Simple Passion

08/06/2025

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 monomaniac succinctness

        Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion is as short as the hours waiting for her lover in the book are long, and perhaps she was looking for the briefest of forms after already writing about the affair far more extensively and in diary form in Getting Lost. (Though she published the shorter work a decade before the longer one) Getting Lost is at least five times the length and covers, day by day, the writer’s longing for a married man who would visit her place, on the outskirts of Paris, intermittently for over a year. If Henry James could say “try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost” (The Art of Fiction), then Ernaux insists that this should include getting lost as well, embroiled in an affair that left her so emotionally and sexually exhausted she couldn’t write - and yet there she was: writing a diary that became a book, as well as the shorter retrospective account that become a novella. 

      When James offered his remark in the late 19th century, he would have done so under the assumption that nothing being lost meant turning experience and observation into fictional accounts. Ernaux, writing a century later, knows that fiction is no longer what it was and takes full advantage of what would have been an incapacity into a different type of capacity. While she may believe according to Anita Chakraborty that “this was a period of her life when she admits to being lethargic from sex and thus useless for work”, that might have been detrimental to a writer trying to create a novel with characters and situations imaginatively realised. Still, Ernaux merely had to put down a few words a day about a man she couldn’t get out of her head. Some will see in this a dereliction of fictional duty; others a dissolving of boundaries that allows writers to get more directly at their preoccupations. If everybody has a novel in them, then autobiographical writers like Ernaux, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Emmanuel Carrere and Catherine Millet propose that the amateur can busily create plots and characters. The real work is being done in books about themselves. This would be an exaggeration, but while autofiction has become too broad a term to describe anyone from James Joyce to Marcel Proust, many a late 20th-century writer would seem to have absorbed the incorporation of the self within the fiction they write. This would include Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, Michel Houellebecq, Peter Handke and W.G. Sebald, all of whom are read surely as much for the thoughts the writers possess as for the narrator who offers by 19th-century standards rudimentary characterisation and narrative development. Adam Gaping reckons “…memoir is perhaps the leading genre of our time, as much as the novel was for the first half of the twentieth century.” (New Yorker) Whether they are quite autofictional as Ernaux, Millet, Knausgaard and sometimes Carrere are is moot, but none is inclined to write like Jane Austen or George Elliot, nor Flaubert or Tolstoy.

      Yet at the same time, Flaubert and Tolstoy have both often been invoked by Ernaux, including by Chakraborty in her review: “Like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, Ernaux’s affair should be counted as one of the great liaisons of literature.” (Guardian)  Ernaux mentions Anna Karenina herself near the end of Simple Passion: seeing in it the superstitious“…as if Anna Karenina were some esoteric work in which it would be forbidden to turn a particular page on pain of ill fortune.” The invocation makes sense: after all, her lover is younger and Russian, her very own Vronsky, even if Ernaux lives in a time where divorce is acceptable and she has already long since parted from her husband before the affair starts. Her children have grown up. At least Ernaux can hardly be accused of appropriation. One of the advantages in making one’s own life the stuff of (auto) fiction is that you can mine and eventually strip mine your own immediate resources, even if there is the risk (and a mixed metaphor) of a fallowed field. Traditional fiction can be viewed as crop-rotation, drawing on enough land to keep things fertile, while autofiction risks an agronomic impoverishment. When a writer covers the same affair more than once, this might seem to prove the point.

      Nevertheless, one of the ironies in retreating from the fictional is that, in an odd way, form becomes paramount. The writer by focusing on their life (or at least a consistent version of it that resembles what we know of a given writer) escapes repetition by formal variation. The difference between Getting Lost and Simple Passion is almost non-existent in content and enormous in execution. Simple Passion is mainly in the past tense and Getting Lost in the present, even if these tenses are complicated in the writing, partly because of the complications involved in the feelings. Near the end of Simple Passion, a footnote alerts us to the shift in tenses we may have begun to notice. “For want of a better solution, I have switched from the past to the present, although it is impossible to establish the demarcation line between the two tenses. I am incapable of describing the way in which my passion for A developed day by day. I can only free certain moments in time”, she says, “and single out isolated symptoms of a phenomenon whose chronology remains uncertain — as in the case of historical events.” In Getting Lost, the tense moves between the immediately anticipatory and the subsequently recollected.  “This morning’s drama: he’ll call tonight, or tomorrow and say it’s over.” There was a phone call earlier. A second call made me think it had to be him. It was Eric. (Ernaux’s son] In Getting Lost, Ernaux is in the affair; in Simple Passion, she reflects upon it. This is further complicated, however, by Simple Passion being published shortly after the affair in 1991 and Getting Lost a decade later. The latter may have been written at the time of the encounters, but Ernaux sat on it while promptly publishing a book that the Fitzcarraldo back cover claims is “blurring the line between fact and fiction.” A book that takes its form from the intricacies of a life can seem much less concerned with form than one that fits into a template of fictional expectation. When Ernaux speaks of how impossible it was for her to establish the demarcation line between two tenses, this can merely be a grammatical problem or a technical determination in a typical novel.  A writer may be inexperienced and realise they have slipped into a different tense, or an experienced writer might feel that during a tense passage, so to speak, a more immediate approach is needed. 

         This isn’t what concerns Ernaux.  What does isn't solving creative problems in the manner above, but in taking risks that involve the intricate relationship between life and literature. As she says, “If it’s not a risk [to write it] then it’s nothing.” (Guardian) That might not generally be a useful dictum for writing, but it probably is for Ernaux's work. If the writer wishes to escape the rules of fictional expectation and into autofictional exposure (no matter if Ernaux dislikes the term autofiction), what are the new demands? By analogy, we can think of a writing approach that could appear antithetical to Ernaux’s. In the Oulopo movement, various writers often used the ludic: lipograms, rhopalism and palindromes. In lipograms, a letter will insistently be unused in the text; rhopalism consists of a poem with each line made up of a single word and the next line a letter longer than the previous one, and so on. A palindrome is of course where a text can be read forwards or backwards. Ada, Abba, madam, civic, rotor, kayak. But try and write a palindromic sentence, things start to get difficult. The point was to create rules that needn’t be those of established literary forms. As practitioner Daniel Levin Becker says, “I buy pretty wholeheartedly into the argument that creativity thrives on rules and constraints, and that there are rules and constraints in virtually everything we do–so there’s potential for organized play, i.e. games, all around us. For me the games usually have to do with language, and are usually pretty momentary–but what’s cool about this line of thinking is that (a) it can be anything with rules and (b) it doesn't have to be momentary, that you could use those rules to build something much bigger if you were so inclined.” (WritersNoOneReads) There may have been Oulipo writers who managed to produce work that remained within the constraints and yet were also explorations of biographical reality. Ernaux writes of one such practitioner, Georges Perec, "when he wrote A Void in 1969, an entire novel without the letter e, it was the exploit that one noticed, but the central figure of Perec’s work is there, displayed, made readable: absence, emptiness, a hole. A few years later, W or the Memory of Childhood, gives the key to this figure: the absence of childhood memories, a mother, without a grave, who disappeared in Auschwitz.” Ernaux adds: “Bits torn from a memory filled with holes alternate with the imaginary construction of a concentration camp-like athletic universe, W, and it is in the intersection of the efforts to create a case history and the reconstruction of the fantasy, their reciprocal reflections, that, perhaps something of the unspeakable, genocide, can be grasped: 'the unsayable is not buried inside the writing, it is what prompted it in the first place,' he writes.” (AnnieErnaux.Org)  

      Ernaux sees in Oulipo less the playful than the revelatory, seeing the game with form as the only way perhaps Perec could make sense of experiences that would otherwise have been inaccessible. Ernaux too has moved far away from the rules and regulations of classic fiction, with Ernaux offering no world in these two books. In Getting Lost, she says, “I’d have done better to work on my paper for the Barbican instead of going to the Cocktail party. Abysmal. Parisian. More journalists than writers (and always the same writers —-Sollers, Bianciotti, etc.)”  She is referring to a talk she will go on to give in London, and Philippe Sollers and Hector Bianciotti are well-known French writers. Of course, Ernaux can claim she has written a diaristic account of an affair and has no obligation to fill in details that would remove its authenticity. Yet this is partly what autofiction allows; it doesn't give the writer creative licence but in some ways its inverse: Lincoln Michel says, “When I’ve taught fiction classes, I’ve often seen that when students encounter a book outside of the modes of actual realism or faux worldbuilding realism, they don’t know how to evaluate it. They believe that a different way of seeing reality aren’t invitations to see reality in a new way yourself, but simply failures of worldbuilding.” (Electric Lit) If this is what readers expect it is undeniably partly what Oulipo resisted, and autofictional books do so also, if very differently. Imagine a work that uses the diary form but remains within a fictional expectation. The Barbican would be given a broader context; Sollers and Bianciotti writers given at least a hint of description and also first names. Her children would be included and their opinion on their mother’s affair offered, how her ex-husband felt and a physical description of all of them. 

    There may be an ethical reason for their absence: maybe her ex-husband and her children are being protected just as Ernaux explains that she wants to say as little about her lover because she doesn’t want to expose him. But this would indicate for some that autofiction doesn’t work. If worldbuilding is important, then this type of novel must be rejected or if accepted, must accept the collateral damage to those who enter the writer’s life. Ernaux rejects this, saying in a footnote inA Simple Passion,  her lover “did not choose to play a part in this book, only in my life” and that she must protect his identity, saying “I cannot describe him in greater detail or supply information that might lead to his identification.” How then to describe the indescribable? This wouldn’t be an imaginative limitation but an ethical concern. If Oulipo writers found themselves setting impossible tasks based on often mathematical principles, or linguistic gymnastics, the autofictionist’s limits are ethical. They are even, or maybe more especially, legal ones, as Vigdis Hjorth discovered where “the 'unpleasantness' in the novel  [Will and Testament] has spilled spectacularly over into real life. Hjorth’s sister, Helga, a human rights lawyer, responded to the book by writing a novel of her own, Fri Vilje (Free Will), in which a character suffers the trauma of living with the public fallout from a narcissistic sibling’s “dishonest” autobiographical novel. Hjorth’s mother, Inger, threatened legal action against a theatre in Bergen, which staged an adaptation of Will and Testament. The lawsuit demanded £23,000 in compensation for every family member affected by the story.” (Guardian) One might wonder if Hjorth offered a little too much world-building.

         Yet this is where the legal and the aesthetic come together and create an equivalent of the rules Oulipo insisted upon. What is character, a writer might say, and offer various features that will create one: the colour of their hair, their eyes, the clothes they wear, the job they do, the place they live. A little about their wife and their children. All this will be fictionally justifiable but autofictionally potentially libellous, or at the very least indiscreet. Yet our claims propose that within the autofictional there are two potentially opposing purposes. One would be the assumption that writing a book so close to the truth is a way of exposing oneself and exposing others. It cuts through the cant and hypocrisy of life and refuses to coat it in fictive form so that the raw nerves are all the more exposed. The other is that it accepts the limitations of that exposure and thus the similarities with the resistive practices of Oulipo. It can also and perhaps inevitably combine elements of both, with the writer revealing herself with a factive I and semi-concealing others as elliptical subjects. 

    This can, of course, create a characterisational imbalance that might lead the autofictional narrator to be fully rounded and the other main characters less developed. We might believe that Ernaux’s life is more reclusive and solipsistic than it happens to be because of the limitations she feels obliged to place upon her work. But it might also be a way of creating a world that lends itself well to the shorter books Ernaux often writes. By limiting herself in Simple Passion to the eighteen months of the affair, by proposing that during this period nothing mattered to her except this man, and by leaving anyone else merely an adjunct to this passion, Ernaux achieves the sort of monomaniac succinctness Marguerite Duras practicedin books like The Lover, The Malady of Death and Emily L. but unlike Duras offers it in a harder, firmer form. There is in Duras’s genius the vague; in Ernaux, the concrete. Duras never had much interest in the specifics of things: in going shopping, travelling the metro and the presence of pop culture. In Emily L the narrator says, “I see cities as objects of dread, with their thick defensive walls. That’s how I see governments too. And money. And money people, I’m full of echoes of war and of colonial occupations. Sometimes, when I hear orders shouted in German, I have almost a compulsion to kill.” 

      Ernaux is more inclined to ground things in the everyday even when lost in recollection. “I would take myself back to Venice, where I had spent a week’s holiday just before meeting A [the Russian lover]. I tried to recall my timetable and the places I had visited…I would reconstitute my room in the annexe of La Calcina Hotel, straining to remember every detail: the narrow bed, the blocked window giving on to the back of the Cafe Cucciolo, the table and its cloth on which I had placed some books.” Ernaux will tell us about trying on a skirt in a Benetton shop and finds herself browsing through a copy of Techniques of Lovemaking in a hypermarket. Edmund White reckoned, speaking of Ernaux’s book about post-war France and that amongst other things charts the rise of living standards and moral freedoms, “The Years is an earnest, fearless book, a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism, for our period of absolute commodity fetishism." (New York Times) Ernaux’s work generally possesses this dimension as she acknowledges herself as a woman living in the suburbs and privy to the lives of those who aren’t so far removed from herself even if much of her work has illustrated the difference between her working-class upbringing and her professional status as an academic and writer. She lives in a new town (Clergy-Pontoise) and regularly travels on the RER. She might have escaped her background but not so much that she can’t identify with people whose lives aren’t all about art and ideas. The books usually have a quotidian immediacy mingling with self-preoccupation and this can make her books quick and easy reads, without one quite saying the books are without substance. 

        Much of this consequentiality comes from autofictional necessity. If one of the problems for many post-war writers was form, and that form had exhausted itself and left the writer with choices that could seem too free, then how to regain necessity? One answer was the conceit; the other contrariness. Oulipo and the Nouveau roman weren’t one and the same, but they both shared a disdain for books based on plot and characterisation. Michel Butor, one of the less radical novelists of the latter movement, nevertheless noted, “when we do something different, it shows that something different is possible and, consequently, these forms which presented themselves as the only ones are no longer the only possible ones.” (Contemporary Literature) Philip Stevick, looking at loosely post-modern writing in 1973, noted one of its features is that “new fiction, finally, in common with only a few scattered instances before it, seeks to represent, explicitly or implicitly, the act of writing as an act of play.” (Triquarterly) The risk is there is nothing that grounds the writing, and by retreating from realism the writer gains a useless freedom: an escape from traditional forms, yet also a retreat from the consequential. There are lots of reasons why this would be both irritating hyperbole and indifferent to developments in the analysis of language throughout the 20th century. But at the same time, there is no doubt that if the post-modern novel could be a play of signification,  a self-contained reality that needn’t attend to the moral let alone juridical, concerns beyond it, this is reversed in autofiction where characterisation isn’t rejected based on a retreat. It isn’t rejecting well-rounded 19th-century characterisation, it is contained by legal limits that wish to hold strongly to facts but must subsequently limit its capacity to explore character. 

     This is a point completely missed by Christiana Spens when she says, writing on Simple Passion: “I was frustrated by the secrecy of the author. Why did she not mention the man’s wife more? Why did she not mention the political context – this man was a Russian diplomat in France during the end of the Cold War.” Spens notes “they had met at an arts event, of the sort that security services around the world often use as fronts for espionage and soft power struggles. Was ignoring this the most French political statement ever? That with all that going on, rather than mention the war, Ernaux chose to wallow in an illicit affair instead?” (New Statesman) Pragmatically it protects the man’s identity, with Ernaux trading character complexity for personal confession, a trade-off that many might not accept but that would be to reject a form rather than to question a novelist’s abilities. When Ernaux says in the foreword to Getting Lost, she was using the initial S rather than the Russian’s name, “not that I believe that in doing so, I could protect his identity — a vain illusion, if ever there was one — but because the de-realising effect of the initial seemed consistent with what this man was to me, the embodiment of the abolute of something which instils a nameless terror.” 

       But that name has been protected, even a Nobel prize victory hasn’t revealed it, and yet in Ernaux’s claim, there is both the legalistic need to withhold his name, and the aesthetic desire to turn him into a symbolic function — and this is so in both Getting Lost and Simple Passion, where the S is an A.  Simple Passion contains a twofold necessity, even if each is contrary to the other. One protects the man legally; the other protects Ernaux existentially - as if she were finally more worried about becoming a nutcase than fretting over a court case. After all, she notes after he leaves her that she should get herself screened for AIDS - it “occurred to me. ‘At least he would have left with that.’” She also says just after this, “I reflected there was very little difference between this reconstruction and a hallucination, between memory and madness.”  This is a madness that accepts no reality beyond the couple. Earlier in the book, she notes every time the phone rang, “I was consumed with a hope that only lasted the time it took me slowly to pick the receiver and say hello. When I realised it wasn’t him, I felt so utterly dejected that I began to loathe the person who was on the line.”  The use of the initial becomes the necessary means to protect the lover’s privacy, and a radical signification to protect her from a man who left her feeling half-insane.   

            Ernaux is saying this is no more his fault than hers; more the inevitable outcome of an affair where she sleeps with a married man who won’t leave his wife and will protect his career. Equally, the book doesn’t indicate the narrator is doing anything wrong either: she seeks pleasure and he offers it, and the wife is only ever a cause for jealous concern and not empathic consideration. In the right-wing City Journal, Jonathan Clarke says, “Ernaux has vexed French social conservatives for decades by writing about her abortion, her extramarital affairs, and her ambivalent feelings about motherhood. Of course, it is silly to quarrel with a writer’s choice of subject matter. What rankles is her handling of this material, her evident confusion of brutality and indifference with authenticity.” Clarke notes that the problem is “Ernaux’s relentless concern with her own moods and prerogatives ends in moral abdication.” But all he adds is a demand for conservative morality over liberal actions. If Ernaux registered more guilt, then she would be entitled to cover such liberal subject matter. But the coldness offends Clarke, even if this is central to Ernaux’s work. She neither pities nor self-pities, which isn’t the same thing as saying she isn’t self-absorbed, or rather so preoccupied with her lover that self and other dissolve without becoming a virtue. If someone becomes focused on a dying partner, parent or child, the obsessive becomes virtuous; with a lover it can become indifference to all else, as evident in Ernaux’s comment about the telephone and also when she says, “I was entirely at the mercy of that crucial moment when I would hear the car brake, the door slam and his footsteps on the concrete porch.”  But she adds that it was “a moment which I always anticipated with unspeakable terror.” It is that Ernaux feels terror that makes the novella so interesting, with her well aware that the self-aggrandisement in taking a younger lover also contains the potential self-abasement of her reliance upon his presence there. A book more open to the world wouldn’t have quite conveyed that potent impotence; that combination of feeling alive and having little say in the emotions generated.

          In proposing a focus on a close relative as potentially a more worthy preoccupation, we should, of course, acknowledge that Ernaux has written books about her parents’ illness and death: A Man’s Place about her father, and I Remain in Darkness, about her mother. But Clarke notes of the latter that this has little to do with concern, quoting various passages where Ernaux says, “All that stands between me and death is my demented mother” and “She smells bad. I can’t change her. I sprinkle her with eau de cologne.” Clarke adds, “Ernaux has said that she believes neither in 'duty' nor in 'boundaries'—which is evident enough.” (City Journal) Yet the boundary question seems untrue. Someone with no interest in them would reveal the name of her lover and would be unlikely to avoid events where the lover might be. “I avoided opportunities of meeting him in public, in the company of other people, as I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him just for the sake of it. And so I didn’t go to an inauguration to which he had been invited, obsessed by his image nonetheless throughout the evening: smiling, showering a woman with attentions the same way he had behaved with me when we first met.” Unlike other works about contemporary female obsession (The Piano Teacher and Days of Abandonment), Ernaux isn’t one to make a scene, and most novels are made up of exactly that: scenes. Ernaux's notion of boundaries might be pertinent to the ways she resists certain actions in life, but they are also about eschewing actions in literature. If we find Spens’ comments naive, it rests on asking from Ernaux what she consistently resists, no matter the occasional drama in her work, and perhaps no scene more vividly than the abortion she has in Happening, a scene Clarke quotes in detail all the better to condemn the writer. Ernaux says: “We don’t know what to do with the fetus. O goes to her room to fetch an empty Melba toast wrapper and I slip it inside. I walk to the bathroom with the bag. It feels like a stone inside. I turn the bag upside down above the bowl. I pull the chain.” Clarke reckons “even in the name of realism, the hatefulness of this scene is inescapable” as he believes “she is the writer for those who find their own choices endlessly interesting but do not assign any particular weight to them.” (City Journal) If Pens misunderstands autofiction dramatically, Clarke does so morally - they seek events and ethical through lines the work often resists or at least questions. (Carrere’s work is centrally about the latter aspect). 

         By proposing that autofiction can be both a development and a radical rejection of a movement like Oulipo, we can see that the constraints Ernaux and others insist upon needn’t be ludically self-enclosed but necessarily self-imposed when one risks exposing identities and facing legal threats. It gives literature an internal necessity out of external ones, and imposes form without making it arbitrary. Fiction usually offers a combination of the world and the imagination, the factual detail and its narrative development. Oliver Twist never existed, but the Victorian London Dickens placed him in did; there was no Rastignac but Balzac’s post-Napoleonic Paris very much existed. In Oulipo’s work, there need be no London or Paris - the conceits of the imagination and the ingenuity of the craft often suffice. In autofiction, the writer becomes Oliver or Rastignac as the characters exist just as the cities the work is located in happen to do so as well. If autofiction is “fictionalised autobiography that does away with traditional elements of the novel such as plot and character development” (Guardian), then one can claim, negatively that “autofiction is egocentric, self-indulgent, lazy.” (Art Review) Autofictionist Shelia Heti muses over the latter claim and reckons that perhaps autofiction succeeds less because it has confessional qualities, but that its nature is constructed. This can lead to all sorts of problems, with Carrere, Knausgaard and others rearranging facts and making things up. However, in principle, the autofictional construct is predicated on a reality compressed by the various ethical and legal demands that limit it. In this sense, autofiction construction rests in its compression, and few autofictionists have followed this principle more than Ernaux, with Simple Passion, Exteriors, A Man’s Place and other works so short that they can be read in one sitting. There are long longer books of course (including Getting Lost and The Years). But there is no doubt that much of Ernaux’s significance rests on managing through the eradication of plot, character and event much that can pass for grisle in the fictional world. There is of course in plot, character and event much that is meat rather than fat, and while autofiction has its place, that isn’t quite saying it should replace fiction that contains all the elements that make up vivid world-building. Yet as a corrective against obliviously bloated novels, autofiction can be useful in cleaning the fictional palate as it removes the fatty, stringy residue from its teeth. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Simple Passion

 monomaniac succinctness

        Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion is as short as the hours waiting for her lover in the book are long, and perhaps she was looking for the briefest of forms after already writing about the affair far more extensively and in diary form in Getting Lost. (Though she published the shorter work a decade before the longer one) Getting Lost is at least five times the length and covers, day by day, the writer’s longing for a married man who would visit her place, on the outskirts of Paris, intermittently for over a year. If Henry James could say “try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost” (The Art of Fiction), then Ernaux insists that this should include getting lost as well, embroiled in an affair that left her so emotionally and sexually exhausted she couldn’t write - and yet there she was: writing a diary that became a book, as well as the shorter retrospective account that become a novella. 

      When James offered his remark in the late 19th century, he would have done so under the assumption that nothing being lost meant turning experience and observation into fictional accounts. Ernaux, writing a century later, knows that fiction is no longer what it was and takes full advantage of what would have been an incapacity into a different type of capacity. While she may believe according to Anita Chakraborty that “this was a period of her life when she admits to being lethargic from sex and thus useless for work”, that might have been detrimental to a writer trying to create a novel with characters and situations imaginatively realised. Still, Ernaux merely had to put down a few words a day about a man she couldn’t get out of her head. Some will see in this a dereliction of fictional duty; others a dissolving of boundaries that allows writers to get more directly at their preoccupations. If everybody has a novel in them, then autobiographical writers like Ernaux, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Emmanuel Carrere and Catherine Millet propose that the amateur can busily create plots and characters. The real work is being done in books about themselves. This would be an exaggeration, but while autofiction has become too broad a term to describe anyone from James Joyce to Marcel Proust, many a late 20th-century writer would seem to have absorbed the incorporation of the self within the fiction they write. This would include Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, Michel Houellebecq, Peter Handke and W.G. Sebald, all of whom are read surely as much for the thoughts the writers possess as for the narrator who offers by 19th-century standards rudimentary characterisation and narrative development. Adam Gaping reckons “…memoir is perhaps the leading genre of our time, as much as the novel was for the first half of the twentieth century.” (New Yorker) Whether they are quite autofictional as Ernaux, Millet, Knausgaard and sometimes Carrere are is moot, but none is inclined to write like Jane Austen or George Elliot, nor Flaubert or Tolstoy.

      Yet at the same time, Flaubert and Tolstoy have both often been invoked by Ernaux, including by Chakraborty in her review: “Like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, Ernaux’s affair should be counted as one of the great liaisons of literature.” (Guardian)  Ernaux mentions Anna Karenina herself near the end of Simple Passion: seeing in it the superstitious“…as if Anna Karenina were some esoteric work in which it would be forbidden to turn a particular page on pain of ill fortune.” The invocation makes sense: after all, her lover is younger and Russian, her very own Vronsky, even if Ernaux lives in a time where divorce is acceptable and she has already long since parted from her husband before the affair starts. Her children have grown up. At least Ernaux can hardly be accused of appropriation. One of the advantages in making one’s own life the stuff of (auto) fiction is that you can mine and eventually strip mine your own immediate resources, even if there is the risk (and a mixed metaphor) of a fallowed field. Traditional fiction can be viewed as crop-rotation, drawing on enough land to keep things fertile, while autofiction risks an agronomic impoverishment. When a writer covers the same affair more than once, this might seem to prove the point.

      Nevertheless, one of the ironies in retreating from the fictional is that, in an odd way, form becomes paramount. The writer by focusing on their life (or at least a consistent version of it that resembles what we know of a given writer) escapes repetition by formal variation. The difference between Getting Lost and Simple Passion is almost non-existent in content and enormous in execution. Simple Passion is mainly in the past tense and Getting Lost in the present, even if these tenses are complicated in the writing, partly because of the complications involved in the feelings. Near the end of Simple Passion, a footnote alerts us to the shift in tenses we may have begun to notice. “For want of a better solution, I have switched from the past to the present, although it is impossible to establish the demarcation line between the two tenses. I am incapable of describing the way in which my passion for A developed day by day. I can only free certain moments in time”, she says, “and single out isolated symptoms of a phenomenon whose chronology remains uncertain — as in the case of historical events.” In Getting Lost, the tense moves between the immediately anticipatory and the subsequently recollected.  “This morning’s drama: he’ll call tonight, or tomorrow and say it’s over.” There was a phone call earlier. A second call made me think it had to be him. It was Eric. (Ernaux’s son] In Getting Lost, Ernaux is in the affair; in Simple Passion, she reflects upon it. This is further complicated, however, by Simple Passion being published shortly after the affair in 1991 and Getting Lost a decade later. The latter may have been written at the time of the encounters, but Ernaux sat on it while promptly publishing a book that the Fitzcarraldo back cover claims is “blurring the line between fact and fiction.” A book that takes its form from the intricacies of a life can seem much less concerned with form than one that fits into a template of fictional expectation. When Ernaux speaks of how impossible it was for her to establish the demarcation line between two tenses, this can merely be a grammatical problem or a technical determination in a typical novel.  A writer may be inexperienced and realise they have slipped into a different tense, or an experienced writer might feel that during a tense passage, so to speak, a more immediate approach is needed. 

         This isn’t what concerns Ernaux.  What does isn't solving creative problems in the manner above, but in taking risks that involve the intricate relationship between life and literature. As she says, “If it’s not a risk [to write it] then it’s nothing.” (Guardian) That might not generally be a useful dictum for writing, but it probably is for Ernaux's work. If the writer wishes to escape the rules of fictional expectation and into autofictional exposure (no matter if Ernaux dislikes the term autofiction), what are the new demands? By analogy, we can think of a writing approach that could appear antithetical to Ernaux’s. In the Oulopo movement, various writers often used the ludic: lipograms, rhopalism and palindromes. In lipograms, a letter will insistently be unused in the text; rhopalism consists of a poem with each line made up of a single word and the next line a letter longer than the previous one, and so on. A palindrome is of course where a text can be read forwards or backwards. Ada, Abba, madam, civic, rotor, kayak. But try and write a palindromic sentence, things start to get difficult. The point was to create rules that needn’t be those of established literary forms. As practitioner Daniel Levin Becker says, “I buy pretty wholeheartedly into the argument that creativity thrives on rules and constraints, and that there are rules and constraints in virtually everything we do–so there’s potential for organized play, i.e. games, all around us. For me the games usually have to do with language, and are usually pretty momentary–but what’s cool about this line of thinking is that (a) it can be anything with rules and (b) it doesn't have to be momentary, that you could use those rules to build something much bigger if you were so inclined.” (WritersNoOneReads) There may have been Oulipo writers who managed to produce work that remained within the constraints and yet were also explorations of biographical reality. Ernaux writes of one such practitioner, Georges Perec, "when he wrote A Void in 1969, an entire novel without the letter e, it was the exploit that one noticed, but the central figure of Perec’s work is there, displayed, made readable: absence, emptiness, a hole. A few years later, W or the Memory of Childhood, gives the key to this figure: the absence of childhood memories, a mother, without a grave, who disappeared in Auschwitz.” Ernaux adds: “Bits torn from a memory filled with holes alternate with the imaginary construction of a concentration camp-like athletic universe, W, and it is in the intersection of the efforts to create a case history and the reconstruction of the fantasy, their reciprocal reflections, that, perhaps something of the unspeakable, genocide, can be grasped: 'the unsayable is not buried inside the writing, it is what prompted it in the first place,' he writes.” (AnnieErnaux.Org)  

      Ernaux sees in Oulipo less the playful than the revelatory, seeing the game with form as the only way perhaps Perec could make sense of experiences that would otherwise have been inaccessible. Ernaux too has moved far away from the rules and regulations of classic fiction, with Ernaux offering no world in these two books. In Getting Lost, she says, “I’d have done better to work on my paper for the Barbican instead of going to the Cocktail party. Abysmal. Parisian. More journalists than writers (and always the same writers —-Sollers, Bianciotti, etc.)”  She is referring to a talk she will go on to give in London, and Philippe Sollers and Hector Bianciotti are well-known French writers. Of course, Ernaux can claim she has written a diaristic account of an affair and has no obligation to fill in details that would remove its authenticity. Yet this is partly what autofiction allows; it doesn't give the writer creative licence but in some ways its inverse: Lincoln Michel says, “When I’ve taught fiction classes, I’ve often seen that when students encounter a book outside of the modes of actual realism or faux worldbuilding realism, they don’t know how to evaluate it. They believe that a different way of seeing reality aren’t invitations to see reality in a new way yourself, but simply failures of worldbuilding.” (Electric Lit) If this is what readers expect it is undeniably partly what Oulipo resisted, and autofictional books do so also, if very differently. Imagine a work that uses the diary form but remains within a fictional expectation. The Barbican would be given a broader context; Sollers and Bianciotti writers given at least a hint of description and also first names. Her children would be included and their opinion on their mother’s affair offered, how her ex-husband felt and a physical description of all of them. 

    There may be an ethical reason for their absence: maybe her ex-husband and her children are being protected just as Ernaux explains that she wants to say as little about her lover because she doesn’t want to expose him. But this would indicate for some that autofiction doesn’t work. If worldbuilding is important, then this type of novel must be rejected or if accepted, must accept the collateral damage to those who enter the writer’s life. Ernaux rejects this, saying in a footnote inA Simple Passion,  her lover “did not choose to play a part in this book, only in my life” and that she must protect his identity, saying “I cannot describe him in greater detail or supply information that might lead to his identification.” How then to describe the indescribable? This wouldn’t be an imaginative limitation but an ethical concern. If Oulipo writers found themselves setting impossible tasks based on often mathematical principles, or linguistic gymnastics, the autofictionist’s limits are ethical. They are even, or maybe more especially, legal ones, as Vigdis Hjorth discovered where “the 'unpleasantness' in the novel  [Will and Testament] has spilled spectacularly over into real life. Hjorth’s sister, Helga, a human rights lawyer, responded to the book by writing a novel of her own, Fri Vilje (Free Will), in which a character suffers the trauma of living with the public fallout from a narcissistic sibling’s “dishonest” autobiographical novel. Hjorth’s mother, Inger, threatened legal action against a theatre in Bergen, which staged an adaptation of Will and Testament. The lawsuit demanded £23,000 in compensation for every family member affected by the story.” (Guardian) One might wonder if Hjorth offered a little too much world-building.

         Yet this is where the legal and the aesthetic come together and create an equivalent of the rules Oulipo insisted upon. What is character, a writer might say, and offer various features that will create one: the colour of their hair, their eyes, the clothes they wear, the job they do, the place they live. A little about their wife and their children. All this will be fictionally justifiable but autofictionally potentially libellous, or at the very least indiscreet. Yet our claims propose that within the autofictional there are two potentially opposing purposes. One would be the assumption that writing a book so close to the truth is a way of exposing oneself and exposing others. It cuts through the cant and hypocrisy of life and refuses to coat it in fictive form so that the raw nerves are all the more exposed. The other is that it accepts the limitations of that exposure and thus the similarities with the resistive practices of Oulipo. It can also and perhaps inevitably combine elements of both, with the writer revealing herself with a factive I and semi-concealing others as elliptical subjects. 

    This can, of course, create a characterisational imbalance that might lead the autofictional narrator to be fully rounded and the other main characters less developed. We might believe that Ernaux’s life is more reclusive and solipsistic than it happens to be because of the limitations she feels obliged to place upon her work. But it might also be a way of creating a world that lends itself well to the shorter books Ernaux often writes. By limiting herself in Simple Passion to the eighteen months of the affair, by proposing that during this period nothing mattered to her except this man, and by leaving anyone else merely an adjunct to this passion, Ernaux achieves the sort of monomaniac succinctness Marguerite Duras practicedin books like The Lover, The Malady of Death and Emily L. but unlike Duras offers it in a harder, firmer form. There is in Duras’s genius the vague; in Ernaux, the concrete. Duras never had much interest in the specifics of things: in going shopping, travelling the metro and the presence of pop culture. In Emily L the narrator says, “I see cities as objects of dread, with their thick defensive walls. That’s how I see governments too. And money. And money people, I’m full of echoes of war and of colonial occupations. Sometimes, when I hear orders shouted in German, I have almost a compulsion to kill.” 

      Ernaux is more inclined to ground things in the everyday even when lost in recollection. “I would take myself back to Venice, where I had spent a week’s holiday just before meeting A [the Russian lover]. I tried to recall my timetable and the places I had visited…I would reconstitute my room in the annexe of La Calcina Hotel, straining to remember every detail: the narrow bed, the blocked window giving on to the back of the Cafe Cucciolo, the table and its cloth on which I had placed some books.” Ernaux will tell us about trying on a skirt in a Benetton shop and finds herself browsing through a copy of Techniques of Lovemaking in a hypermarket. Edmund White reckoned, speaking of Ernaux’s book about post-war France and that amongst other things charts the rise of living standards and moral freedoms, “The Years is an earnest, fearless book, a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism, for our period of absolute commodity fetishism." (New York Times) Ernaux’s work generally possesses this dimension as she acknowledges herself as a woman living in the suburbs and privy to the lives of those who aren’t so far removed from herself even if much of her work has illustrated the difference between her working-class upbringing and her professional status as an academic and writer. She lives in a new town (Clergy-Pontoise) and regularly travels on the RER. She might have escaped her background but not so much that she can’t identify with people whose lives aren’t all about art and ideas. The books usually have a quotidian immediacy mingling with self-preoccupation and this can make her books quick and easy reads, without one quite saying the books are without substance. 

        Much of this consequentiality comes from autofictional necessity. If one of the problems for many post-war writers was form, and that form had exhausted itself and left the writer with choices that could seem too free, then how to regain necessity? One answer was the conceit; the other contrariness. Oulipo and the Nouveau roman weren’t one and the same, but they both shared a disdain for books based on plot and characterisation. Michel Butor, one of the less radical novelists of the latter movement, nevertheless noted, “when we do something different, it shows that something different is possible and, consequently, these forms which presented themselves as the only ones are no longer the only possible ones.” (Contemporary Literature) Philip Stevick, looking at loosely post-modern writing in 1973, noted one of its features is that “new fiction, finally, in common with only a few scattered instances before it, seeks to represent, explicitly or implicitly, the act of writing as an act of play.” (Triquarterly) The risk is there is nothing that grounds the writing, and by retreating from realism the writer gains a useless freedom: an escape from traditional forms, yet also a retreat from the consequential. There are lots of reasons why this would be both irritating hyperbole and indifferent to developments in the analysis of language throughout the 20th century. But at the same time, there is no doubt that if the post-modern novel could be a play of signification,  a self-contained reality that needn’t attend to the moral let alone juridical, concerns beyond it, this is reversed in autofiction where characterisation isn’t rejected based on a retreat. It isn’t rejecting well-rounded 19th-century characterisation, it is contained by legal limits that wish to hold strongly to facts but must subsequently limit its capacity to explore character. 

     This is a point completely missed by Christiana Spens when she says, writing on Simple Passion: “I was frustrated by the secrecy of the author. Why did she not mention the man’s wife more? Why did she not mention the political context – this man was a Russian diplomat in France during the end of the Cold War.” Spens notes “they had met at an arts event, of the sort that security services around the world often use as fronts for espionage and soft power struggles. Was ignoring this the most French political statement ever? That with all that going on, rather than mention the war, Ernaux chose to wallow in an illicit affair instead?” (New Statesman) Pragmatically it protects the man’s identity, with Ernaux trading character complexity for personal confession, a trade-off that many might not accept but that would be to reject a form rather than to question a novelist’s abilities. When Ernaux says in the foreword to Getting Lost, she was using the initial S rather than the Russian’s name, “not that I believe that in doing so, I could protect his identity — a vain illusion, if ever there was one — but because the de-realising effect of the initial seemed consistent with what this man was to me, the embodiment of the abolute of something which instils a nameless terror.” 

       But that name has been protected, even a Nobel prize victory hasn’t revealed it, and yet in Ernaux’s claim, there is both the legalistic need to withhold his name, and the aesthetic desire to turn him into a symbolic function — and this is so in both Getting Lost and Simple Passion, where the S is an A.  Simple Passion contains a twofold necessity, even if each is contrary to the other. One protects the man legally; the other protects Ernaux existentially - as if she were finally more worried about becoming a nutcase than fretting over a court case. After all, she notes after he leaves her that she should get herself screened for AIDS - it “occurred to me. ‘At least he would have left with that.’” She also says just after this, “I reflected there was very little difference between this reconstruction and a hallucination, between memory and madness.”  This is a madness that accepts no reality beyond the couple. Earlier in the book, she notes every time the phone rang, “I was consumed with a hope that only lasted the time it took me slowly to pick the receiver and say hello. When I realised it wasn’t him, I felt so utterly dejected that I began to loathe the person who was on the line.”  The use of the initial becomes the necessary means to protect the lover’s privacy, and a radical signification to protect her from a man who left her feeling half-insane.   

            Ernaux is saying this is no more his fault than hers; more the inevitable outcome of an affair where she sleeps with a married man who won’t leave his wife and will protect his career. Equally, the book doesn’t indicate the narrator is doing anything wrong either: she seeks pleasure and he offers it, and the wife is only ever a cause for jealous concern and not empathic consideration. In the right-wing City Journal, Jonathan Clarke says, “Ernaux has vexed French social conservatives for decades by writing about her abortion, her extramarital affairs, and her ambivalent feelings about motherhood. Of course, it is silly to quarrel with a writer’s choice of subject matter. What rankles is her handling of this material, her evident confusion of brutality and indifference with authenticity.” Clarke notes that the problem is “Ernaux’s relentless concern with her own moods and prerogatives ends in moral abdication.” But all he adds is a demand for conservative morality over liberal actions. If Ernaux registered more guilt, then she would be entitled to cover such liberal subject matter. But the coldness offends Clarke, even if this is central to Ernaux’s work. She neither pities nor self-pities, which isn’t the same thing as saying she isn’t self-absorbed, or rather so preoccupied with her lover that self and other dissolve without becoming a virtue. If someone becomes focused on a dying partner, parent or child, the obsessive becomes virtuous; with a lover it can become indifference to all else, as evident in Ernaux’s comment about the telephone and also when she says, “I was entirely at the mercy of that crucial moment when I would hear the car brake, the door slam and his footsteps on the concrete porch.”  But she adds that it was “a moment which I always anticipated with unspeakable terror.” It is that Ernaux feels terror that makes the novella so interesting, with her well aware that the self-aggrandisement in taking a younger lover also contains the potential self-abasement of her reliance upon his presence there. A book more open to the world wouldn’t have quite conveyed that potent impotence; that combination of feeling alive and having little say in the emotions generated.

          In proposing a focus on a close relative as potentially a more worthy preoccupation, we should, of course, acknowledge that Ernaux has written books about her parents’ illness and death: A Man’s Place about her father, and I Remain in Darkness, about her mother. But Clarke notes of the latter that this has little to do with concern, quoting various passages where Ernaux says, “All that stands between me and death is my demented mother” and “She smells bad. I can’t change her. I sprinkle her with eau de cologne.” Clarke adds, “Ernaux has said that she believes neither in 'duty' nor in 'boundaries'—which is evident enough.” (City Journal) Yet the boundary question seems untrue. Someone with no interest in them would reveal the name of her lover and would be unlikely to avoid events where the lover might be. “I avoided opportunities of meeting him in public, in the company of other people, as I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him just for the sake of it. And so I didn’t go to an inauguration to which he had been invited, obsessed by his image nonetheless throughout the evening: smiling, showering a woman with attentions the same way he had behaved with me when we first met.” Unlike other works about contemporary female obsession (The Piano Teacher and Days of Abandonment), Ernaux isn’t one to make a scene, and most novels are made up of exactly that: scenes. Ernaux's notion of boundaries might be pertinent to the ways she resists certain actions in life, but they are also about eschewing actions in literature. If we find Spens’ comments naive, it rests on asking from Ernaux what she consistently resists, no matter the occasional drama in her work, and perhaps no scene more vividly than the abortion she has in Happening, a scene Clarke quotes in detail all the better to condemn the writer. Ernaux says: “We don’t know what to do with the fetus. O goes to her room to fetch an empty Melba toast wrapper and I slip it inside. I walk to the bathroom with the bag. It feels like a stone inside. I turn the bag upside down above the bowl. I pull the chain.” Clarke reckons “even in the name of realism, the hatefulness of this scene is inescapable” as he believes “she is the writer for those who find their own choices endlessly interesting but do not assign any particular weight to them.” (City Journal) If Pens misunderstands autofiction dramatically, Clarke does so morally - they seek events and ethical through lines the work often resists or at least questions. (Carrere’s work is centrally about the latter aspect). 

         By proposing that autofiction can be both a development and a radical rejection of a movement like Oulipo, we can see that the constraints Ernaux and others insist upon needn’t be ludically self-enclosed but necessarily self-imposed when one risks exposing identities and facing legal threats. It gives literature an internal necessity out of external ones, and imposes form without making it arbitrary. Fiction usually offers a combination of the world and the imagination, the factual detail and its narrative development. Oliver Twist never existed, but the Victorian London Dickens placed him in did; there was no Rastignac but Balzac’s post-Napoleonic Paris very much existed. In Oulipo’s work, there need be no London or Paris - the conceits of the imagination and the ingenuity of the craft often suffice. In autofiction, the writer becomes Oliver or Rastignac as the characters exist just as the cities the work is located in happen to do so as well. If autofiction is “fictionalised autobiography that does away with traditional elements of the novel such as plot and character development” (Guardian), then one can claim, negatively that “autofiction is egocentric, self-indulgent, lazy.” (Art Review) Autofictionist Shelia Heti muses over the latter claim and reckons that perhaps autofiction succeeds less because it has confessional qualities, but that its nature is constructed. This can lead to all sorts of problems, with Carrere, Knausgaard and others rearranging facts and making things up. However, in principle, the autofictional construct is predicated on a reality compressed by the various ethical and legal demands that limit it. In this sense, autofiction construction rests in its compression, and few autofictionists have followed this principle more than Ernaux, with Simple Passion, Exteriors, A Man’s Place and other works so short that they can be read in one sitting. There are long longer books of course (including Getting Lost and The Years). But there is no doubt that much of Ernaux’s significance rests on managing through the eradication of plot, character and event much that can pass for grisle in the fictional world. There is of course in plot, character and event much that is meat rather than fat, and while autofiction has its place, that isn’t quite saying it should replace fiction that contains all the elements that make up vivid world-building. Yet as a corrective against obliviously bloated novels, autofiction can be useful in cleaning the fictional palate as it removes the fatty, stringy residue from its teeth. 


© Tony McKibbin