Wild desire in the midst of cancer: writer Annie Ernaux recounts a life-threatening experience

“On Cancer and Desire”: Annie Ernaux and a striking example of what literature can do (Photo: The Converation)

One of the reasons why the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature Annie Ernaux It was her courage. “For the courage and clinical acumen with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective obstacles of personal memory,” reads the justification for the highest literary award. It was in 2022. Until then, 15 French women had won it: all men. Her work is fundamentally autobiographical.

That courage made her write The event (2000), where she talks about the illegal abortion she had in 1963, when she was a university student in Rouen, or Shame (1998), where he tells how his father almost killed his mother after a visceral fight. A few days ago, he showed his literary teeth again with an old text that he published The New YorkerIt is moving, superb and brilliant, it is titled “On Cancer and Desire” and it begins like this:

I first saw M.’s sex on the night of January 22, 2003, in the entrance of my house, at the foot of the stairs that lead to the bedrooms. There is something extraordinary about the first sight of another’s sex, the discovery of what was previously unknown. So that is what we are going to live with, what we are going to live our love with. Or not.

Annie Ernaux in her youth. Photo taken from The Line of Fire[Los libros de Annie Ernaux pueden leerse, en formato digital, en BajaLibros, ingresando aquí]

Breast cancer was detected on October 3, 2002. That morning Annie Ernaux She entered the Curie Institute sensing the news (“It was something that was destined to happen to me, like all things that happen mainly to women, although neither my mother nor my grandmother had had it, nor any of my aunts or cousins”). The strange thing is that October is breast cancer month.So at least that way I was keeping up with fashion.“, writes.

The story is about that illness, but also about M.’s love. Together they wrote a book that is full of photographs that he took himself, because he is a prominent photographer. Now we know: his name is Marc Marie. And the book: The Use of the Photopublished in France in 2005 by Gallimard. As the title of the text indicates, cancer and desire, but also that enormous silenced zone that is formed by the conjunction of both things.

We had dined together at a restaurant he knew well on Via Servandoni, near the Jardin du Luxembourg. He had just left the woman he had been living with for several months. During the meal I said to him, “I would like to take you to Venice,” and immediately added, “But I can’t now because I have breast cancer and I am having surgery next week at the Curie Institute.” He showed none of the signs—the almost imperceptible withdrawal, the sudden rigidity—with which even the most polite and serene people betray their horror, despite themselves, when I tell them I have cancer. The only time he seemed disturbed was when I told him that my new hairstyle, which he had often praised, was a wig, and that I had lost my hair as a result of chemotherapy.

Two covers: “L’Usage de la photo” and its translation into English, “The use of photography”

Ernaux y Marie They met in early 2003. By then, as she tells it, she was in the middle of treatment. That night, after dinner, they went to a bar that was practically empty and continued chatting. At one point, he surprises her: “I have a sincere proposal for you: come spend the night with me at my hotel.She had to decline the offer: she had an appointment with an anesthesiologist the next morning. But she invited him to her house another day.

The night they were finally alone and naked in bed, she did not take off her wig. Another strange feature of her body was the catheter, “It looked like a beer bottle cap“He just went with the flow, that’s what he decided.

He later admitted that he was shocked to see my pubis, as bare as a girl’s. He had never heard of this consequence of chemotherapy, but who talks about it? I didn’t know about it either until it happened to me.

At one point, looking at my chest, he asked me if the cancer was in my left breast. I was surprised. The right one was visibly more swollen than the left because of the tumor. He probably couldn’t imagine that the prettier of the two was the cancerous one.

Annie Ernaux. Photograph taken from Free Letters

The Use of the Photo (which was translated into English as The use of photography) is the chronicle of those days. The body of Ernaux becomes a “theater of violent operations”: a tumor and lymph nodes were removed, a catheter was implanted in his shoulder, he was given chemotherapy and radiotherapy, he lost his hair. At the same time, the passionate adventure of love. The mornings after his nights with M., he woke up with “the devastated landscape that remains after making love”.

This landscape is made up of clothes and shoes thrown randomly in the hallway, papers on the floor, and dishes in disarray. The beauty and mystery of disorder are seen in the photographs and Ernaux enhances them with her writing by describing them, giving them context, and endowing them with the poetic and emotional meaning they deserve.

Now, I think I’ve always wanted to preserve images of the devastated landscape left behind after lovemaking. I wonder why the idea of ​​photographing it never occurred to me before, or why I never suggested it to any other man. Maybe I thought there was something vaguely shameful or undignified about the idea. Somehow it seemed less obscene to me—or now seems more acceptable—to photograph M.’s sex.

Maybe it was also something I could only do with that man and only at that moment in my life.

The Frenchwoman, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, wrote about “a complicated year”: a passionate romance while going through breast cancer (Photo: News Agency / Anders Wiklund via REUTERS)

“He makes me live above cancer”, he writes at one point. Also: “Because of my completely smooth body, M. called me his mermaid wife.” The degree of intimacy that Ernaux builds in the text is very high, and makes all of us, the readers, silent participants in that story. She has done this on more than one occasion: claiming the political dimension of intimacy. For Ernaux, the biographical is more than a “therapy”, it is a way of showing what has been silenced.

Admired by Emmanuel Carrère, Virginie Despentes, Édouard Louis, Didier Eribon and millions of readers, Annie Ernaux It is an unavoidable reference to the power that literature can acquire, to the darkness it is capable of illuminating.

Today he is 83 years old and lives in the new French city of Cergy-Pontoise – in his own words: “a city without a past” – 25 kilometres from Paris. I hope he continues writing; I hope he never stops.