Past, Present and Passion Tense in Annie Ernaux's Passion simple

Abstract

Women In French Studies Past, Present and Passion Tense in Annie Ernaux's Passion simple1 Annie Ernaux's Passion simple2 (1991) is a contemporary text which fuses both progressive and traditionalist elements. On the one hand, in this story of passion, sexuality and writing, Ernaux experiments with narrative strategies and grammatical patterns in an effort to seek new ways of expressing the life of a contemporary woman. On the other hand, she depicts a heroine caught up in traditional societal conventions which have long denied equality to women. Writing in the first-person autobiographical mode, Ernaux reconsiders typical female trajectories by re-examining the adulterous plot and re-writing the fate ofMadame Bovary to fit contemporary standards.3 Yet despite the fact that the narrator/protagonist4 seems to live out personal and sexual freedom, the reader has the nagging notion that beneath a facade of independence is a woman somewhat uncomfortable with her choices. The traditional and stereotypical female role haunts her, and seems to prevent her from fully embracing personal liberation. Textual tensions and inconsistencies in this autobiographical narrative seem to reflect Ernaux's struggles: to both revamp the heroine at a moment in which expectations of women protagonists are varied and contradictory, and to break new narrative ground in order to express women's complex, modern realities. Ernaux finds in the autobiographical form the flexibility needed to examine contradictory aspects of the self and of writing. While postmodern theorists have questioned and complicated the definition of the 'self, for example, Ernaux and other women writers in particular are also re-examining the parameters of a 'life'. Ernaux depicts in this text one scene in a life rather than recounting a complete autobiography from childhood to adulthood.5 Similar to other recent publications which depict significant episodes in a life, this story also implicitly asks whether and how this historical moment is representative.6 The narrator remembers important events which coincide with her liaison with her lover, who is called A. and who comes from "un pays de l'Est" (32), such as the fall of the Berlin wall and the murder of Ceausescu. Including these historical moments serves a dual purpose: it lends authenticity to the story, and at the same time it validates this woman's experience in the 78 Women In French Studies still male-dominated world of history and politics.7 What is common to the personal narrative and to the brief chronicle of societal changes in Passion simple are the themes of liberation and freedom. Political uprisings in the East, however, are secondary to the storyline. Ernaux's éducation sentimentale is perhaps in part a modern feminine version ofthe romantic education of Flaubert's Frédéric Moreau. Ernaux expresses her admiration for the nineteenth-century author in an interview: "(J)'ai vraiment une très très grande admiration (pour Flaubert) et (j'ai été) très très profondément marquée par L'Education sentimentale" (Epron 2: 10). Richard Terdiman explains that in L'Education sentimentale (1869), for example, Frédéric witnesses the street demonstrations at the start of the insurrection in February 1848, yet rather than join the revolutionaries, he hides and waits for his beloved with whom he has arranged a rendez-vous (709). Terdiman elaborates: The novel reproduces this sense that the action of the revolution happens alongside the concerns of its characters, but never engages them directly . . . The 'outside' world of social existence is üiere-outside But it seems to have noüiing to do with the inner drama of 'feeling' (sentiment) that is played. . . . (709) Likewise, the all-consuming passion of Ernaux's protagonist in Passion simple dictates that the political transformations in the former Eastern block and turmoil in the Middle East (The Gulf War is cited briefly toward the end of the text) can only have a secondary impact; the heroine is first and foremost living a romance. Ernaux continues to fuse the post-modern and the traditional in her choice of narrative structure and voice. She adopts contemporary techniques in autobiographical writing, for example, in her avoidance of conventional chronological organization. In Passion simple, we encounter the same structural pattern found in...