Time Travelling in Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille

Abstract

This article is a close reading of Ernaux’s latest book, Memoire de fille (2016). Following Les Annees (2008), generally perceived to be her masterpiece although atypical of her work because it is written in the third person, Memoire de fille seems at first sight to be a return to the first-person voice as well as to a narrower and more personal focus. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear – as I show in the article – that in her latest work Ernaux goes further than ever before in her attempts to travel back through time into her past selves, including one almost physical ‘return’ to the past through photography which rivals Proust’s experiments with his madeleine. The article shows how this work contains some of Ernaux’s most self-reflexive and theorized ideas about time – lived, imaginary, reading and writing time – although these are always offered in the context of her autobiographical project. I also show how, again like Proust, Ernaux’s experiments with time in Memoire de fille are crucial to her formation as a writer, as a writing self.