Deciphering the silence

The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2022 Literature Prize to Annie Ernault, a French woman who dedicated her literary career to her autobiography. A completely ordinary female autobiography. At the same time, “perfect” here means closeness to perfection with an amazing simplicity of implementing the plan, believes Dmitry Butrin.

It is impossible not to be surprised at how surprisingly accurately the decisions of the Nobel Committee in the Literature Prizes correspond to public expectations – and how subtly and often just cruelly these decisions subvert these very expectations. The two leaders in this year’s bookmaking fuss over this year’s Nobel Literature are Michel Houellebecq and Salman Rushdie. With Rushdie, everything is, as always, very difficult, although his autobiography “Joseph Anton”, which is not so old and still necessary for anyone interested in this undeniably great author, comes to mind very appropriately. But the prize for literature in 2022 was apparently awarded exactly for what Houellebecq has been trying to do for more than a year and not for the first decade: to show us through himself, to demonstrate that the art of self-reflection since the time of bl. Augustine and the pears he stole as a teenager (and the theft took place at the end of the 4th century of the Christian era) are given to us so that we know – yes, the literature of our time is constantly trying to catch the Other at arm’s length, to study him, but there is just like us. It’s literally the same. Almost.

It is not so easy for the Russian reader to remember who Annie Erno is, although she has been translated into Russian quite a lot.

Yes, and how not to translate – it is popular in its homeland, in France, and, it seems, no less, in the largest reading markets in the world – in the USA and Great Britain. Very well received by the Venice Film Festival in 2021, Audrey Diwan’s The Event is an adaptation of one of Erno’s most famous texts, L’Evenement, published in 2000. And her first text, the novel “Les Armoires vides” (this should probably be translated as “Empty linen closets”), was published back in 1974. With Erno, historically, things don’t happen very quickly, and Audrey Diwan’s film seems to show only one side of her novels, the complex, social side that interests Houellebecq (and Rushdie) so keenly. Erno, at the same time, due to the extreme stylistic simplicity, is much more complicated than “Elementary Particles”, and “Submission”, and even more so “Maps and Territories”.

The subject of Annie Ernault’s scientific interests is French literature of the 18th-19th centuries, mainly the playwright and prose writer Pierre de Marivaux. These are the first attempts of the French theater about three hundred years ago, without abandoning the conventions of the Italian theater of masks, to carefully look under the mask and try to tell what is under it, how the individuality looks like – not yet high, not exotic, not rude, but ordinary: restless, shy, stupid, finding it difficult to say what she wants, because she does not have words for this. The subject of Erno’s literary interests is herself: a couple of dozen of her novels and stories, including the last volume, The Years, there are various elements of her autobiography. She got married, got sick, had an abortion, lost her mother, bought “whiskey, almonds and stuff”, got sick, got angry, got jealous, changed landscapes, broke up, looked at cities, tried on dresses. Mostly silent, as is customary among women in our world: Erno is a decoding of silence about what the world seems unimportant – both men and women seem to be equal, but in different ways.

The question “Well, what is she silent about?” – the main question that a man has in his head, and there are no special difficulties in gender theory, they are very far from them.

Erno in the world of the victorious march of the third wave of feminism is not even the first, but, in fact, the zero, basic wave of feminism, the recognition and self-awareness of the existence of women. It’s extremely difficult to understand that this is the contents of the linen closets, all these panties, bras and socks, this uncertainty in the voice, these shades and interrupted lines have an existential significance and therefore constitute something that does not complement being, but represents it, represents it. the power to create the world and destroy it. In vain it seems to you that everything in the world has already been done in order to go somewhere further with this very feminism: nothing will work without this zero step, Erno is exceptionally convincing in this matter and shocks precisely with this, and not with the frankness that is in the world still too much, although it seems that it is not enough.

And she shows how the world is made, in the simplest and most uncomplicated ways.

Somewhere with a click on the nose, stuck where it doesn’t belong, somewhere just by undressing, and somewhere with a surgical instrument leading a direct terrible incision right there, into the fearless, but such a fascinating abyss of oneself. It is not customary to praise Annie Erno’s texts, opinions about them are rarely shared – there is a lot of intimate in them and at the same time there is absolutely no parrhesia, selflessness, excessive sincerity that destroys the very concept of culture. This is literature, that is, what has a framework, what has been done, what has a goal – to tell.

And it is especially important what Erno does with the concept of time in this regard: she, like her own literary hero, shows that millions of ordinary women and men who lived, live and will live here, their personal memory and what remains in it , is the history of this civilization. Here Annie Ernault is the literary embodiment of the ideas of Maurice Halbwachs with his “Social Framework of Memory”: we are what we remember, there is no history other than personal, and personal memory is a memory dependent on what is happening around now.

But, as always, the Nobel Committee rewards language rather than the ideas it expresses. And no one else has yet learned to write about all this most important thing in the world in the same simple way.

No wonder: it’s so easy to get confused in yourself if you don’t be Annie Erno.