{"id":130385,"date":"2018-10-26T09:00:55","date_gmt":"2018-10-26T13:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130385"},"modified":"2018-11-01T15:43:37","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T19:43:37","slug":"bad-genre-annie-ernaux-autofiction-and-finding-a-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/26\/bad-genre-annie-ernaux-autofiction-and-finding-a-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Genre: Annie Ernaux, Autofiction, and Finding a Voice"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Annie Ernaux<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWhen I was twenty-one,\u201d wrote Zadie Smith at age twenty-five, \u201cI wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons<\/em> who\u2019d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault.\u201d What is a writer\u2019s voice? Surely, as in life, we all have many voices, different ones for different occasions.<\/p>\n

For the young Zadie Smith, Kafka\u2019s voice established a norm: this is what literature sounds like. Different genres\u2014fiction, academic articles, general nonfiction\u2014conjure certain expectations. I write differently in all of them. But over the last couple of years, I\u2019ve started to feel the strain of singing so many styles on the page, and I\u2019ve started to wonder: What does my own voice sound like, freed from the mold? Do I even have one?<\/p>\n

As any classically trained singer or actor can tell you, trying to make your voice sound like someone else\u2019s can do all manner of damage to it. Voicing relies on friction between the breath and the folds of the vocal cords, but the cords can wither or be damaged from being struck too harshly. This can spill out into the body as well, and tension can build in the jaw, neck, shoulders. \u201cGood voice work,\u201d writes Cicely Berry,\u00a0former RSC voice director, \u201cshould always aim to use the voice that is there and stretch it and open up its possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yet there is no sound in a vacuum. Influence can be a question not of imitating someone else\u2019s voice, but of hearing the right pitch. Influence is a \u201cmultifarious\u201d force, Adrienne Rich once said. \u201cYou might be resisting a certain poetry intellectually and emotionally while absorbing it at some more intuitive level, taking what you can use.\u201d For me, the right influence turns a text into a kind of tuning fork, which I can sound by \u201cstriking\u201d the text with my eye (I take this from the French expression jeter un coup d\u2019oeil au texte<\/em>). If I read something by Virginia Woolf, it can center my work, make it more unified, poised, and fill it with color; something by Jeanette Winterson, and it\u2019s more heart-loving; something by Annie Dillard, and it touches the earth and knows the names of weather patterns. This kind of influence ought to be audible only to the writer; if I\u2019m writing well\u2014if I\u2019m writing like myself\u2014there will be no hint that I\u2019ve been reading Woolf, or Winterson, or Dillard. They\u2019re just a melody I\u2019ve been listening to.<\/p>\n

Annie Ernaux is a writer I\u2019ve returned to in this way since I first read her at the age of twenty. I was at university in Paris, and was making the difficult transition from studying French to actually speaking it. French was becoming a living, working language through song lyrics, films, and the books I chose to read rather than those I\u2019d been assigned. Contemporary French fiction evoked the city I was beginning to know, and projected me into it, unlike the dead world described in the books on the syllabus.<\/p>\n

I picked up Ernaux\u2019s Passion Simple<\/em> (1991) at the Fnac, partly because it was really thin (under a hundred pages), and partly because, well, that title. After a brief preface about watching porn on a fuzzy TV, it begins: \u201cA partir du mois de septembre l\u2019ann\u00e9e derni\u00e8re, je n\u2019ai plus rien fait d\u2019autre qu\u2019attendre un homme.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 (\u201cBeginning in September of last year, I did nothing else but wait for a man.\u201d) Everything she does, she writes, has something to do with this man. Everything she sees reminds her of him, of some moment they shared, some stray comment he made, some place he had visited or person he had spoken of. I, too, was doing not much besides thinking about, and waiting to hear from, a guy. It is an experience I have lived through several times since, and it is always the same. Present and past and future are suspended into one temporality: the expectant tense. (Tense as the vocal cords straining to sound.) To live sexual obsession is to, in Ernaux\u2019s words, \u201cexperience pleasure like a future pain.\u201d I had never seen anyone write about this kind of unabated tension, in which real life vanishes into the margins, and the world is mediated exclusively through memories of the lover. Ernaux\u2019s book was the first time I\u2019d read anything that took sexual obsession as a serious, intellectual topic, instead of as something to be ashamed of. She is simply, radically, writing about desire as though she is its agent, not as its object. Ernaux writes with straightforwardness and honesty; she doesn\u2019t justify or explain herself. The text is so underwritten in places as to resemble, almost, a psychoanalyst\u2019s case study, and Ernaux, with her even, detached tone, is more therapist than patient.<\/p>\n

She writes about how the act of writing this extreme experience is incompatible with the experience itself: \u201cThe tense [or time] of writing has nothing to do with that of passion.\u201d Passion Simple<\/em> is about the failure of form and genre to capture the obsessive encounter\u2014something always escapes. The problems of passion become problems of writing. This is also probably why I was drawn to the text: it demystifies both sex and writing.<\/p>\n

Ernaux grew up working class in Yvetot, Normandy. After publishing three novels, she broke through to wider acclaim with two exquisitely sensitive works about the life and death of her parents: La place<\/em> (1983) and Une femme<\/em> (1988). Ernaux begins to set words to paper because writing is the only thing she can do in her mourning, because it now seems to her \u201cthat I write about my mother because it is now my turn to bring her into the world.\u201d Ernaux\u2019s voice is measured: flat, but not quite affectless. Following the shattering loss of her parents, Ernaux strives for balance between feeling and reporting, writing with almost sociological objectivity.<\/p>\n

The term that sometimes gets applied to Ernaux\u2019s work is autofiction<\/em>, though she refuses it. There is no fiction in works like La place<\/em>, Une femme<\/em>, or Passion Simple<\/em>. Autofiction is a hybrid of fiction and autobiography that was codified by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977: \u201cFiction of strictly real events or facts; the autofiction, if you like, of having entrusted the language of an adventure to the adventure of language, outside the wisdom of the novel, be it traditional or new.\u201d Doubrovsky\u2019s sense of autofiction produces the self within language, rather than within an approved genre; it brings form out of voice. Ernaux is interested in the truth of experience, whatever form that might take, and this is what sets her work apart from autobiography or conventional memoir. She is more aligned with writers like Catherine Cusset, who argues that \u201cthe only fiction in autofiction is the work on language. The facts are real, and the project is to reach a certain truth.\u201d Another practitioner of autofiction, Christine Angot, prefers to call it the roman en je<\/em>\u2014a novel in the key of I, you might say, or, in a French play on words, a novel in the key of play [jeu<\/em>]. Angot distinguishes this roman en je<\/em> from the autobiographical novel which does not \u201cwork from objectivity, isolating it like a chemical\u201d; the autobiographical writer takes the I<\/em> as a game, one that pretends that making form into plot brings the \u201creal into existence.\u201d\u00a0Autofiction, on the contrary, has the same goal\u2014to \u201cfaire exister le r\u00e9el\u201d\u2014<\/em>but tries to break the story in order to do so.<\/p>\n

Passion Simple<\/em> was the first time I\u2019d encountered autofiction (if that\u2019s what it is). It was so liberating: you could, as a writer, be straightforward, write like you speak, leave the question of genre open and ambiguous. But autofiction isn\u2019t without its detractors, and neither is Ernaux. Passion Simple<\/em> inspired at least two male critics to write their own books in response, Philippe Vilain\u2019s L\u2019Etreinte<\/em> (1997), and Alain G\u00e9rard\u2019s Madame, c\u2019est \u00e0 vous que j\u2019\u00e9cris<\/em> (1995). Siobhan McIlvanney, in her study of Ernaux\u2019s work, argues that G\u00e9rard\u2019s work \u201ccan be interpreted as an endeavor to undermine the female narrator\u2019 s narrative dominance.\u201d G\u00e9rard assumes the role of Ernaux\u2019s absent lover, and castigates her for her transgression of writing about their affair: \u201cwe\u2019d promised each other to never reveal our secret.\u201d As Elizabeth Richardson Vitti points out, this is a direct refutation of Ernaux\u2019s formal decision to use \u201creportage to describe impersonally the impact of their relationship on her.\u201d G\u00e9rard \u201cpassionately targets his former lover who to his mind has misrepresented their relationship.\u201d G\u00e9rard no doubt saw himself as playfully entering the game of the roman en jeu<\/em>. But, as we well know, the critical stakes are not the same for men as they are for women when it comes to writing the self. Where he creates a lucid, inventive world, she is told she cannot see beyond her own navel.<\/p>\n

There is the question, still, of Ernaux\u2019s own disavowal of the term, as if admitting to any fiction at all in her work would dilute its power. Is autofiction, then, as the critic Marie-Jos\u00e9e Roy asks, a \u201cbad genre?\u201d The term mauvais genre<\/em>, in French, has all kinds disreputable connotations, from the low genres of fantasy, science fiction, or the detective novel to the taint of doing something tacky, or trashy, something not comme il faut. And of course, genre<\/em> in French can translate to gender<\/em> as well. The notion that to write autofiction might be to write \u201cbad genre\u201d carries all kinds of implications for voice-based, female-oriented autofiction. For a woman, to write the mauvais genre<\/em> is to open yourself up to being seen as the wrong kind of woman, and the wrong kind of writer.<\/p>\n

If so, so be it; there is great pleasure, and great tonality, in doing genre and gender the \u201cwrong\u201d way. Good voice work doesn\u2019t ask you to sing in some approved style; it invites you to sing as only you can. In print, there is no objective test of pitch or key, the only truth is in how it strikes the reader.<\/p>\n

My encounter with Ernaux marks the beginning of my life as a writer. I work across genres, often in the same text; I write across languages, moving from French to English and back again. It\u2019s thanks to Ernaux that I have the courage to write in my second language, that I write the world from my body outward, that I attempt to make language from the adventure of my experience. I tune myself to Ernaux every time I write, sometimes without realizing it. I keep Passion Simple <\/em>nearby; I don\u2019t touch it too often. But sometimes it\u2019s enough just to look at a page. My eye strikes it, and the circles of tone it releases set my own writing into key; they help me find the gaps between my own words, and let them stay there. The brain is a sex organ like any other, Ernaux reminds us in Passion Simple<\/em>. But it is also a musical instrument. We train ourselves to our obsessions, and they vibrate within us.<\/p>\n

This essay is adapted from the forthcoming anthology <\/em>Under the Influence (Gorse Editions), edited by Joanna Walsh<\/em><\/p>\n

Lauren Elkin is the author of <\/em>Fl\u00e2neuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London.<\/em>\u00a0She lives in Paris.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ernaux is simply, radically, writing about desire as though she is its agent, not as its object. Ernaux writes with straightforwardness and honesty; she doesn\u2019t justify or explain herself. 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