Exteriors: Annie Ernaux

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The triumph of Ernaux’s approach ... is to cherish commonplace emotions while elevating the banal expression of them.... A monument to passions that defy simple explanations.’ Annie Ernaux reminds me of Joan Didion. Writing that is confessional, possesses the hunt for clarity, quirky observations, and wit that stays with the reader till the end. 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. 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.

To commute is to travel regularly, to follow the same route, and this is what Elkin—and, to a lesser extent, Ernaux—has decided or feels compelled to do. Elkin maps the 91 and 92 busses, Ernaux her new town; Exteriors, too, opens with public transit, though not on a bus but in the parking lot of an RER station. The Réseau Express Régional is the transit system that serves Paris and its suburbs. Cergy-Pontoise, where Ernaux lives, was established as a commuter’s town in the mid-1970s. The town forms the terminus (or perhaps the origin) of two RER lines. On the wall of a parking lot, Ernaux reads the graffitied “INSANITY.” That evening, she drives along the “gaping trench excavated to extend the RER,” feeling as if she is “riding towards the sun.” Reading Ernaux, I was reminded of how the pathway to owning the surrounding around us by putting the observations in a tabloid is a very indirect way of knowing ourselves. 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. Thus, for me, the enjoyment of Exteriors was to have in my hands an example of a writer honing her craft. Ernaux’s observations are nothing if not exact, accurate, and faithful; they are as detailed as they are non-judgmental. But ultimately, they are moments in time, movements captured and made static by words. What would be of passing interest is if Ernaux waited a decade or two for the new town to “grow old,” and then repeated the exercise. They compared PCs and Macs, ‘memories’ and ‘programs’. We waited good-naturedly for them to abandon their off-putting lingo, which we had no desire to elucidate, and return to subjects of common exchange. They mentioned the latest cover of Charlie Hebdo and the most recent episodes of The X-Files, quoted American and Japanese films, and advised us to see Man Bites Dog and Reservoir Dogs, whose opening scene they described with relish. They laughed affectionately at our musical tastes – total crap – and offered to lend us the latest Arthur H.Ernaux became pregnant in October 1963, after visiting a boyfriend, P., in Bordeaux. She wrote to P. that she ‘had no intention of keeping it’. Doctors couldn’t help because they were in an impossible legal position; she then tried a leftist friend who told her about a friend, LB, who had ‘almost croaked’ during an abortion a few years earlier. The leftist friend then tried to kiss her. Needing an abortion, Ernaux discovered, made her appealing to men. She waited outside the office of the paper LB worked for, Paris-Normandie, but never caught her. She read medical journals for clues. She went to Martainville, ‘a rough, working-class area’ of Rouen, to find a doctor who did abortions, but ended up wandering aimlessly, humming ‘Dominique’, a song by Soeur Sourire that was often on the radio in 1963, a jaunty acoustic guitar-and-voice tune at odds with the despair she felt. But the voice of Soeur Sourire ‘gave me the courage to go on living that afternoon’: Annie Ernaux’s new book, Exteriors, is about feeling overwhelmed. It is a collection of journal entries written over the course of seven years (1985-1992), when she lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town forty kilometers outside of Paris. I say that it’s about feeling overwhelmed because, in the preface, Ernaux describes how living in “a place bereft of memories, where the buildings are scattered over a huge area, a place with undefined boundaries, proved to be an overwhelming experience.” But after that, Exteriors is void of emotion and meaning, focusing instead on the physical world — things, people, and their actions — a direct result and illustration of an overload of emotion. 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.

Later in the narrative, Ernaux’s interest in the body takes her again to the butcher’s where she observes client-shopkeeper dynamics and how the butcher categorizes his customers: “A subconscious ritual is being played out here, celebrating the convivial symbolism of meat, gorged with blood, the family.” Naturally, eaters of halal and kosher meat are barred from this family and “the recurring bliss of Sunday lunches.” The butcher’s, alluded to in the introduction, becomes the fulcrum of Frenchness, an exclusionary space where the steaks are clearly marked for men and women. Further on, the meat takes on a more overtly religious meaning: It was only after recording all these observations and evesdroppings that she became aware of how much of herself was included in the conversations of others. Revealing her own interest, anger or shame. Soeur Sourire is one of the many women I have never met, and with whom I might have very little in common, but who have always been close to my heart. Be they dead or alive, real people or fictional characters, they form an invisible chain of artists, women writers, literary heroines and figures from my own childhood. I feel that they embrace my own story.

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Ernaux is also interested in other people’s voices and how they tell their stories. She observes a mother-daughter couple on public transport: “Clearly impressed by their own social status, they feel they have the right to share everything they do and say with the other passengers, knowing full well that they are the centre of attention.” They reveal an “[i]ntimacy of a mother-daughter relationship which they see as enviable.” I bought a copy of Marie-Claire at the station in the New Town. This month’s horoscope: ‘You will meet a wonderful man.’ Throughout the day I wondered whether each man I spoke to was the one they meant. Still, this way of tandem working was new for Ernaux. She has used pictures as prompts before, most notably in “ The Years” (2008), her most expansive book, a sweeping generational portrait in which she marks the passage of time by describing photographs of herself, subjecting her own image to the same frank gaze that she applied to her parents’ bodies. Here, though, she was guided by someone else’s gaze—that of Philippe, the movie’s de-facto cinematographer, who, as Ernaux dryly remarked at the New York screening, died, in 2009, “of a smoker’s cancer.” It never occurred to either of them that she would use the camera herself. Shooting was a man’s job. Graffiti plays an important role throughout the text. Of course, there’s something bleak about a new town already vandalized, but it also signifies verve and humanity. Ernaux does a marvelous job balancing the two and showing that blemishes are a part of life, and should be appreciated as such: “On the walls of the railroad station in Cergy, after the October riots, one could read: ALGERIA I LOVE YOU, with blood-red flowers between ‘Algeria’ and ‘I.’” However, when it comes to the war of the sexes, the world described by Ernaux matches Houellebecq’s nostalgia perfectly. The fridge and the kitchen are battlegrounds in all Houellebecq novels, with the liberated wife either refusing or not having the talent to cook, and the male protagonist hankering after a France when women were women and men were men. At the butcher’s, Ernaux observes someone say, “I’d like a steak for a man,” invoking a quotidian French world-making in which everything is binary, most of all sex (surely, this is the sentence we have been instructed to look out for in the introduction). Women do all things in a womanly way, men do things in a manly way, and never the twain shall meet. As we have learned from other works of Ernaux, the premium placed on womanly behavior is so high that women learn to look at themselves from the outside at an early age, resulting in Frantz Fanon’s “third-person consciousness.”

anonymous figures glimpsed in the Métro or in waiting rooms . . . who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us." Snark aside, Ernaux’s oeuvre has dealt with the consequences of trying to be “the French woman” — most notably, putting men’s desire above all and hating your own body in the process. These transgressions against the self are peppered throughout her other books that echo one another not just in content but also in the merry-go-round of their French and English titles. There is a volume entitled La Vie Exterieur (2000) published in English as Things Seen in 2010, supporting the view that Ernaux has been writing one narrative in different styles, focusing on different periods of her life.Of all of Annie Ernaux’s books that I have read (I am about halfway through Annie Ernaux: The Unboxed Set comprising 12 books), I venture to say Exteriors might be her most self-indulgent. I say that because it seems as if she wrote this book primarily to sustain the edge of her wonderful restrained, understated style of writing. It’s sort of doing some practices, or drills. 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" also gives us a look into Ernaux's writing process, and the way literature so completely engages her mind — something I found both enviable and amusing. I devoured – not once, but twice – Fitzcarraldo’s new English edition of Simple Passion, in which the great Annie Ernaux describes the suspended animation of a love affair with a man who is not free. Every paragraph, every word, brought me closer to a state of purest yearning.’ 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.’

Annie Ernaux receiving the 2022 Nobel prize in literature from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images 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. Again, she draws on diary entries she wrote while commuting on the Paris Métro, usually just observing strangers, and seeing how they help her reflect on her own life. Actually, she might say that the exterior life becomes her life, she uses it as a way to reflect on her own memories:

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Admirable for its quiet grace as well as its audacity in a willingness to note (and thus make noteworthy) the smallest parts of life. It’s a masterclass in understatement, a quality difficult to find nowadays, in literature or life.’ I realise that there are two ways of dealing with real facts. One can either relate them in detail, exposing their stark, immediate nature, outside of any narrative form, or else save them for future reference, ‘making use’ of them by incorporating them into an ensemble (a novel, for instance). Fragments of writing, like the ones in this book, arouse in me a feeling of frustration. I need to become involved in a lengthy, structured process (unaffected by chance events and meetings). Yet at the same time I have this need to record scenes glimpsed on the RER, and people’s words and gestures simply for their own sake, without any ulterior motive. One of the key observations, which Ernaux makes in the introduction, is that for twenty years she has lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town forty kilometres outside Paris. It is a “place bereft of memories”, widely spread and with undefined boundaries. A no-man’s land. This made her listen closely to the conversations on the trains and in the supermarkets. Her attempt to convey the reality of an epoch. The most interesting moments are the contempt a customer shows for a cashier, or the interactions with a man begging for money.