Unraveled Narratives: On Annie Ernaux’s “The Young Man”
Annie Ernaux, transl. Alison L. Strayer | The Young Man | Seven Stories Press | 2023 | 64 Pages
“I want to live a fable,” reads the epigraph of Getting Lost (2001; transl. 2022), Annie Ernaux’s published journal entries about her affair with a married Soviet diplomat, whom she refers to only as “S.” The quote is an anonymous inscription from the Basilica Sante Croce in Florence. The journals lay bare Ernaux’s attempts to spin the messy reality of the affair into a fable—a story with meaning and narrative shape.
Trying to make sense of her experiences after the fact is often Ernaux’s only choice: She does not drive the relationship’s course. Throughout the affair, it is S. who makes the decisions. He calls, he chooses when to meet. Ernaux waits. Every time he leaves, she writes, “The waiting returns, the desire, and the suffering, because in the type of relationship we have, I’m at the mercy of his phone calls.”
An entry from December 1988 reads: “What if he doesn’t come? Or if the decline that has begun were to continue? The weather is splendid, as it was in November. It’s not November anymore, however—” Ernaux senses S. pulling away; he’s been asking to meet less frequently. So she romanticizes her sadness using the world around her: The relationship is in decline, the sunshine a cruel reminder of its former passion and fervor. Then a break in the text, followed by an entry from a few hours later: “He arrived just as I finished writing ‘however.’ Did the good weather bring him? A blissful encounter.” Suddenly, miraculously, the sound of S.’s car in the driveway—and now the weather is a symbol of the relationship’s good fortune.
Ernaux also uses forces grander than the weather to narrativize her experiences. She writes of a dinner at the Élysée that both she and S. attend:
The royal dinner, music . . . It crossed my mind that this old-world “entente cordiale” may one day be swept away by other powers—I was thinking of the USSR and China. Perhaps last night we resembled the people of 1913 or 1938, gathered in these same gilded halls—or, fleetingly, those at Madame Bovary’s dinner in Vaubyessard.
She tests out different ways of fitting this fragment of experience into a larger narrative: the rising dominance of China and the USSR, or a scene in a Flaubert novel. A few sentences later, she tries to fit together her and S.’s lives before they knew one another: “S was born on April 5, ’53. My mother died on April 7. Éric was conceived on April 2.” She imagines where he was between her own major life events, as if the universe had planned his birth specifically for her, between the entrance of her son into her life and the exit of her mother.
The relationship that Ernaux journals about in Getting Lost would become the inspiration for her autobiographical novel of sexual obsession, Simple Passion (1991; transl. 1993). Given the narrative sketches in Getting Lost, one might guess that Simple Passion would be a more formal attempt at storytelling. But Simple Passion includes no story in the traditional sense. Instead, we’re dropped in the middle of the relationship and left to observe what Noor Qasim, writing in The Drift, described as “passion as such.” Ernaux writes:
I am not giving the account of a liaison, I am not telling a story (half of which escapes me) based on a precise—he came on 11 November—or an approximate chronology—weeks went by. As far as I was concerned, that notion did not enter the relationship; I could experience only absence or presence. I am merely listing the signs of a passion, wavering between “one day” and “every day,” as if this inventory could allow me to grasp the reality of my passion. Naturally, in the listing and description of these facts, there is no irony or derision, which are ways of telling things to people or to oneself after the event, and not experiencing them at the time.
Rather than move from “one day” to the next, Simple Passion hovers in the “every day.” Experiences are described as generalities, rather than discrete events: Sentences start with “sometimes,” “throughout this period,” “I would.” Ernaux’s feelings are relatively consistent, and she is more concerned with tracking their nature, their intensity, than their change over time.
When S. leaves France and returns to his home country, Ernaux is despondent, cycling through the stages of grief. Then, some time later, S. returns to France and asks Ernaux to meet. In a traditional narrative, this would be a moment when something is done to Ernaux—when she has to grapple with the effects of a decision made by someone else. But Simple Passion does not treat the meeting in a traditional narrative sense, as a turning point that provides closure or moral clarity. Instead, she writes, “It is that surreal, almost non-existent last visit that gives my passion its true meaning, which is precisely to be meaningless, and to have been for two years the most violent and unaccountable reality ever.”
The affair is “meaningless,” not a story to be told with a moral, with development and change over time. Instead, it’s a black hole, a singularity of experience. This mirrors how the book is shaped: as an examination not of a “story,” but of the “signs of a passion.” By rejecting narrative and its associated tools—morality, meaning, “irony,” “derision”—Ernaux can look at passion and obsession as neutral, natural phenomena.
Life is not experienced in this way, as is made evident by Getting Lost—as pure sensation, free of meaning, morality, and narrative structure. But by rejecting the story written by S.’s decisions and focusing on the experience of passion itself, Simple Passion wrests back agency. It manages to explore Ernaux’s feelings and experiences separately from the decisions imposed by others.
Ernaux has used this same method of examining personal experience in her other works—works that often examine what it’s like to live in a world where major decisions are made for you, and you must react. A Girl’s Story (2016; transl. 2020) further exaggerates the dynamic of powerlessness that characterizes Simple Passion. In A Girl’s Story, Ernaux writes about her first sexual experience, during her time as a camp counselor in Normandy. Here, she writes, H. is in control. During their first encounter—as in subsequent ones—“He is the master, always one step ahead,” she writes, while “she would like to be anywhere but there, but she does not leave.”
But as in Simple Passion, the project here is not to create narratives, but to unravel them.“To go all the way back to the end of ’58 means agreeing to the demolition of all the interpretations I’ve assembled over the years,” Ernaux writes. With this unraveling of interpretations comes a similar result: a peeling back of shame to reveal the experience in its essence.
While it’s true that the relationship in A Girl’s Story is a traumatic one, Ernaux’s understanding of it is clouded by the reactions of others, the mores of 1958. The humiliation and shame come not during the experience itself, but afterwards, when fellow counselors taunt her, insult her, write “long live whores” in toothpaste on her mirror. Ten years later, during the throes of the sexual revolution, her experience might be interpreted differently—Ernaux would be seen as “sublimely bold, a pioneer of sexual freedom.” Today, in 2023, readers might understand the encounter yet another way: as something approaching assault, given the inherent power imbalance of their relationship. But when Ernaux peels back these interpretations, the story, the line between doer and done to, is not so clear cut. “There is no difference between what she does and what happens to her,” she writes of herself in the third-person.
This project of undoing narratives is not just a personal one. In Happening (2000; transl. 2001), Ernaux writes about her experience seeking an illegal abortion as a university student in 1963. Her primary motivation for writing the book, Ernaux has said, was a sense of guilt—not over the abortion, but over her silence about it. When France legalized the procedure, the news seemed to engulf the history of the time before the victory, the veneer of modernity obscuring the experiences of women like her. “There’s a parade every Fourteenth of July,” Ernaux said to Alexandra Schwartz in an interview for The New Yorker. “We celebrate that; we aren’t supposed to forget. But if it concerns women? It’s all over, no one needs to talk about it. I had the feeling that I would die one day and there would be no trace of it.”
The events that comprise the backdrop of Happening take place against Ernaux’s will: She becomes pregnant and is repeatedly denied an abortion, condescended to by doctors and friends alike. But like in A Girl’s Story and Simple Passion, she takes back the control by unraveling narratives—this time, of France’s national history itself—and attempting to examine what lies beneath them: whether the stark, unflinching details of her the abortion, or her feelings of aversion toward the fetus, which she calls “that thing” in her journals.
This is one of the aspects that has made Ernaux’s writing so beloved: her writing of women and the working class into history, into national memories that were supposedly collective but excluded these perspectives—whether in Happening and its record of the years before abortion was legalized in France, or in A Girl’s Story, which examines a sexual experience before the advances of the women’s movement.
The Young Man (2022, transl. 2023), Ernaux’s latest book to be translated into English by Alison L. Strayer, feels different. In this book, Ernaux is in her fifties, in a relationship with a man thirty years her junior. Now, it is Ernaux who is in control: From the beginning, A., a young, working-class student, is infatuated with her as an older, successful writer. Though Ernaux is now famous in part for writing about her own working-class background, by this point in her life, she has comfortably ascended into the bourgeoisie with the acclaimed publication of books like Simple Passion and her two works that examine her parents’ lives, A Man’s Place (1983; transl. 1992) and A Woman’s Story (1988; transl. 2019). A. wrote to her for a year before she agreed to meet him; during their first dinner together, “through timidity, he remained all but speechless.”
Reading The Young Man in the context of Ernaux’s other works can feel disorienting—sometimes even like a betrayal. Where is the seventeen-year-old who was consumed by the older camp counselor’s desire? The university student scrambling to get an illegal abortion? The woman waiting helplessly by the phone for S.’s call? While Ernaux made formal innovations to capture and challenge the lack of agency she experienced in these situations, in The Young Man, Ernaux makes the choices—and often seems to revel in her newfound power. “I was in a dominant position, and I used the weapons of that dominance,” Ernaux writes. “I allowed myself to snap at him—I don’t know if my harsh retorts had to do with his economic dependence or his youth.”
Ernaux seems not to be driven by passion or devotion, but by a kind of artistic curiosity. “Often I have made love to force myself to write,” she reflects in the book’s early pages. “Perhaps it was the desire to spark the writing of a book—a task I had hesitated to undertake because of its immensity—that prompted me to take A. home for a drink after dinner at a restaurant.”
She is hoping to write about the illegal abortion she got as a university student in the 1960s—the book that would later become Happening. But as the relationship progresses, she finds herself absorbed by another story: the love story between herself and A. “My main reason for wanting our story to continue was that, in a sense, it was already over and I was a fictional character in it,” she writes.
She knows she will end the relationship soon—when A. tries to speak of their future, she demurs—and yet she continues the affair because of what A. shows her about herself. The sensory experiences of A.’s apartment and mannerisms—his cheap hot plate, his tendency to wipe his mouth with bread—bring her back to her own childhood and early adulthood, and serve as a benchmark for how far she’s come. Thirty years earlier, she would have rejected such a partner, not wanting to see her working-class origins reflected back at her. Now, she has little material evidence to link herself to her past life: Her parents have died, and she lives in a comfortable home in the Paris suburbs. A.’s habits demonstrate how different her life has become: “That I noticed those signs—and perhaps, more subtly still, was indifferent to them—proved that I no longer inhabited the same world as him.” The relationship allows Ernaux to hover between past and future, youth and old age:
In contrast to the days when I was eighteen, or twenty-five, and completely immersed in anything that happened to me, with neither past nor future, in Rouen, with A., I felt as if I were reenacting scenes and actions already past—from the play of my youth. Or indeed as if I were writing/living a novel whose episodes I was constructing with care.
Here is another way that Ernaux has advanced: not just in social class but in age. When she was eighteen, twenty-five—the eras of A Girl’s Story and Happening—she did not have the conception of a past and a future to anchor her experiences in a larger story. While her earlier writing excavates times “with neither past nor future,” giving them another look in hindsight, her experiences in The Young Man are themselves shaped by the past. This, too, contributes to the unique sense of narrative in The Young Man. A narrative that progresses forward, after all, relies on a past to leave behind.
Eventually, Ernaux’s relationship with A. achieves its purpose. Work on the book about the abortion speeds up, and the further Ernaux progresses, the stronger her urge to leave A. becomes, “as if wanting to tear him away from myself as I’d done with the embryo.” While S. left her in Simple Passion, in The Young Man, it is she who leaves A.: “I worked steadily on my story and, through a resolute strategy of distancing, on ending the relationship. The breakup coincided, give or take a few weeks, with the book’s completion.”
But Ernaux retains a level of self-awareness about her crafting of this story. The words she uses—“reenacting scenes . . . from the play of my youth”—indicate a recognition that these are scenarios that she’s set up, not some omnipotent interpretation of events. And while Ernaux is no longer the younger woman with no past or future, to whom things happen, she does not fall back on a traditional narrative structure of linear progress. Rather, she examines how A. shows her a new way of understanding life: as a “strange and never ending palimpsest.”
“I could continue to accumulate images, experiences, and no longer feel anything but repetition itself,” Ernaux writes. “This impression was a sign that his role in my life—that of revealing where I stood in Time—had come to an end.” This idea is strange, slightly contradictory on its face. Ernaux feels nothing but “repetition,” indicating a kind of circularity, and yet the young man’s role has “come to an end,” suggesting progress and completion.
But perhaps The Young Man shows us these understandings of life are not mutually exclusive. After we peel back the narratives that we spin subconsciously, those stories that are shaped by external forces—whether capricious lovers or restrictive laws—maybe we are free to craft new ones, to purposefully make meaning for ourselves out of the things that happen to us and the things that we do. After she won the Nobel Prize in literature last year, Ernaux told Alexandra Schwartz that it felt like her life was following a destiny: “Not a destiny that was written from the beginning,” she clarified. “One that was constructed, bit by bit, of course.”
The end of Ernaux’s relationship with A. coincides not only with Happening’s completion, but also with the end of the year: “It was autumn, the last of the twentieth century,” Ernaux closes The Young Man. “I found that I was happy to be entering the third millennium alone and free.” How different these sentences are from Ernaux’s halting, tentative voice in Getting Lost, which one moment believes her relationship with S. is in irreversible decline, and the next is in raptures about the blissfulness of their most recent encounter. By the time she writes The Young Man, Ernaux has spent years deconstructing the stories we tell ourselves. She’s gained the perspective—and the material success—to write her own story, and call it destiny.