Annie Ernaux is a class defector. That is to say that she has changed social background and that this trajectory is in no way trivial in her experience and her relationship to the world. Daughter of Norman merchants, she was born in 1940 and grew up in a very modest environment. As an adult, through her studies, her marriage, her status as an associate in modern letters, then her literary work, she joined the intellectual bourgeoisie.
In The place, published in 1983, she recounts the gap that was created between her and her father, until his death. “She pays homage to her background but never spares her parents or herself. It takes courage to describe the contempt that we sometimes develop at the end of adolescence, when we have the chance to study while our parents have jobs they did not choose. It shows its less brilliant facets. I read that with a shiver, ”says Adrien Naselli to 20 minutes. The journalist signed last year And your parents, what do they do? (Lattès) a survey of class defectors that the author has agreed to read and annotate.
“I sent my chapters and she replied within a week with a host of details and thoughts,” he continues. At 80, with her star status, she has kept total humility. She is proof that you can climb the ladder without becoming tyrannical or losing your generosity. »
“She carries in her flesh the differences between social classes”
Son of a bus driver and a secretary, Adrien Naselli studied literature at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. “I was desperately trying to put words to what was happening to me, this feeling of having torn myself away from my unqualified family but of not being part of this intellectual and bourgeois universe either, confides the journalist. As a class defector, Ernaux carries in his flesh the gaps between social classes and this is what I came to look for in his work, with the relief of discovering that it is a shared social process. »
Screenwriter and director Audrey Diwan, who brought last year to the screen The event, in which Annie Ernaux recounts the clandestine abortion she had recourse to, does not say anything else. “It reveals a system, the place of women in society but also that of the class defector among others. His “I” changes into a “we”, a form of powerful collective voice. And the Nobel Prize for this [jeudi] proves that this voice carries and unites beyond borders,” the filmmaker told AFP.
“I had told their story”
At the microphone of France Culture in November, Annie Ernaux returned to the reactions to the release of The place. “I received testimonials from everywhere telling me that I had told their story. I think that there are millions of us, billions, no doubt, to have experienced this passage from one world to another. This passage of having had parents who were not at all acculturated to the dominant culture and finding themselves changing place or changing social class. »
Although crowned with the Renaudot prize in 1984, this novel was received in a mixed way by literary critics. “Interestingly, it is well received regardless of the political orientation of the medium, as long as the critics are also class defectors,” explained three years ago to 20 minutes Isabelle Charpentier, professor of sociology at the University of Picardie and author of a thesis in political science on Annie Ernaux.
“The certainty that the social takes precedence”
The neo-Nobelise has thus influenced generations of writers younger than her own. Virginie Despentes, Edouard Louis, Didier Eribon or even Nicolas Mathieu. The latter, from the so-called “peripheral” France of which he speaks in his novels, told on Instagram the memory of his meeting trembling and moved during a signing session. Admiration for Annie Ernaux takes a form as cerebral as it is affective and she returns it well.
“I particularly remember this passage which appears in the conclusion of my investigation, where she affirms that the story of her life will have been her change of class”, specifies Adrien Naselli. Referring to the many testimonials that make up the book, Annie Ernaux writes: “Reading your last chapter, at one point something obvious struck me: the feeling of constantly finding myself on familiar ground, of reading myself and my parents, my background (not to “show off”, discretion, but also not to let oneself be walked on, etc.) Which attests to the essential, irremediable character in me of the transfugivity (I assume the neologism), reinforcing my certainty that the social takes precedence. »