Brunella Tipismana
Ernaux, Ferrante and the Arriviste Novel
When Annie Ernaux won the Nobel it was a victory for the girls, or so people tell me. Yes, the Swedish Academy gave her the prize for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” She might as well have received it for demonstrating the merits of being in a situationship with someone who doesn't care whether you live or die. See: in an essay in The Drift, published just a few days after Ernaux's victory, critic Noor Qasim uses Ernaux's novels as foils to the “millennial sex novel.” Against the Sally Rooneys and Lillian Fishmans of the world—against their neurotic, masochistic affect—stands Ernaux, patron saint of autofiction, “tak[ing] sexual obsession seriously.” Article headlines following the award announcement, when not plainly descriptive, carried certain semantic associations: Annie Ernaux's Complex Passions, Annie Ernaux and the Writer's Obsession with Intermittent Love, The Erotics of Yogurt: On Annie Ernaux’s “Look at the Lights, My Love.” Anecdotally, there’s a tweet I cannot forget: Annie Ernaux unlocking how to describe the feeling of being dicknotized in prose really is an achievement for humanity en par with quantum mechanics. Less anecdotally, one of her most popular books in the US is Simple Passion, a slim volume about the trials of being, supra, dicknotized.
True: Ernaux’s sex books are incredible. Unflinching and ambitious, they are unlike anything else I have read before. Also true: she was long ignored by the French establishment precisely because of her artistic commitment to the private lives of women. As Rachael Cusk mentions in her profile of the memoirist, among certain sectors of the French cultural elite “the Nobel news caused (...) some startling paroxysms of venom.” Was literature surrendering to self-pitying autofictions? To the complaints of the housewife? To women and their narcissisms? These are all facile critiques, all easily dismissed as patriarchal hysterics. Yet the reaction to Ernaux’s Nobel in America’s media class seemed to confirm them. Maybe it was a win for the girls. Maybe it was about the situationships all along.
But it would be facile, too, to deny that much of the American coverage of Ernaux’s work did at least gesture towards her ample literary range. The author, born into a working-class family in Yvetot, France, writes about love with the same depth she employs to write about her transit between social classes, an illegal abortion she had as a young woman, or the social transformations of France in the aftermath of the Second World War. Ernaux possesses a near-sociological clarity about the internal and external dynamics of class; her attention to individual experience is always modulated by her awareness of social totality. And even if these facts rarely floated up to the wide surface of popular discourse, anglophone critics did mention this essential feature of her writing. Some even were excited about it, as a headline from Jacobin exemplifies: Annie Ernaux’s Writing Has Given Dignity to the Lives of the Working Class.
I don’t think this triumphant tone is warranted either, but let me explain. I spent the fall re-reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, the four-book saga that follows the lives of Elena Greco and her best friend across four decades. It’s a bildungsroman that deals with, roughly, the same literary matter as Ernaux: motherhood, daughterhood, friendship, marriage. Ferrante works, too, within the reality of proletarian life: like Ernaux’s narrative personas, Elena Greco makes a journey from proletarian Naples to the upper echelons of Italian society and, like Ernaux, she has to deal with the consequences. Throughout the four novels, the story of Elena and Lila, the friend who inspires and taunts her, unfolds across time in synchrony with the story of their neighborhood, their families and their country. A friend’s professor called it Hegelian chick-lit; when I manage to ignore the undertones, I don’t disagree.
I’d like to make the case for reading Ernaux and Ferrante alongside each other. I admit that the two operate in different stylistic registers: while Ernaux's career is made up of lean, unrelenting memoirs, Ferrante’s baroque novels teeter on the edge of collapse. But their bodies of work illuminate each other; they help us discern the contours of a literary mode we could call the arriviste novel. It’s the story of the artist who makes it from the bottom to the top of the world by virtue of their education, talent and luck. It is also a story of the shame and resentment that always accompany the striver’s desires: shame toward the place from which she comes, resentment toward the place to which she is going. The arriviste novel—the novel of ambition, of social mobility, of class exile—is perhaps not the only kind of working-class text our historical moment can produce. But it is one of the narrow few working-class stories our structures of cultural production can nurture and let thrive. True, this general plot is not exactly new—money and status anxiety have preoccupied literature for a long time. Yet Ernaux and Ferrante, in their literary achievements, have given the arriviste a new life.
They have written books that are primarily about class, not love—but love is a good starting point. Early in the Neapolitan novels, working-class Elena Greco leaves home for the Pisa Normale, a selective public university. She is a student from Naples with an accent and a chronic lack of cultural capital; in today’s college admissions vernacular she would be tagged FGLI. “I was one of those who labored day and night, got excellent results, were even treated with congeniality and respect, but would never carry off with the proper manner the high level of those studies.” These anxieties recede upon meeting Franco Mari, her future boyfriend. Elena, lost in a school full of “a kind of humiliating diversity,” believes she needs Franco to teach her his habitus: “what the university hierarchies were, what was beyond the borders of our towns or cities, beyond the Alps, beyond the sea.” Her suspicions are correct: his partnership protects her. “His wealth, his upbringing, his reputation, well known among the students, as a young militant on the left, his sociability, even his courage when he delivered carefully measured speeches against powerful people within and outside the university—all this had given him an aura that automatically extended to me, as his fiancée or girlfriend or companion, as if the pure and simple fact that he loved me were the public sanctioning of my talents.” His social position is seductive; his attention, a balm.
Something similar happens to Denise Lesur, the protagonist of Ernaux’s first novel, Emptied Out. Lesur, Ernaux’s autobiographical alter-ego, is a college student from Normandy who falls in love with one of her classmates. “He is brilliant, lucid, has his theories on finance, on legal matters, knows all about politics and is sure where he stands… And me, I feel like a dimwit, a cultural parvenu, who knows only about literature… Just a storekeeper's daughter who is looking for a way to escape, worrying about marks, exams, trying to get high grades, what a farce.” Like Elena Greco, Lesur is “struck by the amazing revelation that there are people like him, lots maybe, who are not afraid of life, who feel confident and unconstrained… I'm nothing more than a girl from a poor family, with a chip on her shoulder, a social climber, all a waste of effort.” Like Franco Mari, the unnamed young man has the weight of an entire social class on his side; the son of an educated family, “he has a lot of interests, things he enjoys: medieval music, movie cartoons, sailing, contemporary theater.” Politics, pop culture, elite sports: it’s the lingua franca of her school, and she speaks it with an accent.
Greco and Lesur have one thing on their side: literature. Small consolation, thinks Lesur. Literature is for social climbers. Compared to the interests of her crush, “literature is the sign of an impoverished mind, typical escapist stuff.” The boy, smiling, confirms her diagnosis. Literature is not political, not useful, not enough. “You can't face reality,” he says upon hearing about her reading list. “You can't deal with real-life problems.” Franco Mari believes this too: as he tells Elena after she publishes her first book, “You did everything possible, right? But this, objectively, is not the moment for writing novels.” Law students, militant marxists, engagé children who will soon join in the strikes of May '68, these men believe themselves to be political in a way Greco and Lesur are not. Over the course of these conversations, both women come to see themselves confined to the world of women's frivolities; art, they learn, is simply not where the action is.
These conversations set in motion the truer desire that will dominate the rest of their lives. Formal education has let them inside a new world, but their unevenly reciprocated love for these men makes both women realize they lack true power. So Greco escapes the dialect of Campania, which lies diametrically opposed to the Italian of her professors; Lesur attempts to forget the patois of Normandy, spoken by her father in the day-to-day running of his rural grocery store. To belong, they realize, they must learn to walk and talk like the men who have humiliated them, turn against the cadences of the South or the North in favor of the metropolis.
But both Ferrante and Ernaux work with a comprehensive definition of language; they also learn to master the material and social vernacular of the elite. In college, Ferrante’s character and Ernaux’s literary personas start reading “‘proper’ literature” (as writes Ernaux, in A Man’s Place). They let go of anything that could be seen as provincial. They learn “to spot the difference between those studying science and those studying the arts… Hardworking chemists, badly dressed, nothing to say, just clods really.” (Later, Ernaux adds “Perhaps they're like me? In the library, the law and arts students stay together”). They practice how to talk about politics with the revolutionary fervor and intellectual affect of their classmates. “I had trained myself to be like them,” Ferrante writes at the beginning of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third book of the saga. “A refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn’t supposed to fail.” In these schools, both women find their future husbands, middle-class men who fill their lives with historical novelties: televisions, supermarkets, free-market freedom.
A couple of years later they find themselves living in Florence or Paris. Time is full with their duties towards their husbands and children. Writing is not enough—or it's not possible—in the tedium of domesticity. They have accessed the life their parents were shut out of, the better life they aimed for throughout the first half of their youth, and this was their prize: “the whole future,” writes Ferrante, “debased by the repetition of domestic rituals in the kitchen, in the marriage bed.”
They never fully crossed the social rift that divided them from their lovers, but now a larger rift separates them from their families and their pasts. Ernaux diagrams this transformation in her memoir A Man’s Place. “My father became what was known as a simple man, modest, a good man. He no longer dared to tell me stories about his childhood.” Later, she adds: “During this period, he would occasionally fly into a terrible rage which twisted his features into a rictus of hate.” The shame she once felt about her class origins turns into mourning. Traveling back to Yvetot right after her father’s death, two thoughts come to her at the same time: “Now I really am bourgeois” and “It’s too late.”
In Ferrante the feeling is acerbic. For years, Elena refuses to return to Naples; away from home, though, a question still haunts her. “Would my mother truly emerge from me, with her limping gait, as my destiny?” She soon understands she does not belong to Florence. Pietro Airota, her husband, comes from Italy's cultural elite. He is “perfect in his over cultivated courtesy.” In the landscape of his life she only serves a cosmetic purpose: looking at his family, she thinks that she’ll never be free. “I could only remain near them, shine in their radiance.” The words of her first teacher, who urged Elena to study beyond primary school, cast a shadow: “If one wishes to remain a plebeian, he, his children, the children of his children deserve nothing.” Under that same logic—the logic that has given her a beautiful, stifling life—her parents, too, deserve nothing except oblivion.
This is the emotional heart of the arriviste novel. Going home—to Naples, to Yvetot—and sliding back down the class ladder is unthinkable. It is also impossible: the women no longer speak the language of their parents. They no longer belong to their childhood neighborhoods, and they have never belonged to the life of the metropolis; they are confined to that liminal space that finds enunciation through their books. Hold back the tears: to escape poverty is nothing pitiful. One has to be exceptional to pull this trick off. Exceptionally gifted, diligent, cunning, servile and/or lucky—it does not matter: exceptional regardless. (“You’re my brilliant friend,” Lila once tells Elena, “You have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”) But, as Rachael Cusk writes about Ernaux, the only tangible result of this exceptionality is isolation. The melancholic undercurrent of Ferrante and Ernaux’s work comes from this discovery: social mobility is a kind of exile.
Ferrante and Ernaux know that, for a handful of fortunate and occasionally talented people, education and assimilation offer social, cultural and later literal capital. This is the arc of the Neapolitan novels and a central problem of several of Ernaux's books. Yes, artistic success confers a modicum of (mostly social) power, as does the cultured air of the bookworm. But this is not the only reason why both women dedicate their lives to writing. Their paths lack the pragmatism that characterizes the paradigmatic arriviste. After all, the most direct way to penetrate a society, besides lineage, is money; the pragmatic arriviste is at BlackRock. No, an obstinacy and a real passion animate their commitment to literature. This is why Franco Mari’s formulation is so disturbing. If writing cannot change reality, what are these women to make of the project of their lives? The question they both set to address, then, is whether literature has power: whether it can function in the realm of the political, and whether it can be a space for emancipation.
One more thing. Their ability to answer these questions is, as always, determined by their social position. I wrote earlier that the arriviste novel is maybe the most popular working-class public narrative of our time. This is, broadly, because of what writer John Merrick calls the impossibility of working-class achievement. Intelligence and style are not a privilege reserved for the educated and the rich: talent is democratic. But talent needs to be cultivated, and this is a resource-intensive enterprise. The artist needs food and shelter, time to read and write, education to sharpen her mind and cultural capital to navigate the rarefied world of publishing. And these privileges are reserved for the wealthy, their children, and the opportune meritocrat who happens to stumble into their orbit.
Little is known about Ferrante’s life (she writes under a pseudonym), so I will save us all the speculation. But Ernaux’s life is emblematic of this phenomenon. Yes, she wrote her first novel in secret and submitted it for publication anonymously—this is the exceptionality, central to her artistic project, discussed by Cusk. Yet Ernaux wrote that first book only after the process of class exile had already taken place: as she has said in the past, she could only write that novel with intellectual skills acquired through her anomalous educational journey, in the free time granted by her economic position. We must remember this if we want to understand why most contemporary books about the working-class experience are apostate stories, from Ernaux and Ferrante all the way to Hilbilly Elegy. The culture industry is so precarious and stratified that a book can only reach us when it has been written by someone who never was from the working class, or who, through the mechanisms of upward social mobility, is no longer part of it.
So the task of the arriviste is twofold. She must discover, as I mentioned earlier, what literature can do: if it can be a political tool or a tool for liberation. She must also grasp the contradictions of her moral position as someone who is removed from the class she seeks to emancipate—but whose ability to write and be read is predicated on this displacement in the first place.
In Frantumaglia, the book compiling the few interviews she has given throughout her career, Ferrante admits that Elena Greco’s desire to “escape from misery” through education is “remarkable.” “But profound changes require generations, they must affect the community. And at times Elena herself will feel that individual lives, even the most fortunate ones, end up being insufficient and in many ways guilty.” Ferrante concludes the Neapolitan novels with what is effectively an artist’s statement: “Lila is right, one writes not so much to write, one writes to inflict pain on those who wish to inflict pain. The pain of words against the pain of kicks and punches and the instruments of death. Not much, but enough.”
Ernaux’s response is similar. In her Nobel Prize lecture, she explains that as she became aware of this dual task, she learned to discard “good writing”—the ornate, glossy language of the master. Instead, “what came to me spontaneously was the clamor of a language that conveyed anger and derision, even crudeness; a language of excess, insurgent, often used by the humiliated and offended as their only response to the memory of others’ contempt, of shame and of shame at feeling shame.”
Her goal was to find a way to measure the distance of her class exile, “to find the words that contain both reality and the sensation provided by reality.” Her aim was also to inscribe the stories of her family, of people like her family, at the core of culture: to dignify them through language, to denounce the feelings of estrangement that accompany a lifestyle considered inferior. Not to belabor the point: her Nobel lecture is titled “I Will Write to Avenge my People.” Writing, these women tell us, might not be liberation. But it will be justice, which can often look like revenge.
Brunella Tipismana is on full financial aid but she’s really chill about it.