or reporting of experience (témoignage)

a critical questionning of accepted notions about social, political and economic realities (mise en question du réel)

As a writer Ernaux feels that she is, to use Sartrean terminology `en situation dans son époque' and as such, cannot but engage with the issues of the day. As a writer she will not, indeed cannot, inhabit an ivory tower. Her world is `le monde du hard-rock, ... des villes nouvelles, ... des vieux quartiers parisiens ou rouennais, etc.'. Ernaux is a citizen of contemporary France - a modern industrial society with deep racial, social and economic divisions (`de la richesse ... et de la nouvelle pauvreté'). This is accepted as `un état de fait' that cannot be avoided.

I don't want to give you the misleading impression here that Ernaux is a terribly up-to-the-minute writer. Some of the most important issues facing France today - increasing ethnic polorization, the rise of right-wing parties, unemployment etc. - are hardly touched upon at all. However, she does address a number of issues that are important to our understanding of post-war France. She writes of social inequality, power relations between the sexes, female sexuality and sexual freedom, the educational system etc. - and a whole range of issues that touch the lives of many French people.

Ernaux is what the French would propbably call `un écrivain du ressassement'. That's a neat way of saying that she's a writer whose work repeats itself. The books Ernaux has published to date, with the exception of Passion simple and Journal du dehors, tell essentially the same story. The principal characters of all Ernaux's works are women. They all relate their own experiences of growing-up and their difficult encounters at school, university and within marriage. The experience of social mobility - of moving from one class to another - is central to all of the texts. All of the characters are `passeur[s] entre deux rives' as Ernaux puts it in La Place (Routledge p.103/Gallimard p.112), moving backwards and forwards across the boundaries of class, language and culture. Rural or semi-rural Normandy is the unchanging landscape against which their stories take place.

The stories told in all Ernaux's work bear a strong ressemblance to the details of Ernaux's own life. Hre works are, as you might have guessed if you've read them, all autobiographical. Indeed, it is possible to argue that Ernaux's entire oeuvre is a vast projet autobiographique. Anyway, I don't want to talk about autobiography too much today as I'll be discussing it in more detail in lecture 3.

Moreover, besides the superficial similarities in story, setting and characterization, Ernaux's writings turn compulsively and obsessively around a central core of issues and preoccupations. Ernaux's writings are, if you will, variations or modulations on a common set of themes.

Ernaux's first book, the novel entitled Les Armoires vides is perhaps the clearest example of her preoccupations as a writer containing in embryo all the themes Ernaux will pursue in her later work. Its narrator is a young woman called Denise Lesur who is a second-year literature student. An unplanned pregnancy has led her to a back-street abortion clinic and it is there that she decides to relate the story of her life so far. Denise's story is, typically, one of migration from a social class (uneducated rural lower middle-class) to another (educated urban bourgeoisie) and of the confusions engendered by this shift. She describes herself as: `Baisée de tous les côtés' (Les Armoires vides p.17), and the story she tells is her attempt to understand the alienation she feels at sea between two different worlds.

Denise's parents own and run a `café-épicerie' in small-town Normandy just like the parents in La Place and Une Femme. She enjoys a carefree childhood with them and the other children from the neighbourhood until she reaches school-age. Her parents who themselves have experienced social mobility, moving from the peasantry to the lower middle- classes, are anxious that she too should do well and send her to the local fee-paying school, the école libre. It is at the école libre that Denise's feelings of estrangement begin. Denise soon becomes aware of the social differences which set her apart from the other children and of her own inferiority: `Je me sentais lourde, poisseuse, face à leur aisance, à leur facilité, les filles de l'école libre' (Les Armoires vides p.61).

In order to feel more at home in her new world Denise is obliged to erase all traces of her own culture. She learns to modify her behaviour and tastes by adopting those of her middle-class fellow students. She begins to detest: `le bal musette avec accordéon, le petit coup de blanc, les films de Fernandel, les concerts de l'harmonie municipale, tout ce que l'on aime chez moi' (Les Armoires vides p.130) and aspires to: `le monde des surboums, des blue-jeans, du coca-cola' (Les Armoires vides p.130) of her classmates. Her identification with this milieu continues throughout school and university. As she grows older and becomes more sexually aware she begins to see relationships with middle-class boys as a way of strengthening her sense of belonging to this milieu. Her sense of truly having arrived occurs one day when: `un garçon du collège a dit de moi , ça m'a fait cent fois plus de plaisir qu'un vingt sur vingt en math' (Les Armoires vides p.127). Later, at university her sense of having escaped her origins is crushed when she meets Marc, a law student of impeccable cultural credentials. She feels that she is: `une arriviste de la culture ... Rien qu'une fille de cafetier qui veut s'en sortir' (Les Armoires vides p.168). Her sense of failure is compounded when she discovers she is pregnant and that Marc is unwilling to stand by her.

At the end of her story, Denise has come to an understanding of the alienation and the feelings of anger she has experienced for so much of her life:

J'ai été coupée en deux, c'est ça ... Le cul entre deux chaises, ça pousse à la haine. (Les Armoires vides p.181).

As I mentionned earlier, if we look at Les Armoires vides we can see in embryonic form many of the themes Ernaux pursues in all her writings and in La Place and Une Femme in particular. What exactly are the themes of Les Armoires vides and Ernaux's work in general though? Well, we'll be discussing them in greater depth later on but for the moment let me briefly introduce what I think the most important themes are. By the way, I've ordered these themes en vrac without any hierarchy or order of preference. No theme is necessarily more important than another. To a large extent, they overlap and interlock but five main themes can be identified:

Firstly there is an attention to literature and to the ways in which literature or at least the institutionalized dissemination of literature has silenced or neglected certain experiences - the experiences of women and of working-class people in particular. Les Armoires vides opens with Denise having an abortion - an abortion described in violently physical terms (Les Armoires vides p.12). Denise, who is a student of literature, describes her feelings toward literature immediately after her abortion:

Il n'y a rien pour moi là-dedans sur ma situation, pas un passage pour décrire ce que je sens maintenant, m'aider à passer mes sales moments ... Les bouquins sont muets là- dessus (Les Armoires vides p.12).

Que peut écrire un écrivain qui a appartenu au monde dominé quand il arrive finalement dans le monde bourgeois et surtout dans une littérature qui est en France essentiellement bourgeoise à 80%? Donc tous mes livres tournent un petit peu autour de ça ...
Annie Ernaux quoted in Loraine Day and Tony Jones, Ernaux: La Place/Une Femme (Glasgow: Glasgow Introductory Guides to French Literature, 1990)

Écrire, c'est un recours, c'est faire quelque chose dans le sens de la réparation ... A travers mon père, j'avais l'impression de parler pour d'autres gens aussi, (pour) tous ceux qui continuent de vivre au-dessous de la littérature et dont on parle très peu. Donc c'était une sorte de devoir, je n'en ai jamais douté, pas plus que pour ma mère ...
Annie Ernaux quoted in Loraine Day and Tony Jones, Ernaux: La Place/Une Femme (Glasgow: Glasgow Introductory Guides to French Literature, 1990)

Mon livre [La Femme gelée] ne s'inscrit pas dans un schéma préétabli. Je me contente d'apporter ma pierre, en écrivant mon expérience de femme. Bien que je n'y milite plus, les mouvements féministes me semblent nécessaires. Ils font avancer les choses. J'ai moi-même participé au MLAC et me suis battue pour la reconnaissance de l'avortement. Mais il ne faut pas séparer l'évolution de la femme de politique. Tout est lié.
Annie Ernaux, `Une Femme dans l'engrenage' [interview] in Combat, 13 March 1981

In Une Femme, she describes herself as the archivist of now redundant knowledge and skills:

Elle tenait bien sa maison, c'est-à-dire qu'avec le minimum d'argent elle arrivait à nourrir et habiller sa famille, alignant à la messe des enfants sans trous ni taches, et ainsi s'approchait d'une dignité permettant de vivre sans se sentir des manants. Elle retournait les cols et les poignets de chemises pour qu'elles fassent double usage. Elle gardait tout, la peau du lait, le pain rassis, pour faire des gâteaux, la cendre de bois pour la lessive, la chaleur du poêle éteint pour sécher les prunes ou les torchons, l'eau du débarbouillage matinal pour se laver les mains dans la journée. Connaissant tous les gestes qui accomodent la pauvreté. Ce savoir, transmis de mère en fille pendant des siècles, s'arrête à moi qui n'en suis plus que l'archiviste. (Une Femme p.26)

Social mobility or class transition is a theme central to Ernaux's oeuvre. Leaving one class for another is the common experience of all of Ernaux's characters. They often occupy the role of both insider and outsider, moving back and forth across class divisions, on the margins of the petit-bourgeois culture and community in which they have their roots and the more cultivated middle-class milieu to which they have migrated. In fact Ernaux doesn't use such terms as working-class or middle-class. Like the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, she prefers the terms: classe dominante - those in possession of capital, formal education and social status and classe dominée - those in possession of little or no capital, formal education and social status. In all her writings social mobility - moving from a milieu dominé to a milieu dominant - is experienced in terms of both liberation and loss: liberation in the sense of the new perspectives opened up by education and by encounters with different people; loss in the sense of being expelled from an embracing sense of community, of no longer being `at home' anywhere, of having no stable identity. Social mobility in Ernaux's work is seen as inevitably creating a kind of wound - a wound to be healed by the act of writing perhaps - but of this more later.

In her first three novels the theme of social mobility is explored via the experiences of her young female characters in the context of post-war France. In La Place and Une Femme however, the theme of social mobility is explored via the experiences of the parents in the 1920s and 1930s. The focus in these two texts is very much on the difficulties and contradictions the parents experience as former peasants who have clawed their way up to the property-owning lower middle-class. The parents are both beneficiaries of and refugees from the historical chnges that took place in France in the early twentieth century - I'm talking here about France's shift from being a largely agrarian, agricultural, rural society to being a, industrialized, technological and urban society.

Ernaux uses the theme of social mobility to explore the nuances of class distinction and the power relations between classes. Ernaux's later work in particular - I'm talking about both La Place and Une Femme here - is about the lack of understanding between social classes, what Arlette Farge called `cette dépréciation invivable et destructrice'. Ernaux is concerned to expose the ways in which working-class life and cultural preferences have been systematically denigrated and denied validity. Ernaux contests the idea that middle- class culture is the legitimate culture, that middle-class savoir-vivre is the only one of any value. There are two quotes from La Place which illustrate this nicely:

Je me suis pliée au désir du monde où je vis, qui s'efforce de vous faire oublier les souvenirs du monde d'en bas comme si c'était quelque chose de mauvais goût. (La Place, Routledge p.83/Folio p.72-3)

J'ai fini de mettre au jour l'héritage que j'ai dû déposer au seuil du monde bourgeois et cultivé quand j'y suis entrée (La Place, Routledge p.102/Folio p.111)

Closely linked to the theme of class transition is that of education. For all of the characters in Ernaux's work, education is the means by which social mobility is attained. It is through success at school that the various characters move away from their milieu d'origine.

Because of the educational success of Ernaux herself and of her various heroines we should not assume that Ernaux's considers the educational system in France as either a liberating or a democratic force within society. Nothing could be further from the truth in fact. Ernaux sees the school and university system in France as colluding with social injustice and reinforcing existing class divisions. Those children from less priviledged backgrounds who are successful within the educational system are rare and such success is acheived at considerable personal cost.

Ernaux's representation of the French educational system in her works is consistent with the theories of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. To put it crudely, Bourdieu's writings on the educational system argue that schools and universities reproduce and reinforce social inequalities. Bourdieu theorizes the relationship between the educational system and social reproduction, that is to say, the ways in which bourgeois capitalist society `reproduces' the citizens it needs to maintains the status quo, to perpetuate that system. The educational system plays a major role in `reproducing' good little citizens who will perpetuate the divisions of bourgeois capitalist society. The educational system is thus, in Bourdieu's opinion, the central pillar in the edifice of an unequal society.

This goes against the grain of writings by philosophers and educationalists since the French Revolution - one could cite Condorcet here - for whom education is the `royal road' to greater social equality and human dignity. Education allows individuals to fully realize themselves, their potential as human beings. This is also, I suppose, the reason why many of you are sat here today.

Now, although this ideal is laudable, it does not take stock of the way in which the educational system actually functions within our society. Rather than encourage or nurture intelligence and imagination, the French school system recognises only a narrow and class specific form of intelligence. Schooling is more a matter of accumulating and reproducing what Bourdieu calls `le capital culturel' (cultural capital). Cultural capital can be defined as a whole series of codes, social and linguistic, which teachers and, later on, others in authority expect `good' pupils to know. The educational system is thus more to do with the maintenance of a certain kind of ethos and exclusivity than anything else. Those especially excluded are working-class children, in particular those from rural areas, because they are not yet in possession of the sort of culture endorsed and valued by the educational institutions themselves. The educational system covertly colludes in the exclusion of working-class children by upholding a certain set of values which devalue all others.

The story Denise Lesur tells in Les Armoires vides is a good example of what Bourdieu is getting at. The `le dépaysement complet' (Les Armoires vides p.53) Denise describes at school is engendered by her exposure to a pedagogic experience which does not recognise the kind of knowledge she possesses as a child of parents who were once peasants and who have had limited access to formal education. Denise learns the importance of acquiring the requisite cultural capital, mastering what she calls: `un système de mots de passe pour entrer dans un autre milieu' (Les Armoires vides p.78). She also learns the importance of rejecting own cultural background. In order to achieve educational success she must actively distance herself from her parents, effacing or erasing all traces of her own culture. In order to make progess at school she must be betray her class, despise and spit upon its values.

Hence the emotional damage and the complex feelings of guilt and self-disgust at colluding (of being a good little swot and being rewarded for it) that Denise feels in Les Armoires vides.

Another major theme in Ernaux's work is the French language. I should of course correct myself here since there is no such thing as the French language. It is simply the name we give to a certain language amongst a number of other smaller systems or discourses; dialects, patois, professional jargons, slang, technical languages etc which exist alongside one another. Not all of these systems have the same value in society: some are more powerful than others. Ernaux's work attends to the ways in which language carries cultural meanings and values and relates to specific social interests, to the ways in which power in society is linked to one's control over language.

Michèle Bernstein identifies language as the major theme of La Place which is, for her, a book about two people who, both literally and metaphorically do not speak the same language:

Annie qui va au pensionnat, au lycée, à l'université, accède au discours de la culture, de la bourgeoisie (c'est l'amalgame le plus douloureux). Elle est mal à l'aise comme une qui a trahi: elle a changé de langage.
Michèle Bernstein, `Annie Ernaux. Souvenirs d'en Normandie' [review of La Place] in Libération, 1 March 1984

La faute, c'est leur langage à eux, malgré mes précautions, ma barrière entre l'école et la maison, il finit par traverser, se glisser dans un devoir, une réponse (Les Armoires vides p.115)

The language we speak often embodies and reinforces relationships of power, of dominance and subordination. There is an emphasis on language as the site of struggle - on the ways in which language is used to put people down or to deny the validity of what they have to say. Ernaux's work is about understanding the power relations between speakers, the subtle and innumerable strategies by which words can be usedas instruments of coercion and control, as tools of intimidation and abuse, as signs of politeness, condescenion or contempt.

The theme of family relationships is every bit as important as that of social mobility. Ernaux's writings address the dynamics of family relationships - more specifically - of the intensity of emotional ties between parents and children. Relationships between parents and children are often fraught with ambivalence. This ambivalence is not a negative feature of such relationships. Rather, it is a sign of the depth and complexity of our feelings towards those who are central to our lives. Ernaux is interested above all in the dynamics of family relationships, that is to say, in the ways in which our feelings and behaviour towards our family change and are transformed through time. It is in the evolving tensions between mothers and daughters in particular that Ernaux is most interested. Ernaux's first two works; Les Armoires vides and Ce qu'ils disent ou rien take this as one of their major themes, as of course does Une Femme which we shall examine in a later lecture.

Ernaux's books return to the same story again and again, working and re-working a number of common situations and problems. Now, we often tend to think that writers are interesting because of the wide range of issues they approach in their writings. With Ernaux however, the reverse is true. The strength of her works and the distinctiveness of her voice as a writer derive from the persistence with which she has pursued a limited range of issues.

If you are ready for a more detailed reading of La Place click on Lecture 2. For bibliographical details click on Selected Further Reading.