Exteriors

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In some of the books she tries to be almost ruthlessly unemotional, focusing on cold descriptions of events and relationships. In Exteriors she is maybe more directly reflective. Here’s a kind of similar reflection to the last quotation, a little more expanded:: Exteriors contains the first of Ernaux’s journals to be published, and afterwards she began accumulating several different sorts of text around the main emotional events in her life. She didn’t at first think she would publish the account of her visits to her mother in the nursing home, which appeared as I Remain in Darkness, but thought again. ‘I have come round to thinking that the consistency and coherence achieved in any written work – even when its innermost contradictions are laid bare – must be questioned whenever possible.’ Ernaux often wonders aloud about the purpose of her writing: why she writes, who she’s writing for, what she hopes to achieve. In her journals, she lives a problem day to day; in her memoirs she’s able to shape reality, squash time. The image she uses elsewhere is of a horizontal line crossed at intervals by vertical ones of different lengths, like a graph. The books are vertical and the journals are horizontal, and we have access in our lives to both.

The book is at once lyrical and unruly. It’s a story of fleeting encounters, overheard conversations and clear-sighted observations that will make you pay attention to the seemingly ephemeral details of ordinary life.’ Her first book, Les Armoires vides ( Cleaned Out), a novel depicting her early life and her abortion, was published by Gallimard in 1974, when she was 34. Her mother died in 1986 after living with dementia for several years. While her mother was ill she had an affair with a married man; the year before her mother died, she divorced Philippe. In 2000 she retired from teaching; at last she would have the space and time to work on the book she had dreamed of for so long. But then, cancer was discovered in her breast. She wrote all the way through her treatment, recovered, and Les Années eventually came out in 2008 in France (and as The Years in the English translation by Alison Strayer, published in 2018). She became more famous still, the first living woman to have her work appear in the Gallimard Quarto series (the cooler younger sister of the Pléiade), nominated for the Man Booker International, winner of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize and the Premio Strega Europeo. Her children had children; she had other relationships, and sometimes the men moved into the house in Cergy, which she kept in the divorce. Now in her eighties, she still lives in Cergy.

Cergy-Pontoise is inhospitable and solitary, perhaps because it is so new and Ernaux so new to it. Aboard the 91 and 92, Elkin is forced up against the other passengers, but there is little touch in Exteriors. Only one couple kisses—and that’s at the Eglise Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Paris. No one holds hands, apart from a tall man on the Paris-Cergy train who joins his own “quivering” pair together. On an escalator, Ernaux experiences a “fleeting impression, a light touch against [her] hip.” Turning, she finds her handbag undone (though nothing is missing) and a young man smoking a cigarette on the step behind her. As he passes, he smiles and says, “Excuse me, Madame”. Proximity can be frightful, and here it signals not community but rather alienation. Blanche proved to be the engine of the marriage, the dreamer and the doer. It was her idea to take over the café-grocery—she was a natural behind the counter—though this was not the end of hard times. The clientele was poor, and often asked for credit; Alphonse worked other jobs to keep the family afloat. Then there was the German Occupation to deal with, and the chaotic scramble of rationing and rebuilding that followed the war. When Annie was five, the family moved to Yvetot and took over another, more profitable café-grocery, living in the rooms upstairs. That is where Ernaux grew up: sleeping with her parents in a single bedroom, using an outdoor toilet, greeting customers with a loud, clear “ Bonjour” while watching, at Blanche’s instruction, to see that they didn’t pinch anything from the shelves. French novelist/memoirist Ernaux ( A Frozen Woman, 1995, etc.) turns conversations overheard and people and places observed into a disturbingly effective documentary record of modern life. Hiába apróka a könyv, nem könnyen fogyasztható. Izgalmas, mert úgy mesél Annie Ernauxról, hogy azt a világ apró rebbenései és a krónikás ezekről alkotott benyomásai mögé rejti, azaz egyáltalán nem személytelen. Szerettem, mert más mint az autofikciói, és egy olyan életbe enged betekintést, amiről én a nyolcvanas években nem is álmodhattam. My Ernaux odyssey continues with the latest republication by the UK publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. Exteriors was first published in French in 1993 and in English in 1996. It takes the form of random journal entries between 1985 and 1992. I don’t think those years have any especial significance once you know when this was first published.

Instead, one can concentrate on how her heart sinks, how she doesn’t want to be quite so self-centered. In any case, she ends the journal entries with the understanding that just as she might be using other people as props for her stories, so do other people use her for theirs. Thus, she invites this reader to cannibalize her narrative, to see her as a symptom of Frenchness, and to comb it for everyday exclusionary practices. In the course of her nearly fifty-year career, Ernaux has published more than twenty books. The first few were what you and I would call autobiographical novels: the protagonists, young women to whom Ernaux lent her own thoughts and experiences, are clearly self-portraits. Pretty soon, though, Ernaux pulled down the scrim of fiction and adopted the first person. Her “I” is not a put-on, some coy invitation to the reader to try to untangle what is real from what is false. Ernaux works exclusively from the factual material of life—her life. But how to shape and present the facts? How to account for their particular power and the way that the truth changes, or doesn’t, when exposed to the forces of memory and time? These are profound artistic questions, fundamental to both Ernaux’s creative practice and her moral principles. “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled,” she has written. “There is no such thing as a lesser truth.” They think I’m not legitimate,” Ernaux said to me. “What disgusts them is that there are people who have found, in literature, something that speaks to them, and that those people aren’t C.E.O.s or company bosses.” Ernaux is also the first French woman to win the Nobel, “and that doesn’t work for them, at all.” For years, she has dealt with sexist criticism of her work, and not just from the right. After she published “ Simple Passion,” a soul-baring account of a love affair with a married man, a literary critic at the liberal weekly Le Nouvel Observateur took to calling her Madame Ovary.There is a ghostlike quality to Exteriors, even in the title. The author is a spectator, rarely ever participating in the world around her — unless it’s standing in line or stepping onto the train (where many of the scenes take place) to then introduce someone else. It is very reminiscent of David Antin’s “talk poems.” As a matter of fact, a lot of the entries in Exteriors read like poems, mostly due to their varying lengths and the fact that there’s this subtle, understatedness to them, which can be taken at face-value or reread and mined for universal truths. Although, in my opinion, both methods are equally fruitful. All this – the suffering and anxiety of waiting, the brief soulagement of lovemaking, the lethargy and fatigue that follow, the renewal of desire, the little indignities and abjections of both obsession and abandonment – Ernaux tells with calm, almost tranquillized matter-of-factness [that] feels like determination, truth to self, clarity of purpose.’ For writers to write with vulnerability is scarier than anything I can think of right now. That is why I read poetry, as the dilemma of what it conceals or shows never ends. Go home! The man tells his dog; it slinks away, submissive, guilty. The same expressions used throughout history for children, women and dogs.

At twenty-two, Ernaux made a vow: “If by twenty-five I haven’t fulfilled my promise of writing a novel, I’ll commit suicide.” She did write one then, but she couldn’t get it published. Even so, she chose life—or two of them. She married, had two children, and became a teacher. She had met Philippe Ernaux in Bordeaux, where he studied political science and she earned her teaching certification. “We discussed Jean-Paul Sartre and freedom, we went to see Antonioni’s ‘L’Avventura,’ we shared the same left-wing views,” Ernaux writes. But after they married, in 1964, the couple moved to Annecy for Philippe’s work and settled into a constricted domestic routine. Ernaux kept house, cooked the meals, and looked after the children while commuting to classes and grading papers—“a woman with no time to spare.” Her other life, that of a “literary being,” she hid, writing in secret to shield her work from her husband’s eyes.I suggested to Ernaux that there might be something validating in the present outpouring of loathing. Hadn’t she been writing for years about the contempt of the rich for the poor, of men for women, of the dominant for the downtrodden? “It’s proof,” she agreed. Still, it depressed her. In the uproar, Ernaux saw a renewal of the frightening wave of outrage that had engulfed her ten years ago, when she published a column in Le Monde decrying “A Literary Elegy for Anders Breivik,” a barely concealed apologia for the Norwegian mass murderer by Richard Millet, an author and editor at Gallimard. While condemning Breivik’s crimes, Millet blamed them on multiculturalism and the erosion of European Christian identity; Ernaux called his text “a fascist pamphlet that dishonors literature.” Three days later, Millet stepped down from Gallimard’s prestigious reading committee. Many others shared Ernaux’s disgust—for instance, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Nobelled in 2008. But Ernaux’s column, counter-signed by a hundred and eighteen fellow-writers, was seized upon as a flash point. L’affaire Richard Millet became a kind of referendum on what wasn’t yet termed cancel culture, with Ernaux denounced as a harridan intent on enforcing politically correct censorship at the expense of a man’s career. “I was called a killer,” Ernaux said. She herself felt that “it was really a hallali”—a hunting call, with Ernaux as the chased stag. What is it I am desperately seeking in reality? Is it meaning? This may sometimes, though not always be true since I have acquired the mental habit not only of experiencing emotions but of 'getting them into perspective'." How do French women do it? How do they stay so thin? How do they dress so well? These are questions that have plagued the universal sisterhood of women for centuries. That is why it’s crucial we read French women’s memoirs, so we can organize our lives accordingly. The slim one I have in hand is Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, published in French as Journal de dehors in 1993, arriving somewhere in the middle of her “autofiction” career. The book, as the title suggests, gazes at the navel of not the self but of others, possibly finding the self there anyway. While the world of exteriors does leave impressions on Ernaux, her focus remains her writing. She is forever searching the outside world for signs of intimacy, landing on one in the metro: “a boy and a girl and stroke each other, alternately, as if they were alone in the world. But they know that’s not true: every now and then they stare insolently at other passengers. My heart sinks. I tell myself that this is what writing is for me.” Is this what Ernaux is doing? Staring at her fellow travellers and readers insolently, while she strokes her ego? I am sure, despite her instructions, I am reading her wrong here. Pici könyv, tele szilánkokkal*. Ez az első - és egyetlen, azt hiszem -, ami nem Ernaux életét tárgyalja, noha tulajdonképpen ezek a benyomások is személyesek. Ha együtt utaztunk volna, álltunk volna sorba a hentesnél, biztosan mást vittünk volna haza élményként.