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Show how the epigraph, « Notre vrai moi n’est pas tout entier en nous », is
illustrated by Journal du dehors.

Across Annie Ernaux’s work, the role she plays as author and narrator is often

effaced to leave space for the focal point in the text, whether it be a parent (as seen

in La place (1983) and Une femme (1987), a romantic entanglement (Le jeune

homme (2022), or political and historical events (oft-seen as her magnum opus, Les

années (2008). Ernaux consistently positions herself as equal, if not inferior, to the

subjects of her writing; she is always present, but rarely takes centre stage. In

Journal du dehors (1993), and its follow-up La vie extérieur (2000), this sense of

absence is heightened, as its source material is not an external event or character,

but her own personal diary. The intimate nature of this genre, built out of personal

experiences, implies that Ernaux herself should be at the heart of the text. But

instead, the image we see of her is one refracted across other people, places,

stories, sights, and sounds, and it is up to the reader to form their own image of her.

Michael Sheringham remarks how, in Journal du dehors, “je” is ‘totally absent from

more than two-thirds of the individual fragments’1, Ernaux’s “self” is indistinct and

difficult to place. This essay will explore the many ways she achieves this, and the

places where we can find Ernaux’s “vrai moi”.

Ernaux’s life began in Normandy, raised by working-class parents who wished for her

to better herself and her position through education. And so she did, moving through

the social ranks by going to school, then university, becoming a lecturer and a writer.

Ernaux began to write, in her own words, thinking ‘orgueilleusement et naïvement

qu’écrire des livres […] suffirait à réparer l’injustice sociale de la naissance’2; she
1
Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.322.
2
Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize Lecture (2022) <https:/www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2022/12/ernaux-
lecture-french.pdf> [accessed 10 May 2023], p.1.
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saw literary writing as a means to vindicate her people and a tool for effecting real

change in society. In her essay Vers un je transpersonnel, Ernaux explores the

exchange and oscillation between life and literature in her work, revealing her desire

to always be crossing borders in her writing. She writes how ‘le je que j’utilise me

semble une forme impersonnelle’3, so even though “je” is the most personal

pronoun, Ernaux intends to use it in a way that more resembles “on”, as a plural.

This sentiment is echoed in Journal du dehors in one of her asides to the reader; in

explaining her choice to include such a wealth and breadth of characters, she writes

‘je cherche quelquechose sur moi à travers eux’ 4. By sharing the ‘je’ with the reader,

Ernaux refracts the narration, decentralising the self, so it can be found across the

text as she looks outside to reveal what is within.

Looking at Journal du dehors through its paratexts is helpful in beginning to look at

Ernaux’s rejection of total subjectivity in the narration and narrative of this text.

Immediately, the title establishes a line of tension between internal and external. A

diary is by its very nature a deeply personal form of writing, and thus with it comes

associations of interiors, a direction inwards. This is directly contrasted with ‘du

dehors’, a diary of the outside, or exteriors, a direction outwards, and therefore

paving the way for a series of crossings and the blurring of boundaries. Rather than

the intimité inherently linked to writing a diary (le journal intime), Ernaux creates an

extimité that looks outwards beyond her own subjective experience. Sheringham

notes that the epigraph, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘implies that the true self,

which the “journal intime” traditionally seeks to express, may lie outside rather than

3
Annie Ernaux, Vers un je transpersonnel (1993) <https://www.annie-ernaux.org/fr/textes/vers-un-je-
transpersonnel/> [accessed 11 May 2023].
4
Annie Ernaux, ‘Avant-propos’, Journal du dehors (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p.37.
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inside’5; she takes a time-honoured writing tradition, the diary, and reshapes it to

create new meaning. It is also worth looking at the beginning of the quote that the

epigraph is taken from, where Rousseau writes that ‘notre plus douce existence est

relative et collective’6, reflecting the importance of collectivity and shared meaning

throughout Journal du dehors.

In creating implicit links between seemingly unrelated people and scenes, Ernaux,

long-time admirer of Virginia Woolf7, echoes Woolf’s ambition in writing Mrs Dalloway

(1925) to ‘dig out beautiful caves’8 behind her characters, to mine out imagined

histories to better understand the people she represents. In Journal du dehors,

Ernaux maintains that ‘dans le fond des têtes, la vérité est en place’9 as she looks

out to those around her to find truth and meaning. This makes the project not just a

study of the self, but a study of others. Through decentralising the subject of the

book, meaning is equally weighted among the fragments of conversation,

newspapers, television programs (to name a few) that make up the text. By way of

explanation of the lack of a traditional narrative, Ernaux writes ‘aucune description,

aucun récit non plus. Juste des instants, des rencontres. De l’ethnotexte’10. It

becomes clear that her aim is to reduce the presence of her role as writer and

instead lionise the role of the reader, who is thusly given space to find meaning in

these moments and meetings. The ostensible mundanity of the people she meets -

5
Sheringham, Everyday Life, p.321
6
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques Dialogues (1782), p.173. [Accessed at:
<https://ebooks-bnr.com/ebooks/pdf4/rousseau_juge_de_jean_jacques.pdf>].
7
Ernaux, ‘Nobel Prize Lecture’, p.2.
8
Virginia Woolf, et al., The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Vol. II 1920-24 (London: Hogarth Press, 1980),
p.263.
9
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.94.
10
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.65.
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and yet does not really meet - disappears through their very documentation in the

book, their transcription in literature is an act of veneration.

Explaining her writing process in the ‘Avant propos’, Ernaux remarks: ‘j’ai eu envie

de transcrire des scènes, des paroles, des gestes d’anonymes, qu’on ne revoit

jamais’11, mirroring Marc Augé’s observation that ‘par le fréquentation quotidienne

des transports parisiens nous ne cessons de frôler l’histoire des autres […] sans

jamais la rencontrer’.12 There is very little personal reflection from Ernaux herself,

everything we do learn about her life is learnt indirectly, having led on from the story

of another person, almost always a stranger. As Sheringham writes, ‘It is other

people […] who reveal us to ourselves’13, and Ernaux only allows herself to be

revealed through other people. In one of her entries, Ernaux greets an old lady

passing her on the street, causing her to reflect: ‘je commence à l’être à l’âge où l’on

dit bonjour aux vieilles dames […] À vingt ans je ne les voyais pas, elles seraient

mortes avant que j’aie des rides’.14 Another boundary is traversed here, the gap

between young and old, past and present; the old lady invokes a memory from

Ernaux’s youth, which, in turn, allows the reader to reflect on the passage of time.

Later, seeing a young homeless man begging on the street, her pity for him is

heightened, because she feels ‘il me semblait que je venais de voir l’un de mes fils

en train de mendier’.15 This is significant on two levels: it reveals a personal detail,

that Ernaux has sons, while invoking empathy for a young man living on the margins

of society.

11
Ernaux, ‘Avant-propos’, Journal du dehors, p.8.
12
Marc Augé, Un ethnologue dans le metro (Paris: Hachette, 1986), p.20.
13
Sheringam, Everyday Life, p.327.
14
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.83.
15
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.81.
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Throughout Journal du dehors, there is keen presence of marginalised people, those

living on the peripheries of French society. Ernaux remarks that she began writing

‘pour venger ma race’,16 that is, of the working class, an ambition borne of a desire to

write in a way that would distinguish her from the literati she was surrounded by.

Siobhán McIlvanney notes that ‘public and private are inherently intertwined in

[Ernaux’s] writing, in that the self is always implicated in the portrayal of the Other’,17

and knowing this provides context for Journal du dehors’ preoccupation with the

dispossessed. This this is where we can find Ernaux’s self in more broad a capacity:

through the people she chooses to write about and therefore honour. Many entries in

the text revolve around homeless people she encounters walking through Paris.

Seeing a man provocatively asking for money ‘pour que j’aille me saouler la

gueule’,18 she writes of the ‘créativité permanent des hommes’;19 in place of the usual

derision or judgement that beggars are treated with, her response imbues the scene

with emotion and life. Yet in another scene, she walks past a blind beggar without

giving him money, writing ‘je suis passé très au large de lui, comme ceux qui ne lui

donnent’.20 By including this scene, she makes a distinct effort to avoid moralising,

not to appear sanctimonious; “I am just like you”, she says to the reader.

Ernaux doesn’t just look at the bottom of the social hierarchy, her attention reaches

across the breadth of the spectrum of society. Ruth Cruickshank observes that both

Journal du dehors and its follow-up La vie extérieur ‘span a period during which

16
Ernaux, ‘Nobel Prize Lecture’, p.1.
17
Siobhán McIlvanney, Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2000), p.6.
18
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.87.
19
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.87.
20
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.21.
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inequality in income and social mobility grew’,21 and throughout this text, there are

contrasts and juxtapositions that foreground concerns with social inequality. At an art

gallery, a woman is depicted sighing ‘profondément, comme plongée dans le

désespoir par cette constatation’22 at paintings priced ‘entre deux millions anciens et

deux millions et demi’.23 The woman’s reaction to this expensive painting is written

with hyperbolic language, mocking her misplaced sincerity. This scene is then

juxtaposed with heart-breaking pathos with a sign on the wall which reads ‘Pour

manger. Je suis sans famille’,24 signalling the vestiges of the presence of an

unknown beggar, ‘celui ou celle qui avait marqué cela était parti’.25 Later, at the

butcher’s, Ernaux recounts an exchange in social capital between the regular and

the unknown customers. With the new customers, the butcher and his wife ‘disent «

bonjour maddame x » dès qu’ils s’aperçoivent de la présence de quelqu’un de

connu’,26 yet with unknown customers ‘ils sont distants, réservés, l’échange’.27 This

scene suggests the strangeness of a social hierarchy within a public space, a

traversing of impalpable societal boundaries.

A more literal boundary that Ernaux traverses and re-traverses throughout the text is

between her home in Clergy-Pontoise and Paris proper. Before Ernaux lived in

Clergy-Pontoise, she lived in the countryside, ‘dans des villes où étaient inscrites les

marques du passé et de l’histoire’,28 contrasting her new home in a Parisienne Ville

21
Ruth Cruickshank, ‘“Une immigrée de l'intérieur’ and ‘Les exclus de l'intérieur”: Distinction,
Spectacle and Symbolic Violence in Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure’,
Nottingham French Studies, 48:2 (2009), 80-93 (p.81).
22
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.21.
23
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.22.
24
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.22.
25
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.22.
26
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.41.
27
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.41.
28
Ernaux, ‘Avant-propos’, p.7.
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Nouvelle, a place without history that Robin Tierney names as a site of ‘middle-class

aspirations of order and affordable comfort’.29 For De Certeau ‘places are

fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read,

accumulated times that can be unfolded’,30 so instead Ernaux creates her own

histories, her own meaning. She writes: ‘De l’extérieur, le centre Leclerc ressemble à

une cathédrale de verre’,31 beatifying the quotidian space of the supermarket, a

space that is present frequently throughout the text. In contrast, at the Charles-de-

Gaulle-Étoile métro she witnesses ‘des femmes achetaient des bijoux au pied des

escaliers mécaniques parallèles’,32 an urban site where informal transactions take

place, unlike the regularity and order of the supermarket.

Yet the supermarket is still somewhere that is, for Ernaux, fecund with human

interaction. A character that reappears multiple times is ‘le ramasseur de caddies’33

at her local Franprix, and the repetition of his presence in the text makes him part of

Ernaux’s history-making in this new town. She often sees him ‘appuyé à un mur’,34

seemingly with an air of malaise, but one day she sees him with his girlfriend as a

customer in the same shop and ‘il paraissait maintenant libre at heureux’.35 Her

choice to represent both sides of this man reflects the perspicacious nature of her

writing; she bears witness to the multiplicity of human character always seeing

beyond the visual. Ernaux reveals the invisible alongside the invisible, often

perceiving a person and their actions and suggesting what they might be thinking,

29
Robin Tierney, “‘Lived Experience at the Level of the Body”: Annie Ernaux’s “Journaux Extimes”’,
SubStance, 35:3 (2006), 113–30 (p.114)
30
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984),
p.108.
31
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.50.
32
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.22.
33
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.16.
34
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.16.
35
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.57.
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what their motivations might be. Seeing a young woman ferociously chewing gum on

the metro, Ernaux writes that ‘un homme en la voyant ne peut que l’imaginer lui

cisaillant le sexe et les couilles’, 36 humorously inventing an imagined inner life for a

cast of strangers, making literature out of an everyday scene. Jacques Derrida

contends that, in literature, ‘behind what is in effect the richness of a sense to be

interpreted, there is no secret meaning to be interpreted’,37 and it is in this space that

Ernaux writes. She is not dogmatic or definitive, but inhabits the tension between the

collective and the subjective to find meaning and create a narrative out of these

seemingly unrelated events.

In her Nobel prize lecture, Ernaux asks ‘Comment ne pas s’interroger sur la vie sans

le faire aussi sur l’écriture?’,38 speaking to the eternal ties between life and literature.

Ultimately, the role of Annie Ernaux’s life as set out in Journal du dehors acts as a

vessel for what Sheringham names as ‘manifestations of the “outside”’;39 all the

scraps of what might have taken place in an ordinary day. She collects these things

and in doing so becomes the proverbial glue that binds together all the fragments of

her diary, to make something that can be read and shared, and new meanings made

by its readers. The idea that “notre vrai moi n’est pas tout entier en nous” thus

functions for Journal du dehors on multiple levels: Ernaux sees herself in the outside

world, in public and the written word, allowing us to see ourselves in Ernaux, in

literature.

36
Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p.43.
37
Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine (Cultural Memory in the Present) (UK: Stanford University Press,
2005), p.163.
38
Ernaux, ‘Nobel Prize Lecture’, p.4.
39
Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.321
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Bibliography

 Augé, Marc, Un ethnologue dans le metro (Paris: Hachette, 1986).

 Cruickshank, Ruth, ‘“Une immigrée de l'intérieur” and “Les exclus de

l'intérieur”: Distinction, Spectacle and Symbolic Violence in Journal du dehors

and La Vie extérieure’, Nottingham French Studies, 48:2 (2009), 80-93.

 De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1984.

 Derrida, Jacques, Paper Machine (Cultural Memory in the Present) (UK:

Stanford University Press, 2005).

 Ernaux, Annie, ‘Nobel Prize Lecture’ (2022)

<https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2022/12/ernaux-lecture-french.pdf>

[accessed 10 May 2023].

 Ernaux, Annie, Annie Ernaux "la place", television interview, L'INA éclaire

l'actu, 6 April 1984,

<https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/video/i11095690/annie-ernaux-la-place>

[Accessed 11 May 2023].

 Ernaux, Annie, Journal du dehors (Paris: Gallimard, 1993).

--- La vie extérieure, 1993-1999 (Paris: Gallimard, 2000)

--- Une femme (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).

--- Vers un je transpersonnel (2018) <https://www.annie-ernaux.org/fr/textes/vers-un-

je-transpersonnel/> [accessed 11 May 2023]. (Originally published in Université de

Paris-X (1993), 219-22.)

 McIlvanney, Siobhán, Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins (Liverpool:

Liverpool University Press, 2000).

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 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques Dialogues (1782)

[Accessed at:

<https://ebooks-bnr.com/ebooks/pdf4/rousseau_juge_de_jean_jacques.pdf>]

 Sheringham, Michael, Everyday Life, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

 Tierney, Robin, ‘“Lived Experience at the Level of the Body”: Annie Ernaux’s

“Journaux Extimes”’ SubStance, 35:3 (2006), 113–30.

 Woolf, Virginia, The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Vol. II 1920-24 (London: Hogarth

Press, 1980).

Word count: 2470