19 Dec 2023

Writer whore Free Woman in Perdersi Ernaux Gives Voice to The Dark Side of Female desire

The latest book by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux is very different from its predecessors, and the title, Perdersi (L'orma, 2023) , is the first sign of this. The hypostatization of the ego on the surrounding world, «almost absent from these pages», is in fact the seal of a writing that gives intimacy an absolute, elusive dimension; and erases, with a gesture that reveals the entire subservience of the ego to S. – «figure of the absolute, of that which arouses nameless terror» – the life that is consumed beyond passion and desire, which have never been so voracious, intense and tearing as in this novel.

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux the plot of the book

Getting lost – which in reality has (almost) nothing of the novel – is the diary of an annulment< a i=3>: the story of a woman worn out by waiting who obsessively retraces "the thoughts, the gestures, all the details - from the socks she was holding while making love to my desire to die in her car". It begins, like all private reports,in medias res: with a phone call to the USSR embassy which reopens an old wound and makes the narrator fall back into a past that is still incomprehensible to her. It is this event that pushes Annie to pick up an old diary to which she had entrusted all her most hidden feelings, fears and disappointments linked to her relationship with that Soviet man, S.,< /span>: «before haste arrives, indifference to any material event (breaking a precious object, for example), to duties (correspondence, etc.), because nothing matters anymore apart from desire".a sort of disease, or paralysis, of thought which had quickly turned into desire and republish it: to let go, once and for all, of the burden of a

The novel therefore coincides with the content of this intimate diary; and outlines, in just over two hundred pages, the contours of a story that existed, above all, in the mind of Annie, who in S. arrives at sacrificing every cell of his body, in a sort of "oblation". It's a sick relationship you're talking about Getting lost ; yet all the traits of relationships between men and women can be traced there, exacerbated: the jealousies, the unanswered questions, the unawareness of who one is for the other, the fear that everything will end, the decision - taken on impulse , in a rare moment of conviction – to put an end to it all; and then the hesitations, the obsessive thoughts, the fear of not being enough; the awareness of the fraying of a relationship, the resignation with which one awaits its end, the difficult (and perhaps impossible) attempt to come to terms with it - which is, after all, a form of mourning: «then, writing , the idea of ​​being able to write about "this person", about our encounters, replaces the idea of ​​dying. And I understand that, inside me, desire, writing and death have continually exchanged places, always have."

An investigation into the contradictory nature of desire

In these days in which the discussion on desire and consent is becoming increasingly noisy, we have often asked ourselves what the boundaries are within which the former is allowed to act: how legitimate, how possible, how a woman desires a man who has nothing to do with her and in what terms is this influenced by the power that man represents, first of all because male: «The call. Every time, the "destiny", the telephone call, the sign coming from the afterlife, this fear, this immediate happiness [...] and it is the devastating happiness, the instantaneous disappearance of an anguish which, tonight, had reached paroxysm …. […] It makes me want to cry, to laugh. I will start washing the floors, the bathrooms, doing some cleaning to welcome him, the "male", the man, the one who for a certain time I recognize as a god".

The relationship that Annie Ernaux talks about moves in a gray area, halfway between awareness of submission – «all my drama it is here, in my inability to forget the other, to be autonomous, [...] this need for man, so terrible, close to the desire for death, for the annihilation of myself" - and the need to live a relationship which, in a in some way, it is in turn capable of mediating a form of "feminine" power and legitimation: «A memory, last night: for several months, in my room in Yvetot, I kept the blood-stained panties from that night in Sées, in September '58. Ultimately I am actually "redeeming" that experience, [...] a horror on which I have built my life [...]. Friday, Friday… the awful thought of introductions to his wife. To be the most beautiful, the most sparkling, desperately."

An aesthetic and political operation

It would seem to be Ernaux's least feminist novel, due to the absoluteness with which the subject of love (Annie) consciously makes herself the object of other people's desire, abdicating her own autonomy; and at the same time it is perhaps the one that most betrays the truth of the relationships between the masculine and the feminine, which can always and only exist in this contradictory and paradoxical, even (and above all) when you are convinced that you are an emancipated woman and that you have deconstructed the power of the male gaze: «My whole life will have been an effort to escape man's desire, that is, mine. In '63, I repeated to myself the biblical phrase: "And I will make peace flow over her like a river" without even knowing that those words meant my desire, the sperm flowing over me like a river."

By choosing to publish this novel, Annie Ernaux thus carries out an operation that is both aesthetic and political: for her ability, on the one hand, to mark a difference between ideology and human substance, exactly as all good literature does; and to confer, on the other hand, weight and narrative dignity to a theme, such as female desire, which for years has been relegated within a marginal space of the literary field. That this happens in the most intimate and private context of the author is, in this sense, a non-secondary element, which reveals the desire to claim, discursively and forcefully, the reality of the political personal: «As for me, I am the writer , the whore, the foreigner, but also the free woman. They are not the "good" that one possesses and displays, that consoles. […] Men look at each other and we look at them? Role of she who reveals, the mother dispensing power".

Annie ern aux's writing in Getting Lost

The writing of Perdersi, like that of all Ernaux's books, is synthetic and opaque : tells the bare minimum, fixing the gestures in the space of a few words; it suggests the sense of abandonment, rather than making it explicit; finally records, with millimetric precision, every action, thought and epiphany from which the narrative voice is captured. Despite this, thetime of the novel is enormously dilated, and the effort to objectively fix it in a meaningful structure clashes with the self-fictional character of the text, which prevents access to any form of realityother than that internal and sentimental of the self: «The incredible thing is that in this story I continually make an error of chronology, of a certain chronology of my feelings, of the reality of our relationship and of external events. […] What matters therefore is not the reality of our relationship, but the perception I had of it." Reality, in short, does not exist except within writing that gives it shape and meaning; and it is in this space, entirely alternative and separate - the only one that, in some way, belongs only to Annie - that everything is done, as if out of a kind of forced necessity: «I am very tired, incapable of doing anything other than this : write about him, about “this thing” so mysterious, so terrible. Now I no longer look for the truth in love, I look for the perfection of a relationship, beauty, pleasure. […] The obligation of truth can only exist in writing, not in life".