Annie Ernaux shows herself without filters or complacency

Madrid. From a very young age, the French writer Annie Ernaux writes a work diary in which she sculpts her own ideas, gives them shape, revels in her own obsessions and reflects on herself. The Cabaret Voltaire publishing house publishes in Spanish this fundamental tool of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature under the title The black workshopin which her thoughts are recorded, many unfinished projects and the endless questions that daily life inspires, the fears of a world adrift, the future of women, the way to help her own “race”, which for her is the working class, the people from below, to which she has always belonged and of which she feels proud.

Ernaux’s literary work (1940, Normandy) contains a series of traces of his biography. His writing speaks above all of his life experience and of the working class that has faced a hostile, severe, violent world, but sometimes full of tenderness and beauty. Hence, her style is direct, without frills, because, as she has said in numerous interviews, her books are altogether an “autosociobiographical story” in which, based on her experiences, she constructs a social story, a plot that describes a historical moment, a lost generation, the story of a woman from rural France who now lives in a country that is no longer placid or austere and from where she clings to memory to talk about love, illness, abortion, education, from his dead sister…

That “black workshop”, where she shapes her books, represents her introspection, her way of dialoguing with herself, without respite and without filters, without pause and without complacency. Because in parallel with his novels, Ernaux has kept a work diary, a kind of notebook that allows us to peek into the secret part of his work and that bears witness to that dialogue.

Ernaux has explained: “all the books I have written are preceded by a phase, often very long, of reflections and questions, of uncertainties and abandoned directions. Starting in 1982, I took the habit of writing down this exploratory work on dated sheets and I have continued to do so to the present. It is a diary of efforts, of the perpetual irresolution between projects, between desires. A kind of workshop without light and without an exit, in which I circle around the search for the tools that most fit the book that I glimpse, in the distance, in clarity.”

The inconsolable sadness of living

When he was awarded the Formentor Prize in 2019, something was explained that coincides with the spirit and ins and outs of The black workshop: “Annie Ernaux’s renunciation of the resources that beautify the impostures of family and social order is one of the most notable contributions to the literary culture of our time. With an iron will she dismantles the conventional model of the story and dispenses with the sequential logic of events to make her own life the object of a stark ethnological investigation.

“Ernaux’s books are located at the crossroads of literature, social sciences and photographic documentation to unravel the nature of a self traversed by everyday life and subjected to the inconsolable sadness of living. Ernaux shamelessly reveals the feminine condition, shares with the reader the intimacy of shame and reflects with a stripped-down style the disordered fragmentation of contemporary experience. Without ceasing to embrace the numbness suffered by the humiliated and the offended, without giving in to the ornamental temptation of worldly egotism and resisting the coercion of fame.”

The writer has dedicated a good part of her life to teaching as a professor of French literature. In addition to the Nobel Prize, she has received many awards, among which the 2008 French Language Prize stands out. She is the author of an essentially autobiographical and intimate work, with titles such as The empty closets (1974), What they say or nothing (1977), The frozen woman (1981), a woman (1987), Outside Diary (1993), I haven’t left my night (1997), Be lost (2001), The occupation (2002), Writing like a knife (2003), The use of the photo (2005), The years (2008), The other daughter (2011), Look at the lights, my love (2014), Girl’s memory (2016) y The young man (2022).

La Jornada exclusively publishes a preview of The Black Workshop, with authorization from the publisher Cabaret Voltaire, a few days before it is distributed in Spain.

(1982)

4 March

Impression that I always rely on the “complex”, the family, etc., for lack of audacity, for security. But when I start in this direction, I’ll get bored. Only a different technique – a mix of tones, eras and points of view – could avoid that trap for me. If the dream, according to André Breton, and I believe it, is capable of providing the solution to daytime problems: I dreamed that Claude Duneton sent me the second volume of his memoirs. Well, I think that his method is not appropriate and his mocking lyricism sounds false to me. A sign, then, that something else must be done in terms of “memory.”

Yesterday I thought I would have time to write two books.

26 April

Difficult, everything, and I don’t know what relationship there may be at this moment between what I write and the horror that the sensation of my real situation produces in me. And, perhaps, what I do is not “fair” or good. An atrocious comparison: one suffers as much for a book criticized for not being good, and which perhaps is not, as for a masterpiece. And, in the same way, I suffer for a man who, as he has amply demonstrated, certainly does not deserves.

(1985)

domingo, 6 October

I thought I was much bolder when I started The empty closets in 1972, an ambitious project from the beginning. The problem is that now I no longer have time to make mistakes.

(1990)

29 June

Returning from Éragny, always with that particular violent emotion when listening to a melody linked to loving memories, driving on the highway, I thought that only love and death are truly the bottom of existence, the background of writingwhatever the story. Once again, P., my mother, childhood (“52”), the summer of ’54, and sexual discovery came together in my mind.

(1993) 9 November

Maybe work without a network, at least at first.

What is a life? What is the yo? Respond to that.

(1997)

Saturday, 4 April

Classified, quickly reviewed all accumulated notes. All of this constitutes material of pure autobiography. Difficult to reconcile with an objective approach (but I am not obliged to use them).

On the other hand, I realize that memory is organized by periods and not, obviously, by years. The “annals” are impossible. The relationship between memory and personal time with history remains to be clarified.