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Annie Ernaux: Nobel acclaimed, intellectual discussed

2022-12-09T11:05:28.744Z


Criticism of the political ideas of the French writer, who this Saturday will receive the prize in Stockholm, and her position on Israel coexist with the almost unanimous literary assessment


It seemed that the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the French Annie Ernaux aroused a rare unanimity about her qualities as a writer and the value of her work.

Feminists and the left celebrated it, but, beyond political or social identification, lovers of good literature were aware that a greater author, someone who had invented a new way of seeing and telling, received a well-deserved prize. .

But the unanimity on Ernaux, who read the acceptance speech in Stockholm on Wednesday and will participate in the award ceremony on Saturday, is less solid than it seemed.

The reproaches point not to his work, but to his political opinions: to the intellectual.

Where they were first heard was in Germany.

For obvious historical reasons, alarm bells go off quickly in this country when criticism of Israel is judged excessive.

And the author of

The Place

and

The Years

he has never hidden his position on this matter.

He has signed manifestos against the holding of Israel-France cultural days and against the Eurovision Song Contest in Israel.

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement that promotes the boycott of Israel for the occupation of Palestinian territory, declared anti-Semitic by the German Parliament, effusively congratulated her on the award.

"The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Annie Ernaux represents a setback for the global fight against anti-Semitism and human group phobia," said Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

The tabloid newspaper

Bild

, in an article titled 'The Dark Side of the Nobel Prize Winner', described her as “a convinced supporter of the anti-Semitic BDS movement that wants to destroy the Israeli state through boycotts and sanctions”.

The serious press has been more nuanced, but the controversy shows that the reception of a Nobel goes by neighborhood or by country.

In France, with exceptions, the prize announcement in October elicited a mix of left-wing and national pride.

In Spain and other countries, the celebration was largely feminist and generational (“the intense twenty-somethings”, as read in an ironic headline in this newspaper).

In Germany or Israel the reading was different.

Annie Ernaux, on Wednesday after signing books in a Stockholm bookstore.

Tim Aro (EFE)

The controversy also shows that there is no neutral Nobel.

Nor is Ernaux Peter Handke, who received the Nobel Prize in 2019 amid protests for his defense of Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, although both share a bare writing that seeks to capture the world as it is, without artifice.

Ernaux, unlike Handke, has not dedicated part of his work to Israel and Palestine, as Handke has done with Serbia and the Balkans, nor has he gone to prison to visit a leader tried for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, as Handke did with Milosevic, nor has he read a speech at anyone's funeral like it.

And yet, Ernaux is, like Handke, an author who has never shied away from controversy, and who in her opinions the last thing that worries her is looking good or not offending.

In interviews, articles and newspapers, she has given her opinion on everything.

On the Islamic veil: "Wanting to understand the meaning and practice of the

hijab

here and now (...) is to recognize in the one who chooses to wear it the visible claim of an identity, the pride of the humiliated".

On the violence of the yellow vests: "It is a real violence that responds to a symbolic violence."

Of the divine and the human.

In short, what intellectuals usually do: they have their works, which can be sublime, and then there are their opinions, fallible and open to discussion.

“She is a fantastic writer”, says, in a Parisian café, the novelist and critic Pierre Assouline, who has applauded the Nobel without hesitation.

"At the same time, the citizen Annie Ernaux, as soon as she takes political positions, abdicates all the critical intelligence, all the sensitivity, all the delicacy of judgment that she knows how to deploy in her work."

Assouline alludes to her adherence to the eurosceptic and anti-capitalist politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon and to the yellow vests, or her defense of the boycott of Israel.

Assouline spoke about all this a few days earlier, on November 26, with the journalist from

Le Monde

Raphaëlle Leyris and the conservative philosopher Alain Finkielkraut on

Répliques

, Finkielkraut's radio program on the public broadcaster France Culture.

In the first part of the program, they commented and praised the writer's work.

In the second, Finkielkraut and Assouline questioned her political positions, which outraged some admirers of the author.

Annie Ernaux, together with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, at the demonstration in Paris on October 16 against President Macron.

MOHAMMED BADRA (EFE)

“It is the extreme left, but there is something obsessive that makes you think,” Finkielkraut said on the program after listing several episodes of criticism of Israel.

Assouline stated that, in order to understand Ernaux's positions, perhaps one would have to go back to the establishment run by Ernaux's parents, and where she grew up, in a Normandy town: "One would have to go back to the Yvetot café-grocery and ask what kind of conversations were in this cafe in the fifties.

There's a racist background there that begs to be explored."

“Has France Culture gone mad?” asks

the media critic Daniel Schneidermann, dedicated to Finkielkraut and Assouline , in his latest chronicle in

Libération .

Schneidermann also criticizes the writer Marc Weitzmann for saying, in his program on the same station: "The Nobel Prize winner for Annie Ernaux, writer of fixed, social and sexual identity, from which she interprets the world, is also the non- Nobel to Salman Rushdie, writer of cosmopolitanism and identity, well, changing”.

Rushdie, a regular

nobel laureate

and convicted of a fatwa by the Imam Khomeini in 1989 after publishing

The Satanic Verses

, was stabbed this summer and has lost sight in one eye and mobility in one hand.

The literary sociologist Gisèle Sapiro, in an article in the publication

En attendant Nadeau

, in reference to Finkielkraut and Assouline, maintains that both "delivered to a public denunciation that distorted the meaning of [Ernaux's] words and his commitments" .

And she denounces "the frequent amalgamation between anti-Semitism and legitimate criticism of the Israeli Government for the occupied territories."

In his

Nobel Lecture

on Wednesday, Ernaux seemed aware of all this debate when addressing politics.

Accused of defending the Islamic headscarf in France, she mentioned Iranian women who remove their headscarves and "rise up against the most violent and archaic form" of male power.

Close to Mélenchon, a politician who has been reproached for his complacency with Vladimir Putin's Russia, she denounced "the violence of an imperialist war led by the dictator at the head of Russia."

Israel was not featured in the speech.

“I do not confuse this political action of literary writing, subject to the reader's reception, with the positions that I feel compelled to adopt in relation to events, conflicts and ideas”, he summarized.

Or, as the German daily

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

has written about her positions on Israel: “There is no reason to sugarcoat Annie Ernaux's criticism of Israel: this is what you have to discuss.

But there is also no reason, by this, to discredit her literary creation: in this there should be unanimity ”.

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Source: elparis

All life articles on 2022-12-09

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