The two texts by Ernaux that I have chosen for my study, Journal du dehors and its follow-up La Vie extérieure, differ from many of Ernaux’s other works in that they focus not on her personal history and her ambivalence over her deviation from her social and familial origins but rather on her daily life amidst anonymous others as she moves throughout Paris and Cergy-Pontoise, the young new town (“ville nouvelle”) where she lives. Comprised of a seemingly arbitrary series of passages ranging in length from a brief paragraph to a couple of
pages, Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure gather small city scenes in what Ernaux calls “une collection d’instantanés de la vie quotidienne collective” (Journal 8). In her detailing of this collectively shared culture, from the impressions evoked by popular songs on the radio to the experience of shopping in a big-box grocery store, Ernaux offers a close look at everyday life in contemporary urban France. Of all her works, Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure contain Ernaux’s most compelling explorations of urban socio-spatial practices and politics.
In her journaux extimes, the term that critics use in referring collectively to Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure, Ernaux documents her observations in various city spaces as well as her subjective reactions to what she observes.10 Chronicling her urban experiences
between the years 1985-1992 (Journal du dehors) and 1993-1999 (La Vie extérieure), Ernaux both presents and comments on sights and sounds of people and things in the metro, supermarkets, streets, and other locations around Cergy-Pontoise and Paris. Her accounts of everyday city life are permeated with feelings and memories provoked by the ephemeral scenes she witnesses. In one episode in La Vie extérieure, her description of a couple embracing on a metro platform before running after a train demonstrates the facility with which she weaves personal reflection with distanced observation. Reaching the platform with time to spare before the arrival of her train, she remarks:
On a le temps de voir, en bas, le long du mur bleu, un couple se serrer,
s’embrasser. Tous deux la quarantaine. Le grondement d’une rame qui arrive. L’homme et la femme se séparent et courent vers le train. Ils étaient juste à l’endroit où, un soir de l’année dernière, vers minuit, j’étais avec F. Comme la femme, j’avais le dos au mur. L’escalier mécanique descendait
interminablement, vide, dans un cliquetis continuel. (24)
10 The term “journal extime” coined by Michel Tournier has been applied to Ernaux’s two
texts by a number of critics, including Siobhán McIlvanney, Robin Tierney, and Fiona Handyside. For a discussion of Tournier’s use of the term for his own writing, see Fui Lee Luk, “Extimate Self-Portraits: The Inversion of the Journal Intime in Michel Tournier’s
Ernaux elaborates on neither “F” nor her relationship with him, foregrounding instead the scene in the present moment that conjures a brief memory from the past. This moment exemplifies the uniqueness of Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure within the autobiographical oeuvre of Ernaux. The incidents she observes in her journaux extimes trigger memories of the past to which she alludes without elaboration, making her
autobiography secondary to the present day event, and reaffirming the snippets of everyday life as the structuring mechanism of the works.
Within Journal du dehors Ernaux refers self-reflexively to the text itself as an “ethnotexte,” a comment she echoes later in La Honte (1997) when she describes herself as “en somme ethnologue de moi-même” (Journal 65; Honte 40). These two comments point to a key element of the works of Ernaux, namely the blurring of boundaries between personal and collective experience, and, as such, between the self and the other. In Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure, Ernaux inverts the diary form by focusing primarily on the outer rather than inner world of the narrator. Ernaux herself labeled Journal du dehors “un anti-journal intime” (Ernaux and Tondeur 43). Through this inversion, Ernaux illustrates her belief that, in the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau provided as an epigraph to Journal du dehors, “Notre vrai moi n’est pas tout entier en nous” (6; emphasis in the original).11 Identity for Ernaux does not emanate from deep within the individual but rather is formed socially and culturally, so one must look to the outside world for clues about one’s self.
11 Ernaux explains in her interview with Tondeur: “Cette citation de Jean-Jacques Rousseau a
été mise après, dans une intention polémique. Ce texte se veut un anti-journal intime. Et je crois que le moi, notre moi, nous est révélé par la fréquentation des autres, non seulement par le regard qu’ils portent sur nous, mais aussi par l’intérêt, les souvenirs, qu’ils éveillent en nous” (43).
Ernaux’s genre-breaking “anti-journal intime” has inspired many academic articles and book chapters. Much of the scholarship has been devoted to studying the implications of a diary based on exterior, public encounters rather than solitary introspection. Whether framing the journaux extimes in terms of the (anti-)diary (Baisnée, McIlvanney), the
autobiography (Miller), or the “ethnotexte” (Ionescu, Mall, Lancaster), critics have tended to focus on Ernaux’s exploration of her identity, as both a socio-cultural construct and a
narrative stance, and as a complicated negotiation between self and other.
In his writings on Journal du dehors, Michael Sheringham has contextualized
Ernaux’s text within literary and philosophic discourses on everyday life, finding in it echoes of Barthes’s cultural semiology and de Certeau’s performative model of cultural memory (Everyday 323; “Cultural” 49, 56-57).12 Robin Tierney picks up on the question of memory, proposing a connection between social memory and emotions registered bodily during Ernaux’s anonymous encounters (113). Tierney focuses specifically on the physical experience of the emotions of fear, shame, and desire. Tierney’s study and those by Sheringham are notable for their considerations of the embodied, social, and performative model of everyday life that appears in Ernaux’s journaux extimes. I seek to add to this scholarship by studying the spatial dimension of Ernaux’s unique representation of everyday life.
A number of articles on Ernaux’s Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure have
12 Sheringham distinguishes Ernaux’s study of signs from Barthes semiology by noting that
in Journal du dehors “there is an added level provided by a complex play of identification and subjective reaction. Inflected by issues of gender, class, sexuality, and personal identity, the semiological gaze is conscripted into a wider network” (Everyday 323-24). Ernaux brings such issues also to the Certeauian concept of cultural memory, showing that “[t]he layers of class, history and social structure are revealed through an act of recognition involving a dynamic relation between subject and cultural memory” (“Cultural” 56).
focused specifically on urban aspects. What seems to be largely missing from this
scholarship is a dynamic notion of the city, where the city is seen as anything more than the setting of the works. I wish to contest the assumption that, in Ernaux’s works, urban space is simply a stage for the theater of everyday life. For instance, Rosemary Lancaster calls Ernaux’s urban space “an intricately wrought backdrop for the multitude of little human dramas the author observes” (402). Most criticism on the journaux extimes neglects to recognize the vital role that urban space plays in the experiences and identities described by Ernaux. At the same time, this criticism overlooks the ways in which diverse subjects come together to create urban space through their provisional and shifting relations. Too often, Ernaux’s Paris and Cergy-Pontoise are assumed to be fixed entities, products of postwar urban planning. In his analysis of Journal du dehors, Edward Welch reviews the urban development history of Cergy-Pontoise and the other new towns surrounding Paris. He concludes that through her experiences in the new town, Ernaux is gradually conditioned to a new, modernized way of life (135-36). He casts Ernaux as “someone who has become part of the system put in place by the post-war planners, and who, moreover, shows herself to be complicit with that system” (135). I would argue that by concentrating on the overdetermined city of urban planners, this reading does not take into account the complexity of the
relationship between the subject and the city resulting from everyday practices and the social construction of space. In treatments of Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure, the city tends to be portrayed has having a one-way, negative effect on the subject, causing postmodern alienation through social stratification and rampant consumerism. This effect certainly exists in the contemporary city, and critics like Horvàth and McIlvanney
urbanization. However, a static view of the city is insufficient for addressing complex urban dynamics wherein the city is continuously constructed through social, discursive, and bodily practices.
One notable exception to scholarship that glosses over Ernaux’s depiction of urban space is Fiona Handyside’s analysis of Cergy-Pontoise in the journaux extimes and Eric Rohmer’s 1987 film L’Ami de mon amie. Handyside contrasts the perceived sterility and functional efficiency of the new town with the “messy process of living everyday life” that Ernaux and Rohmer demonstrate as they “assert the value of the margin as a place with the potential for re-thinking identity” (54). By complicating certain assumptions about the new town that have limited prior analyses of Ernaux’s journaux extimes, Handyside has initiated an important conversation in which I shall take part.
Critics discussing both Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure have generally treated them together as though they comprised one work. For the sake of readability, I do the same in my analysis, despite the fact that there are intriguing differences between the two texts. La Vie extérieure contains far more references to media stories and current affairs, as evidenced by, for example, Ernaux’s ongoing commentary on the apathy of the French public towards the Bosnian War.13 This greater focus on events of historical importance likely owes to the impending end of the century, since this second journal extime covers 1993-1999. McIlvanney notes that “La Vie extérieure demonstrates a more acute awareness of the passing of time than Journal du dehors, an awareness entirely fitting of the historical period
13 In one entry in La Vie extérieure, Ernaux imagines how Europeans could react to a news
story about an attack in Sarajevo: “La seule chose à faire serait que tous les gens de France et d’Europe se rassemblent sur les places et exigent des gouvernements la solution du conflit. Si on ne le fait pas, c’est que cette guerre et ces enfants morts sur le marché de Sarajevo sont pour nous moins importants que le loto, le film du soir à la télé, qu’ils ne nous sont qu’un
it records” (143). Indeed, an entry from 1997 underscores Ernaux’s preoccupation with fleeting time in La Vie extérieure, as she quotes Van Gogh, who wrote in a letter: “‘je
cherche à exprimer le passage désespérément rapide des choses de la vie moderne’” (81). Her enhanced perception of precise moments in time is even reflected in the organization of the book, with entries not only divided by year, as was the case in Journal du dehors, but also headed with the date. Ernaux’s increased concern with historical time in La Vie extérieure could arguably indicate a larger direction in her writing, particularly given the 2008 publication of her “autobiographie impersonnelle,” Les Années, in which she explores her personal history through French collective memory and culture (Les Années 240). However, such questions about autobiography and memory are beyond the scope of this present study. For this reason, I will set aside the intriguing differences between Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure to focus instead on their overlapping representations of everyday urban life.