This disguise in one of its aspects is an act of atonement for the distance that occurred between them and them in adolescence, the “class distance”, and the goal is to “rehabilitate a lifestyle that is seen as inferior” and a style of language, both in speech and in writing. Therefore, when the narration concerns a austere life and subject to necessity like her father’s life, she says, “I have no right to side with art,” so what is available to her is “flat writing that comes to me automatically,” “a neutral writing, without nostalgia, and without collusion with an educated writer.” With this supposed complicity in every cultural text, her betrayal is complete, in order to give a proper image of an “ordinary man”. But where do you put this picture?
Ernault abandons “real” literature (the writer’s quotes), exemplified in the verses of Henri de Rainier, and volunteers in its place declarative language, without “big sentences and new phrases” and without “stylistic sentences that create distance between us”, for a “moral and political mission”. However, this is not all. The language in which you write is not really automatic, nor is it the language of “good people” as it suggests to us, but rather a “discovery that belongs to both social analysis and aesthetics”.
“The act of writing here, perhaps not so different from the motion of doubting needles,” in one of her explanatory comments in her short novel, The Occupation, Ernault reinterprets writing, as ritual mischief and as a kind of obsession, like a woman piercing a paper bride in a ritual of voodoo magic, with a grudge. Towards an unknown nemesis who is accompanied by her former lover. Just as she is not ashamed of the class, she is not ashamed of exposing herself as a woman, haunted by the deepest forms of pain, pleasure, turmoil, and lust. In one passage, her novels Lost, paints a scene of oral sex that is the most descriptive, direct, and intense. In the preface to “The Occupation,” she leaves us with a phrase that is austere, but has a more magical effect in how intimate it is: “My first movement, upon waking in the morning, was to grasp his erect penis, as he fell asleep.”
In her more complete work, The Years, she does what she has always done before, but in a tighter way and with epic ambition, by piecing together those scraps of autobiography and family, stretching from the brief Nazi occupation of France and the horrors of the Algeria War, to the Revolution of ’68 and beyond, until Consumerism of the new century, to chart a course for the political, cultural and social shifts in her country, with an eye that sees the historical as a sociological affair, and the economic as the basis of their movement.
But is what Erno writes really literature? Or an autobiography, or “meditations with an anthropological resonance,” as Iskandar Habash describes it, translated into Arabic? In a number of her interviews, Ernault refuses to classify her work in the category of “self-fiction”, as what she writes is purely autobiographical. In English, publishers, critics, and bookstores have long refused to acknowledge her literary work, and her books have been shelved by “non-fiction”.
After a series of scandals, Noble seeks safe and politically correct choices, albeit not without a small adventure. Like awarding the prize to the Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich for her documentary literature, and to Bob Dylan for his songs, the selection of Erno this year seems to confirm the Nobel’s authority to demarcate and expand the literary boundaries. But that adventure remains symbolic, and minimalistic. Arnaud, in addition to enjoying the recognition of critics and the cultural establishment, is one of the most popular writers in France and its Francophonie.
