Exteriors

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Her sparse writing may suggest an aloofness, but Ernaux is in fact tuned to how non-white bodies are perceived in “fashionable” French spaces in the ‘90s: While all these technologies make it easy to keep in touch with family and friends, what I miss are the strangers. Certainly, I have not stayed in London for the weather. I am here for the crowds that spill out onto the pavement, the ladies’ pond in Hampstead Heath, the chaos of Kingsland Road—what Jane Jacobs referred to as “the ballet of the good city sidewalk.” I live in London for its strangers, for the unknown meetings that might take place. In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs explained that cities “differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.” Jacobs’ impassioned argument had its weaknesses, particularly its refusal to take the role of race into consideration, but she understood the importance of a density of overlapping lives. Strangers represent chance and the ephemeral. They present endless and magical possibilities. Later in the narrative, Ernaux’s interest in the body takes her again to the butcher’s where she observes client-shopkeeper dynamics and how the butcher categorizes his customers: “A subconscious ritual is being played out here, celebrating the convivial symbolism of meat, gorged with blood, the family.” Naturally, eaters of halal and kosher meat are barred from this family and “the recurring bliss of Sunday lunches.” The butcher’s, alluded to in the introduction, becomes the fulcrum of Frenchness, an exclusionary space where the steaks are clearly marked for men and women. Further on, the meat takes on a more overtly religious meaning:

Cergy-Pontoise is inhospitable and solitary, perhaps because it is so new and Ernaux so new to it. Aboard the 91 and 92, Elkin is forced up against the other passengers, but there is little touch in Exteriors. Only one couple kisses—and that’s at the Eglise Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Paris. No one holds hands, apart from a tall man on the Paris-Cergy train who joins his own “quivering” pair together. On an escalator, Ernaux experiences a “fleeting impression, a light touch against [her] hip.” Turning, she finds her handbag undone (though nothing is missing) and a young man smoking a cigarette on the step behind her. As he passes, he smiles and says, “Excuse me, Madame”. Proximity can be frightful, and here it signals not community but rather alienation. Ernaux is also interested in other people’s voices and how they tell their stories. She observes a mother-daughter couple on public transport: “Clearly impressed by their own social status, they feel they have the right to share everything they do and say with the other passengers, knowing full well that they are the centre of attention.” They reveal an “[i]ntimacy of a mother-daughter relationship which they see as enviable.”

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The truth” is hardly a fixed concept, in life or in literature, and, for a moment, Ernaux lets us glimpse two versions of it at once: the cool crust of material reality, and, bubbling hot underneath, her own emotions, effortfully suppressed. “A Man’s Place,” Ernaux’s fourth book, was her first big success. It won the Prix Renaudot; Ernaux heard from legions of readers, and not just French ones, who felt that she was writing to and about them. This is not how people tend to react to sociology. Ernaux has said that she gave them “a mirror.” In other words, she gave them art. In some of the books she tries to be almost ruthlessly unemotional, focusing on cold descriptions of events and relationships. In Exteriors she is maybe more directly reflective. Here’s a kind of similar reflection to the last quotation, a little more expanded:: One of the phrases most associated with Ernaux, “ transfuge de classe,” can seem derogatory. A “ transfuge” is a defector. But Ernaux herself uses the term, partly as an objective description of her situation as a woman who, by dint of education, rose to the middle class and then, by force of talent, to the cultural élite—and partly, it can seem, as a kind of deserved epithet that expresses her own ambivalent feelings at having moved so far from the world of her parents. In 1983, when she published “ A Man’s Place,” an account of her father’s life, she took as an epigraph a quotation by Jean Genet: “May I venture an explanation: writing is the ultimate recourse for those who have betrayed.”

While the world of exteriors does leave impressions on Ernaux, her focus remains her writing. She is forever searching the outside world for signs of intimacy, landing on one in the metro: “a boy and a girl and stroke each other, alternately, as if they were alone in the world. But they know that’s not true: every now and then they stare insolently at other passengers. My heart sinks. I tell myself that this is what writing is for me.” Is this what Ernaux is doing? Staring at her fellow travellers and readers insolently, while she strokes her ego? I am sure, despite her instructions, I am reading her wrong here.

For writers to write with vulnerability is scarier than anything I can think of right now. That is why I read poetry, as the dilemma of what it conceals or shows never ends. Blanche proved to be the engine of the marriage, the dreamer and the doer. It was her idea to take over the café-grocery—she was a natural behind the counter—though this was not the end of hard times. The clientele was poor, and often asked for credit; Alphonse worked other jobs to keep the family afloat. Then there was the German Occupation to deal with, and the chaotic scramble of rationing and rebuilding that followed the war. When Annie was five, the family moved to Yvetot and took over another, more profitable café-grocery, living in the rooms upstairs. That is where Ernaux grew up: sleeping with her parents in a single bedroom, using an outdoor toilet, greeting customers with a loud, clear “ Bonjour” while watching, at Blanche’s instruction, to see that they didn’t pinch anything from the shelves. Snark aside, Ernaux’s oeuvre has dealt with the consequences of trying to be “the French woman” — most notably, putting men’s desire above all and hating your own body in the process. These transgressions against the self are peppered throughout her other books that echo one another not just in content but also in the merry-go-round of their French and English titles. There is a volume entitled La Vie Exterieur (2000) published in English as Things Seen in 2010, supporting the view that Ernaux has been writing one narrative in different styles, focusing on different periods of her life.