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In the summer of 2024 I returned to Annie Ernaux and picked up Exteriors. Partly because it was a short read, partly because of the title. “Exterior” felt very strangely familiar yet mysterious and it was time to find out what exactly the title evokes. Ernaux begins the book with an apt epigraph, “notre vrai moi n est past tout entier en nous,” which translates to “our true self is not entirely within us,” a theme that this impersonal series of diary entries so poignantly embodied.
In 2022, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling was overturned Roe v. WadeAnnie Ernaux received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here was a writer who wrote so lyrically about the experience of her illegal abortion happening. She is also known for her raw accounts of sex, passion, and what it means to be a woman in it all, in her books La Passion Simple and Se perdre (Getting lost).
Source: Goodreads
In “Exterieurs,” however, Ernaux takes on the role of observer and not that of a writer. Exteriors, a collection of vignettes of everyday life in the suburbs of Paris, was translated from French by Tanya Leslie and was originally a diary kept by Ernaux between 1985 and 1992. Without any public performance for a literary audience, Exteriors tells of public memories, often from the working class, as she recounts her days in her city: of commuters, customers and cashiers, children and young people, and also of objects in public spaces. Through this process, she also reflects on the transcendental “I,” the role she plays and that we all play in public life and in the lives of others.
The cancellation of the “self” in auto-sociobiography
In the outdoor area, Ernaux has chronicled the otherwise invisible everyday life that navigates systemic work and class hierarchies in public spaces. She provided an honest account of the symbolic violence in everyday life. Above all, Ernaux points out that desire, frustration, and social and cultural inequality are reflected in the way we examine the most mundane events in life, such as examining our shopping carts, appreciating a painting, or the contempt we show a cashier, that is, “anything that seems unimportant or meaningless.”
Ernaux’s books were largely classified in the genre of autofiction, with which she often disagreed. However, this work moves away from that practice and instead serves as one Auto-sociobiographya term coined by Ernaux. Autosociobiography locates writing at the interface of literature and sociology, which always takes the form of a larger political commentary. In this detailed memoir of her everyday life in Cergy and Paris, Ernaux attempts to portray reality as it is. In the foreword she writes: “The feelings and thoughts that places and objects evoke have nothing to do with their cultural content.”
In the foreword she writes: “The feelings and thoughts that places and objects evoke have nothing to do with their cultural content.”
Thus, it has maintained the separation without distorting the reality and meaning derived from these places and objects by the feelings they evoke in the unforgiving “I,” the self. The main elements of an autosociobiography include shallow writing, that is, writing that expresses it as it is seen without internally exploring themes or ideas from the author’s perspective. In “Exterieurs,” Ernaux also maintained the simplicity of her writing and avoided subjectivity. Because subjectivity and the introduction of one’s own feelings can distort the image and representation of reality.
The outside through split consciousness
Ernaux grew up working class in Normandy, France. In particular, looking at her appearance in this way, it can be seen that, while maintaining her sociological objectivity, she has assumed the position of a class defender, a person who has transitioned from her rural working-class upbringing to become part of the educated French literary elite. Today it belongs to the bourgeois literary world. But in her writing she is rooted in the alienations and memories of her class origins. With Exteriors, Ernaux archives the world around her and the conditions of everyday life.
MEP Paris: Exteriors – Annie Ernaux & Photography, 2024, installation view. Photo: © Quentin Chevrier. Courtesy of MEP, Paris
In her opinion, the only way to make her visible as she is is to present it as it is, without clouding her observations with romance or redemption. This also leads one to her Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “I will write to avenge my people.” What once began as a promise to herself to base her writing on recording the work and lives of her people in her twenties, Ernaux has now taken tangible form, such as in her own books, including Exteriors, conducting an investigation into how gender, class and power are organized public spacessuch as trains, hypermarkets, etc. She has documented other invisible and ordinary people, lives and bodies navigating work systems.
In Exteriors we experience a type of writing that is reduced to the author’s and reader’s unconscious reactions to the world. By simply reading this work, the reader also comes into close contact with the reality of his own perspective and accuracy. It lets you examine her reactions to her own appearance as well as Ernaux’s reports. Ernaux writes in her final paragraph: “My former existence lies outside my own life: in passengers commuting on the Metro or the RER; in shoppers seen on escalators in Auchan or at the Galleries Lafayette; in total strangers who cannot know that they own a part of my history; in faces and bodies that I will never see again. Likewise, I myself, anonymous among the bustling crowds on streets and in department stores, must secretly play a role in the Playing other people’s lives.”
Ernaux undermines the idea that an autobiographical work should include the narration of the self with personal and intimate revelations. Exteriors thus locates itself in spaces and routines shared by strangers, in the collective and material memory of our immediate world. Through this record, Ernaux has preserved not only the nature of society, but also the conditions and temporary intersections that form the basis of a complex web of relationships.
Through this record, Ernaux has preserved not only the nature of society, but also the conditions and temporary intersections that form the basis of a complex web of relationships.
Our exterior does not exist as it is. In fact, our appearance is created by our lived experience and unconsciousness. For as Anais Nin famously said: We do not see things as they are, but we see them as we are. However, in this exercise, Ernaux has tried to separate subjective feelings from the conscious images that have captured her memory and public memory at large, while still maintaining her position within the society that she observes daily but consciously.
Source: Times Literary Supplement
Exteriors was written to read more like a photograph than indulgent prose. Any addition to this memory, whether poetic or romantic, would mislead the record itself. “Exteriors” is therefore a representation of how life is shaped by material conditions and how life endures through the conditions that shape it.
Shreenithi Annadurai is an India-based lawyer. Her areas of interest include art as political expression and issues of representation and resistance, drawing on rights-based perspectives and feminist media practices.
