Anne ElnohThe real name is Anne Duxuansney, and he was born on September 1, 1940 in the small town of Lillebona in Normandy, France. She was born in the bottom of the house, her grandfather was illiterate, and her parents dropped out of school at the age of twelve, becoming workers one after another, and later moved to Evetto to open a cafe and grocery store to make a living. Erno lived in Eveto until he was 18 years old, and every day he watched the dirty and broken shop come and go. Perhaps, it was this kind of daily life that created her traits as a social observer in the future. But at that time, she had no special feeling about the poverty of her family. "When we were children, we only knew that our parents lived in a certain circle and would eat whatever they had." She recalled this later. What is a little different from the traditional French family is that in her family, her father is gentle and always serves as a chef at home, while her mother has a hot personality and a strong style. This inconsistent personality of her mother was also passed on to Erno, which made her feel a spirit of resistance since she was a child.
Nobel Prize was announced on the spot. Photo/IC photo
Life in a small town
Erno's parents, although they have not received a complete education, their experience in school has allowed them to see the leverage of knowledge. They hope that the next generation can get rid of the underlying situation and make a name for themselves, so they attach great importance to Erno's education. Books and readings really opened the door to the world for Erno. She showed her academic talent since childhood and was admitted to a Catholic private high school with outstanding grades. Later, she received higher education at the University of Rouen and the University of Bordeaux, and in 1971 she passed the High School Teacher Qualification Examination (AGREG) - an exam that is much more difficult than what we understand. She can only pass successfully by solid and hard academic training. She is a representative of the French elite exam. Later, Herno began teaching in middle schools near Switzerland's Savoy and Paris Saint-Germain, and later found a teaching position at the French Distance Education Center. In terms of personal life, in 1964, she married Philip Elno, a bourgeoisie born in the small , and gave birth to two sons. In this way, education and later marriage allowed Ernault to escape from the lower-class working family and grow into a tall, beautiful blonde intellectual woman. She also tried to pursue her PhD with the drama of Maliwo as the subject of research, but finally gave up halfway.
Erno's career as a writer is closely linked to his own life. "Writing is to avenge your own ethnic group." She said this in interviews many times. Since she was a teenager, she has been chasing between two worlds: on one side the poor and vulgar lower class society represented by her parents, and on the other side the rich and frivolous petty bourgeois represented by her school. Sensitive and self-reliant Erno created a strong sense of tear and complex emotions mixed with shame, contempt and love for his family. Her first few works were nurtured by poor family background and experiences of class leaps. In "Empty Cabinet" (1974) and "A Woman's Story" (1987), she vividly demonstrates this complex and ambiguous relationship with her parents.
Two books with great influence
Erno also has a strong sense of self-awareness about his own gender. At the age of 18, Elno read Beauvoir's " Second Sex ", a life-changing book in her eyes. Later, she met her like-minded partner in many ways. But after marriage, her husband showed a machismo side, shattering her beautiful ideal of gender equality. After living together for seventeen years, Erno finally decided to divorce her husband. At that time, her father had just passed away, and she had completed three novels and was working on the position of a man that was about to become famous. The awakening of female consciousness turns writing Yu Ernault into a means of reaching the truth, and tells her true and private experience as a woman: the loss of virility in Shame (1997) and A Girl’s Memory (2018), the illegal abortion in Events (2000), the marriage failure in Frozen Woman (1981), and the experience of breast cancer in The Use of Photos (2005).
Another scholar who had an important influence on her was the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu . In 2002, when Bourdieu died, Ernault also published an eulogy in Le Monde, France. Elno began to come into contact with Bourdieu's theory as early as the 1970s. His class theory and extensive field surveys of French society were in line with Elno's thoughts on his own hardships, and also made her clear about the efforts of her literary writing. Ernault combines sociology with autobiography, constantly using words to record and describe a sense of discomfort caused by class collision and the sense of tearing as a "class betrayer", expressing the heavy weight of individuals being dominated by their origins and the women's pursuit of love. She describes reality through writing, and the experience of wandering between the two classes allows her to form a unique perspective on reality, allowing her to write about her own experiences and family memories to break through the scope of personal experience, become a carrier of social and collective experience, and show a literary anthropology style.
Erno once wrote in "Writing as a Blade": "I rarely regard myself as an individual, but rather as the sum of some experiences, determined by some social, historical, gender and linguistic factors, and constantly engage in dialogue with the world (past and present)." In 2011, the French Garima Publishing House published Erno's collection of works "Writing Life", which combines 11 of her works, excerpts from private diaries and some other photos and texts. If Balzac 's " Human Comedy " attempts to record a history of bourgeois success in the 19th century, then we can also see that Erno also tried to record the times and characters she lived in through her familiar daily life, and remind the world that class and gender struggles last forever in the contemporary world.
"The Years of Eternity", author: (France) Anne Erno, translator: Wu Yuetian, version: People's Literature Publishing House, June 2021.
Social autobiography
Although Erno's writing starts from her own experience and has a strong autobiographical color, it also focuses on social issues and reflects the reality of the social, political, historical and cultural fields with her own experience, which is inseparable from her long-term tendency to intervene. In fact, at this point, she upholds the tradition of intervention of French writers and has always been actively speaking out for the lower class and immigrant groups from the standpoint of the left in various current political events. Taking the actions in recent years as an example, she supported the leader of the French Left Front, Jean-Luc Melanchon, during the French election, and published articles in the Liberation Daily to support the "Yellow Vest Movement" in 2018 and 2019, shouting "We are yellow Vest!" In 2020, she even sent an open letter to the French President Macron , revealing the shortcomings of her rule: "Since you led France, you have ignored the alarms issued by the medical system, and turned a blind eye to the slogans of the people's march, 'The government counts money, we counts deaths'." She is particularly concerned about women's issues. In 2017, Ernault expressed support for Ulia Bdellga, an Algerian social activist in Le Monde, in France, believing she was a victim of various racist, anti-Semitism and anti-gay rhetoric.
Erno's works have always been detractors. Some people think that her works are dirty and obscene, specializing in selling misery, shocking the audio-visual with naked descriptions. Once, a reporter from French TV 2 scolded her: "How did you write these things?" In response, she only responded: "(because) it all happened." Ernault believes that literature is not neutral, and talking about literature does not just mean talking about beautiful articles; literature has a function, it is an action, so she does not mind showing the reality in the eyes of her women, even if it is private and unbearable in the eyes of others. Poverty and gender equality are the themes of her work, and the justice she is rushing for in reality. This is why, her writing is very personal and universal. In this sense, it can be said that she is a representative of contemporary interventional literature.Starting from tiny daily writing, Elno arrived at the other side of the great writer.
Erno has been writing since he published his debut at the age of 34. If you pay attention to her creative chronology, we will find that most of her works are published after the age of sixty. In addition to "A Man's Position" won the Renodo Award in 1984, the other literary awards she won were basically after the new century, such as "Yu You Years" won the Margaret Duras and the François Moriac Award in 2008, the French Award in the same year and the Margaret Usenal Award in 2017. After winning the Nobel Prize, Ernault said he felt a sense of "responsibility for fairness and justice." In her later years, she was still full of fighting spirit, and her creations had gone beyond the scope of literary writing. In 2022, she collaborated with her son David to produce the documentary "Super Eighth Years" based on more than ten volumes of family videos shot by her ex-husband Philip Elno from 1972 to 1981, which was shortlisted for the "Director's Biweekly" of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. These images of daily life record the Christmas and birthday scenes of the small family over the years, as well as vacation trips in Chile , Moscow and Albania. Ernault once again took advantage of her outstanding ability to use real materials, showing in these private images a chronicle of the middle-class French family after the May Storm social movement in 1968. The translator of "The Years" " Mr. Wu Yuetian once mentioned that when he visited France with a Chinese delegation in 2009, Ernault had two surgeries due to cancer and was unable to attend the meeting. Thirteen years have passed, and now we see Elno on the camera has just celebrated her 82nd birthday. Although her face is old, her voice is as gentle and clear as ever, and her eyes are lively and firm. I believe this brave woman will keep writing and acting.
text/Kumquat Fang
editing/Medite Li Yongbo
proofreading/Xue Jingning
