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Writing as Flat as a Photograph: Subjectivity in Annie Ernaux's La Place

“[Annie] Ernaux describes the scene of her father’s death objectively, with a measured, studied neutrality,” writes Warren Motte in “Annie Ernaux’s Understatement” (56). Like many critics, and like Ernaux herself, Motte sees Ernaux’s 1983 novel La Place (A Man’s Place) as an example of minimalist writing in which emotions, poetics, and subjectivity are intentionally and vehemently excluded in favor of a more neutral and factual style, even while dealing with an extraordinarily personal crisis—the death of the narrator’s father. Winner of the 1984 Prix Renaudot, La Place, detailing the narrator’s father’s life, death, and relationship with his daughter, both heralded Ernaux as one of France’s foremost contemporary authors, and cemented her nowsignature “flat” writing style. La Place, which is neither entirely autobiographical nor entirely fictive, approaches the personal and simultaneously tries to avoid it through this use of écriture plate—that is, unemotional, flat, so-called “objective” writing: “Aucune poésie du souvenir, pas de dérision jubilante. L’écriture plate me vient naturellement ...” (“No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral writing style (l’écriture plate) comes to me naturally ...”) (La Place 24; Leslie 22–23). Thus Ernaux’s text actively attempts to reject any sort of poetic, emotional, or otherwise subjectively constructed interventions, in terms of both textual content and form. In fact, in her later work L’écriture comme un couteau (Writing As Sharp As a Knife), Ernaux explicitly describes the style she developed in La Place: “La seule écriture que je sentais ‘juste’ était celle d’une distance objectivante, sans affects exprimés, sans aucune complicité avec le lecteur cultivé” (“The only writing that I felt was ‘legitimate’ was that of an objectifying distance, without expressing affect, without any complicity with the cultivated reader”) (Écriture 34; all translations, except La Place, are mine unless otherwise noted). It is particularly important to note, however, Ernaux’s emphasis on