Anne Ernaux is a French writer; she was born in 1940, and in 2022 she won the Nobel Prize for literature. I read her Things Seen (2000) for the first time that year, stepping onto a tram towards Prahran Market. I know—can see—myself leaning against the metal bar, holding my new, small book in one hand. I know the coat I wore. I can see that different, rounder face.
The French title of Things Seen is La vie extérieure—the outer life, or the external life. It is composed of journal entries; mostly brief, vigorous studies of Parisians in stations and shops and airports. And then, occasional extractable phrases—like Stories are a need to exist, on April 8, 1993—a kind of construction which will take its happy place in didactics, or panel discussions, or grant applications. The title of Ernaux’s Nobel acceptance speech—I Will Write to Avenge My People—seems to have something of this. It is taken from an early diary entry, sixty years before, she says.
I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers…would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth. That an individual victory could erase centuries of domination and poverty…
So, the title is a half-lie—its desire, its pull, began as an illusion which would be dispelled over the course of Ernaux’s life. But in its dispelling, it became a truth—through Ernaux’s desire to break with writing well, to take up the clamour of a language which conveyed anger and derision, even crudeness, contra-Woolf, contra-Proust, contra-Flaubert, she represented everything that happened to my girl’s body. Her representation of the body, as discovery, brought the work into politics. But because it began with the initial formal impulse, this politics was insurgent, rather than self-conscious.
Ernaux’s decision to take on a ‘flat’ affect is a political one; The violence was no longer displayed; it came from the facts themselves and not the writing. Finding the words that contain both reality and the sensation provided by reality would become, and remain to this day, my ongoing concern in writing…
When she writes about the life of her father, she will flatten the ‘I’ so as to elude the reader’s bourgeois condescension—there will be no gaudy representation of suffering to flatter her audience into pleasure. And yet, the body of her work is nothing like bare, sober extraction—instead, her ‘I’ is an exploratory tool that captures sensations: those which memory has buried…
The prerequisite of sensation has for me become both the guide and guarantee of the authenticity of my research. But to what end? Not to tell the story of my life nor free myself of its secrets but to decipher a lived situation, an event, a romantic relationship, and thereby reveal something that only writing can bring into being and perhaps pass on to the consciousness and memories of others.
There is only one difference between this ‘bringing into being’, and similar, emptier claims to the representation of sense in life-writing. The difference has two movements—first, Ernaux’s genuinely philosophical grasp of desire, consciousness, and memory; and second, the total subsumption of those ideas into form. This, like her politics, is insurgent (the form is actually the beginning; the ideas rise from it, but are also covered by its shape).
In June 2023, I read Getting Lost (2001), the diary of Ernaux’s affair with a Soviet diplomat, and used a passage in Grubbery:
About this article: I constantly struggle against the urge to do nothing because I see everything that needs to be done. I cannot imagine a timetable, a slow succession of words and sentences that fill up time. I have no patience…Awareness of the pain which this will represent, and already does. And the horror of writing an article…
Here, she is describing how it feels to live, between meetings with her lover. Outside of time, and agonised by it, she experiences the production of writing not as an escape—that joy and rupture into artistry—but as a one-thing-after-another ordering (of pain). Something strange is happening here, between desire, sense, time—and the problem of an ‘end’.
Two years ago—writing something I felt ill-prepared for, something which would surely reveal me as naked, and inept—I cited Ernaux for the experience itself, and for the feeling of its time. Some months later, I would read Simple Passion (1991), in which Ernaux takes her weary diary entries, and turns them into a pitiless, spare account of the affair. In September 2023, I quoted three of its passages in Grubbery. This is the first:
It occurred to me that writing should aim to do the same, to replicate the feeling of witnessing sexual intercourse, that feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgement.
I think it’s important to note that she writes this in response to watching pornography. For the writer, this suspension means holding up an object which is part-frozen in time, but which is still an ‘intercourse’, still something moving up against, and hurting, and pleasuring. The ‘time’ of the text is not actually static, or isolable from the time of the reader/viewer—but it can be replayed, the bodies moving back and forth in narrative—while its witness’ anxiety remains arrested, without release in the form of any moral judgement.
I also quoted these:
[f1] I often like to weigh up a strong desire against an accident of which I am either the instigator or the victim, or an illness, or some other tragedy. Knowing whether I would agree to pay the imaginary price of disaster is a sure means of assessing the strength of my desire, possibly also of challenging fate: ‘I don’t care if the house burns down so long as I get to finish writing this book.’
…
Quite often I felt I was living out this passion in the same way I would have written a book: the same determination to get every scene right, the same minute attention to detail. I could even accept the thought of dying provided I had lived this passion through to the very end—without actually defining ‘to the very end’—in the same way I could die in a few months’ time after finishing the book.
If sexual desire brutalises the steady passage of time, then this idea of ‘an end’ ensures that time still passes well enough for representation to take place. That Ernaux sees the end of one desire (the affair) as comparable to the realisation of the other (the writing) is very interesting—because only one is the final movement.
Elsewhere in the text, she writes,
I feel no sense of caution or restraint, nor do I have any doubts, finally. Something has come full circle. I commit the same errors as in the past but they are no longer errors. There is only beauty, passion, desire.
Ernaux grew up after the Second World War, proximate to a generation of French intellectuals whose Marxist (and Sartrean) inheritance was built out from the Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Kojève’s model of desire is a re-interpretation of Hegel; his desire is a dialectic of recognition—it is not only that we desire other people; it is that we want they want (we desire the desire of the other). And we want that desire to be reciprocated, so that we might feel fully human. Jacques Lacan will take this and run towards There is no sexual relationship, and desire as continuous lack structuring the empty centre of consciousness. Lacanian recognition, especially in love, is misrecognition—the desires cannot match up, but we will pretend, for our whole lives, that they do (and thus that we are compatible at all). We are arrested in the time of desire, which will only be completed in death.
Ernaux knows all of this—in A Girl’s Story she describes first studying philosophy— Her first essay…casts her into a nameless anguish: can a distinction be made between an objective and a subjective mode of knowledge? The girl who in former years wrote essays with ease now becomes obsessed with a task that seems to her utterly terrifying. She is seized with panic at her inability to find and develop ideas.
This is it—the problem of Ernaux’s work, and the reason for its singularity. This first terror will, eventually, be the thing that draws from her the fullest development of ideas, within a form of writing which is at once entirely subjective (the ‘I’), and entirely objective (the facts of living it observes).
And it is because of this that Ernaux-ian desire is unlike the philosophical desire which is clearly kept in mind. When she writes that, I commit the same errors as in the past but they are no longer errors, this is a dialectical statement, and, again, she knows it.
For Kojève, history was nothing more than the persistence of error—the conclusion of the dialectic, and the end of history, constitutes the end of human error. Following this, Ernaux is placing her work, and its formal effect on the moment under recollection, at the end of the dialectic—at its resolution. The end has already happened, in its writing. All that is left is the record of sensation, which holds (at a level often beyond immediate signification) the residues of philosophy, morality, and politics. Sublated, all the errors of life and the concept.
Do desire, and representation, actually function like this? I don’t know. But part of what is maintained in the product of Ernaux’s work is the knowledge that although there might have been a misrecognition in the human-to-human relationship of desire, a kind of recognition can take place in writing.
Between people, you can trust another person, and allow them to handle you towards their desire. In that, a part of yourself is given over to this bigger thing, and you will want to be recognised for who you were/are, before and during them. You will want their desire to make you human, and they will want the same. This becomes more complicated when recognition is explicitly mediated on the level of ideas. The strength of the relation would depend on the reciprocity of that level; a trust which comes from not using the other’s thought as a means.
The problem with explicitly ‘theorising’ recognition, or any concept, in life-writing, is that it takes the author’s knowledge of their (intimate) present for granted. Ernaux poses herself against those self-narratives which seek to bring to light a dominant truth…to ensure a continuity of being. She does this, because that kind of writing always neglects to consider the following: our failure to understand what we experience, at the moment we experience it; the opacity of the present, whereby every sentence and every assertion ought to be riddled with holes.
The present is the time of misrecognition; it even contains an absence of meaning. But its errors multiply the future possibilities of writing; the possibility of meaning.
This is why she says, I do not envy him: I’m the one who is writing. Because it is not only a question of narrative control—it is a question of error, and of who gets to re-form the errors of desire (which we enter into, over and over again) into a satisfaction which could never be achieved in the experience described. Or who can.