EDWARD LOUIS
Change: method
translation by Stella Zumbulakis
ed. Antipodes, p. 284

Anya Erno Award Nobel Prize 2022 sparked a heated debate about literary the value of her work. I am not in a position to say that this is a masterpiece, but it is prose in which you meet with yourself – social experiences that are common to all of us born after the war. Meanwhile, these are texts that have introduced a direction that has been gaining more and more writers and readers in recent decades – autobiographical literature. These are not small achievements. Erno, fifty years her junior, a prose writer, also belongs to the same movement. Edward Louis (c. 1992): both in terms of the autobiographical nature of his work and the tools of sociological analysis he uses, and in terms of his political activism. By belonging to the very poor, the two writers managed to break through the traditional barriers of French society, explore and change their destiny.

But this is where their great similarity ends, since Louis also experienced bullying in his own environment from the first years of his life because of his “non-male” movements and his “thin” voice. As with the earlier Ending with Andy Belgel (2014), which Edouard Louis wrote at the age of twenty-two and enjoyed international success, in “Edit: method”, the author recreates his irresistible desire to escape from the family environment, the village, poverty and homosexual “stigma”. However, it is a stubbornness that quickly reveals its traumatic nature, for it will be proven that no place is a refuge, and no success will exempt him from constant compulsion to flee.

From isolated Alencourt in Picardy it goes to the regional capital of Amiens and from there to the City of Lights, Paris. But neither the great Ecole Normale that he manages to visit, nor the majestic and aristocratic surroundings that he manages to enter, calm him down. One of the means of managing trauma may be psychoanalysis, to which Édouard Louis does not show any inclination.

Instead, he uses the tools of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (as did the mentor Didier Eribon in the also autobiographical Return to Rennes, 2009). Louie tries to uncover the hidden rules of the established order about what is legal, what is required, and what is not. And, as in his interim books A History of Violence (2016) and Who Killed My Father (2018), he seeks to demonstrate that ultimately “self-evident” social imperatives lead to the permanent marginalization of entire sections of the population. .

For example, in order to prove his masculinity according to the social principles of his environment, the father had to challenge the teachers at school, as a result of which he was excluded from the education system and condemned to extreme poverty.

Louis’ books are read with bated breath. The author talks about everything without delay. Having experienced the most extreme insults, he is not afraid to expose himself. As he argued in an interview, the literary device of oblique submission, rather than direct presentation of what he wants to express, is an aesthetic device of conservative literature. On the contrary, for him, art must show aspects of reality that people do not want to see, and thus make it a serious instrument of politics.