Abstract

 Annie Ernaux writes that writing should attempt to give the impression provoked by the sexual act on a screen, that anguish and the stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgement. (Ernaux,1992). In this study, we examine how passionate love is used as a metaphor for the act of writing, based on the novel Passion simple by the French writer Annie Ernaux. “All the traits that define passion are found there in writing: quest towards an impossible object, the extreme tension that binds the subject to its object in a dual relationship, a mixture of elation and pain.” (Mion, D. 2010). Through the literary analysis of the revelation of the narrator of her highly personal experience of extreme obsession for a married man, we observed the nature and the different stages of writing parallelly developed in the novel. Passion is short and intense, painful, and traumatizing, like an illness, leaves indelible traces in the narrator so as her decision to write which originates through the sparks of inspiration, but forces to relentless work in isolation to create an everlasting literary work. Passion is raw, immoral, more shameful for the female narrator which is like the act of writing auto-fiction for a female writer portrayed through the technique of “flat writing”. Writing passion is also going beyond oneself through depersonalization, an involuntary stop in time, inviting to folly. As Ernaux depicts what it feels like to have an “existence lived entirely for someone else” clearly implies the objective of a writer. Writing is also therapeutic with the emotional discharge on a paper as well as an attempt to relive an experience by retelling through words. What makes Ernaux stand out as “a writer” among numerous accounts of confessions by the public, is the objectification of her personal experience. 

Keywords: Passion simple, Annie Ernaux, Writing, Passion, Auto-fiction

 Introduction

Annie Ernaux writes that writing should attempt to give the impression provoked by the sexual act on a screen, that anguish and the stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgement. (Ernaux,1992). Writing desire and intimacy, and “provoking” the readership is a remarkable characteristic in modern French women writing. She further emphasizes that writing is a quest for truth, an update of reality, an undistorted, brutal, vertiginous unveiling.

• What is the aim of writing? What can we call literature?
• Can the whole act of writing be compared to “something else”?
• Writing desire and fantasies, and “provoking” the readership, is it a remarkable characteristic in modern French women writing?

In this study, we examine how passionate love is used as a metaphor for the act of writing, based on the novel Passion simple by the French writer Annie Ernaux. Comparing writing to passion is not accidental: “All the traits that define passion are found there in writing: quest towards an impossible object, the extreme tension that binds the subject to its object in a dual relationship, a mixture of elation and pain.” (Mion, D. 2010). Marguerite Duras in her book Écrire provides insight in to the same by mentioning a passion that “lives” within her. As Jeniffer Willging points out in her essay Annie Ernaux’s Shameful narration:            

“She felt no shame, she maintains, while experiencing her passion, nor while writing her account of it. Reading this account, however, is somehow mortifying.” Therefore, it is noteworthy to analyse the rapport between passion and writing.

METHODOLOGY

The research was conducted through the textual and literary analysis of the French novel Passion Simple, a short semi-autobiographical novel by Annie Ernaux which narrates the highly personal experience of an extreme obsession of a female narrator who is a writer and a professor in literature, for a married man named “A” who appears to be a diplomat constantly travelling and absent from her life. The literary analysis was followed by a close reading of the ensemble of her auto- fictional literary work notably Se perdre, La honte, as well as her interview book Écriture comme un couteau. Literature was investigated through the research work on Annie Ernaux studies as well as scholarly articles on auto-fiction, particularly on the works of Marguerite Duras.

RESULTS / DISCUSSION

 The etymology of the term passion is the Latin passio, “the act of suffering", and by the Passion of Christ is understood his torture and his suffering endured on the cross. Passion in its current sense is intense love, a state inseparable from suffering: Passion means suffering, something suffered, the dominance of destiny over the free and responsible person.

We observed the nature and the different stages of Writing parallelly developed in the novel. Passion is short and intense, painful and traumatizing, like an illness, leaves indelible traces in the narrator so as her decision to write which originates through the sparks of inspiration, but forces to relentless work in isolation to create an everlasting literary work. 

“Quite often I felt I was living out this passion in the same way I would have written a book: the same determination to get every single scene right, the same minute attention to detail.” (p.9)

Passion is raw, immoral, more shameful for the female narrator which is like the act of writing auto-fiction for a female writer portrayed through the technique of “flat writing”. The female narrator decides to write down her romantic encounter in the past, and she determines to be brutally honest without any moral judgement. Her memory is constructed through stilt phrases and consists of banal sentences devoid of rich literary techniques.

• “From September last year, I did nothing else but wait for a man…”(p.1)
• “my long, painful wait, invariably tinged with jealousy” (p.7)
• “I could even accept the thought of dying providing I had lived this passion through to the very end— without actually defining “to the very end”—in the same way I could die in a few months’ time after finishing this book. ” (p.9)
• “experienced pleasure like a future pain.” (p.15)
• “My whole body ached. I would have liked to tear out the pain but it was everywhere.” (p.18)
• “The man who returned that evening wasn’t the man I was carrying inside me throughout the year when he was here, and when I was writing about him. I shall never see that man again. Yet 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. (p.24)

Writing passion is also going beyond oneself through depersonalization, an involuntary stop in time, inviting to folly. As Ernaux depicts what it feels like to have an “existence lived entirely for someone else.” clearly implies the objective of a writer. Writing is also therapeutic with the emotional discharge on a paper as well as an attempt to relive an experience by retelling through words.

CONCLUSION

What makes Ernaux stand out as “a writer” among numerous accounts of confessions by the public, is the objectification of her personal experience. 

As Ernaux suggests, writing passion was to tell others not to have this kind of passion, therefore, she could be suggesting, that writing is not just narrating personal life but making it universal through objectification. “But I haven’t written a book about him, neither have I written a book about myself. All I have done is translate into words -words he will probably never read; they are not intended for him-the way in which his existence has affected my life. An offering of a sort, bequeathed to others”.

Therefore, the passion though used as a metaphor is not a subjective expression in her novel. However, it also forces the author to alienation and revisit her trauma repeatedly as she mentions “to go on writing is also a means of delaying the trauma of giving this to others to read.”

REFERENCES

Ernaux, A., (1992), Passion Simple, Paris, Editions Gallimard.

Lacore-Martin, E. (2008), Le Cerceau De Papier: Mémoire, Écriture et Circularité Dans Passion Simple Et Se Perdre d'Annie Ernaux, French Forum, 33(1/2), 179-193.

Merleau, C. (2004), The Confessions of Annie Ernaux: Autobiography, Truth, and Repetition, Journal of Modern Literature, 28(1), 65-88.

Mion, D. (2010), Une passion, celle d'écrire chez Marguerite Duras, Champ psy, 57, 43-52. 

Willging, J. (2001), Annie Ernaux's Shameful Narration, French Forum, 26(1), 83-103.

Extended abstract by Charitha Liyanage , Department of Languages, Cultural Studies and Performing Arts, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka