SOURCE: Day, Loraine. “Fiction, Autobiography and Annie Ernaux's Evolving Project as a Writer: A Study of Ce qu'ils disent ou rien.” Romance Studies 17, no. 1 (June 1999): 89-103.

In an article which presents an overview of the relationship between autobiography and fiction in French literature in the last twenty years, Jacques Lecarme cites Annie Ernaux as a writer who is fully committed to the exploration of ‘les voies du récit vrai’.¹

The appropriateness of Lecarme's remark with respect to Ernaux's ongoing preoccupations as a writer is beyond dispute. Since the publication of La place (1984), Annie Ernaux has produced texts which work on lived experience in a style that is direct and unadorned.² She seeks to elucidate ‘le vécu obscurément subi’,³ ever mindful that the truths which she pursues are personal and poetic, rooted in the perceptual matrix of the present moment of writing, and therefore necessarily relative.⁴ In another article, Lecarme and Bruno Vercier suggest that Ernaux's careful attempt in Une femme to define the field in which she works could stand as an appropriate description of many contemporary first-person narratives:

Annie Ernaux ne manque pas de récuser, à sa manière, l'horizon autobiographique: ‘Ceci n'est pas une biographie, ni un roman naturellement, peut-être quelque chose entre la littérature, la sociologie et l'histoire.’ Ne conviendrait-il pas d'ajouter la psychanalyse à cette constellation qui circonscrit avec beaucoup de justesse le champ où s'effectue, pour beaucoup, cette venue à un Je qui ne peut plus être celui du roman?⁵

Despite (or perhaps because of) Ernaux's current position as a writer whose work—in her own eyes and in the perceptions of readers and critics—centres on the exploration of a verifiable personal history embedded in a specific social and historical context, it is worth recalling that Ernaux has not always eschewed the fictional treatment of autobiographical themes.

Ernaux's first three publications (AV [Les armoires vides], CQD [Ce qu'ils disent ou rien], and FG [La femme gelée]) are all novels which draw in different ways on autobiographical sources. These three novels failed to achieve the critical or popular acclaim which greeted La place, and some critics have seen them as the early, uneven experiments of a writer who was struggling to find a distinctive style and voice.⁶ Whatever aesthetic judgement is made of this early phase of Ernaux's work (and it is my view that a sustained analysis of this issue remains to be undertaken), it is certainly the case that the semi-fictional texts contain the seeds of her later work. Although this is most evident from a thematic point of view, the three novels also prepare the ground for the formal and generic development of Ernaux's writing in subsequent years.

Taken overall, the triptych of novels published by Ernaux between 1974 and 1981 displays a marked shift in perspective and style which allowed Ernaux to move closer to the controlled and measured form of expression which she adopted in La place and subsequent works. La femme gelée, published in 1981, three years before La place, was Ernaux's third and last novel. With its unnamed narrator (allowing for the possible identification of narrator and author), its balanced tone and objective assessment of past experience, La femme gelée displays some of the features which would characterize Ernaux's later work, standing in marked contrast to Les armoires vides and Ce qu'ils disent ou rien where named narrators (Denise and Anne) vent their resentment and bitterness in the face of their milieu and situation. Adopting a substantive rather than a formal perspective, it can be said that both Les armoires vides and La femme gelée are broadly congruent with the author's personal history, as it is evoked in her more openly autobiographical works. By contrast, critics seeking to trace the connecting threads of a body of work which they, like most commentators, perceive as fundamentally autobiographical, have not found it easy to accommodate Ernaux's second novel, CQD.

For example, in her study of La place and Une femme, M.-F. Savéan accords marginal status to CQD, supporting this view by identifying the ways in which CQD deviates from the familial and generational context which is present in the other novels, as in La place and Une femme, and which is compatible with the personal history of the author herself. It is argued that in a body of work ‘axée sur l'autobiographie’, these departures from a verifiable personal history distance CQD from Ernaux's project as a writer. Somewhat paradoxically, Savéan also suggests that the fictionalized cast of CQD serves to mask the representation of experiences which the author may have felt to be too close to home. A further tension exists between the body of Savéan's commentary on CQD, which suggests that the autobiographical aspect of the novel centres on Ernaux's memories of adolescence, and the subsequent undeveloped remark concerning the ‘jeu de miroirs’ that can be identified in the reference to the French teacher in the concluding paragraph of CQD (Annie Ernaux was herself a teacher of French at a CES in Pontoise at the time when CQD was written).⁷ This tantalizingly reflexive moment at a key point in the novel surely merits further consideration, not least because it serves as a reminder that even if the novel does draw on the linguistic and cultural malaise which Ernaux experienced as a teenager, it does so through the prism of the author's intervening years and mediates the author's preoccupations, concerns, and needs at the time of writing.

Elsewhere, I have argued that CQD has an important place in the evolution of Ernaux's techniques as a writer, specifically in the development of the ‘plain style’ for which she is known.⁸ Here, I shall suggest that the novel draws on a complex network of autobiographical elements which connect CQD to the body of Ernaux's work, and that these sometimes competing elements are manifest in the text as a process of doubling which can be seen in the narrator's quest for a soul-mate or role-model as well as at the level of the textual figures who might be viewed as projections of the author. I shall further suggest that analysis of the imbrication of fictional and autobiographical elements to be found in CQD illuminates Ernaux's subsequent rejection of fiction, while simultaneously suggesting the extent to which all her writing, and indeed perhaps all writing, is autobiographical at some level.⁹ It will be argued that CQD marks an important phase in Ernaux's developing sense of the position she wished to occupy as a writer, in relation to her subject matter, her readers and the wider social context which contains and structures the literary field.

Ernaux has acknowledged the unique status of CQD in her work, describing it as ‘le seul de mes textes qui soit vraiment un “roman”’.¹⁰ Notwithstanding this comment, it is clear from Ernaux's remarks in an interview with me in 1987 that the novel draws substantially, if very flexibly, on autobiographical material:

Je me suis aperçue que finalement c'est plus facile de se projeter dans une situation imaginaire que d'aller à la quête du réel, très très nettement […] c'était plus facile pour moi d'écrire comme écrirait une adolescente … c'était une sorte de sortie de moi-même, sortie à moitié bien entendu, puisque … mais en même temps il y avait un jeu parce que j'étais professeur donc j'avais des classes comme ça, donc alors je voyais des filles, c'est-à-dire que je faisais une espèce d'osmose avec des élèves, j'avais un contact aussi très passionnel avec les élèves, je ne sais pas à quoi c'est dû, … mais j'avais des élèves âgées … qui avaient des difficultés, qui ne réussissaient pas à l'école … et elles me racontaient des choses … Je les voyais comme élèves mais je les voyais comme héroïnes [rires] … En même temps, elles étaient un peu moi aussi, c'est-à-dire qu'il y a toujours un jeu de projection, de souvenir, et en même temps elles étaient des filles de leur époque qui n'était pas la mienne […]. Mais finalement c'était plus facile à écrire que cette espèce de quête que je fais, que j'ai faite, une quête du réel, comme j'ai fait dans La femme gelée.¹¹

Later in the interview, Ernaux identified other experientially-based threads which are taken up in CQD: her recollections of working as a monitrice in a colonie de vacances as a teenager, and her desire to write about Cergy-Pontoise, the new town to which she had moved in 1975. This complex interplay of memory and sensitivity to her current environment, identification with her pupils and unease in her professional life, was rooted in Ernaux's painful awareness of her own divided class identity and sense of betrayal in relation to her parents and their world, an awareness exacerbated by the daily contact with working-class adolescents which forced her to confront the implications of her accession to middle-class status. These interlocking autobiographical strands in the composition of CQD will be examined in my assessment of the ways in which Ernaux's work on the novel allowed her to move forward in the process of finding her place as a writer. Notwithstanding Ernaux's assertion that as a primarily fictional work, CQD is dissociated in her mind from the ‘quête du réel’ which she feels she undertakes in her best work, I shall argue that the novel may usefully be seen as an imaginative negotiation of very real difficulties in the author's quest for a sense of identity and direction in her personal and professional life, particularly as a writer.

In the summer of 1976, Ernaux's recollections of working in a colonie de vacances as a young woman were sufficiently prominent in her mind to provide the inspiration for a possible title for the novel: Les Enfants de l'été, a reference to the refrain of a song which was used as a kind of rallying chant at the holiday centre in Sées where Ernaux was a monitrice in 1958. CQD contains a reference to this song (p. 112), but Ernaux rejected ‘Les enfants de l'été’ as a title, mainly because it does not evoke the theme of language which is central in the novel.¹² However, the very possibility of choosing a title linked to the summer spent in the colonie suggests that these memories were of more than tangential significance in the genesis of the novel. A stay in a colonie de vacances is also mentioned by the narrator of La place, who associates it with a painful memory. In this text, the narrator's reunion with her parents following her stage of eight weeks in the colonie triggers acute awareness of the gulf between herself and her parents, and a sense of guilt at leaving them behind: ‘J'avais pour la première fois vécu loin de la maison, pendant deux mois, dans un monde jeune et libre. Mon père était vieux, crispé. Je ne me sentais plus le droit d'entrer à l'université’ (P [La place], p. 86). Given that early versions of the work that would become La place flank the writing of CQD,¹³ it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the sense of betrayal may be seminal in CQD as it is in La place. This is a key point to which I shall return.

Like all Ernaux's published texts, CQD is a sustained first-person narrative, but it is unique amongst her works to date in so far as the generational and social situation of the narrating ‘I’ does not match the chronology and social frame of Ernaux's own story. The focalizer in CQD is a girl who is fifteen in the mid-1970s; she attends a state school (a CES); her parents (both manual workers, her mother on a part-time basis) are owner-occupiers of a small suburban villa (the mortgage has just under half its term to run). The setting of CQD is not the café-épicerie of Ernaux's childhood, although the novel makes reference to the place names familiar from Ernaux's other works (Rouen, Le Havre, Veules-les-Roses). As Anne broods in her bedroom, she hears cars speeding to the Normandy coast on the nearby route nationale, just as several of Ernaux's other narrators do from the first-floor partitioned bedroom in the house located in what is identified in La honte as the rue du Clos-des-Parts in Yvetot. Notwithstanding these references, Ernaux has stated that the décor of Pontoise provided the setting against which she imagined the events of Anne's summer (ILD). The signs of a recently and inadequately developed new town (high-rise blocks, monotonous estates, construction sites and vacant lots, have a clear if discreet presence in CQD. This amalgamation of Cergy-Pontoise and Yvetot in the setting of CQD points to the way in which the novel mobilized both Ernaux's memories of her adolescence and her situation at the time of writing the novel.

In broad terms, there are similarities between the familial situation of Anne and Ernaux's own adolescent background, as it is evoked in her other works. Anne's parents are on the wrong side of the economic and cultural tracks, although they are upwardly mobile in a modest way; they have aspirations for their only daughter, who is increasingly alienated from them as her education throws into relief their lack of sophistication and finesse, and who looks to sexual experience as a means to escape their sphere of influence and to punish them for the scorn they inspire in her.

On the other hand, Anne's parents have characteristics that clearly set them apart from the parental figures in Ernaux's other texts: Anne's mother is a fanatical housekeeper and her father drinks. Moreover, the austerity of the 1950s (which is the backdrop for the teenage years of Ernaux's other narrators) is replaced in CQD by the consumerist preoccupations of the 1970s, and the attitudes of the younger generation mimic the permissive mores vaunted in the media at the time. Anne's sexual experimentation advances at breakneck pace, in contrast to the cautious and carefully graduated process described in Les armoires vides and La femme gelée. As a teacher of low-achieving, sexually precocious teenage girls who readily confided in her, Ernaux was well placed to understand the difficulties of socially disadvantaged young women in the 1970s. Indeed, it is clear that the novel engages with many issues prominent in the feminist agenda at the time: double standards in sexual relationships, violence against women, the cultural and social subordination of women, the failure to disseminate adequately information about contraception.

CQD is written with careful attention to historical context: references to the political and economic climate, and to teenage fashion, style and taste, situate the novel in a particular historical moment. The extreme and unforgiving tone of Anne's internal monologue, as well as the unrelentingly colloquial register which characterizes it, are consistent with her position as a rebellious and confused teenager.¹⁴ The narrative does not overstep the perceptual capacities of the youthful and inexperienced narrator. These factors convincingly create and sustain the illusion of an authentic teenage voice of the 1970s, although the strong edge of social criticism which is implicit in the work points to the controlling vision of the thirty-six-year-old author. Readers familiar with Ernaux's other works will also recognize the author's voice in the evocation of Anne's radical disenchantment with her parents, as well as in many details of her story. I shall not attempt to identify all the features of CQD which connect it to the body of Ernaux's work or set it apart from her other texts. Instead, I shall suggest a reading of CQD that links it to a particular and crucial phase in Ernaux's adolescence, and to a specific text: La honte.

It is obvious that CQD and La honte are radically different kinds of work. A period of twenty years separates their respective publication dates; CQD is a novel with a fictional narrator, whereas La honte is an ethno-autobiographical work in which Ernaux speaks openly in her own voice; Anne is fifteen, whereas Ernaux was twelve in the summer of 1952 which lies at the heart of the narrator's quest in La honte. Notwithstanding these important differences, some similarities between the two texts can be identified: of all Ernaux's narrators, Anne is the closest in age and in linguistic range to the twelve-year-old whose experience is investigated in La honte; both CQD and La honte focus on a single traumatic summer, although, like all Ernaux's works following CQD, La honte has a mature narrator whose retrospective range is much broader than the one available to Anne; finally, and perhaps most significantly, CQD and La honte are associatively linked through a network of narrative details.

Broadly speaking, these details fall into certain categories. Firstly, there are expressions drawn from the linguistic register of Ernaux's childhood: ‘lui tirer les vers du nez’ (CQD, p. 75; H [La honte], p. 62), ‘on/elle (ne) vaut pas cher’ (CQD, p. 76; H, p. 63), ‘ça ne me faisait rien’/‘ça ne m'a rien fait’ (CQD, p. 20; H, pp. 64, 111), ‘qu'est-ce qu'on pense(ra)/dira(it) de toi/nous’ (CQD, pp. 128, 146; H, pp. 68, 104), and most significantly, ‘gagner malheur’ (CQD, p. 74; H, pp. 15, 31, 70).¹⁵ Secondly, there are circumstances linking Anne's summer and the summer evoked in La honte: the grandmother's death (CQD, pp. 72-79; H, p. 111), the mother's recent menopause (CQD, p. 43; Jnsp [“Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit”], pp. 56-57), the recourse to ‘the advertisement game’ which feeds the narrators' fantasies of social distinction (CQD, p. 37; H, pp. 127-28), and above all a backcloth of parental strife, including an incident when the narrators' glasses are broken (CQD, pp. 43-44, 85, 119-20, 124; H, pp. 13-15, 19, 112-13).¹⁶ Thirdly, there are signs of psychological disturbance in the narrator: the torpor which overcomes her at school, in the days and weeks following the crisis (CQD, p. 143; H, pp. 18, 109), visual disturbances (CQD, pp. 145-46; H, p. 120) and fear of madness (CQD, pp. 36, 107-08, 136; H, pp. 38, 120). Finally, there are references to bodily excretions which are usually veiled in silence: the used sanitary towel promised or produced by a school friend, for the enlightenment of the pre-pubertal narrator (CQD, p. 142; H, pp. 93-94) and the very idiosyncratic thoughts about excrement (canine in CQD, human in H, and in both cases deposited on open ground in summertime), pictured by the narrators as enduring ‘to mark the spot’, at least perhaps until the rains of winter, and carrying memories of a specific moment and state of mind (CQD, p. 82; H, p. 123).

What seems significant is not so much that cross-references can be made (in a creative project which works on personal experience, certain moments judged to be significant are likely to figure in more than one work), but that they are so numerous, and so distinctive, that they punctuate the course of a single summer and chart the narrators’ ‘descent into hell’, and perhaps above all that they include references to the possibility, fear, and incidence of violence between the narrators' parents.

It is not my intention to suggest that CQD straightforwardly transposes the stage in Ernaux's adolescence which is evoked in La honte. The overt focus of Anne's story, her sexual experimentation and subsequent disillusionment, has no parallel in La honte, although the narrator's nascent awareness of sexuality is certainly a very insistent subtext in the later work. The three-year age gap between the narrators, as well as the difference in their generational, familial and educational situation, allows Anne a level of sexual activity which is incompatible with the life of the narrator of La honte at the age of twelve. As an account of early sexual experimentation and adolescent rebellion against the parental model, no doubt CQD owes more to Ernaux's memories of her mid-teenage years than to those relating to her twelfth year. A careful reading of Ernaux's most recent works does indeed suggest that in writing CQD she drew partly on memories of her own fifteenth year, including her reading experience at that time. For example, numerous echoes of the work of Sartre may be found in CQD. These include issues of substance, notably a degree of consonance between Anne's ‘sentiment bizarre’ (CQD, pp. 20, 22, 23) and the malaise experienced by Roquentin in La Nausée,¹⁷ and her elated but fleeting impression of self-coincidence (CQD, pp. 113-14), reminiscent of Mathieu's remembered experiences in L'Age de raison.¹⁸ Points of detail also link CQD to Sartre's writing, for example the choice of an unusual and distinctive expression, ‘les yeux de chat qui fait dans la braise’ (CQD, p. 68; La Nausée, p. 75). “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit” records Ernaux's memory of reading La Nausée at the age of fifteen (Jnsp, p. 47). That she did not consciously include intertextual references to Sartre's work in CQD¹⁹ suggests both the power of reading to mark and shape subjectivity and the extent to which all writing and all language develop through and from an existing discursive field. On a different note, the circumstances of the death of a pet cat also link Annie Ernaux's fifteenth year with Anne's (CQD, pp. 151-52; Jnsp, p. 20).

At this point, I propose to refer to psychoanalytical thought in order to draw out the significance of the connections which I have identified between CQD and La honte. It is a basic insight of psychoanalysis that fear of separation and loss is a universal, primal experience, first arising in infancy.²⁰ Each new loss revives and resonates with earlier losses, in a process of accretion which lays down the psychic material which may later be implicated in depression. Given the infantile origin of what Rochlin has called ‘the loss complex’, the early experience of separation from the mother (or care-taker) subtends losses throughout life.²¹ Returning to CQD and La honte in the light of these insights, what seems most significant is that both texts explore a summer of crisis, when the narrators' self-image and relationship with their parents undergo a sea-change. It will be argued that Ernaux was (perhaps unconsciously) drawn to the events of 1952, at the time of writing CQD, because 1976 was also a time of crisis, uncertainty and disarray. I shall suggest that Ernaux found herself, at the age of thirty-six, working through conflicts which were associatively linked to the traumatic events which took place in the summer of her twelfth year, and that these conflicts profoundly influenced the form and content of CQD.

Ernaux's writing, and the considerable body of auto-referential material which she has produced in response to the questions of journalists and researchers, consistently identify her position in relation to her parents and their world as a residual source of conflict and division in her life, and as fundamental to her writing. This ongoing tension rests on the play of attraction and repulsion, connection and disconnection, and generates feelings of displacement, guilt and betrayal. Reading CQD in the light of La place, Une femme and “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit” suggests that Ernaux's feelings towards her parents were preoccupying her, and perhaps more than usually troubling, at the time when CQD was written. As Anne's mother is such a dominant figure in CQD, I shall begin with the mother-daughter relationship.

In January 1976 Annie Ernaux's mother returned to Yvetot after six years of living with her daughter in Annecy and Cergy-Pontoise, helping bring up her two young grandsons (aged twelve and eight in 1976). Madame Duchesne²² had to adapt to living outside the family structure and without the grandmotherly responsibilities that had shaped her existence for the past several years (F [Une femme] pp. 78-79, 81-82), and although Ernaux has acknowledged the difficulty of having her mother live with her (F, pp. 75-76; Jnsp, p. 92), she must have found it hard to adjust to life as a working mother without the quality child care and domestic support her mother had lovingly provided (F, p. 79; Jnsp, p. 10).

The play between merger and separation in mother-daughter relationships has been explored over the past two decades by many feminist thinkers, working from a wide variety of perspectives. The theories which have been put forward are very diverse, but a recurrent theme is that fluid ego boundaries between mother and daughter make differentiation problematic, generating hostility between mother and daughter, especially from the daughter's side.²³ This means that the task of finding a balance between mutuality and autonomy is a life-long task for both parties, beginning for the mother in pregnancy, and continuing for the daughter after her mother's death. The work of Donald Winnicott centres on the mother—child relationship and posits the crucial role of the provision of a secure maternal holding environment. His contribution to theories of human development extends far beyond the concept of ‘good-enough mothering’ for which he is widely known,²⁴ and his importance for feminist theories of mothering and mother—child relationships has yet to be properly explored.²⁵ According to Winnicott's theory of child development, a phase of destruction (of the other in fantasy) is necessary for the child to place the mother (or primary care-taker) outside the self. The internal image of the other is destroyed, testing the other's capacity for survival in the outside world. This process is a step on the way from the illusion of omnipotence to the capacity to acknowledge reality. If all goes well, it allows differentiation to take place, since the external object has been shown to exist independently, to be beyond the control of the child's mental powers.²⁶ In an influential development of this theory, Jessica Benjamin has suggested the importance of this idea for the understanding of adult relationships.²⁷

In CQD, the very negatively marked intensity of Anne's feelings towards her mother, provoking wilful denials of connectedness or intimacy between them, paradoxically suggests the extent to which Anne remains bonded to her mother.²⁸ The daughter's defiant assertions of independence (for example ‘qu'est-ce qu'elle m'avait dit d'intéressant depuis longtemps. Début juillet, j'ai découvert que je n'avais pas besoin d'elle, sauf pour bouffer et dormir, m'acheter des affaires’ [CQD, p. 29]) are belied by the feelings of nostalgia, concern, guilt and dependency in relation to her mother which surface elsewhere in her interior monologue (CQD, pp. 58-61, 145). The cited remarks take on added resonance in the light of Madame Duchesne's move to Yvetot. The loss of her mother's practical support (perhaps in itself generating a degree of conscious or unconscious resentment) clearly triggered more pervasive feelings of severance in the daughter. Following her mother's move to Yvetot, the narrator of Une femme is acutely aware of their separation (‘ce studio est le seul lieu que ma mère ait habité depuis ma naissance sans que j'y aie vécu aussi avec elle’ [F, p. 83]), convinced the move had been a mistake (‘elle me paraissait encore trop jeune pour être là’ [F, p. 83]), and frustrated by the difficulty of communication in the absence of the daily preoccupations of a shared existence (F, p. 83). It would seem that the mother's attempt to (re)assert her independence left the younger woman perplexed and uncomfortable, while it stripped the older woman of her defences against encroaching old age. The narrator is uneasily aware that her willingness to reintegrate her mother into the family, for extended visits and holidays, stems as much from her own reluctance to visit her mother in Yvetot as from responsiveness to her mother's needs (F, p. 84), yet the evocation of their periodic reunions conveys a strong sense of homecoming for both parties (F, p. 84). No doubt the positively charged tone of this passage is partly a function of its place in the economy of the work as a whole (immediately preceding the account of the accident from which the narrator dates her mother's decline, it marks the last of the good times in the narrator's memories of her mother), but it creates an enduring image of two women linked by a powerful emotional and visceral bond.

If Ernaux's sense of loss in 1976 was acute, as these remarks suggest, might it not have reactivated the anxieties of the summer of 1952 which are the subject of La honte? At that time, the narrator's fears of losing her mother (whether through a second act of violence on her father's part, or through a separation which in the child's mind could become definitive, as with the trip to Lourdes) combined with the torment of being ashamed of her mother, (another kind of loss), plunging the child into a trauma which she would never fully overcome. Evoking a period of radical destabilization in a mother—daughter relationship, CQD might be read as a transposition of the author's ongoing need to work on her relationship with her mother. From this perspective, CQD may bear witness to Ernaux's struggle with the early stages of a process (accepting the inevitability of separation, while at the same time identifying and acknowledging her mother's place in her life) which would later be recorded and analysed in Une femme and “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit”.

Anne's father has a much smaller place in her story than her mother does, perhaps because, immediately before the composition of CQD, Ernaux had been working on a draft of the text that would become La place. Since Ernaux had reached an impasse in her work on the text relating to her father when she started to write CQD, it may be that the need to take a break from work that had reached stalemate explains the relative slightness of the father's role in the novel, as well as the negative characteristics which differentiate him from the father figures in Ernaux's other works, if this critical slant is seen as a conscious departure from personal sources. Anne's father drinks, sometimes more than he should; he is quarrelsome and loudspoken, out of touch with his daughter and usually resentful rather than appreciative of her presence. These characteristics are in marked contrast to those of the gentle, nurturing father encountered in other of Ernaux's works (in H, the uncharacteristic nature of the father's violence is stressed [H, pp. 14-15, 125]). Equally however, with his irascibility and occasional violent outbursts, Anne's father anticipates the behaviour of the father whose verbal and physical aggression is recorded in the opening lines of La honte. As she thinks back to one of her parents' quarrels, Anne recalls her childhood fears that parental violence would one day go too far: ‘le grand soir moi je sais bien à quoi il ressemble depuis toute petite, ils se foutraient sur la gueule et les gendarmes viendraient, et je me bouchais les oreilles’ (CQD, pp. 119-20). In La honte, the narrator buries her head in a pillow to block out her parents' cries (H, p. 14), and fears her father will end up in prison (H, p. 19).

The mature narrator of La honte remembers that for the child who witnessed the struggle between her parents, la scene fell outside the domain in which judgement could be passed or blame attributed (H, pp. 18-19). However, the girl's very strong object-cathexis for her mother (evident in the two key scenes when the mother's body is subjected to actual or metaphorical assault [H, pp. 13-15, 109-11]) calls into question the possibility that her neutrality could be maintained in the face of a perceived threat to her mother's life. Anne's alienation from her father seems to be an accomplished fact rather than the wishful thinking manifest in Anne's stated indifference towards her mother. If CQD to some extent revisits the summer of 1952, the narrator's hostility towards her father might be read as a belated and indirect (perhaps even unconscious) expression of the author's uneasy disapprobation of her father's recourse to violence.

At this point, it is worth bearing in mind that Ernaux's relationship with her parents was nothing if not ambivalent, generating painful tensions which permeate her work. For Ernaux's narrators, hostile filial judgements of the parental figures sit uneasily with primal allegiances that cannot be disavowed, provoking anxiety and guilt. For all her scathing animosity towards her father, even Anne is not exempt from moments of discomfiture when she reflects on their former closeness (CQD, pp. 27-28).

Thinking about CQD in relation to La place, it is striking that the closing lines of the novel evoke a situation which is echoed in the conclusion of La place.²⁹ Both texts bring together a teacher and a working-class pupil who has cause to feel let down by the school system. In La place, the unnamed young woman who works in the supermarket has ended up in a repetitive job with few prospects; in Anne's case, her teachers fail to meet her needs as a young woman alienated from her home environment and deeply confused by the adult world. The conclusions of both texts, like the opening section of La place (which juxtaposes the account of the narrator's success in the CAPES oral with the account of her father's death) evoke an unexpressed but potent sense of betrayal. In La place this betrayal is fully assumed by the narrator, who has precisely set herself the task of exploring the gulf that increasingly separated her from her father as she progressed through the education system. In CQD however, the teacher is not the narrator, but is focalized externally, represented from the outside by the younger narrator who is a fictional creation, albeit one which draws both on Ernaux's recollections of her own teenage years in Yvetot and on her observations of and projective identification with her teenage pupils in Pontoise. Moreover, the teacher is very explicitly criticized and challenged by the narrator (who herself plans to become a teacher) in the closing lines of her interior monologue: ‘Jamais je ne vais finir ma dissert, la prof me collera un zéro. C'est elle qui dit, ça lui prend, changer la vie, il faut changer la vie. Alors qu'est-ce qu'elle fait là?’ (CQD, p. 154). The figure of the teacher, who could herself be seen as Ernaux's double, is found wanting by a narrator who might be a surrogate both for Ernaux's adolescent self and for the pupils to whom and for whom Ernaux feels responsible, and who may further be said to represent the world of Ernaux's parents, which she has now left behind. The dérision which has been directed at Anne's parents throughout the narrative is now deflected towards the teacher, who is unable either to defend herself or to acknowledge the validity of Anne's judgement, since she has no access to the first-person voice.

As Anne's summer progresses, her sense of identity grows increasingly uncertain: she no longer recognizes herself in her parents' image of her, and she seeks in vain for a ‘double’ or role model to pit against the emptiness which she finds when she looks within herself (CQD, pp. 89, 116). Anne's cousin Daniel and one-time soul-mate Alberte provide two negative models; the dead-end fate which awaits them (in Anne's perception) is all the more distressing as she had strongly identified with them (CQD, pp. 76, 142, 153-54). Even the calm and attractive monitrice whom Anne admires is diminished when Anne realizes that the older girl's charisma provides no defence against male duplicity (CQD, p. 118). Anne wants to become a teacher, but more often than not, her own teachers disappoint her.

Driven by the need for self-understanding and self-expression, Anne tries her hand at writing, only to be discouraged and frustrated by the gap between her own experience and vocabulary and the formal conventions which, in her understanding, govern literary expression.³⁰ Although she lacks the confidence to trust and act on her insights, Anne realizes that she wants and needs to tell her own story (CQD, pp. 106, 134) and to speak in her own voice (CQD, pp. 106-07), even if this means confronting the uncertainty of ongoing subjectivity (CQD, p. 89). If Anne is Ernaux's double, a surrogate for the teenager she was, or might have been, the teacher is both Anne's double, an image of the teenager's possible future (and potential disillusionment) and the double of Ernaux the French teacher. Is there a position in the text from which these doubles and surrogates can be embraced and acknowledged as the multiple avatars of a subjectivity in process?

In thinking about Ernaux's own voice or ‘place’ in the novel, it is tempting to suggest that the author is everywhere, omnipresent in the text. In a way this is true of all her works, not just because ‘all writers are writing about themselves at some unconscious level’,³¹ but also because Ernaux's texts are always attentive to the palimpsestic nature of subjectivity, as her narrators trace the successive stages of their development. However, it must be borne in mind that for Ernaux the concept of place is saturated with meaning; the attempt to situate herself in relation to a primary displacement (her cultural alienation from her parents), experienced as a founding moment of consciousness, is a fundamental trope of her writing. This fundamental concern with her place as a writer in the cluster of relationships which literature sets in play has led Ernaux to develop the directness of voice and expression and the ethno-autobiographical focus which are characteristic of her work from La place on.³² In my conclusion, I shall suggest that the composition of CQD contributed significantly to the process leading Ernaux to adopt the distinctive personal voice for which she has become known.

With the composition of La femme gelée (published in 1981, at a point in time roughly equidistant from the publication dates of CQD and La place), the author moved one step closer to overtly assuming a place in the narrative: although still designated a novel, the text features an unnamed narrator whose circumstances closely parallel those of Ernaux herself at the time of writing. In La place (1984) and subsequent works, the fictional frame is abandoned and the narrators speak in a voice which is progressively identifiable as Ernaux's own.³³ As a writer, Ernaux has developed a very provocative literary voice, committed to frank communication and challenging readers to follow—and explore for themselves—the increasingly intimate pathways of self-investigation (self-exposure?) mapped out in her work.

In her interview with me in 1987, Ernaux said that of all her then completed works (AV, CQD, FG, and P had been published, and F was forthcoming), it was CQD for which she felt the least attachment. The reasons given were connected with the overtly fictional nature of the work, together with the speed and relative ease with which the novel was written (substantially in a month in the summer of 1976). Its composition provided release and escape from a personal situation in which Ernaux felt increasingly trapped, and which left no time for writing. In the context of the heuristic function which she associates with writing, Ernaux summed up the relative lack of appeal the novel held for her by commenting with self-directed irony: ‘J'ai l'impression de ne pas avoir assez souffert.’ However, Ernaux's recollections of the summer in question leave little doubt that intense suffering certainly preceded the composition of CQD, and that it found cathartic release in the process of writing: ‘Ce qu'ils disent ou rien, je l'ai écrit en un mois […] J'allais très mal, j'allais vraiment très mal, parce que je ne trouvais plus le temps d'écrire […] donc j'ai demandé à être seule pendant un mois C'était ça ou … je ne sais pas …’.³⁴

The dispersed (and at times conflicting) nature of the autobiographical investments in CQD is consonant with the author's acknowledgement that the novel was written at a time of considerable personal malaise, perhaps involving a crisis of confidence and the loss of a sense of direction. ‘Le moi clivé’ which the author has identified in the narrator of La place,³⁵ remains ‘unclaimed’ in CQD, although its presence is clearly felt in the fragmentation, doubling, and corrosive dérision which are so pervasive in the novel.³⁶ This might be seen as a (perhaps unconscious) textual manifestation of the cultural displacement which was fundamental to Ernaux's identity, and which (although the writer herself may not have been aware of this at the time) would need to be fully assumed at a personal and textual level, before Ernaux could move forward in her evolution as a writer. Equally however, the presence of a figure (the teacher) corresponding to the author's persona at the time of writing, and appearing for the first time in Ernaux's work, might be seen as an acknowledgement of the author's need to make a place for the adult she has become, to address the conflicts of her position as a teacher and writer. It is hard to resist the idea that the narrator's very explicit challenge to this figure (‘qu'est-ce qu'elle fait là?’ [CQD, p. 154]) expresses Ernaux's own profound reservations about her position and practice as a teacher and writer committed to the belief that literature has a contribution to make in the struggle against social injustice.

It is also worth noting that, on several occasions, Anne's reflections could be read as ironic references to the author's own situation. For example, Anne imagines that life will be plain sailing when she is an adult woman with two children and a decent job (CQD, p. 9), and she is keenly sensitive to the middle-class aura which attaches to teachers, even when their appearance, behaviour or remarks suggest more ambiguous class affiliations.³⁷ These scattered allusions have a caustic edge: two of them express the narrator's view that for a middle-aged person, the death of a parent is relatively untraumatic (CQD, pp. 41, 75). Such potentially self-referential moments further suggest that the author's desire to give textual presence to the contradictions and tensions which are contemporaneous with the process of writing is working its way to the surface. Finally, Anne's desiderata for her own writing (engagement with her own lived experience, using a discursive register with which she is comfortable, and speaking in her own voice) invite a reading of the novel that foregrounds literary practice. Indeed, the narrator's longing to write in a way which would allow her to work openly and directly on her own experience might be said to anticipate the evolution of Ernaux's own project as a writer.³⁸ Taken together, these points suggest that for Ernaux, the problem of defining her place as a writer was a crucial one which could not be passed over, perhaps least of all in a work fuelled by the desire to tap dammed-up creative energy, and conceived within a fictional frame which left the way clear for an imaginative engagement with unfinished business; as Ernaux has said, ‘la fiction passe par où elle veut’.³⁹ It may be surmised that the composition of CQD helped Ernaux to write her way out of school-teaching: she left the CES in Pontoise in June 1977, and has not held a post in a school since. I would also argue that the text signals the author's unease with regard to her position as a writer, both within the text and in the extratextual domain. Writing CQD did not allow Ernaux to overcome the creative impasse which blocked her progress with La place (on her own admission, CQD ‘est pris entre deux difficultés d'écriture’),⁴⁰ but it may have planted the seeds of dissatisfaction with a creative form (autobiographical fiction) in which as a writer she was everywhere and nowhere, and in which both her engagement with her subject matter and communication with her readers remained oblique, indirect, and inhibited. If this is so, then CQD set the stage for a radical change of direction in Ernaux's writing practice, taking her closer to the adoption of the ethno-autobiographical voice and direct mode of address which have become the hallmarks of her works subsequent to La place.⁴¹

Notes

1. J. Lecarme, ‘Paysages de l'autofiction’, in Le Monde des livres, 24 janvier 1997, p. vi.

2. The following abbreviations will be used for works by Ernaux: AV (Les armoires vides, Gallimard, 1974), CQD (Ce qu'ils disent ou rien, Gallimard, 1977), FG (La femme gelée, Gallimard, 1981), P (La place, Gallimard, 1984), F (Une femme, Gallimard, 1988), PS (Passion simple, Gallimard, 1992), H (La honte, Gallimard, 1997, Jnsp (“Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit”, Gallimard, 1997). Page references are taken from the Folio editions, except in the case of La honte and “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit”, where the Gallimard Blanche editions are used as Folio editions are not yet available.

3. Cited in Le Dictionnaire: littérature française contemporaine, ed. by J. Garcin (Paris: Françoise Bourin, 1988), p. 182.

4. See for example H: ‘Il n'y a pas de vraie mémoire de soi’ (p. 37), or the comments in Jnsp concerning the text's relationship to F (Jnsp, pp. 12-13).

5. J. Lecarme and B. Vercier, ‘Premières personnes’, Le Débat, 54 (1989), pp. 54-67; the quotation is from page 57. The quotation from F is from the concluding paragraph of the text (p. 100). Ernaux progressively revises the way she classifies her writing. In ‘Quelque chose entre l'histoire, la sociologie, la littérature’ (in La Quinzaine littéraire, 532 (1989), p. 13), Ernaux added another element to the description put forward in F: ‘j'ajouterais peut-être, maintenant, “la poésie”’. Ethnology has also become an increasingly important term in her conception of her writing project (H, p. 38).

6. See W. Motte, ‘Annie Ernaux's Understatement’, The French Review, 69.1, (October 1995), 55-67 (especially p. 65). A similar judgement is implicit in the remarks of M.-F. Savéan (“La place” et “Une femme” d'Annie Ernaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 39).

7. M.-F. Savéan, pp. 25-33; the cited remarks are taken from pages 30 and 33. Denis Fernandez-Recatala also focuses on the narrator's cultural and linguistic malaise as a teenager alienated from her parents (Annie Ernaux (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1994), pp. 41-64). C.-L. Tondeur and P. M. Wetherill miss or disregard the specificity of the context of CQD (C.-L. Tondeur, Annie Ernaux ou l'exil intérieur (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), p. 92; La place ed, by P. M. Wetherill (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 41).

8. See ‘Ce qu'ils disent ou rien in Annie Ernaux's Trajectory as a Writer’, Essays in French Literature, 35 (November 1998).

9. In evoking the idea that all writing is in some sense autobiographical, I have in mind that all writers necessarily work with the material provided by their own lived experience. However, as James Olney has pointed out, in post-structuralist theory, the understanding that the self that produces writing is also produced by it develops into the proposition that ‘the self that was not really in existence in the beginning is in the end merely a matter of text. […] The self, then, is a fiction’ (‘Autobiography and the cultural moment’, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. by J. Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 22). As an agrégée des Lettres and as a teacher of literature for the CNED (Centre national d'enseignement à distance), Annie Ernaux is cognizant with contemporary literary theory, including the field of autobiography (she was responsible for a course in autobiographical writing in 1977-78), and her work engages with contemporary thinking about subjectivity and writing, while avoiding the kind of critical discourse which would be inaccessible to many readers. Notwithstanding her insistence that her work explores a verifiable personal history, Ernaux is certainly not exempt from the uncertainty about the self which has been so pervasive in the closing decades of the twentieth century. For Ernaux, the self is intersubjective, decentred, processual, and fictive, in the sense that memory and therefore identity are inseparable from imaginative ‘textual’ elaboration (see PS, pp. 68-69). Indeed, she openly challenges the very existence of a ‘self’: ‘Il n'y a pas de “moi”, de personne en soi, d'individu. On est le produit de différentes histoires familiales, de la société’ (‘Ce jour-là, le 15 juin 1952’, Télérama, 2453 (15 janvier 1997), p. 32).

10. Letter to Loraine Day dated 20 February 1997.

11. The interview took place on 26 November 1987 in Annie Ernaux's home in Cergy. It will be referred to as ILD in my article and notes. I am most grateful to Annie Ernaux for permission to quote from this interview and from other unpublished material (permission granted in letters dated 1 March 1998 and 7 November 1998).

12. Information concerning the summer camp and the song is taken from ILD and from a letter from Annie Ernaux to me, dated 25 October 1998. The theme of language in CQD is explored in detail in my article referred to in note 8.

13. A twenty-five page first draft of P was begun at Easter 1976, and set aside in May. CQD was substantially written in the summer of 1976, although it was not completed until October of that year. Between January and April 1977, Ernaux worked again on P, writing about one hundred pages of a novel based on her father's life. Many other drafts were written before Ernaux completed P in 1983 (information from ILD and from a letter from Ernaux to me, dated 8 March 1997). P. M. Wetherill has documented the lengthy genesis of P in his introduction to this text, pp. 30-35.

14. Both the evocation of a specific historical moment in CQD and the stylistic features of Anne's discourse are explored in more detail in Loraine Day, art. cit.

15. The terms listed here are limited to expressions that occur exclusively in CQD and H.

16. In a letter to me dated 20 February 1997, Ernaux confirmed that the memory of the fear of violence between her parents entered into the composition of CQD: ‘Cqdr … contient … bien des éléments autobiographiques. Ainsi, une ou deux phrases qui font allusion à ce qui ouvre La honte (pp. 85, 119)’. My discussion makes no reference to the strong sense of parental indignity, because this is also very prominent in AV, and figures in some measure in virtually all Ernaux's works.

17. Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée, Folio edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1938).

18. L'Age de Raison, Livre de Poche Edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 71-73.

19. Ernaux made this point in a letter to me dated 20 February 1997.

20. Lack of space precludes detailed referencing in support of this point. For a useful overview of the place of separation and loss in psychoanalytical thought, see J. Rheingold, The Mother, Anxiety and Death (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 86-89.

21. G. Rochlin, ‘The Loss Complex’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 7 (1959), pp. 299-316. For references to the cumulative and retrojective nature of separation anxiety, see M. Klein, ‘Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, in Love, Guilt and Reparation (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 344-69 (especially pp. 353-54 and p. 369). See also H. Segal, (Introduction to Melanie Klein (London: Karnac Books, 1988), p. 80), and J. Rheingold, pp. 86-87.

22. The surname and the mother's forename Blanche appear for the first time in Ernaux's published works in Jnsp (p. 41).

23. For a review of feminist work on motherhood and mother-daughter relationships from a psychoanalytical perspective, see Elizabeth Wright's Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (London: Blackwell, 1992), specifically the entries by M. Hirsch (pp. 252-54 and 280-84), C. Kahane (pp. 284-90), N. Segal (pp. 266-70) and M. Whitford (pp. 262-66).

24. See for example Segal in Wright, p. 267.

25. Rosalind Minsky's discussion of Winnicott's work from feminist perspectives deserves acknowledgement (Psychoanalysis and Gender: An Introductory Reader, ed. by Minsky (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 110-36), as do Claire Kahane's brief but suggestive remarks in Wright, pp. 286-87.

26. See D. Winnicott, ‘The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications’, in Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), pp. 86-94.

27. See Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (London: Virago, 1990), especially pp. 36-42 and 68-84. Benjamin's analysis of adult relationships focuses on the erotic bond, but it is clear that her theory has more general applications.

28. For a useful discussion of the mother-daughter relationship in CQD, see Lucille Cairns, ‘Annie Ernaux, Filial Ambivalence and Ce qu'ils disent ou rien’, Romance Studies, 24, (1994), 71-84. An analysis of the mother-daughter theme in Ernaux's work may also be found in Tony Jones and Loraine Day, ‘La place’ and ‘Une femme’ (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990) pp. 35-78) and in Tondeur, pp. 89-107.

29. In a letter to me dated 20 February 1997, Ernaux wrote: ‘La conclusion de La place a été écrite après CQDR, de façon absolument certaine. Ces deux “fins” se correspondent en effet, je m'en suis aperçue ultérieurement’.

30. Anne's feelings about writing, and the ways in which these articulate with Ernaux's development as a writer, are discussed in detail in my article referred to in note 8 above.

31. Rosalind Minsky, p. 176.

32. Ernaux's concern to define her place as a writer in the contemporary social order and in relation to potential readers may be usefully juxtaposed with Philippe Lejeune's concept of the autobiographical pact: ‘Ecrire un pacte autobiographique (quel qu'en soit le contenu), c'est d'abord poser sa voix, choisir le ton, le registre dans lequel on va parler, définir son lecteur, les relations qu'on entend avoir avec lui: c'est comme la clef, les dièses ou les bémols en tête de la portée: tout le reste du discours en dépend. C'est choisir son rôle’ in L'Autobiographie en France (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, ‘Collection U2’, 1971), p. 72.

33. Ernaux readily acknowledges the autobiographical dimension of all her work and in extra-textual contexts she has freely identified herself as writer with the intratextual narrators of her works from P on. However, it should be noted that it is only in her most recent publications that authorial identification with the narrating ‘I’ is explicitly established in the texts themselves. In H and Jnsp, the narrator is referred to as ‘Annie’ (H, p. 42; Jnsp, pp. 21, 67, 69, 90), while in Jnsp the narrator is positioned within a network of family relationships (involving named individuals and familiars) which matches Ernaux's own family situation (for example, Jnsp, pp. 19, 31, 50, 93).

34. ILD

35. Unpublished interview with Loraine Day and Tony Jones, 6 July 1990.

36. This interpretation is consistent with psychoanalytical theories of doubling. Freud, drawing on the work of Otto Rank, identifies three fundamental ‘motivations’ for doubling phenomena: preservation of the ego in the face of the threat of engulfment/destruction, premonitions of death and the workings of conscience (see S. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Collected Papers, Vol. IV (London: The Hogarth Press, 1950), pp. 368-407 [see especially pp. 387-391]). Along similar lines, Winnicott suggests that disintegration may be seen as a defence against ‘unintegration’ in ‘Fear of Breakdown’, International Review of Psychoanalysis, 1 (1974), pp. 103-07; the reference is taken from page 104. Lack of space precludes further exploration of these remarks and their possible relevance to CQD, but it is worth noting that Freud's three categories of motivation and Winnicott's proposition all involve a threat or challenge to the ego.

37. CQD, pp. 19, 115, 154. This issue is also flagged by Anne's reflection that a teacher observed strolling at a local fun fair seems out of place, an interloper whose pleasure is at best vicarious (p. 49). Ernaux is herself drawn to fun fairs, which for her evoke powerful memories of the excitement of childhood outings and adolescent encounters with boys (letter to me dated 12 November 1998).

38. This subject is developed in my article cited in note 8.

39. ‘Le silence ou la trahison?’, interview with Jean-Jacques Gibert, Révolution, 260 (22 février 1985), pp. 52-53; the quotation is found on page 52.

40. Letter to Loraine Day dated 8 March 1997.

41. My thanks to Tony Jones for his thoughtful response to this study. I also wish to express my gratitude to Annie Ernaux, for her continuing support and unstinting generosity in fielding queries and requests for information.