Annie Ernaux, the French author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, probably owes it to her left-wing feminism that men don’t get along well with her. You could also say: They don’t actually occur at all. With the exception of her own father, of course, because he is an exponent of that milieu, the precariat, that she wants to “avenge” for all the humiliations that it has allegedly had to experience from time immemorial: at least that’s what she said in her much-noticed Nobel Prize speech separately described their own writing motivation.
On the other hand, the man with whom she was married for almost 15 years and with whom she gave birth to two sons, a scion of the French bourgeoisie, lawyer, civil servant who died early of cancer, is at best mentioned in her many autobiographical texts; it is not described, viewed or evaluated. This book, in which Annie Ernaux describes an affair she had with a student from Rouen when she was over 50, does not give a clear picture of the young man either. Of course, one learns that he also comes from the precariat, is extremely jealous, wants to have a child for her and generally displays the stereotypical role behavior of his species.
The “young man” does not get a name from the author; at some point she finally brings herself to call him “A.” In general, it quickly becomes clear that this lover, with whom she has a lot of mattress sex in unheated rooms, which reminds her of her own student days, is basically not what she cares about at all. Of course, she’s flattered that he desires her: “After all, he left a twenty-year-old for me.” But what’s more important is what he triggers in her. “Ce n’est pas toi; c’ est tout ce que tu me rappelles” (It’s not you, it’s all you remind me of), as Annie Ernaux’ older colleague Francis Carco once said. And so the affair with A. is also described as a “relationship in which sex, time and memory mixed”. This also includes the reversal of time. At some point the author is satisfied: “With my husband I felt like a proletarian, with him I was an educated citizen.” And again she can take revenge a little.
The writing project of Annie Ernaux
And then the memory opens its floodgates: She herself as a young, insecure woman, looking into an unclear future, but at the age of A. making an existential decision: wanting to abort her child from a stranger – that is more and more like ” result” of this erotic encounter. A. is exploited with the unabashed production egoism of a writer as a “time opener”. And in the end there is the idea of a new book in which Annie Ernaux can write about that very abortion. The more she thinks about the new writing project, the more she realizes that A.’s role in my life was “over. My initiatory role in his probably too.”
Probably yes, but maybe not? Doesn’t matter. After all, it’s not about him. Before you as a reader, presumably also as a reader, break the baton about this attitude, you should realize that this is precisely what The human condition belongs to the creative man: He uses everything that happens to him as material for his work. This is not a particularly new finding, and this dynamic is legitimate.
On the other hand, what one might have expected from a supposedly thoughtful writer like Annie Ernaux would have been a discussion of this dynamic; not in the sense of an apology or accountability, mind you, but in the sense of an analysis of what she did there. But you will look in vain for this analysis on the 40 pages of the slim book. Perhaps a book that, by the way, bears the title “The Young Man” simply cannot be longer if the author sees herself as a left-wing feminist?
The book gives rise to an interesting consideration, especially from a feminist point of view: could it be that this time it follows a completely different impulse for revenge than Ernaux’s books usually do? The impulse of the writing woman to finally do what men have been doing to women for centuries: declaring them a “muse” to use to write their god-given works? One would understand that; not for the tremendous coldness that speaks out of this tight-lipped etude.
Annie Ernaux: The Young Man. Translated from the French by Sonja Finck. Suhrkamp, 41 pages, 15 euros