Anne Ernau stated that her writing was deeply influenced by Bourdieu’s sociological theory. The writer began to study Bourdieu’s works in the 1970s, found writing materials and writing forms beyond “literature” by reading “Distinction: A Social Criticism of Judgment”, created impersonal autobiography and “plain” writing, and innovated The Tradition of “Critical Realism” in French Literature. This article attempts to analyze the relationship and differences between Ernau’s works and Bourdieu’s reflective sociology from three aspects: autobiography and objectification of participation, interesting social criticism and literary forensics, and “plain” writing and formalization. Describes how Ernor made the sociologist’s craft his own, pioneering “sociological” writing.
Since Balzac initiated the encyclopedic writing of The Comedy of Human Beings, critics have begun to discern philosophical, historical or sociological essentials in the texts of Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust. Antoine Compagnon, a professor at the Collège de France (also translated as Compagnon), pointed out that in “Human Comedy” and “Remembrance of Things Past”, novels and criticism, literature and philosophy are mixed, hybridized, transitional and throughout the work. Annie Ernaux (Annie Ernaux, 1940—) also carried out a dialogue between literary criticism and philosophy, history and sociology in works such as “Les années”, but she continued to show that she held “critical realism” position, and declared that his writing themes and techniques were deeply influenced by Bourdieu’s sociological theory. Writers publish their theoretical sources, forcing critics to consider the professional crafts of writers and sociologists, and the epistemological and formal similarities and differences between literature and sociology. Ernau uses a sentence from the writer Raymond Jean to describe the role of the critic: “Redo in daylight what the writer did in the dark.” The author tries to distinguish between Ernau’s works and Pierre · Bourdieu’s reflection on the relationship and difference between sociology, clarifies how Ernau turned the sociologist’s professional skills into his own, and created “sociological” writing.
In 2003. in the interview “Writing Like a Knife”, Erno divided his works into two categories: finished products (textes concertés) and diaries, intending to show the relationship between public and private, literature and life, whole and unfinished. opposition between. “Empty Wardrobe” (Les armoires vides, 1974), “What They Said or Nothing” (Ce qu’ils dissent ou rien, 1977) and “Frozen Woman” (La femme gelée, 1981) in the first category of finished products are semi- Autobiographical novels, which are the inner monologues of a 20-year-old female college student, a 15-year-old middle school student and a mother of two children; “Position” (La place, 1984), “A Woman” (Une femme, 1988), “Shame” (La honte, 1997) and The Event (L’événement, 2000) are “auto-sociobiographie” (auto-sociobiographie); Passion simple (1992) and Occupation (L’occupation, 2002) It is the analysis of personal passions in an impersonal way. The second category is the unpublished private diary, shorthand of her private life, but “External Diary” (Journal du dehors, 1993) and “External Life” (La vie extérieure, 2000) are not included, their unfinished structure , fragments and chronological frames have the appearance of a diary, but in fact they are photographs that record everyday, urban, and collective life. “Long Time” was published in 2008. aiming to “express the inner and collective” at the same time, describing the long-term personal external experience, which can be called “collective autobiography”. In general, writers use oxymoron to emphasize the intrinsic and extrinsic, personal and collective autobiographical features of their works. The writer’s subject (“I”) is gradually diluted in the text, from identity-seeking (“I” is “renegade” “woman”) to identity diffusion (“I” is “us” “they” “she”). So, how does Erno define autobiography?
In the 1970s, Ernau started the literary world, and the French theoretical circles were discussing the autobiographical style. In 1975. Philippe Lejeune, the founder of French autobiographical research, published “The Autobiographical Contract” and proposed the definition of autobiography: “When a person mainly emphasizes his personal life, especially the history of his personality, we Call this person’s retrospective narrative written in prose an autobiography.” According to this, an autobiography needs to satisfy two basic conditions, “the autobiographical contract (that is, the author declares, explicitly or implicitly, that he is writing an autobiography rather than a novel ) and the identity of author and character in name”. French writer and literary critic Serge Doubrovsky (Serge Doubrovsky) proposed “autofiction” (autofiction, also translated as “self-fiction”) two years later, trying to supplement Lejeune’s autobiography. He adopted the rigid standard of autobiography proposed by Lejeune, that is, using personal experience and facts as materials and insisting on the identity of the author, narrator and characters in the names, but pointed out: traditional autobiography is a narrative written by a great man in the past tense in his later years. A lifetime of beautiful essays, self-writing refers to the writing of the present by ordinary people in the form of “fiction” or fiction, that is, “a postmodern variant of autobiography” under the background of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. According to Yang Guozheng’s research, most of the contemporary autobiographical works do not meet Dubrovsky’s standards. They are dedicated to exploring “how to write” rather than “what to write”, and are keen to subvert the retrospective perspective and linear order of traditional autobiography. , the pursuit of authenticity, and like to try to graft literature and theory, which makes them closer to the metatext (métatexte) mixed with fiction and reality, which is difficult to classify.
Ernor makes it clear that her work is autobiographical rather than self-fictional. According to Trésor, the meaning of fiction includes: (1) lies; (2) intentional or unintentional imaginative constructions intended to conceal or beautify reality; (3) mostly anecdotal imaginative creations in works of art . Evidently Erno understood fiction in these senses. She said that her first three works were labeled as “novels”, because in the literary field at that time, literature was a novel, and for her, a novel meant changing reality, rather than using fiction to protect and cover herself. Her autobiography writes about ordinary people like Dubrovsky’s autobiography, but unlike the latter’s “fiction” that intentionally creates diversity and uncertainty, her autobiography conforms to Lejeune’s autobiographical real contract, except that Deviating from the traditional autobiographical model, it appears as impersonal autobiography. She confesses that she has little interest in recalling her past, and hardly considers herself a unique individual, but a decisive sum of experience, society, history, gender, and language. Her “I” is constantly connected with the past and the present. dialogue with the world and form individual subjectivity. She wants to use subjectivity to rediscover and reveal more general collective mechanisms or phenomena, “I experience things in a specific way like everyone else, but I want to write about them in a general way.” As we shall see, Erno’s autobiography fits well with Bourdieu’s self-analysis. In “Esquisse pour une auto-analyse” (Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, 2004), Bourdieu intends to “use the most objective analysis to serve the most subjective things”. Like Dubrovsky, he understands autobiography in the traditional sense, thinking that autobiography is a self-myth, a perfect fake of being constructed, a unique and self-sufficient series of events related to only one subject, which does not meet the requirements of self-knowledge. Purpose. Bourdieu breaks the personal myth not by deconstructing “I”, but by objectifying “I”. He considered personal history to be a specialization of the collective history of a group or class, and advocated the replacement of biography by the “trajectoire,” the successive occupation of the same actor (or group) in a constantly changing social space. a series of positions. Understanding the trajectory of a subject means constructing the different stages of the champ that contains the existence of this trajectory, as well as the entire objective relationship between him and other subjects in the champ. The subject (“I”) is thus not Sartre’s free consciousness (cogito) or Freud’s unconscious, but the socio-historical unconscious, “I speak against the background of the loud noise of the ‘id’ speaking”. Bourdieu called this “I” “habitus”. Habitus is a disposition system internalized by an individual conditioned by objective conditions, which functions as mostly unconscious principles (patterns) of action, cognition, and thinking to generate individual or group practices and awareness of practices. The individual incorporates social space into the body and mind, and the habit is internalizing the outside and externalizing the inside. Early habits are formed in the family during childhood, and attributes related to the social position of the parents are internalized by the children. Subsequent habits are superimposed on the original habits, most importantly schooling habits. Actors reconfigure habits in terms of their social trajectories (ascent, stagnation, or decline). If the production conditions of the habit do not match the conditions for its use, the habit may split, may contradict itself, and produce a hysteresis effect. People with similar habits behave in the same way spontaneously and understand each other in practice. Habit thus transcends the oppositions of subjectivism and objectivism, of individual and group.
Bourdieu rejected the biographical recall construction of saints in his “Outline of Self-Analysis”, and used objectification tools for self-reflection, explaining how his social position and trajectory created his sociologist skills (habits). He was born in Dangan, Pyrenees-Atlantic, France, and was admitted to the philosophy class of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1948. His father was a rural postman, voted left, helped the poor, joined a union, and was very different from the conservative farmers, working relatives, and neighbors around him. “As the son of apostate,” Bourdieu’s “childhood experience of an apostate” formed a sharp contrast with his higher education experience: he was a tame excellent student, but mocked the sacred education system; Take pride in your academic success. This contradiction shaped his critical worldview, and his divisive habits made him turn from the palace of philosophy to the field of sociology:
I spent most of my teenage years in a small remote village in southwestern France. I can satisfy the demands of the schooling system only by giving up many of my experiences and innate qualities, not just a certain accent… The resulting objective and subjective type of externality favors a relationship with the center of French society Institutions in particular form a very specific relationship with the world of knowledge. There are more or less subtle forms of racism that cannot fail to evoke a certain insight, and being constantly reminded of an alien identity allows one to see things that others may not see or feel. That is to say, I am indeed a product of the betrayal of the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
Bourdieu came to the podium of the French Academy from the lower class, deeply felt the difficulty of acquiring legal culture, and turned his personal likes and dislikes, secrets and traumas into research topics: “I constantly regard myself as an object, but not In a narcissistic sense, but as a representation of a class.” He admits that “in a way, maybe all I ever did was sociology and ethnography about myself”.
Erno was born in Lillebeaune, Seine-Maritime, France. Her parents ran a café-grocery store. She entered Rouen, Bordeaux, and Grenoble Universities with honors and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree. In her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, she said: “I was born in the class of landless farmers, workers and merchants. These people were discriminated against because of their manners, accent and lack of culture.” Writing.” This motivation for writing comes from her long-term study of Bourdieu’s theory. In the spring of 1972. she discovered Bourdieu’s Les héritiers (1964) in a bookstore in Annecy. At that time, this book was very famous as a theoretical weapon of social criticism of the “May Movement” in 1968. It revealed how the background of birth caused differences in the academic performance of college students, and how the French education system reproduced social and cultural levels. Erno felt that it revealed her experience and feelings from being ruled to ruling the world through education more profoundly than any literary book, so she began to write her own experience of a class defector-“The Empty Wardrobe”. In 1979. Bourdieu’s “La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement” (La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement) was published, and she was writing “Position” based on her father’s experience. She said that in the author’s intentionally calm words, she read the throbbing and suppressed flames of pain and resistance, and this resistance was intensified by her personal memory of opposing the injustice of the world. “The author never said ‘I’, Because it was always ‘us’ that mattered.” “Differentiation” is an impersonal and hidden manuscript, and the author’s “I” is “class habit”, which is reflected in the collective fate in personal encounters, which provides a theoretical basis for Ernor to write “I”. She decided to give up fiction and “write about my father, his trajectory from a farmer to a small businessman, his way of life”. She has titled “Positions” as “Ordinary Life”, “External Life”, “Roads of Life” and “Life of Humiliation”. For her, the boundary between public and private does not lie in the object of writing. “Position” and “A Woman” do not belong to social writing because they target her parents. , belongs to the “private writing” (écrits intimes) that is more or less connected with sex. The “I” speaks in both writings, is the object of narrative and analysis, and shame is integrated with “I” (je) and “us” (nous) or “people” (on). Reconstructing the image of the parents is a necessary detour to the self, “I finally reveal the possessions that I left at the door when I entered the world of the cultural bourgeoisie.” She objectifies both herself and her parents. “Event” takes her own history as the object, describing an absolute female experience—abortion, in addition to leaving witnesses, but also endowing it with time, society, and sacred overall value dimensions, its founding characteristics, and its Memories: It is no longer shameful to cause a female event—a miscarriage—to be done. Sex penetrated by bougie, amniotic fluid and blood is not privacy, but a denunciation of the law, discourse and the entire social world of the time and before the French Parliament passed the “Wei Law” (“Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy Law”) on November 29. 197460 The living conditions of women in the 1980s. A pure “I”, an “I” that does not include others, laws, and history is unimaginable. The “I” merges into a wider reality, a culture, a situation, a pain, becoming “je transpersonnel”. Ernau’s “self-analysis” in the name of “autobiography” is similar to that of sociologists. Bourdieu believes that “we, like writers, elucidate general or specific experiences that are usually unaware or unexpressed.” Ernaud gives collective value to the things that “I” tells, and like Bourdieu emphasizes “the collective interiority of common experiences, beliefs, and thought patterns”, allowing writing to play the function of revealing and changing the world.