Annie Ernaux confessed in Stockholm as she confesses in her books. The latest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature delivered a heartfelt, combative and passionate speech. The 82-year-old French novelist said that writing, for her, has been a kind of intimate revenge, the only way to free herself from her social origins and her painful experiences as a woman.
After a musical prelude by a pianist, Ernaux's twenty-minute intervention fit perfectly with the sober and elegant atmosphere of the Swedish academy. Dressed in a black suit and sitting in an armchair, the author of The Empty Closets and Girl's Memory began by telling why she chose her trade when she was 22 years old. “I will write to avenge my race”, she promised herself, inspired by a reflection of Rimbaud's.
“I proudly and innocently thought that writing books, becoming a writer, coming from a lineage of landless peasants, workers and small businessmen, people despised for their manners, their accent and their lack of culture, would be enough to repair the social injustice of birth. ", he claimed.
The novelist, considered the master of the literature of the self, was awarded, as was recalled today at the ceremony, "for the courage and clinical precision with which she reveals her roots, the estrangement, and the collective limitations of personal memory." She herself admitted having taken refuge in books, in Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, Victor Hugo or Kafka, as "a continent" that opposed her social environment, as "the possibility of transfiguring reality".
Ernaux recalled the macho society in which he grew up, the prohibitions and the rigid imposed roles. She felt an irrepressible impulse to follow the destiny for which she believed herself called. The idea of "avenging my race and avenging my sex" won out. Reading Kafka's The Trial made the prospect of "dying without having entered the door that was made for me, the book that only I could write," unbearable. The writing had to help him "to understand the reasons inside and outside of me that led me to move away from my origins."
The winner recognized the initial difficulty in choosing the language of her books, at first very harsh and even rude, excessive, but necessary because "it is the only resource for the humiliated, the offended, to respond to the memory of contempt, of shame and from the shame of shame.”
Well aware of her political role as a committed intellectual, Ernaux paid tribute to Iranian women who "stand up against the most violent and most archaic form of male power," and also denounced, without naming her, the rise of the extreme right in Europe. , a phenomenon "that remains hidden by the violence of an imperialist war led by the dictator at the head of Russia."
The Nobel laureate estimated that her triumph is more of a collective victory than an individual one, a "sign of hope" for all writers and, in general, "for those who aspire to more freedom, equality and dignity for all humans, whatever their sex and their gender, their skin and their culture”, as well as for those who care about safeguarding the planet for future generations.
Ernaux ended his speech by going back to the opening sentence, to his purpose of “avenging my race”, and insisted that his desire has been “to inscribe my voice as a woman and as a social defector in what is still presented as a place of emancipation, Literature".
