Annie Ernaux and Rose-Marie Lagrave: The unprecedented conversation about feminism, society, and writing

As if it were a dialogued biography, Annie Ernaux and Rose-Marie Lagrave engage in a reflective conversation, posed with a sincerity and a desire for self-knowledge that slightly disregards their place in the fields of literature and sociology. The two women, born four years apart in 1940s France, come from poor families , and their transition to another social class is a constitutive element in their writing and thinking, to which they refer in their book Escribir la intimidad (Writing Intimacy, translated by Gloria Pérez Rodríguez), as if there were an impulse, a demand, or a battle that never ends.

The exchange is the transcription made by Valentine Coppin in book format of a round table at the Centre Interdisciplinaire d 'Études et de Recherches sur l' Allemagne (CIERA) held in 2021 and a complementary interview that took place at the initiative of Éditions de l'EHESS the following year in which the writer winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, Annie Ernaux and the sociologist, director of studies at EHESS, Rose-Marie Lagrave participated.

Both women faced the difficulty of finding their place in the male-dominated fields of literature and social sciences, but they also came from disadvantaged economic backgrounds. This trait, this characterization of class defectors , borrowing from a concept by Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist instrumental in the careers and thinking of the two authors, was the theme of this meeting, which allowed them to get to know each other personally and engage in a dialogue beyond the readings each was doing while following the other's work.

Both French authors found it necessary to use the first person, to write about themselves. For Ernaux, turning her life into literary material emerged as a characteristic and constitutive component of her style. Lagrave, on the other hand, was more resistant to accepting the direct incorporation of her subjectivity into the field of sociology, especially in the 1960s, when the erasure of the person performing ethnographic work was required.

In Annie Ernaux's novel, the experience appears in her first novel, Les Courbons Empétits (1974), but it was in 2000, with the publication of Le Hôpital , that Ernaux referred to the abortion she had while studying philology at the University of Rouen in 1963, at the age of 23. Although France declared a secular state in 1905, legal abortion was only achieved in the 1970s. In Le Hôpital, Ernaux presents a sort of chronicle or sociology of clandestine abortion.

The rawness of the novel, which was adapted for the screen in 2021 by Audrey Diwan and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, speaks of the loneliness of a young woman willing to have an abortion even at the risk of dying . Annie Ernaux's life is marked by her transition through all the expected roles of a woman and, at the same time, by her drastic way of breaking away from them, taking them as a space for research, a sociological exploration (here her closeness to Lagrave and the influence that the sociologist says she received from Ernaux's literature) that allowed her to directly experience the oppression of bourgeois life within the framework of marriage.

Ernaux's novels are, in most cases, based on concrete experiences (she defines herself as an experiential feminist), but they do not seem to belong so much to the genre of autofiction as to a sort of social or existential inquiry into women based on a singular element.

Pure Passion (1993), the novel that chronicles her romance with a young man while she was going through menopause, sold 200,000 copies and was also adapted into a film. Her stories sparked public debate and interest in women's magazines and on television. It's clear that her translation of her life into fiction offered something of a sense of originality.

The sincerity with which she recounts the obstacles to having a clandestine abortion or the way she describes a romance where she was captured by passion, where she was lost in herself, are hallmarks of an insightful analysis of her own life , rather than a development of inventiveness. But lucidity or the capacity for creation are sustained by the construction of that perspective and the recognition of a particularity that she does not attenuate or limit to moral constraints.

For both authors , marriage was the confirmation of male domination , to borrow the title of a book by Bourdieu, an author they repeatedly mention in this dialogue. Lagrave read the manuscripts of that book, published in 1998, and pointed out to Bourdieu that he did not recognize the work of feminists as a cognitive contribution. Ernaux adds, as a critique, his consideration of love as a way of overcoming symbolic violence.

Reading Bourdieu's texts was revealing for both authors in relation to concepts such as the split habitus or the way in which he enabled themes that allowed for the analysis and practice of a closer social universe based on specific positions, operations, and places in the social field that shaped the strategies of individuals.

Although her reflexive sociology did not lean toward the autobiographical component, it somehow inspired or enabled the two authors to propose a sociological perspective arising from the impact that certain social components had had on their actions and character . For Ernaux, domination is a condition she assimilated during the rural life of her childhood and which led her to accept certain disadvantages during her marriage.

The most interesting aspect of the book, and perhaps the main contribution to a discussion that remains somewhat relevant, is the analysis of the place of the self in writing . Lagrave mentions the need for depersonalization in her work as a sociologist until she decided to embrace the first person without losing her fear of falling into the "narcissism of bad taste" or "the biographical illusion," in Bourdieu's terms.

What Lagrave understood was that this self had to exist within the framework of a relationship with others ; it wasn't an identity but a "socialized self." In practice, this change in her writing meant rebelling against her father. Lagrave grew up with eleven siblings, and her father didn't want any of them to stand out, as a tactic to establish fair treatment, without preferences. For Lagrave, using the first person meant standing out from the group of siblings, standing out.

What the two authors capture in different ways is the singularity of an experience that was veiled in the discursive plane . By writing this biographical element, the experience is amplified. Ernaux disagrees with the idea that the third person enables a universal; she is convinced that it is the first person who can inhabit other spaces, as long as it is not too focused on who assumes that voice.

The key element isn't choosing between narrating one's own biography or resorting to imagination—either one can create fascinating or mediocre works—but rather understanding whether referring to experience broadens or limits the discourse . Ernaux says it doesn't depend on the pronoun, but on the place we assign to ourselves in the world.

In the singularity of the first person, a specific experience may emerge that is discredited, or an exceptionality that must be communicated. Using the first person to convey impressions or perceptions linked to a certain authority is not the same as sharing one's own experience to bring it into public view , to a space where its contradictions are examined and where it can dialogue with other experiences.

Lagrave takes her mother's notes recreating domestic economics, searches her siblings' school records, and complements this family configuration with other period data that helps her consider the school system on a larger scale. She defines her method as autobiographical research. She doesn't limit herself to the biographical component but instead builds on it to compare her experience with the social context in which she lived.

For her part, Ernaux argues that when writing about her intimacy, she experiences a distance as if she were another person . The transference into a fictional character allows for this separation and differentiation. There are certain materials where the self is too absorbed in itself, where there is a gluttony for what has been experienced.

In these cases, the first-person perspective begins to lose some of its logical categorization, believing that everything that happens to it is important. Ernaux believes that when writing, his thoughts become things, as if he were objectifying, extracting from that experience something that no longer belongs to him.

Writing Intimacy , by Annie Ernaux and Rose-Marie Lagrave (Altamarea).