Annie Ernaux

09/06/2025

Literature    Download PDF  

Indulging Selves

 What is it to be self-indulgent? It is a term of abuse frequently applied to writers, filmmakers and musicians but rarely unpacked as a particular term. What is the opposite of self-indulgent? Is it to indulge others, or to avoid indulgence at all? Is it to avoid the self at all? The term self-indulgent is a label often aimed at French writing. The great publisher of Beckett, Duras, Butor and Sarraute, John Calder offered it in a Marguerite Duras obituary: “the later work…increasingly became self-indulgent and less attractive to readers.” (Independent) Louis Betty accuses Michel Houellebecq in The Los Angeles Review of Books, of such a misdemeanour, and G.W. Bowersock describes Emmanuel Carrere as a “supremely self-absorbed acquaintance who cannot stop talking about himself. The translator, John Lambert, catches this tone perfectly.” (New York Review of Books) The term is all over Annie Ernaux’s work. Ann Manov describes a book about the author's abortion, Happening, as a slim book that “…largely consists of self-indulgent and painfully predictable reflections on l’événement of l’écriture.” (UnHerd) Brianna Di Monda says of Getting Lost: “It’s not a typical story, even for Ernaux, perhaps because most others have too much pride to publish such unfiltered thoughts. In this way, the book’s greatest weakness—its self-indulgence—is also its greatest strength.” (Chicago Review of Books).  

     In some of these instances, the term isn’t simply used as one of abuse but it isn’t quite interrogated either, and we could do worse than to look at four Ernaux books (Getting Lost, The Years, Exteriors and Simple Passion) to examine the term. Ernaux, like many other modern French writers, has been associated with what Serge Dubrovsky coined ‘autofiction’, a term created back in the seventies. Writers include Dubrovsky, Herve Guibert, Christine Angot and of course Carrere and Ernaux. But no less useful a term however informal comes from Rob Doyle. “It’s not so much self-karaoke as self-cannibalism, with Carrere’s past work continually offering him a way forward. He’s doing what Philip Roth did with his “Nathan Zuckerman” sequence – autobiographical novels that explored the consequences of autobiographical novels – but Carrere has updated the software and (mostly) dispensed with the fictive screen.” (Guardian) 

   It allows us to look at self-indulgence from another angle, as an act of potential self-harm rather than self-love. In the brief introduction to Getting Lost, a diaristic account of a love affair with a younger, Russian man in the late eighties, Ernaux says she perceived that “there was a ‘truth — something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation,” as the self returns but this time sacrificially. There is in her work and in those of other autofictionists a need to expose themselves in a way that may harm others, and one reason why a writer might wish to fictionalise isn’t only, or especiallyto produce a work of the imagination, but also to avoid the fallout from their material that could lead to fallouts with family members and other loved ones. Much has been written about this and whether it happens to be Carrere’s ex-wife horrified at his writing about her without her consent after saying he wouldn’t, or the Norwegian autofictionist Karl Ove Knausgaard’s uncle determined to sue the writer for exposing the family, this is writing that must create a very unusual dynamic around such figures: as though the reality of someone’s life can quickly, or slowly, become the object of someone else’s prose, and that you will become a living character in a novel that hasn’t been created out of the writer's careful creation of a backstory, but the life you have been living up until the moment the writer chooses to reveal you to the literary world.

       This is where scruple meets self-cannibalism — to what degree are you willing to expose others in the process of exposing yourself? The irony of all these apparently self-indulgent books is that they are not so self-absorbed that others aren’t discussed. In her introduction to Getting Lost, Ernaux says “I am conscious that I am publishing this journal because of an inner imperative, without concern for how S might feel”, just after she mentions the “socks he did not remove while making love to his desire to die at the wheel of his car”. Self-absorption might be deemed insufferable, but it isn’t unethical. However, if the self-cannibalising writer writes about others while writing about themselves, they are indeed omnivores — omnivorous as they indiscriminately devour whatever is available. If fiction often takes risks on the page; autofiction takes risks with life, and maybe we can usefully unpack these assumptions about life and prose to understand why writers like Ernaux, Carrere and others are keen to put their lives on the page and perhaps on the line too in the process of putting it on the page. 

     Discussing Ernaux’s work, Ken Chen says, “Should she tell a friend about her affair with a married man? Should she ask her doctor how to get an illegal abortion? The startling impact of Ernaux’s writing emerges partly from the transcription of what is usually hidden from view, a process she describes in a removed third person.” He sees that in the "radical honesty of an Ernaux book, the self is the home of shame and desire.” (Literary Hub) It might sum up well the purpose of autofiction; the desire to acknowledge shame and to defeat it by exposing the shameful without being oblivious to it, and we will have more to say about that later. Speaking of Carrere, his friend Herve Clerc reckoned “he’s very self-involved, but also very able to see the subtle character of others.” (New Yorker) It wouldn’t be enough for a writer to expose themselves without caring whether they are exposing other people: the tension in much of the work rests on self and others. It rests on an awareness that what will alleviate shame for a transformative purpose, and that can become the artwork, might be, for those at the receiving end of the production, an outrage. It can seem like a variation of outing — instead of informing others about a person’s sexual orientation; the autofictionalist drags other people’s lives into their narrative exploration but without fictional devices to conceal identities.  

         Why would an autofictionist do this? A failure of imagination would surely be too hasty an answer. Ernaux reckons, “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled…there is no such thing as a lesser truth.” (New Yorker) It is a lesson learnt perhaps less from life than from literature but where life learns from literature’s minimalist aims to accept that anything can become pertinent. It is as though autofiction comes out of the Nouveau roman’s insistence that nothing intrinsically has meaning, and minimalism’s claim that a story can focus on the mundane over the monumental. When Natalie Sarraute quotes Proust saying “not once does one of my characters shut a window, wash his hands, put on his overcoat, utter a phrase of introduction”, later American minimalists like Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie and Richard Ford weren’t afraid to put such scenes back into the work while also taking out the main ones: the scenes that would drive a novel forward. If a conventional novel might have a character washing their hands after a murder, a minimalist could just have them washing their hands or some other simple activity. Here are examples of this minimalism in their work, the first two from Carver; the latter pair from Beattie. “He cleaned his teeth with his tongue and squinted in the late afternoon winter light.” ('Sixty Acres') “The telephone rang while he was running the vacuum cleaner.” ('Put Yourself in My Shoes') “He came to her door at noon, as he said he would.” (‘Shifting’) “On Saturday they went to the movies, and on Sunday afternoon he drove to her apartment in his black Volvo.” ('La Petite Danseuse'). In these stories, something is going on beyond such uneventful moments, but the writers don’t eradicate them; if anything, they emphasise them. What Proust took out, they insistently put back in. Sarraute in her way wished to remove them as well, as though taking Proust further by making character all but irrelevant next to the perceptions the author wishes to offer, ones that are contrary to preconceptions. The writer works “…unceasingly to rid what he sees of the matrix of preconceived ideas and ready-made images that encase it, as also of all the surface reality that everyone can easily see and which, for want of anything better, everyone uses…” (The Age of Suspicion) Alain Robbe-Grillet says “to reject our so-called ‘nature’ and the vocabulary with perpetuates its myth, to propose objects as purely external and superficial, is not - as has been claimed - to deny man; but it is to reject the ‘pananthropic’ notion contained in traditional humanism. It is no more in the last analysis than to lay claim, quite logically, to my freedom.” (For a New Novel)

      As Robbe-Grillet says elsewhere in the book, if a writer is obliged to tell a story in a certain way, and well, we might wonder what gets left out. “Thus whatever the nature of the situations, the accidents, the fortuitous reactions, the [typical] narrative must flow without jolts, as though of its own accord, with that irrepressible elan which immediately wins our adherence.” While we accept that life is full of moments that can’t be avoided, whether it be opening and closing doors, doing the washing or using the bathroom, literature can excise the everyday since characters can be found in rooms directly, their clothes never get dirty, and they have no intrinsic need to use the facilities.  But it is as though autofiction, driven by revelation no less than typical storytelling, but with different priorities, sees that to reveal concerns the intimacies of the self over the propulsion of the narrative. It also can mean that prose becomes prosaic, even apparently formless. While Robbe-Grillet believes that “…it suffices to change the arrangement of the words, in Madame Bovary, for there to be nothing left of Flaubert”, this needn’t reside especially in Flaubert as a famous prose stylist. What matters is that the words are put together differently, allowing form to emerge. The problem of style needn’t be about brilliant prose but in the danger of formfulness rather than formlessness. Referencing, Nathalie Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet says, formalism should only apply “…to novelists overly concerned with their ‘content’ who, to make themselves more clearly understood, abjure any exploration of style likely to displease or surprise: those, who, precisely, adopt a form — a mold— which has given its proofs, but which has lost all force, all life.” (For a New Novel)

     By escaping ready-form autofiction risks formlessness, but it is still at least not formfulness. Often, auto-fictionists refuse to offer elegant prose as if by way of an alibi for writing about their lives, as though they might be expected in drawing from their life to at least have the decency to offer it in the most elegant manner possible. Yet this would be detrimental to their refusal of form. Ernaux says: “I shall never experience the pleasure of juggling with metaphors or indulging in stylistic play.” (Shame) “James Wood criticised the uneven quality of the prose and the use of clichés,” Sophie Pinkham notes, when he commented on Knausgaard’s work. “But these are essential parts of the method. Knausgaard rejects chiseled sentences in favor of a cumulative effect, and the flatness, the openness, the sprawl provide the space necessary for his discursive treatment of everyday life, allowing the reader to exist inside the narrator’s mind, to see as he sees.” (N+1) 

    Samuel Beckett once said, when someone came to ask him if they could write his biography “(Literary Hub), you are going to reveal me for that charlatan I am”, and it is as though in autofiction there is simultaneously the apparent honesty of the confession and the possible laziness of the prose. The sentences are without ornamentation, just as the life is without fictional augmentation. However, is this creating an excuse more than a purpose: the writer lacks imagination and a prose style and turns weaknesses into a dubious strength. William Deresiewicz thinks so, insisting in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work, “that nothing happens in the writing. The prose consists, for the most part, of a flat record of superficial detail, unenlivened by the touch of literary art: by simile or metaphor, syntactic complexity or linguistic compression, the development of symbols or elaboration of structures—by beauty, density or form.” (The Nation) That may be the point but is it a point? When Becca Rothfeld says “how nice it would be to be afforded the luxury of narcissism — the luxury of writing about experiences that are taken, prima facie, to matter. And yet the privilege of writing about oneself — of passing one’s vanity off as profundity — is reserved almost exclusively for male authors” (Hyperallergic). 

      Ernaux proves her very wrong indeed, and that female narcissism can win the Nobel prize as well. Deresiewicz sees writing with nothing of interest in the prose, and Rothfeld reckons this is a male pursuit. Yet there is Ernaux taken very seriously for doing the same thing. We may wonder if the critics’ criticism turns out to be too weak; whether insisting as Deresiewicz does that the work lacks linguistic compression or as Rothfeld does that it is masculine self-indulgence, there isn’t quite enough force to the complaints. This doesn’t mean a case can’t be made against autofiction but it must be more impregnable to attack than such claims. Deresiewicz falls back on prose style that Robbe-Grillet and others have long questioned, while Rothfeld relies on gender and Ernaux proves her claims unsustainable. If elegant prose justifies self-indulgence, as if the narcissism of speaking about oneself is qualified by the impersonal and established notion of good writing, then it is a bit like a writer saying outrageous things at an awards ceremony but has at least turned up wearing a dinner suit. While there have been plenty men whose work has been close to autobiography (without being labelled autofiction), like Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski, women writers have been no less close to the confessional, including Marguerite Duras and Catherine Millet, and too Miller’s lover Anais Nin. 

     Rather than attacking autofictionists for their poor prose or sexist entitlements, better to see what they are doing and why it might seem a relatively new form within the ethically myriad.  Deresiewicz can be oddly of use here, saying of James Wood (who admires Knausgaard despite the reservations Sophie Pinkham invokes) that, for all his interest in fiction’s ability to tell the truth about the world, there is something remarkably self-enclosed about his criticism. Derisiewicz sees in Wood, “a sense that nothing exists beyond the boundary of his consciousness, and that his consciousness contains nothing but books...But there is a world outside his study, and the books in his study, and one can’t understand fiction without understanding that. The novel, more than other literary forms, embodies a massive engagement with the world—has massive designs upon the world—and demands a comparable engagement from its critics.” (The Nation) While many novels expect us to understand the reality fiction is placed within, this is often a contextual milieu, all the better at revealing fictional significance. Perhaps that balance is more leaning to one side over the other in historical fiction, but even there it is usually the story that matters; hence why we refer to the historical as the backdrop. Whether it is Tolstoy’s War and Peace or McEwan’s Atonement, the Napoleonic Wars or WWII, the war impacts on the characters; it needn't alter the foundations of the text. It wouldn’t be difficult to relocate the novels in different settings and the titles reflect this. Even when a novel is much more specific — like WWI novels All Quiet on the Western Front and Storm of Steel, where the details are very much about the war, and a particular type of war that has become synonymous with the trenches (though they were used in WWII) — the writers are concerned with bravery and cowardice, growing up quickly and coming to terms with death. Other battles could be useful, and a fiction writer’s purpose is usually to find a subject that allows the theme to be explored well; historians, ethnographers and sociologists can take care of the details. A novelist too concerned with the moment they are writing about will no longer explore character and situation but will document the present. Our claim here is not without problems, and there are books brilliant partly because they do capture a moment as if the characters are caught up in a history they can’t quite understand: whether it be the consumer culture in Perec’s Things, or the cultural shifts that make Rabbit Redux a useful book on Nixonite America.  

      Yet one way of looking at this is to compare such works with Annie Ernaux’s The Years. Ernaux’s book is an autobiography, yet it is also a discreet, mainly impersonal account if we accept that there is everybody’s life: one that we lead, and another that happens, indifferent to us but to which we cannot help but belong. When Ernaux says “everyone knew how to distinguish between what was and was not done…Values could be read in others’ eyes upon us” is this ‘us’ Ernaux and her friends or a much more general ‘us’ meaning everybody? When she adds “wealthy people said of shopgirls and typists who were well-dressed, 'they wear their entire fortune on their back,'" is she speaking of herself, her working-class background (her parents were shopkeepers) or young women in France at a particular time when disposable income became available? It’s as if Ernaux reverses Fitzgerald’s claim at the beginning of 'The Rich Boy': “Begin with an individual and before you know it you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created — nothing.” Ernaux proposes that she can create a different type of something, no matter if Fitzgerald’s claim is generally true and why we have suggested that most novels, even if they use certain events as backdrops are wary of pushing them too prominently into the foreground. The Years, from this perspective, is almost all background as foreground. Covering the post-war period in France to 2006, it locates the writer as a contingent figure in time who travels through history as both participant and onlooker. But if in Updike’s Rabbit books Harry Angstrom is more the former than the latter, and thus conforms sensibly to Fitzgerald’s claim, Ernaux emphasises the latter over the former as the narrator, such as she is, becomes present rather as history becomes present in another novel. When she often uses ‘we’ in The Years she uses it to describe the generation of which she is a part, as if this is the contingent reality Ernaux must acknowledge far more than any agency she possesses. “Mitterand’s reelection [in 1988] restored our tranquility. Far better to live without expectations under the Left than in constant fury under the Right.” On the next page, the narrator tells us “Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie…”, “…three girls who persisted in wearing headscarves to school were perceived as the advance guard of Muslim fundamentalism, obscurantist and misogynistic, and finally provided us with an opportunity to think and suggest that the Arabs were not like other immigrants.” Who is this ‘we’ invoked, how singular is it supposed to be, and how ironic are we to take its pronouncements? Is it confirming or countering what the French call bien pensant, a right-thinking person? It carries the language of middle-class dinner party conversation without the dinner party, without the mise en scene and characterisation a novel usually offers, as it will allow characters to discuss the ideas Ernaux presents. Ernaux instead offers them as a hovering abstraction, allowing the novel to move through large periods while constantly capturing an aspect of people’s lives.

        One may see this as an important and too little recognised purpose behind fiction. With all the talk of characterisation, agency and the descriptive, what is often be missed is that aspect. Ernaux’s interest often moves between what we might call the personal and impersonal aspect of one’s existence, depending on the book. In Exteriors and The Years, life is seen from the outside (as Exteriors’ title makes clear); in Getting Lost and Simple Passion it is from the inside, from a claustrophobic obsession. Ernaux explains why she adopts such exteriority or interiority according to the given book, In Exteriors she says: “I paid attention to the conversations exchanged on the RER. I felt the urge to transcribe the scenes, words and gestures of unknown people, who are never to be seen again, graffiti scribbled on walls, no sooner dry than hastily erased, sentences overheard on the radio and news items read in the papers.” In Simple Passionshe opens by announcing, “centuries and centuries, hundreds of generations have gone by, and it is only now that we get to see this [a pornographic film], a man’s penis and a woman’s vagina coming together, the sperm, something we couldn’t take in without almost dying of shame has become as easy to watch as a handshake.” She then adds that “writing should aim to do the same, to replicate the feeling of witness in sexual intercourse, that feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgement.” Ernaux goes on to write about an affair with a Russian diplomat, as she does too in Getting Lost, with the former a novella; the latter the publication of a diary she was writing as the affair unfolded - and while she unravelled.  

        But if the impersonal and the personal books show the same sensibility, it is because the works that apparently have nothing to do with Ernaux, and the books that are all about Ernaux, contain in the former instance a surprising objectivity and in the latter an intriguing subjectivity. Of Exteriors she says, “I am sure that you can learn more about yourself by embracing the outside world than by taking refuge in the intimacy of a journal.” But she says of the intimate journal Getting Lost that “…the outside world is almost totally absent from these pages” and yet an objectivity is perhaps sought, nevertheless. “I wanted to make this passion a work of art in my life, or rather this affair became a passion because I wanted it to be a work of art (Michel Foucault: the highest good is to make one’s life a work of art).” Ernaux may or may not be suffering for her art, but she is suffering within the context of art, as though the Russian diplomat is her own Count Vronsky as she invokes Anna Karenina. In Simple Passion she mentions films that in some ways echo her predicament:The Woman Next Door, Loulou, Trop Belle Pour Toi!  Equally, it is as though she wants to find in romantic tropes what Nathalie Sarraute called tropisms, giving to her feelings both a far greater intensity than the romantic longings and yearnings to be found in a supermarket magazine, or popular music, yet also acknowledging there is validity to such states that pop culture can capture. “Throughout this period I didn’t once listen to any classical music. I preferred songs. Sentimental songs, which previously I had ignored, moved me deeply. In a simple, straightforward manner, they spoke of the absolute, universal nature of passion.” When she would hear Sylvie Vartan sing “C’est fatal, animal’, I knew I wasn’t the only woman to feel that way. Songs accompanied and legitimised my own experience.” (A Simple Passion)

    Describing how she would use tropisms, Sarraute says “I told myself perhaps it would be interesting to take two semblances of characters who were entirely commonplace, as in Balzac, a miser and his daughter, and to show all the tropisms that develop inside of them.” (Paris Review) The writer can use a conventional novel as the basis for the tropism but couldn’t write a standard work of fiction made up of them. “What interest would there be? Because in a more traditional novel, one shows characters with personality traits, while the tropisms are entirely minute things that take place in a few instants inside of anybody at all.” (Paris Review) The purpose of tropisms is that they don't further characterisation; they obliterate it. It reveals perspective but doesn’t contribute to the psychological development of character. If someone sees the sun on the water, the bright blue of a coat, a burnished autumn leaf, these are observations equally available to anyone and needn’t reveal their personality. As opposed to Gatsby’s interest in status in Fitzgerald’s novel, Angstrom’s interest in sex as he gets over his marriage break-up, or Rastignac’s parvenu ambitions in Balzac’s work. 

      However, if fiction seems to have simultaneously evolved and retreated, to have returned to the more accepted demands of storytelling, and has also become more revealing of the details Ernaux proposes when she mentions pornography, it will have done so by absorbing modernist demands without being beholden to some of their difficulties. Writers including Kelman, Handke, Marquez and Carver are probably less difficult to read than Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Faulkner and Woolf. We needn’t overestimate the influences here, nor underestimate the complexity of the more recent writers’ work. It is only to say they might wish to make more concrete the abstractions of their forebears and replace difficulty with urgency, as if, out of the demands the earlier works made, opportunities arose that needed to acknowledge the breakthroughs offered - but needn’t add to the complications involved. In Kelman’s work, the characters are often as idle as Beckett’s and as internally restless. But the context is clear, the situations delineated: frequently figures unemployed or in jobs they dislike in post-industrial Glasgow. It would be unfair to say Kelman has popularised Beckett (book sales alone would suggest otherwise), just as it wouldn’t be fair to insist Marquez has popularised Faulkner (though sales might propose he has). It is more the later works potentially find a solution to the problem’s difficulties without ignoring the problem that has arisen. The difference between a Kelman novel like The Busconductor Hines and Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain is the difference between a writer having passed through this process or not.  

         If we propose Ernaux’s work can be seen within the context of Sarraute’s, it rests partly on finding in the everyday the details that belong to everyone and not someone. The books are written with an assumption that whatever she describes cannot be of no interest since she offers what everyone can see or be part of historically, in the impersonal works, and assumes that whatever she feels will be felt by others in the personal ones. She doesn’t need to develop characters to contain these perceptions and feelings; they can be quickly and instinctively acknowledged by all. “Our experience of the world cannot be subject to classification. In other words, the feelings and thoughts inspired by places and objects are distinct from their cultural content: thus a supermarket can provide just as much meaning and human truth as a concert hall.” (Exteriors) The point of Ernaux’s work is that while it isn’t fiction, it isn’t quite autobiography either. Why it isn’t fiction rests partly on the absence of story. A story to become such a thing needs to be extracted from the surrounding world that isn’t of much narrative interest — the story isn’t only creation; it is subtraction. Its purpose is not just to tell an exciting story but to remove from the telling much that will pass for unnecessary detail getting in the way of the flow. 

   This might sound like we are describing a certain type of story and one many a modern fiction writer has eschewed in their search for the minutiae of the mundane. But even so pared-back a writer as Carver is, in the pared-backness, clearly telling a story. He is finding the important details that can claim for it a narrative purpose. Not much may happen in 'Cathedral', but we can assume that the presence of the visiting blind man to a couple’s home is the most important thing that has happened to the central male character in a while, and the story is about why he believes this is significant. In another example of American minimalism, Communist by Ford, a kid goes along to a goose shoot with his mum's lover. It might not seem like much of an event, but it is important for him. Many works of modern fiction play up that significance to an individual, even if it may not seem much of a story dramatically.

    Yet this is still fiction and Ernaux is resistant to telling it. Speaking of one of her works, she says “The book was massively misunderstood when it came out. They compared me to Madame Bovary. But Madame Bovary is a fictional character! And I am not; I am the person holding the pen.” (The Dial) Here is Ernaux annoyed she has been compared to a character: nobody admired Bovary’s talent; that was reserved for Flaubert. Yet her annoyance could also rest on resisting the content of Flaubert’s novel.  He may have famously said that “…what seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style…a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible.”  (Selected Letters) However, the book would be held together by an exquisite prose style so that the language of literature would be more present than the story it was telling. Yet Madame Bovary is full of storytelling: the husband making a hash of an operation that leads to a lad’s leg getting amputated; there is Emma’s torrid affair; her debts and her suicide. To reduce Ernaux’s work and her own character to a 19th-century novelist and his main protagonist could seem an insult of a particular kind. It is as though in such comments that all Ernoux wanted to do was fit her life into literature; to claim for herself a status equal to that of a literary character. The point would seem more the opposite; to see, and to say, the quotidian nature of her existence wasn’t too different from anybody else's. That was what made it interesting. 

      It is also, of course, why it wouldn’t have much to do with what usually passes for autobiography. When an actor, a rock star or a politician writes about their life, it is because that life is deemed extraordinary, and if they can’t write it themselves, through lack of talent or laziness, a ghost-writer will be called upon. The life cannot be ignored even if the autobiographer hasn’t the ability, the time or the inclination to put down the words. The idea is that such a work should be in the public domain; their celebrity demands it.  However, while Ernaux is now a famous Nobel prize-winning author, she won it for the relative anonymity of the work and what was deemed her bravery in producing it. The Nobel Committee admired “The courage and clinical acuity of her work.”

     Though Ernaux is resistant to the word autofiction, she would nevertheless share with other perceived practitioners an interest in conquering the shame of her existence: a philosophical project that attracted for example both Nietzsche and Sartre. “The charm of knowledge would be small indeed”, Nietzsche says, “were it not that there is so much shame to be overcome on the way to it.” (Beyond Good and Evil)  Elsewhere, he reckons: “Whom do you call bad? – He who always wants to put people to shame. What is most human to you? – To spare someone shame. What is the seal of having become free? – No longer to be ashamed before oneself.” (Gay Science) In his passages on shame in Being and Nothingness, Sartre starts by speaking of a person looking through a peephole and getting lost in their voyeurism, before hearing footsteps that make them aware of the deed as a sudden fear of shame overcomes them. No longer lost in the deed, they are aware of their body as an object in the eyes of others who can witness them and make them feel ashamed. According to Luna Dolezal, Sartre discusses shame firstly as a moral emotion; akin to guilt and where others’ judgements teach one of transgressing a rule or norm. “Second, shame is a mode of self-evaluation through shame, I can see and judge myself. Third, and most significantly for this analysis, shame is an ontological structure of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. It is because of our ’original shame’ … for Sartre, that we have the capacity for reflective self-consciousness and, further, the capacity to be relational subjects.” (‘Shame, Vulnerability and Belonging: Reconsidering Sartre’s Account of Shame’) In Sartre’s account, shame is counter-revealed; someone sees our actions and we feel ashamed. But in some of Nietzsche’s remarks about shame, it rests on its personal overcoming rather than its contingent discovery. It suggests a shame closer to confession but with none of the religious connotations that need accompany such a belief. 

      To be ashamed of oneself in some ways might appear contrary to Sartre’s take; aren’t we ashamed in front of others, and isn’t the other’s look upon us what constitutes that shamefulness? But Sartre well-knew that just as we can imagine Pierre in Berlin, we can also imagine ourselves ashamed in the absence of others but aware of their presence in our minds. Nietzsche might wonder how we can overcome that shame seeing it not as a precondition of our personality but on occasion a limitation to it. A vital aspect of Ernaux’s project is to conquer shame as a condition. In her Nobel speech, Ernaux said: “I was twenty-two, studying literature in a provincial faculty with the daughters and sons of the local bourgeoisie, for the most part. I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth.” Ernaux hoped “that an individual victory could erase centuries of domination and poverty, an illusion that school had already fostered in me by dint of my academic success.” Such an achievement could have made her proud but she turned literary success into being not just a source of pride but also a source in which she could access shame. If pride was something that would make her exceptional as she left behind the labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, shame could return her to that world and many other worlds as well. If pride is the public face of the self, the part to put on the CV, to proclaim on social media; shame is the diaristic self — the person we all happen to be that nobody need know we are. If pride might make us feel special, shame makes us universal. 

        Not everybody can become a Nobel Prize-winning novelist. But everyone, more or less, will have felt the sort of emotions Ernaux churns up in her personal work, and will have observed what Ernaux observes in her less personally focused material. It might be about a heated conversation she hears in a post office, a child excited that she gets to “wear sunglasses in the shape of two hearts and a small apple-green basket of plaited plastic.” (Exteriors). Sometimes, the observations are historically specific but still general for their time. “Girls and boys hung around in separate packs - crossing paths on Sunday after Mass or at the movies.” (The Years) And again, “they had entered the Land of Worry over food, laundry, and childhood diseases. They had never imagined resembling their mothers but now were picking up where they had left off.” (The Years) But these incidents aren’t themselves shameful or capable of inducing shame. This is where the personal works come in. “My whole life has been an effort to tear myself away from male desire, in other words, from my own desire…sperm flowing over me like a river.” (Getting Lost) Sometimes it is humorous. “I realized that I’d lost a contact lens. I found it on his penis.” Sometimes it is harrowing. “He called at three o’clock. After that, it took me an hour or two to return to a state of calm that resembles the one I was in before these last three days: to wash away the anguish, the death which invaded me when I thought he’d gone back to Moscow.” (Getting Lost)

     In Exteriors, Ernaux says “I realize I am forever combing reality for signs of literature” and yet we have noted her horror when critics compared her to Madame Bovary. But there is a difference between reducing life to literature and expanding the life of literature. Flaubert, by claiming in principle to wish to write a novel about nothing, was part of that expansionist project. Contemporary autofictionists (whether they like the term or not) are part of this expansionism, even if they would be less inclined to speak of nothing but instead of the quotidian — something for nothing if you like. This needn’t be about the anguished absence of meaning but the everyday presence of the mundane. Getting Lost may be a book about a great love affair between a Russian diplomat and a well-known writer, but that wouldn’t be the most useful way of describing it. The book is much more about the everyday that sits behind the affair, with Ernaux spending most of the time in the French suburb of Cergy-Pontoise hoping for his phone calls and waiting for him to turn up. It isn’t even especially a book about jealousy or, if it is, there is almost no dramatisation of the feeling, as we find in 'The Kreuzer Sonata', Swann in Love, Catherine Millet’s Jealousy or Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment. 

     The point in Ernaux’s account (in both Simple Passion and Getting Lost) is that she rarely leaves home and remains mainly caught in domestic despair. Cergy-Pontoise is 45km from Paris, and though Ernaux sometimes goes into the city for publishing commitments, for the odd dinner and occasionally to events that her lover will also be attending, like a screening of a Russian film, the book never becomes voyeuristic or hounding. It is Ernaux knowing her place which gives the book much of its quotidian value. She isn’t allowed to contact him, doesn’t know where he lives and, living so far from the city, the impulse to follow him is no doubt partly curtailed by a 40-minute journey on the RER. It becomes a book of rumination, with Ernaux fretting over her feelings, worrying over her age, and seeing her life in the most banal of love stories and songs. She invokes her past, listens to Russian spoken, and wonders if her lover will show up in the immediate future, or even phone. “I don’t wonder at my madness in ’58, after CG, my two years of bulimia, my distress because of men.” “I’m jealous of women who speak Russian (as if they had something in common with him that I never will…)” “Of course (and yet I waited…) he did not call as expected, ‘tomorrow or the day after.’ I’m on the verge of tears and nausea.” 

        Ernaux’s work is no more about nothing than Flaubert’s was: The Happening is about her difficulties finding an abortionist in early 60s France; The Years alludes to numerous political events including May ’68 and Vietnam, whileSimple Passion is a succinct account of the affair that she offers in diaristic form in Getting Lost. But at the same time, it is about a different nothing, as if each age retreats from the dramatic in its own way, or at least perceives it is. Out of this retreat comes a different form of an advance, with the writer in the present age often becoming more explicit as the dramatic becomes more implicit. In other words, it would be dramatically explicit for Ernaux to confront her lover at the embassy or go and see his wife. It is instead explicit in a different way when Ernaux says she refuses to wash her cum-stained underwear, or writes about having anal sex. The drama recedes, but the detail encroaches.

     It is here that we can return to the tropism and see how a rarefied literary problem can become an immediately personal one, without insisting on returning it to psychology, which wouldn’t be an extension of Sarraute’s concerns but a denial of them. If Fitzgerald believed that if you begin with an individual and end up with a type, if you begin with a type you end up with nothing, maybe that nothing can have value, and perhaps too the removal of the individual is the point. As Ernaux says: “It’s no longer my desire, my jealousy, in these pages. it’s desire, it’s jealousy.” (The Possession) This may leave us with a paradox: the autofictionist writes about themselves but also removes character. Character becomes potentially ethically problematic because the more you explore the person, the more risk of revelation there happens to be. In an autobiographical piece that includes plenty of revelations about others, James Salter says in the New Yorker, “to write of people thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up.” (‘James Salter’s Life in Moviemaking’) As Ernaux insists in Simple Passion when the lover hopes she won’t write a book about him. “…I haven’t written a book about him, neither have I written a book about myself. All I have done is translate into words — words he will probably never read, which are not intended for him — the way in which his existence has affected my life.” While Ernaux may be restricted by what she can say, she shouldn’t at all be restricted in how she feels and since the book is about affects that happen to be her own but needn’t necessarily be so (hence the claim she hasn’t written a book about herself), how to go directly to affect without the mediation of character? 

    Thus the project isn’t too far from Sarraute: “Only reluctantly does the novelist endow him with attributes that could make him too easily distinguishable: his physical aspect, gestures, actions, sensations, everyday emotions, studied and understood for so long, which contribute to giving him, at the cost of so little effort, an appearance of life, and present such a convenient hold for the reader. Even a name, which is an absolutely necessary feature of his accoutrement, is a source of embarrassment for the novelist.” (The Age of Suspicion) However, while for Ernaux this becomes a necessity as she cannot expose the diplomat, for Sarraute it is a deliberate choice as she mentions various modernist writers (Gide, Kafka, Joyce) who are wary of naming the figures in their novels. “The reader…must be kept from allowing his attention to wander,” Sarraute says, “or to be absorbed by the characters.” (The Age of Suspicion) The point of the tropism is to create perceptions without characterisation, while the point of autofiction is often to create a perspective without generating a plot. But what matters in both instances would be truths that traditionally would be expected to pass through character, situation and narrative instead go much more directly to the perceptual possibility. If someone obsesses over another as Ernaux does in Getting Lost and Simple Passion, how to examine the nature of obsession as a state over the object of that obsession? 

      A novelist could tell us all about the Russian diplomat’s wife, the details of his job, who he works with, how he is as a boss and so on. But an autofictionist works from inevitable restrictions that pass through the modernist prism yet arrives at an ethical limitation. The autofictionist then must ask themselves what they are risking in expanding the world that a traditional novelist would take for granted as an obligation, and the modernist will resist as a new form of creation. If the traditional novelist is obliged to create a character and a modernist might be suspicious of such creativity, the autofictionist isn’t offering or countering character creation but will be aware that the delineating has ethical consequences beyond the diegesis. Bovary couldn’t sue Flaubert, nor could Oliver Twist Dickens. But, for example, Kim Bong-gon’s work was suspended “…when a person claimed she was “sister C” from Kim’s Young Writers Award-winning 'Such Life' on Twitter on July 10, saying Kim used messages between them word for word in his story without her consent.” (Nasher) Chris Kraus noted,  “I couldn't believe when "I Love Dick" came out Dick Hebdige actuallythreatened to sue because of the whole issue about it invading his privacy.” (Sleek) 

    This notion of autofiction’s collateral damage became so pressing an issue in France that Natalie Edwards opens her article on French autofiction by commenting on “the spate of high-profile scandals that [have brought] literature into the realm of the law” (Autofiction and the Law) as she speaks of Gregoire Delacourt, Eric Reinhardt, Christine Angot, Camille Laurens, Marcela Iacub, and Lionel Duroy. Angot’s work is predicated on examining the relationship between her life and its fictional manifestation. “From her very first novel, Vu du ciel, which was published in 1990, Christine Angot has established herself firmly as a writer who has made it her mission”, Marion Sadoux says, “to explore and expose relentlessly the thin line between reality and fiction.” (‘Christine Angot’s autofictions: Literature and/or Reality?’)  Angot has lost two court cases over her work, finding herself fined 40,000 and 10,000 euros in cases brought by Elise Bidoit. “This week, a criminal court in Paris found her guilty of the cardinal sin of fiction writing: not making it up at all.” (Independent) Angot could potentially have found herself in prison: Edwards says, "Infringement carries a maximum penalty of imprisonment of one year and a fine of 45,000 euros” (Autofiction and the Law)  

        From a certain perspective, Angot didn’t just fail in the eyes of the law but also failed in the eyes of autofiction, accepting that one reason the author resists creating fictional worlds rests on the need to generate a curtailed relationship with character and situation. If the law can claim that too vivid a portrait of a living person has been created, then this would be a failure of both the conventional novel (the character is made up) and the modernist text (the character should hardly exist). Interestingly, “the judges decided she had pinched chunks of Elise’s life and used them to create a caricature. In a wonderfully pretentious Gallic phrase, they argued that Ms Angot hadn’t converted the real person into 'a character expressing ‘a truth’ that belongs solely to her’.” (The Independent) Reading Getting Lost and Simple Passion the books do seem to express a truth belonging solely to Ernaux, and in The Years and Exteriors, she offers work that belongs somehow to nobody in particular and everyone in general. The Years, because it belongs to the times (the post-war years into the 21st century), and Exteriors to the places (Cergy-Pontoise and the RER to Paris). 

    Ernaux has found a way to remake the tropism even if we wouldn’t doubt Sarraute would find this transformation unrecognisable and potentially a capitulation, just as Ernaux even if she taught the subject sees little in common with the writers of the Nouveau roman, declaring: “ Those aren’t the kind of novels I write at all.” (French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century) But if we are correct that sometimes a problem can be reinvigorated by a new investigation, one that might seem to have either little in common with the original or appear to be selling the original short while instead finding a new dimension to the problem, we can see that Ernaux returns to the Nouveau roman and finds a way out of the impasses the earlier writers insisted upon. This needn’t make Sarraute or Robbe-Grillet unreadable and Ernaux too easily readable. It is more to say there were questions ignored within the rejection of the traditional novel that Ernaux could pick up and say that there was still life in literature if one extracted from life for its production. What it needed to do was find the minutiae that would undermine the story, but the quotidian that would capture lived experience. It is an achievement that shouldn’t be underestimated, and one that can usefully be genealogised.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Annie Ernaux

Indulging Selves

 What is it to be self-indulgent? It is a term of abuse frequently applied to writers, filmmakers and musicians but rarely unpacked as a particular term. What is the opposite of self-indulgent? Is it to indulge others, or to avoid indulgence at all? Is it to avoid the self at all? The term self-indulgent is a label often aimed at French writing. The great publisher of Beckett, Duras, Butor and Sarraute, John Calder offered it in a Marguerite Duras obituary: “the later work…increasingly became self-indulgent and less attractive to readers.” (Independent) Louis Betty accuses Michel Houellebecq in The Los Angeles Review of Books, of such a misdemeanour, and G.W. Bowersock describes Emmanuel Carrere as a “supremely self-absorbed acquaintance who cannot stop talking about himself. The translator, John Lambert, catches this tone perfectly.” (New York Review of Books) The term is all over Annie Ernaux’s work. Ann Manov describes a book about the author's abortion, Happening, as a slim book that “…largely consists of self-indulgent and painfully predictable reflections on l’événement of l’écriture.” (UnHerd) Brianna Di Monda says of Getting Lost: “It’s not a typical story, even for Ernaux, perhaps because most others have too much pride to publish such unfiltered thoughts. In this way, the book’s greatest weakness—its self-indulgence—is also its greatest strength.” (Chicago Review of Books).  

     In some of these instances, the term isn’t simply used as one of abuse but it isn’t quite interrogated either, and we could do worse than to look at four Ernaux books (Getting Lost, The Years, Exteriors and Simple Passion) to examine the term. Ernaux, like many other modern French writers, has been associated with what Serge Dubrovsky coined ‘autofiction’, a term created back in the seventies. Writers include Dubrovsky, Herve Guibert, Christine Angot and of course Carrere and Ernaux. But no less useful a term however informal comes from Rob Doyle. “It’s not so much self-karaoke as self-cannibalism, with Carrere’s past work continually offering him a way forward. He’s doing what Philip Roth did with his “Nathan Zuckerman” sequence – autobiographical novels that explored the consequences of autobiographical novels – but Carrere has updated the software and (mostly) dispensed with the fictive screen.” (Guardian) 

   It allows us to look at self-indulgence from another angle, as an act of potential self-harm rather than self-love. In the brief introduction to Getting Lost, a diaristic account of a love affair with a younger, Russian man in the late eighties, Ernaux says she perceived that “there was a ‘truth — something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation,” as the self returns but this time sacrificially. There is in her work and in those of other autofictionists a need to expose themselves in a way that may harm others, and one reason why a writer might wish to fictionalise isn’t only, or especiallyto produce a work of the imagination, but also to avoid the fallout from their material that could lead to fallouts with family members and other loved ones. Much has been written about this and whether it happens to be Carrere’s ex-wife horrified at his writing about her without her consent after saying he wouldn’t, or the Norwegian autofictionist Karl Ove Knausgaard’s uncle determined to sue the writer for exposing the family, this is writing that must create a very unusual dynamic around such figures: as though the reality of someone’s life can quickly, or slowly, become the object of someone else’s prose, and that you will become a living character in a novel that hasn’t been created out of the writer's careful creation of a backstory, but the life you have been living up until the moment the writer chooses to reveal you to the literary world.

       This is where scruple meets self-cannibalism — to what degree are you willing to expose others in the process of exposing yourself? The irony of all these apparently self-indulgent books is that they are not so self-absorbed that others aren’t discussed. In her introduction to Getting Lost, Ernaux says “I am conscious that I am publishing this journal because of an inner imperative, without concern for how S might feel”, just after she mentions the “socks he did not remove while making love to his desire to die at the wheel of his car”. Self-absorption might be deemed insufferable, but it isn’t unethical. However, if the self-cannibalising writer writes about others while writing about themselves, they are indeed omnivores — omnivorous as they indiscriminately devour whatever is available. If fiction often takes risks on the page; autofiction takes risks with life, and maybe we can usefully unpack these assumptions about life and prose to understand why writers like Ernaux, Carrere and others are keen to put their lives on the page and perhaps on the line too in the process of putting it on the page. 

     Discussing Ernaux’s work, Ken Chen says, “Should she tell a friend about her affair with a married man? Should she ask her doctor how to get an illegal abortion? The startling impact of Ernaux’s writing emerges partly from the transcription of what is usually hidden from view, a process she describes in a removed third person.” He sees that in the "radical honesty of an Ernaux book, the self is the home of shame and desire.” (Literary Hub) It might sum up well the purpose of autofiction; the desire to acknowledge shame and to defeat it by exposing the shameful without being oblivious to it, and we will have more to say about that later. Speaking of Carrere, his friend Herve Clerc reckoned “he’s very self-involved, but also very able to see the subtle character of others.” (New Yorker) It wouldn’t be enough for a writer to expose themselves without caring whether they are exposing other people: the tension in much of the work rests on self and others. It rests on an awareness that what will alleviate shame for a transformative purpose, and that can become the artwork, might be, for those at the receiving end of the production, an outrage. It can seem like a variation of outing — instead of informing others about a person’s sexual orientation; the autofictionalist drags other people’s lives into their narrative exploration but without fictional devices to conceal identities.  

         Why would an autofictionist do this? A failure of imagination would surely be too hasty an answer. Ernaux reckons, “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled…there is no such thing as a lesser truth.” (New Yorker) It is a lesson learnt perhaps less from life than from literature but where life learns from literature’s minimalist aims to accept that anything can become pertinent. It is as though autofiction comes out of the Nouveau roman’s insistence that nothing intrinsically has meaning, and minimalism’s claim that a story can focus on the mundane over the monumental. When Natalie Sarraute quotes Proust saying “not once does one of my characters shut a window, wash his hands, put on his overcoat, utter a phrase of introduction”, later American minimalists like Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie and Richard Ford weren’t afraid to put such scenes back into the work while also taking out the main ones: the scenes that would drive a novel forward. If a conventional novel might have a character washing their hands after a murder, a minimalist could just have them washing their hands or some other simple activity. Here are examples of this minimalism in their work, the first two from Carver; the latter pair from Beattie. “He cleaned his teeth with his tongue and squinted in the late afternoon winter light.” ('Sixty Acres') “The telephone rang while he was running the vacuum cleaner.” ('Put Yourself in My Shoes') “He came to her door at noon, as he said he would.” (‘Shifting’) “On Saturday they went to the movies, and on Sunday afternoon he drove to her apartment in his black Volvo.” ('La Petite Danseuse'). In these stories, something is going on beyond such uneventful moments, but the writers don’t eradicate them; if anything, they emphasise them. What Proust took out, they insistently put back in. Sarraute in her way wished to remove them as well, as though taking Proust further by making character all but irrelevant next to the perceptions the author wishes to offer, ones that are contrary to preconceptions. The writer works “…unceasingly to rid what he sees of the matrix of preconceived ideas and ready-made images that encase it, as also of all the surface reality that everyone can easily see and which, for want of anything better, everyone uses…” (The Age of Suspicion) Alain Robbe-Grillet says “to reject our so-called ‘nature’ and the vocabulary with perpetuates its myth, to propose objects as purely external and superficial, is not - as has been claimed - to deny man; but it is to reject the ‘pananthropic’ notion contained in traditional humanism. It is no more in the last analysis than to lay claim, quite logically, to my freedom.” (For a New Novel)

      As Robbe-Grillet says elsewhere in the book, if a writer is obliged to tell a story in a certain way, and well, we might wonder what gets left out. “Thus whatever the nature of the situations, the accidents, the fortuitous reactions, the [typical] narrative must flow without jolts, as though of its own accord, with that irrepressible elan which immediately wins our adherence.” While we accept that life is full of moments that can’t be avoided, whether it be opening and closing doors, doing the washing or using the bathroom, literature can excise the everyday since characters can be found in rooms directly, their clothes never get dirty, and they have no intrinsic need to use the facilities.  But it is as though autofiction, driven by revelation no less than typical storytelling, but with different priorities, sees that to reveal concerns the intimacies of the self over the propulsion of the narrative. It also can mean that prose becomes prosaic, even apparently formless. While Robbe-Grillet believes that “…it suffices to change the arrangement of the words, in Madame Bovary, for there to be nothing left of Flaubert”, this needn’t reside especially in Flaubert as a famous prose stylist. What matters is that the words are put together differently, allowing form to emerge. The problem of style needn’t be about brilliant prose but in the danger of formfulness rather than formlessness. Referencing, Nathalie Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet says, formalism should only apply “…to novelists overly concerned with their ‘content’ who, to make themselves more clearly understood, abjure any exploration of style likely to displease or surprise: those, who, precisely, adopt a form — a mold— which has given its proofs, but which has lost all force, all life.” (For a New Novel)

     By escaping ready-form autofiction risks formlessness, but it is still at least not formfulness. Often, auto-fictionists refuse to offer elegant prose as if by way of an alibi for writing about their lives, as though they might be expected in drawing from their life to at least have the decency to offer it in the most elegant manner possible. Yet this would be detrimental to their refusal of form. Ernaux says: “I shall never experience the pleasure of juggling with metaphors or indulging in stylistic play.” (Shame) “James Wood criticised the uneven quality of the prose and the use of clichés,” Sophie Pinkham notes, when he commented on Knausgaard’s work. “But these are essential parts of the method. Knausgaard rejects chiseled sentences in favor of a cumulative effect, and the flatness, the openness, the sprawl provide the space necessary for his discursive treatment of everyday life, allowing the reader to exist inside the narrator’s mind, to see as he sees.” (N+1) 

    Samuel Beckett once said, when someone came to ask him if they could write his biography “(Literary Hub), you are going to reveal me for that charlatan I am”, and it is as though in autofiction there is simultaneously the apparent honesty of the confession and the possible laziness of the prose. The sentences are without ornamentation, just as the life is without fictional augmentation. However, is this creating an excuse more than a purpose: the writer lacks imagination and a prose style and turns weaknesses into a dubious strength. William Deresiewicz thinks so, insisting in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work, “that nothing happens in the writing. The prose consists, for the most part, of a flat record of superficial detail, unenlivened by the touch of literary art: by simile or metaphor, syntactic complexity or linguistic compression, the development of symbols or elaboration of structures—by beauty, density or form.” (The Nation) That may be the point but is it a point? When Becca Rothfeld says “how nice it would be to be afforded the luxury of narcissism — the luxury of writing about experiences that are taken, prima facie, to matter. And yet the privilege of writing about oneself — of passing one’s vanity off as profundity — is reserved almost exclusively for male authors” (Hyperallergic). 

      Ernaux proves her very wrong indeed, and that female narcissism can win the Nobel prize as well. Deresiewicz sees writing with nothing of interest in the prose, and Rothfeld reckons this is a male pursuit. Yet there is Ernaux taken very seriously for doing the same thing. We may wonder if the critics’ criticism turns out to be too weak; whether insisting as Deresiewicz does that the work lacks linguistic compression or as Rothfeld does that it is masculine self-indulgence, there isn’t quite enough force to the complaints. This doesn’t mean a case can’t be made against autofiction but it must be more impregnable to attack than such claims. Deresiewicz falls back on prose style that Robbe-Grillet and others have long questioned, while Rothfeld relies on gender and Ernaux proves her claims unsustainable. If elegant prose justifies self-indulgence, as if the narcissism of speaking about oneself is qualified by the impersonal and established notion of good writing, then it is a bit like a writer saying outrageous things at an awards ceremony but has at least turned up wearing a dinner suit. While there have been plenty men whose work has been close to autobiography (without being labelled autofiction), like Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski, women writers have been no less close to the confessional, including Marguerite Duras and Catherine Millet, and too Miller’s lover Anais Nin. 

     Rather than attacking autofictionists for their poor prose or sexist entitlements, better to see what they are doing and why it might seem a relatively new form within the ethically myriad.  Deresiewicz can be oddly of use here, saying of James Wood (who admires Knausgaard despite the reservations Sophie Pinkham invokes) that, for all his interest in fiction’s ability to tell the truth about the world, there is something remarkably self-enclosed about his criticism. Derisiewicz sees in Wood, “a sense that nothing exists beyond the boundary of his consciousness, and that his consciousness contains nothing but books...But there is a world outside his study, and the books in his study, and one can’t understand fiction without understanding that. The novel, more than other literary forms, embodies a massive engagement with the world—has massive designs upon the world—and demands a comparable engagement from its critics.” (The Nation) While many novels expect us to understand the reality fiction is placed within, this is often a contextual milieu, all the better at revealing fictional significance. Perhaps that balance is more leaning to one side over the other in historical fiction, but even there it is usually the story that matters; hence why we refer to the historical as the backdrop. Whether it is Tolstoy’s War and Peace or McEwan’s Atonement, the Napoleonic Wars or WWII, the war impacts on the characters; it needn't alter the foundations of the text. It wouldn’t be difficult to relocate the novels in different settings and the titles reflect this. Even when a novel is much more specific — like WWI novels All Quiet on the Western Front and Storm of Steel, where the details are very much about the war, and a particular type of war that has become synonymous with the trenches (though they were used in WWII) — the writers are concerned with bravery and cowardice, growing up quickly and coming to terms with death. Other battles could be useful, and a fiction writer’s purpose is usually to find a subject that allows the theme to be explored well; historians, ethnographers and sociologists can take care of the details. A novelist too concerned with the moment they are writing about will no longer explore character and situation but will document the present. Our claim here is not without problems, and there are books brilliant partly because they do capture a moment as if the characters are caught up in a history they can’t quite understand: whether it be the consumer culture in Perec’s Things, or the cultural shifts that make Rabbit Redux a useful book on Nixonite America.  

      Yet one way of looking at this is to compare such works with Annie Ernaux’s The Years. Ernaux’s book is an autobiography, yet it is also a discreet, mainly impersonal account if we accept that there is everybody’s life: one that we lead, and another that happens, indifferent to us but to which we cannot help but belong. When Ernaux says “everyone knew how to distinguish between what was and was not done…Values could be read in others’ eyes upon us” is this ‘us’ Ernaux and her friends or a much more general ‘us’ meaning everybody? When she adds “wealthy people said of shopgirls and typists who were well-dressed, 'they wear their entire fortune on their back,'" is she speaking of herself, her working-class background (her parents were shopkeepers) or young women in France at a particular time when disposable income became available? It’s as if Ernaux reverses Fitzgerald’s claim at the beginning of 'The Rich Boy': “Begin with an individual and before you know it you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created — nothing.” Ernaux proposes that she can create a different type of something, no matter if Fitzgerald’s claim is generally true and why we have suggested that most novels, even if they use certain events as backdrops are wary of pushing them too prominently into the foreground. The Years, from this perspective, is almost all background as foreground. Covering the post-war period in France to 2006, it locates the writer as a contingent figure in time who travels through history as both participant and onlooker. But if in Updike’s Rabbit books Harry Angstrom is more the former than the latter, and thus conforms sensibly to Fitzgerald’s claim, Ernaux emphasises the latter over the former as the narrator, such as she is, becomes present rather as history becomes present in another novel. When she often uses ‘we’ in The Years she uses it to describe the generation of which she is a part, as if this is the contingent reality Ernaux must acknowledge far more than any agency she possesses. “Mitterand’s reelection [in 1988] restored our tranquility. Far better to live without expectations under the Left than in constant fury under the Right.” On the next page, the narrator tells us “Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie…”, “…three girls who persisted in wearing headscarves to school were perceived as the advance guard of Muslim fundamentalism, obscurantist and misogynistic, and finally provided us with an opportunity to think and suggest that the Arabs were not like other immigrants.” Who is this ‘we’ invoked, how singular is it supposed to be, and how ironic are we to take its pronouncements? Is it confirming or countering what the French call bien pensant, a right-thinking person? It carries the language of middle-class dinner party conversation without the dinner party, without the mise en scene and characterisation a novel usually offers, as it will allow characters to discuss the ideas Ernaux presents. Ernaux instead offers them as a hovering abstraction, allowing the novel to move through large periods while constantly capturing an aspect of people’s lives.

        One may see this as an important and too little recognised purpose behind fiction. With all the talk of characterisation, agency and the descriptive, what is often be missed is that aspect. Ernaux’s interest often moves between what we might call the personal and impersonal aspect of one’s existence, depending on the book. In Exteriors and The Years, life is seen from the outside (as Exteriors’ title makes clear); in Getting Lost and Simple Passion it is from the inside, from a claustrophobic obsession. Ernaux explains why she adopts such exteriority or interiority according to the given book, In Exteriors she says: “I paid attention to the conversations exchanged on the RER. I felt the urge to transcribe the scenes, words and gestures of unknown people, who are never to be seen again, graffiti scribbled on walls, no sooner dry than hastily erased, sentences overheard on the radio and news items read in the papers.” In Simple Passionshe opens by announcing, “centuries and centuries, hundreds of generations have gone by, and it is only now that we get to see this [a pornographic film], a man’s penis and a woman’s vagina coming together, the sperm, something we couldn’t take in without almost dying of shame has become as easy to watch as a handshake.” She then adds that “writing should aim to do the same, to replicate the feeling of witness in sexual intercourse, that feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgement.” Ernaux goes on to write about an affair with a Russian diplomat, as she does too in Getting Lost, with the former a novella; the latter the publication of a diary she was writing as the affair unfolded - and while she unravelled.  

        But if the impersonal and the personal books show the same sensibility, it is because the works that apparently have nothing to do with Ernaux, and the books that are all about Ernaux, contain in the former instance a surprising objectivity and in the latter an intriguing subjectivity. Of Exteriors she says, “I am sure that you can learn more about yourself by embracing the outside world than by taking refuge in the intimacy of a journal.” But she says of the intimate journal Getting Lost that “…the outside world is almost totally absent from these pages” and yet an objectivity is perhaps sought, nevertheless. “I wanted to make this passion a work of art in my life, or rather this affair became a passion because I wanted it to be a work of art (Michel Foucault: the highest good is to make one’s life a work of art).” Ernaux may or may not be suffering for her art, but she is suffering within the context of art, as though the Russian diplomat is her own Count Vronsky as she invokes Anna Karenina. In Simple Passion she mentions films that in some ways echo her predicament:The Woman Next Door, Loulou, Trop Belle Pour Toi!  Equally, it is as though she wants to find in romantic tropes what Nathalie Sarraute called tropisms, giving to her feelings both a far greater intensity than the romantic longings and yearnings to be found in a supermarket magazine, or popular music, yet also acknowledging there is validity to such states that pop culture can capture. “Throughout this period I didn’t once listen to any classical music. I preferred songs. Sentimental songs, which previously I had ignored, moved me deeply. In a simple, straightforward manner, they spoke of the absolute, universal nature of passion.” When she would hear Sylvie Vartan sing “C’est fatal, animal’, I knew I wasn’t the only woman to feel that way. Songs accompanied and legitimised my own experience.” (A Simple Passion)

    Describing how she would use tropisms, Sarraute says “I told myself perhaps it would be interesting to take two semblances of characters who were entirely commonplace, as in Balzac, a miser and his daughter, and to show all the tropisms that develop inside of them.” (Paris Review) The writer can use a conventional novel as the basis for the tropism but couldn’t write a standard work of fiction made up of them. “What interest would there be? Because in a more traditional novel, one shows characters with personality traits, while the tropisms are entirely minute things that take place in a few instants inside of anybody at all.” (Paris Review) The purpose of tropisms is that they don't further characterisation; they obliterate it. It reveals perspective but doesn’t contribute to the psychological development of character. If someone sees the sun on the water, the bright blue of a coat, a burnished autumn leaf, these are observations equally available to anyone and needn’t reveal their personality. As opposed to Gatsby’s interest in status in Fitzgerald’s novel, Angstrom’s interest in sex as he gets over his marriage break-up, or Rastignac’s parvenu ambitions in Balzac’s work. 

      However, if fiction seems to have simultaneously evolved and retreated, to have returned to the more accepted demands of storytelling, and has also become more revealing of the details Ernaux proposes when she mentions pornography, it will have done so by absorbing modernist demands without being beholden to some of their difficulties. Writers including Kelman, Handke, Marquez and Carver are probably less difficult to read than Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Faulkner and Woolf. We needn’t overestimate the influences here, nor underestimate the complexity of the more recent writers’ work. It is only to say they might wish to make more concrete the abstractions of their forebears and replace difficulty with urgency, as if, out of the demands the earlier works made, opportunities arose that needed to acknowledge the breakthroughs offered - but needn’t add to the complications involved. In Kelman’s work, the characters are often as idle as Beckett’s and as internally restless. But the context is clear, the situations delineated: frequently figures unemployed or in jobs they dislike in post-industrial Glasgow. It would be unfair to say Kelman has popularised Beckett (book sales alone would suggest otherwise), just as it wouldn’t be fair to insist Marquez has popularised Faulkner (though sales might propose he has). It is more the later works potentially find a solution to the problem’s difficulties without ignoring the problem that has arisen. The difference between a Kelman novel like The Busconductor Hines and Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain is the difference between a writer having passed through this process or not.  

         If we propose Ernaux’s work can be seen within the context of Sarraute’s, it rests partly on finding in the everyday the details that belong to everyone and not someone. The books are written with an assumption that whatever she describes cannot be of no interest since she offers what everyone can see or be part of historically, in the impersonal works, and assumes that whatever she feels will be felt by others in the personal ones. She doesn’t need to develop characters to contain these perceptions and feelings; they can be quickly and instinctively acknowledged by all. “Our experience of the world cannot be subject to classification. In other words, the feelings and thoughts inspired by places and objects are distinct from their cultural content: thus a supermarket can provide just as much meaning and human truth as a concert hall.” (Exteriors) The point of Ernaux’s work is that while it isn’t fiction, it isn’t quite autobiography either. Why it isn’t fiction rests partly on the absence of story. A story to become such a thing needs to be extracted from the surrounding world that isn’t of much narrative interest — the story isn’t only creation; it is subtraction. Its purpose is not just to tell an exciting story but to remove from the telling much that will pass for unnecessary detail getting in the way of the flow. 

   This might sound like we are describing a certain type of story and one many a modern fiction writer has eschewed in their search for the minutiae of the mundane. But even so pared-back a writer as Carver is, in the pared-backness, clearly telling a story. He is finding the important details that can claim for it a narrative purpose. Not much may happen in 'Cathedral', but we can assume that the presence of the visiting blind man to a couple’s home is the most important thing that has happened to the central male character in a while, and the story is about why he believes this is significant. In another example of American minimalism, Communist by Ford, a kid goes along to a goose shoot with his mum's lover. It might not seem like much of an event, but it is important for him. Many works of modern fiction play up that significance to an individual, even if it may not seem much of a story dramatically.

    Yet this is still fiction and Ernaux is resistant to telling it. Speaking of one of her works, she says “The book was massively misunderstood when it came out. They compared me to Madame Bovary. But Madame Bovary is a fictional character! And I am not; I am the person holding the pen.” (The Dial) Here is Ernaux annoyed she has been compared to a character: nobody admired Bovary’s talent; that was reserved for Flaubert. Yet her annoyance could also rest on resisting the content of Flaubert’s novel.  He may have famously said that “…what seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style…a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible.”  (Selected Letters) However, the book would be held together by an exquisite prose style so that the language of literature would be more present than the story it was telling. Yet Madame Bovary is full of storytelling: the husband making a hash of an operation that leads to a lad’s leg getting amputated; there is Emma’s torrid affair; her debts and her suicide. To reduce Ernaux’s work and her own character to a 19th-century novelist and his main protagonist could seem an insult of a particular kind. It is as though in such comments that all Ernoux wanted to do was fit her life into literature; to claim for herself a status equal to that of a literary character. The point would seem more the opposite; to see, and to say, the quotidian nature of her existence wasn’t too different from anybody else's. That was what made it interesting. 

      It is also, of course, why it wouldn’t have much to do with what usually passes for autobiography. When an actor, a rock star or a politician writes about their life, it is because that life is deemed extraordinary, and if they can’t write it themselves, through lack of talent or laziness, a ghost-writer will be called upon. The life cannot be ignored even if the autobiographer hasn’t the ability, the time or the inclination to put down the words. The idea is that such a work should be in the public domain; their celebrity demands it.  However, while Ernaux is now a famous Nobel prize-winning author, she won it for the relative anonymity of the work and what was deemed her bravery in producing it. The Nobel Committee admired “The courage and clinical acuity of her work.”

     Though Ernaux is resistant to the word autofiction, she would nevertheless share with other perceived practitioners an interest in conquering the shame of her existence: a philosophical project that attracted for example both Nietzsche and Sartre. “The charm of knowledge would be small indeed”, Nietzsche says, “were it not that there is so much shame to be overcome on the way to it.” (Beyond Good and Evil)  Elsewhere, he reckons: “Whom do you call bad? – He who always wants to put people to shame. What is most human to you? – To spare someone shame. What is the seal of having become free? – No longer to be ashamed before oneself.” (Gay Science) In his passages on shame in Being and Nothingness, Sartre starts by speaking of a person looking through a peephole and getting lost in their voyeurism, before hearing footsteps that make them aware of the deed as a sudden fear of shame overcomes them. No longer lost in the deed, they are aware of their body as an object in the eyes of others who can witness them and make them feel ashamed. According to Luna Dolezal, Sartre discusses shame firstly as a moral emotion; akin to guilt and where others’ judgements teach one of transgressing a rule or norm. “Second, shame is a mode of self-evaluation through shame, I can see and judge myself. Third, and most significantly for this analysis, shame is an ontological structure of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. It is because of our ’original shame’ … for Sartre, that we have the capacity for reflective self-consciousness and, further, the capacity to be relational subjects.” (‘Shame, Vulnerability and Belonging: Reconsidering Sartre’s Account of Shame’) In Sartre’s account, shame is counter-revealed; someone sees our actions and we feel ashamed. But in some of Nietzsche’s remarks about shame, it rests on its personal overcoming rather than its contingent discovery. It suggests a shame closer to confession but with none of the religious connotations that need accompany such a belief. 

      To be ashamed of oneself in some ways might appear contrary to Sartre’s take; aren’t we ashamed in front of others, and isn’t the other’s look upon us what constitutes that shamefulness? But Sartre well-knew that just as we can imagine Pierre in Berlin, we can also imagine ourselves ashamed in the absence of others but aware of their presence in our minds. Nietzsche might wonder how we can overcome that shame seeing it not as a precondition of our personality but on occasion a limitation to it. A vital aspect of Ernaux’s project is to conquer shame as a condition. In her Nobel speech, Ernaux said: “I was twenty-two, studying literature in a provincial faculty with the daughters and sons of the local bourgeoisie, for the most part. I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth.” Ernaux hoped “that an individual victory could erase centuries of domination and poverty, an illusion that school had already fostered in me by dint of my academic success.” Such an achievement could have made her proud but she turned literary success into being not just a source of pride but also a source in which she could access shame. If pride was something that would make her exceptional as she left behind the labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, shame could return her to that world and many other worlds as well. If pride is the public face of the self, the part to put on the CV, to proclaim on social media; shame is the diaristic self — the person we all happen to be that nobody need know we are. If pride might make us feel special, shame makes us universal. 

        Not everybody can become a Nobel Prize-winning novelist. But everyone, more or less, will have felt the sort of emotions Ernaux churns up in her personal work, and will have observed what Ernaux observes in her less personally focused material. It might be about a heated conversation she hears in a post office, a child excited that she gets to “wear sunglasses in the shape of two hearts and a small apple-green basket of plaited plastic.” (Exteriors). Sometimes, the observations are historically specific but still general for their time. “Girls and boys hung around in separate packs - crossing paths on Sunday after Mass or at the movies.” (The Years) And again, “they had entered the Land of Worry over food, laundry, and childhood diseases. They had never imagined resembling their mothers but now were picking up where they had left off.” (The Years) But these incidents aren’t themselves shameful or capable of inducing shame. This is where the personal works come in. “My whole life has been an effort to tear myself away from male desire, in other words, from my own desire…sperm flowing over me like a river.” (Getting Lost) Sometimes it is humorous. “I realized that I’d lost a contact lens. I found it on his penis.” Sometimes it is harrowing. “He called at three o’clock. After that, it took me an hour or two to return to a state of calm that resembles the one I was in before these last three days: to wash away the anguish, the death which invaded me when I thought he’d gone back to Moscow.” (Getting Lost)

     In Exteriors, Ernaux says “I realize I am forever combing reality for signs of literature” and yet we have noted her horror when critics compared her to Madame Bovary. But there is a difference between reducing life to literature and expanding the life of literature. Flaubert, by claiming in principle to wish to write a novel about nothing, was part of that expansionist project. Contemporary autofictionists (whether they like the term or not) are part of this expansionism, even if they would be less inclined to speak of nothing but instead of the quotidian — something for nothing if you like. This needn’t be about the anguished absence of meaning but the everyday presence of the mundane. Getting Lost may be a book about a great love affair between a Russian diplomat and a well-known writer, but that wouldn’t be the most useful way of describing it. The book is much more about the everyday that sits behind the affair, with Ernaux spending most of the time in the French suburb of Cergy-Pontoise hoping for his phone calls and waiting for him to turn up. It isn’t even especially a book about jealousy or, if it is, there is almost no dramatisation of the feeling, as we find in 'The Kreuzer Sonata', Swann in Love, Catherine Millet’s Jealousy or Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment. 

     The point in Ernaux’s account (in both Simple Passion and Getting Lost) is that she rarely leaves home and remains mainly caught in domestic despair. Cergy-Pontoise is 45km from Paris, and though Ernaux sometimes goes into the city for publishing commitments, for the odd dinner and occasionally to events that her lover will also be attending, like a screening of a Russian film, the book never becomes voyeuristic or hounding. It is Ernaux knowing her place which gives the book much of its quotidian value. She isn’t allowed to contact him, doesn’t know where he lives and, living so far from the city, the impulse to follow him is no doubt partly curtailed by a 40-minute journey on the RER. It becomes a book of rumination, with Ernaux fretting over her feelings, worrying over her age, and seeing her life in the most banal of love stories and songs. She invokes her past, listens to Russian spoken, and wonders if her lover will show up in the immediate future, or even phone. “I don’t wonder at my madness in ’58, after CG, my two years of bulimia, my distress because of men.” “I’m jealous of women who speak Russian (as if they had something in common with him that I never will…)” “Of course (and yet I waited…) he did not call as expected, ‘tomorrow or the day after.’ I’m on the verge of tears and nausea.” 

        Ernaux’s work is no more about nothing than Flaubert’s was: The Happening is about her difficulties finding an abortionist in early 60s France; The Years alludes to numerous political events including May ’68 and Vietnam, whileSimple Passion is a succinct account of the affair that she offers in diaristic form in Getting Lost. But at the same time, it is about a different nothing, as if each age retreats from the dramatic in its own way, or at least perceives it is. Out of this retreat comes a different form of an advance, with the writer in the present age often becoming more explicit as the dramatic becomes more implicit. In other words, it would be dramatically explicit for Ernaux to confront her lover at the embassy or go and see his wife. It is instead explicit in a different way when Ernaux says she refuses to wash her cum-stained underwear, or writes about having anal sex. The drama recedes, but the detail encroaches.

     It is here that we can return to the tropism and see how a rarefied literary problem can become an immediately personal one, without insisting on returning it to psychology, which wouldn’t be an extension of Sarraute’s concerns but a denial of them. If Fitzgerald believed that if you begin with an individual and end up with a type, if you begin with a type you end up with nothing, maybe that nothing can have value, and perhaps too the removal of the individual is the point. As Ernaux says: “It’s no longer my desire, my jealousy, in these pages. it’s desire, it’s jealousy.” (The Possession) This may leave us with a paradox: the autofictionist writes about themselves but also removes character. Character becomes potentially ethically problematic because the more you explore the person, the more risk of revelation there happens to be. In an autobiographical piece that includes plenty of revelations about others, James Salter says in the New Yorker, “to write of people thoroughly is to destroy them, use them up.” (‘James Salter’s Life in Moviemaking’) As Ernaux insists in Simple Passion when the lover hopes she won’t write a book about him. “…I haven’t written a book about him, neither have I written a book about myself. All I have done is translate into words — words he will probably never read, which are not intended for him — the way in which his existence has affected my life.” While Ernaux may be restricted by what she can say, she shouldn’t at all be restricted in how she feels and since the book is about affects that happen to be her own but needn’t necessarily be so (hence the claim she hasn’t written a book about herself), how to go directly to affect without the mediation of character? 

    Thus the project isn’t too far from Sarraute: “Only reluctantly does the novelist endow him with attributes that could make him too easily distinguishable: his physical aspect, gestures, actions, sensations, everyday emotions, studied and understood for so long, which contribute to giving him, at the cost of so little effort, an appearance of life, and present such a convenient hold for the reader. Even a name, which is an absolutely necessary feature of his accoutrement, is a source of embarrassment for the novelist.” (The Age of Suspicion) However, while for Ernaux this becomes a necessity as she cannot expose the diplomat, for Sarraute it is a deliberate choice as she mentions various modernist writers (Gide, Kafka, Joyce) who are wary of naming the figures in their novels. “The reader…must be kept from allowing his attention to wander,” Sarraute says, “or to be absorbed by the characters.” (The Age of Suspicion) The point of the tropism is to create perceptions without characterisation, while the point of autofiction is often to create a perspective without generating a plot. But what matters in both instances would be truths that traditionally would be expected to pass through character, situation and narrative instead go much more directly to the perceptual possibility. If someone obsesses over another as Ernaux does in Getting Lost and Simple Passion, how to examine the nature of obsession as a state over the object of that obsession? 

      A novelist could tell us all about the Russian diplomat’s wife, the details of his job, who he works with, how he is as a boss and so on. But an autofictionist works from inevitable restrictions that pass through the modernist prism yet arrives at an ethical limitation. The autofictionist then must ask themselves what they are risking in expanding the world that a traditional novelist would take for granted as an obligation, and the modernist will resist as a new form of creation. If the traditional novelist is obliged to create a character and a modernist might be suspicious of such creativity, the autofictionist isn’t offering or countering character creation but will be aware that the delineating has ethical consequences beyond the diegesis. Bovary couldn’t sue Flaubert, nor could Oliver Twist Dickens. But, for example, Kim Bong-gon’s work was suspended “…when a person claimed she was “sister C” from Kim’s Young Writers Award-winning 'Such Life' on Twitter on July 10, saying Kim used messages between them word for word in his story without her consent.” (Nasher) Chris Kraus noted,  “I couldn't believe when "I Love Dick" came out Dick Hebdige actuallythreatened to sue because of the whole issue about it invading his privacy.” (Sleek) 

    This notion of autofiction’s collateral damage became so pressing an issue in France that Natalie Edwards opens her article on French autofiction by commenting on “the spate of high-profile scandals that [have brought] literature into the realm of the law” (Autofiction and the Law) as she speaks of Gregoire Delacourt, Eric Reinhardt, Christine Angot, Camille Laurens, Marcela Iacub, and Lionel Duroy. Angot’s work is predicated on examining the relationship between her life and its fictional manifestation. “From her very first novel, Vu du ciel, which was published in 1990, Christine Angot has established herself firmly as a writer who has made it her mission”, Marion Sadoux says, “to explore and expose relentlessly the thin line between reality and fiction.” (‘Christine Angot’s autofictions: Literature and/or Reality?’)  Angot has lost two court cases over her work, finding herself fined 40,000 and 10,000 euros in cases brought by Elise Bidoit. “This week, a criminal court in Paris found her guilty of the cardinal sin of fiction writing: not making it up at all.” (Independent) Angot could potentially have found herself in prison: Edwards says, "Infringement carries a maximum penalty of imprisonment of one year and a fine of 45,000 euros” (Autofiction and the Law)  

        From a certain perspective, Angot didn’t just fail in the eyes of the law but also failed in the eyes of autofiction, accepting that one reason the author resists creating fictional worlds rests on the need to generate a curtailed relationship with character and situation. If the law can claim that too vivid a portrait of a living person has been created, then this would be a failure of both the conventional novel (the character is made up) and the modernist text (the character should hardly exist). Interestingly, “the judges decided she had pinched chunks of Elise’s life and used them to create a caricature. In a wonderfully pretentious Gallic phrase, they argued that Ms Angot hadn’t converted the real person into 'a character expressing ‘a truth’ that belongs solely to her’.” (The Independent) Reading Getting Lost and Simple Passion the books do seem to express a truth belonging solely to Ernaux, and in The Years and Exteriors, she offers work that belongs somehow to nobody in particular and everyone in general. The Years, because it belongs to the times (the post-war years into the 21st century), and Exteriors to the places (Cergy-Pontoise and the RER to Paris). 

    Ernaux has found a way to remake the tropism even if we wouldn’t doubt Sarraute would find this transformation unrecognisable and potentially a capitulation, just as Ernaux even if she taught the subject sees little in common with the writers of the Nouveau roman, declaring: “ Those aren’t the kind of novels I write at all.” (French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century) But if we are correct that sometimes a problem can be reinvigorated by a new investigation, one that might seem to have either little in common with the original or appear to be selling the original short while instead finding a new dimension to the problem, we can see that Ernaux returns to the Nouveau roman and finds a way out of the impasses the earlier writers insisted upon. This needn’t make Sarraute or Robbe-Grillet unreadable and Ernaux too easily readable. It is more to say there were questions ignored within the rejection of the traditional novel that Ernaux could pick up and say that there was still life in literature if one extracted from life for its production. What it needed to do was find the minutiae that would undermine the story, but the quotidian that would capture lived experience. It is an achievement that shouldn’t be underestimated, and one that can usefully be genealogised.


© Tony McKibbin