From credible to true

literary writing as a gesture of archiving in The years (2008), by Annie Ernaux

Abstract

The work of French writer Annie Ernaux (1940) has growing editorial and intellectual interest in Brazil. Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, it has, of course, been intensely commented on in our specialized journals since then. Despite being literature, tout court, impressive texts by Ernaux such as The Man’s Place (La place, 1983), Happining (L`événement, 2000); The Years (Les années, 2008) – can become, for historians, important points of theoretical, methodological and thematic reflection. His refined way of evoking time, the ways of operating the tenuous limit between literature and factuality, the personal and the collective, the aesthetic and the political, do not go unnoticed by the attentive eye of those who know that historical and literary narratives, once born twins, they should have their relationship thought on better. By moving an “I” and an “other” of the discourse between historical referentiality and literature, the narrative produced by the French author generates relevant consequences for contemporary literature, but not only. The writer’s literary choices put into perspective unresolved problems neither in literary and nor in historiography. In this article, I investigate the place that gender hybridity assumes in her work, on the one hand, and on the other how ideas of temporality and archive are operated and placed in relation in order to corroborate the narrative choice she makes. Both processes are followed in The Years (Les années, 2008) – a book by Ernaux that is fundamental in relation between literature and historiography.