Interesting Criticism of Annie Ernaux - and Politcs

 Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I have written about her here. She interests me - both for style and subject matter. But I also found the criticism by Maria Tumarkin on Public Books, Filling in Time Reading Vasily Grossman While Waiting for S enlightening for putting Ernaux into context of modern history.

...Yes, I’m saying I find Ernaux’s narcissism, like Macron’s, offensive.

I have my own university (call it Mel) different from Melinda’s and I teach creative writing there. “Focus on the work not the writer” is (obviously) what I say to students when they start workshopping each other’s work. Hope they don’t read Sydney Review of Books because here I am.

Ernaux the human is political. She is committed for instance to the Palestinian cause as an active participant in BDS and a signer of many high-profile letters condemning the state of Israel. In her Nobel Prize speech she says, “I grew up as part of the postwar generation, following World War II, when writers and intellectuals positioned themselves in relation to French politics and became involved in social struggles as a matter of course.” The reason she writes and it’s always been so is “to avenge my people” and Ernaux’s people are France’s working classes, particularly working-class women whose lives have been wrung by poverty, patriarchy, humiliation, secrecy, shame.

She writes not to but from – from her “experience as a woman and an immigrant of the interior”; “class defector”, she calls it elsewhere. What many describe as a forensic register to Ernaux’s writing is a mechanism countering any possible contempt or condescension by privileged readers toward her people. A wall. For this and for her focus on the everyday Ernaux went decades being “ignored or patronised by the French literary establishment,” notes Nelly Kaprièlian.

What I have always loved most about Ernaux is how she sees literature as a collective undertaking.....

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Ukraine my homeland is fighting for its survival in part because of two things that didn’t happen in the early 1990s: Russia’s nuclear disarmament after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and a lustration process purging KGB men and women from participating in post-Soviet public life. Ukraine and Baltic states went through lustration. Ukraine of course gave up its nuclear weapons as well.

It’s been surprising to learn from my little perch in Australia how ready people are to stomp with both feet on the reality that Russia, not America, not China, is at present the deadliest imperial power and biggest terrorist organization in the world. Who knew it’d be such a bummer for so many, they’ll grab at whichever ideological lasso is thrown around Ukraine’s neck—anticolonialism, white-on-white violence, multipolarity, Global South v. Global North, NATO warmongering, racial capitalism, proxy American war, criminal dominance of the West—grab at and posit Ukraine, simultaneously mirroring Russian propaganda aims, as a costly and disingenuous distraction from real struggles and real wars.

sch 7/5