Annie Ernaux: política y poética de la memoria

Abstract

Annie Ernaux's books defy easy categorization or categorization into any single genre, as they possess elements of history, sociology, and literature. She wrote approximately sixteen novels, revitalizing the autobiographical genre and imbuing it with a sociological dimension. Through some of these works, she preserves the memory of ordinary people and their customs, of popular culture, of their way of speaking, and seeks redress for social and cultural humiliations. Her paradoxical belonging to two worlds—the peasant and working-class world of her parents and the world of culture, which she accessed through her university education—created for Ernaux a tension between shame and humiliation. This situation is eased by writing in the cultivated language, the language of those who shamed her. Popular language is also inscribed in her work as a vindication of those ignored by history. For her, literature was and is the place of emancipation, a space to inscribe her voice as a woman and a defector, as she stated upon receiving the Nobel Prize in 2022. As a defector from writing, Ernaux negates the notion of fiction, transcending the labels of literary writing in favor of greater authenticity, a revelation of the truth of her own lived experience.