A few days ago, the list of Nobel Prize winners in 2022 was made public.
French writer Anne Hernaud won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first female writer in French history to win the Nobel Prize.
Anne Elnor's award was both expected and unreasonable.
Before the announcement of the winners, many media criticized her: "If Churchill can win the Nobel Prize with his autobiographical work "If I Do It", Elnold will definitely win for her fierce digging into her past." ”
In the past 82 years of Anne Elnor's life, such sarcasm and sarcasm are no stranger to her.
Anne was born into a family of small merchants, and the family lived in poverty, and it was commonplace for her to endure the ridicule and questioning of the rich.
Despite her parents' efforts to get her a good education and a prosperous life, her alienation from society became more and more obvious, and there was a sense of irony in her, because she had also been tainted with the absurdity of the rich and the contempt for ordinary people.
It was also these skin-to-skin experiences that made her think about how to face up to and resolve the contradiction between her rudeness and civilization.
Source: Web
susceptible
In the autumn of 1940, Anne Elnault was born in Ivoto, a small town in Normandy, France, to ordinary people who struggled from farmers to poor merchants.
Before Anne was born, she had an older sister who contracted diphtheria when she was 7 years old.
Annie, who learns that she is not her parents' first child, once thought that she was born by her parents to make up for her sister's lack of love.
This once made her feel frustrated, as if she was a "spare tire", and the "spare tire" naturally received unreasonable treatment and roughness from her parents.
My parents ran a grocery store on the outskirts of the train station, providing food, groceries and coffee to the local population.
At that time, France was occupied by German troops, the situation was unstable, and people lived in deep fear.
Especially people living in hardship, they seem to be born with the label of poverty, rudeness, inferiority, lingering and dislike.
Ordinary people's business is not easy to do, and their lives are lifeless because of poverty.
In the winter, Anne came home from school every day, the lights were never turned on at home, and her parents were busy in the kitchen in the dark, occasionally saying a word and always complaining about "this store must be sold".
And the communication between the family, in addition to endless shouting, was also mixed with violent "slaps", especially on young Anne Elnor.
When receiving customers, her mother would talk to them in a gentle and kind tone, and if she heard Anne Elnor's chaotic noise during this time, she would suddenly rush over, slap her a few times without saying a word, and then go back to receive customers with a smile.
While trying to happily try everything in her power to retain customers, and on the other hand, maintaining a life of misery and poverty, Anne Elnor's mother was exhausted by intensifying conflicts.
And the two faces of her mother made Anne Elno feel the hurt caused by emotional separation at a young age.
Source: Panorama Vision
She follows her mother's appearance and greets customers loudly; not eating or arguing in front of customers; Don't talk about anyone; Secretly monitor the behavior of customers.
Her parents had tried to educate her in a polite way, but the rude habits they had developed were hard to change, they did not understand how cultured people taught their children, and family conversations often ended with harsh swear words and threats of slap in the face.
Her parents, who were separated between contradiction and reality, did not bring warmth to Anne Elnor, a child, and she felt the fear of poverty early on.
Especially when she was twelve years old, her father almost killed her mother, which cast an indelible shadow on her soul.
It was a normal Sunday noon, and Anne Elnor, who had finished Mass, came home to find her mother, who was in a bad mood, arguing with her father.
The quarrel did not make her feel strange, because she had long been accustomed to the rough "conversations" of her strong mother and silent father, day after day, about the poor life.
Until the father couldn't stand his mother's endless preaching, grabbed the corner of his mother's clothes, and walked towards the cellar next to the café.
In the dimly lit cellar, where the father grabbed his mother with one hand and picked up the scythe on the cutting board with the other, Anne Elno was terrified by the scene before her, and she shouted desperately, trying to stop a tragedy.
The incident was etched in her heart, and in the months that followed, she feared a repeat of the tragedy, often raising her heart to her throat while sharing a room with her parents.
The loud words and the change in micro-expressions between her parents can make her like a frightened horse, immediately monitoring the emotions of the two.
And the silence between her parents made her think that disaster was coming.
At that time, no one comforted her frightened soul, soothed her fearful nerves, and to her parents, a quarrel and a good relationship did not seem to need any explanation to a girl who was not deeply involved in the world.
Poverty, parental parenting and quarrels made up Anne Elnor's childhood and exercised her sensitive nerves.
When she grew up, she was keenly aware that her parents' frequent quarrels were not their intention, and that the unchangeable external environment often stimulated human conflicts.
Source: Panorama Vision
But at that time, she did not understand it when she was young, until she worked the road out of poverty according to her parents' wishes, she really felt her own embarrassment, and she also really experienced the discrimination encountered in her parents' lives.
The common encounters and feelings made Anne Elno understand the dilemma of longing for a breakthrough in her parents' life and unable to break through.
embarrassed
12 years old, is the age when Anne Elnor's childhood life is completely over.
In this year, there was an incident in which the father wanted to kill the mother.
This year, Anne Elnaud attended a church school.
At school, Anne Hernaud learned truly standard French, learned elegant living habits, learned civilized upbringing and rules.
But back home, alcoholism, quarrels, rude habits of parents and customers, and country accents became unacceptable in her life.
She lives in a conventional social environment where corporal punishment of children is taken for granted, harsh scolding of children is taken for granted, there is no need for politeness and courtesy between family members, and the pursuit of unconventional standards is seen as eccentric.
But in other parts of the world, these uncivilized habits are ridiculed.
In school, no teacher addresses a student with "you", even for a child as young as five years old. The school's school rules are managed in a family-like manner.
School norms contrast sharply with informality in the family, and a twelve-year-old gradually feels awkward and vile in both environments.
Once at school hygiene, Anne Elno hummed a song happily, and the teacher heard it and asked her to sing it out loud, but she flinched, thinking that when she really sang it out loud, the ladies of these rich families around her would laugh at herself.
Since then, inferiority has gradually formed in the heart, and the identity of the grocer's daughter is mentioned by the teacher in the classroom: "Anne Elnor, if your parents' grocery store has 100 apples..."
Despite her first grades, her undeveloped body, poor origin, simple clothing, messy shelter, and sloppy mother became a source of inferiority that could not be hidden.
Compared with the simplicity of school, Anne Elno saw the unbearable and chaotic life too early, which once made her feel that she was not worthy of the simplicity of school.
Source: Panorama Vision
This feeling, she called shame. It was a shame that only she could feel.
And behind this shame lies the humble and feeble struggle of origin.
Born into poor peasant families, their parents did not read much at an early stage to support their families, but they envied those families who were well-read and educated.
They followed suit to learn standard French, trying to get rid of the country accent and habits, but learning nondescript and pinning their dreams of financial freedom on their daughters.
Parents who are separated between yearning and reality have successfully brought Anne Elnaud into a predicament that she cannot get out of and has to work hard to get out of.
The road to success is not something that parents imagine can be embarked on as long as they study hard. The obedience and dislike of her parents, the inner struggle and hesitation, remained in the heart of the young girl Annie, like a mang, which could not be dissolved.
And this embarrassment lasted until Anne Elnor married into a scholarly family.
After marrying her husband, she left the impoverished native family, left the town, came to the city, lived in a big house, and had her own big bed, but the imprint brought to her by the original family could not be completely removed.
After marriage, she was the only one who took the children back to her mother's house, and every time her mother mentioned asking her husband to go back with her, she was silent.
The husband, who comes from a Kochi family, expresses his disregard for her native family with his actions.
But Anne Elno couldn't change, and the embarrassment spread in her body and mind, and she never completely left the poor grocery store or fully committed herself to a privileged new family.
Contradictions seemed to run through Anne Elnor's life, leaving her heart melancholy and nowhere to rest.
reconciliation
One of the books that had the greatest influence on Anne Hernaud was Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which she read at the age of eighteen, in which the questions about women in those young years were answered, and it was from reading this book that she began a life of gradual rebellion.
The first and most direct manifestation of Anne Elnor's rebellion was when she dropped out of school after being admitted to the teacher as her father wished.
She entered the palatial teacher training school with the hopes of her parents.
However, soon after, she chose to drop out of school and transfer to the Faculty of Letters.
It was also at that stage that she experienced a series of deviant things, including abortion.
Source: Panorama Vision
She was 23 years old in France in 1963 and abortion was illegal.
She really felt helpless and powerless, obviously her own body, but she had no right to dispose of it.
And the mother's indifference is the greatest hostility to her who is pregnant out of wedlock, because the law does not allow it, and for Anne, abortion has become a nightmare that will "invite disaster".
Because she had no money, she could not fly to a regular hospital in Switzerland for surgery like a rich person, and Anne Elnor, who had no money, had to find a rudimentary, hidden informal private doctor, and she endured inner fear and physical pain, with worries about the future.
This experience was remade into the movie "Happening", which won the Golden Lion Award at the 2021 Venice Film Festival.
Anne Elno's intimate affair also included an extramarital affair with a married diplomat that lasted nine years.
She uses unemotional brushstrokes to objectively write about specific events.
As Anne Elnaud said, using psychology to explore the violence between parents at the age of 12 is nothing more than the mother's tyranny that triggers the rebellion of a weak father.
It was not until 1995, when Anne Elnaud wrote the novel "Disgrace", which began with the violence of her father against her mother, that she seemed to be able to examine through this creation: the thing that had a profound impact on her and the fear that had left in her heart turned out to be nothing more than an ordinary quarrel between adults, nothing more.
And the violence she thought was related to her parents, but it was not their fault. They are just victims, because life is not as they want, and they are pushed forward by an invisible hand all their lives, with no choice.
Every work of Anne seems to have an element of reconciliation. After all, the first step to reconciliation is to face it head-on.
The process of confronting the difficulties that have been experienced in life, whether public or private, is precisely the process of using the experience of growing up to dissolve the doubts of the past. Isn't this a form of self-reconciliation?
Although this self-conciliatory way of writing was once called "dangerous writing" by Anne Elnor.
Because society at that time did not approve of such intimate, personal writing, especially women's such ambitious writing.
Those writings, secretly written in the name of writing a doctoral dissertation, instead saved Anne Elnor's identity dilemma with nowhere to place.
It wasn't until she retired at the age of 60 and began writing full-time that Anne Elnor's writing path began to fall unstoppable.
She divorced at the age of 40, gradually distanced herself from mainstream literary society, lived alone on the outskirts of Paris, cared about women's rights but did not classify herself as a feminist.
Even with breast cancer, she never stopped holding the pen in her hand.
Source: Panorama Vision
Some people love the way she writes, arguing that her objective narratives deconstruct various sociological issues, others question that her writing is nothing more than a running book of personal life.
But her personal experience has gradually become a reflection of the times and groups. In the torrent of the times, although the individual is small, he is effectively imprinted with history.
Anne Elnor's "Nobel Prize Road" has not been easy, through war and reconstruction, poverty and prosperity, every step forward in history has profoundly affected generations of people.
As she herself said: "Life is huge, infinitely observable, and a lifetime is not enough to tell you a lifetime." ”