Annie Ernaux: Pouvoir, langue et autobiographie

Abstract

The f irst stories by Annie Ernaux --Les armoires vides (1974), Ce qu'ils disent ou rien (1977) and La femme gelée (1981)-- are dominated by the overwhelming presence of an emotional subject that, doubly marginalised by the subject's sex and modest social position, maintains a conflictive relationship with language and with the world. We analyse the modes of inscription of a voice that rejects both the language of its working-class origins and the model of the school institutional and that, expelled from all discourse, has lost its place within words and within existence. On the one hand, appropriation of the language of the elite, the true foreign language, appears as the only possible palliative against the double ontological def icit that affects the subject and yet remains external to it, as well as failing to provide distance from the permanent risk of degradation (devaluated forms of the language and of the body). On the other hand, inscription of the oral language pertaining both to the mother and to childhood cannot distract from raising the crucial question of the positioning of the narrative voice with respect to statements proscribed by the Institution and by its doxa.