On October 6 this year, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature to French writer Anne Erno, who read: "With courage and keen insight, she reveals the roots, estrangement, and collective constraints of individual memory." ”
Anne Erno thus became the first French woman writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. On November 19, during the 2022 Shanghai Book Fair, Shanghai People's Publishing House brought Anne Elno's three masterpieces - "A Woman's Story", "A Man's Position" and "A Girl's Memory". Poet Ouyang Jianghe, literary translator Yuan Xiaoyi, writer Mao Jian and Zhao Wei, the editor-in-charge of these three books, attended the Sinan Reading Club to share the charm of Anne Elno's works with readers.
It just so happened that November 18, a day earlier, was the centenary of the death of Marcel Proust, a famous French writer and stream-of-consciousness writer. In a way, we can say that Anne Erno was also Proust's "apprentice", and she was deeply influenced by Proust in memory writing. But her language, her view of writing, was very different from Proust's. We can see her writing in the book: "When I read Proust or Mauriac, I don't think they wrote about the era of my father's childhood, and the background of my father's life belongs to the Middle Ages. ”
From left to right: Zhao Wei, Mao Jiang, Ouyang Jianghe, Yuan Xiaoyi. The Paper reporter Luo Xin Photo
Her memory writing
Since the publication of her first autobiographical novel " The Empty Wardrobe " in 1974 , Anne Elno has published more than twenty books, all of which have written about her own life, such as "A Man's Place" about her father, "A Woman's Story" about her mother, and "A Girl's Memory" about her own youth.
"A Woman's Story" book shadow
"A Girl's Memory" book shadow
"A Man's Place" book shadow
Academics generally divide her novels into two categories, one is the autobiographical novel represented by "A Man's Position" and "A Woman's Story", and the other is the "private diary" represented by "Lost" and "I Can't Get Out of the Night". But Anne Elno does not like to call her work "fiction", she prefers to call it "literature", and she hopes to graft her personal and social memory through "literature". In an interview, she said that everyone has their own memory, and the role of literature is to find a form for memory.
"You will find the truest reservations about the times in her personal memory." Yuan Xiao also accused Anne Elno of writing personal stories and being too personal, but her writing is not self-exposed, but brave self-confronting. Her fully personal autobiography has been the subject of research since the 1990s. The French 'I' is more of an unpronounced first-person, or trans-personable first-person. She thinks her 'I' can represent some kind of universality. She is very clear in her writing – when I look at the 'me' of the past, I see a different me. ”
"Her memory is so powerful that she can turn the memory of the individual into the memory of the whole and into the memory shared by everyone." Mao Jian said that "A Man's Position" wrote that Anne Elno happily bought her father a bottle of aftershave, but when her father opened it, she awkwardly asked "what is this for?" This scene reminded Mao Jian of buying a jar of hand cream for his mother when he was in school in Hong Kong, but his mother said that this jar was not as good as a bottle of peanut butter. "Anne Elno is much older than me, but her text is particularly evocative and awakens my memory at once."
"Thematically, Proust is also a person who constructs memories. At this point, Proust had a great influence on Anne Elno. Yuan Xiaoyi said that on the centenary of the publication of "Remembering the Lost Years", France had done a collection of Proust, and the part of the writer's discussion included a piece by Anne Elno. At that time, Anne Ernault revealed that when she first read Proust, she could only find the third volume, but she could not read it, and she did not finish this masterpiece until she was almost thirty or forty years old. "The so-called memory fragment, her starting point is the same as Proust."
"The language of being lived"
But Anne Elno did not think Proust's language was appropriate for her writing. She felt that it was not "the language of her father", and if she used Proust's language to write about her father, it would be "another harm" to her father. When asked which French Nobel laureate she was closest to, her answer was Camus, born in Algeria.
To understand this question, we must first understand the origins of Anne Elno.
Anne Ernault was born in 1940 in a small seaside town in Normandy, France. She was born into the French painter, where her parents ran a small grocery store. In order to free her from the humble social class and harsh living environment, her parents did their best to save food and clothing, and tried to send her to the best private school in the area, which only the rich could afford. However, when Anne Elno realizes her dream and rises to the so-called high class, she becomes irreconcilably estranged from her parents and is forever separated from the world she came from.
In The Place of a Man, Anne Elno writes that dialect is the only language her grandparents speak. Her father always felt that dialect meant inferiority, but he himself could only get rid of some of the native language and speak the non-standard popular French. Between her father and mother, even if they expressed concern on a daily basis, their words were often tinged with foul language and insults. However, in her married family, if someone broke a cup, someone would immediately say in the verse of Sully Pluddom: "Please don't touch it, it is broken." ”
This is the difference that Anne Elno cannot escape in her life.
As a poet, Ouyang Jianghe was most interested in the language used by Anne Elno, which is not a natural French literary language, which is particularly distinctive. "She wrote about her parents, feeling guilty from beginning to end, because she was integrated into the bourgeoisie and could no longer understand her father and mother. But then she understood that only the kind of language her parents used was truly the 'language of being lived', the language of breathing. This language cannot be conveyed through the language of Proust. ”
Ouyang Jianghe said that French is beautiful and delicate, but it is easy to become dazzling, narcissistic and unreal after being overly literary. But Anne Elno is very restrained, she uses a kind of "notepad language" to write letters to her parents, this language touches reality, touches pain, like a ray of sky light in the air, shining on the human soul.
The vastness behind the simplicity
Another characteristic of Anne Elno's language is simplicity.
According to Zhao Wei, Anne Elno has a long notepad in her daily life, and she insists on writing it every day. But when she wrote the book, "A Man's Place," "A Woman's Story," and "A Girl's Memory" were all short, basically less than a hundred pages. "When she found this form, the things in the diary became fodder, and if she gave it form, it became literature."
Mao Jian describes Anne Elno's literature as "slide writing", like using a photograph to show an important event in a woman's life. Several points in time are crucial in her writing, such as the time she witnessed a fight between her parents in 1952, when her father slapped her mother hard and became the starting point of her memory; For example, in 1958, she attended a summer camp and had her first intimate relationship with men.
When writing about that summer camp, Anne Elno used a sentence that impressed Yuan Xiaoyi: "A good student of a religious school in another province, from an ordinary family, yearns to become a bohemian middle-class intellectual."
"Just such a sentence, but there is a lot of information behind it." Yuan Xiaoyi said, "Anne Erno used 40,000 words to write something, which we may need to use 400,000 words, but her only 40,000 words are very rich." I think the value of literature is also here. The seemingly small amount of text space actually gives us a very wide space to go back even further. The writer's ability to record another state of language is itself the richness of language. ”
If Proust's language is like fine high pixels, presenting an old Europe that can be magnified ten thousand times, Anne Elno's language awakens another old Europe. In Ouyang Jianghe's view, literature is not to contact reality, but to contact reality, and literature is not to show the truth itself, but to show the sense of reality. Lacan has an assertion: "Reality is neither true nor false, but wordal." In this sense, all writing contains the position of "what is writing itself", which is a worldview, not only the definition of style, the definition of genre, but the fundamental understanding of writing.
"Without fundamental understanding, you can never be a good writer. Anne Elno thinks very well in this regard. ”
It is reported that next year Shanghai People's Publishing House will publish three works by Anne Elno: "Shame", "Young Men" and "Writing is a Knife". "Shame" tells the story of a violent argument between her father and mother when Anne Elno was twelve years old, and her father almost wanted to kill his mother; Young Men is Anne Elno's latest May 2022 book, which follows her experience in her fifties with a young man in her early twenties. The work was first conceived in the 90s, and more than twenty years later, she finally completed the work, which took only about thirty pages, but the impact of the text was extremely strong; In the interview "Writing is a Knife," Anne Elno talks about herself, her writing, the world, literature and society, and her plain writing style that is as sharp as a knife. This book will be a key to our understanding of Anne Elno's oeuvre.