Simple Passion, and an Account With No Room for Shame

A woman in her late forties spends about a year and a half waiting for a married man to telephone. That is the whole of the material. She buys clothes she would not otherwise have bought. She watches programmes she has no interest in, in case he is watching them. She cannot read and does not work well. She calculates, from the hour of the last call, the earliest hour at which the next one could reasonably arrive. When he is out of the country she counts the days. The book that records this runs to fewer than a hundred pages, and its sentences are among the flattest written in the last half century.

It is Passion simple, published by Gallimard in 1991. Its author, Annie Ernaux, was born in 1940, which puts her in her late forties across the period described. It appeared in English as Simple Passion, translated by Tanya Leslie and published by Seven Stories Press in 1993, and in Japanese as Shinpuru na Jonetsu, translated by Hori Shigeki and published by Hayakawa Shobo in January of that same year. In 2022 Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in the Swedish Academy’s stated citation, for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.

What makes the book a strange object is not the affair, which is ordinary, but the series of refusals it performs. It does not explain the passion; the narrator states that to explain would be to concede that it was an error or a disorder requiring justification, and says she intends to describe it instead. It does not redeem the period, does not convert it into tragedy, does not extract a lesson from it and does not offer it as a warning. It neither condemns her nor absolves her. It reports.

This essay is about one thing the book does, which is easy to feel on the page and hard to name afterwards. Ernaux did not remove shame from the content. The content is precisely the material a culture keeps its shame in: a married man, a woman old enough to be told she should know better, a professional life suspended, a telephone. What she removed was shame from the register. She never argues that she ought not to be ashamed. She writes in a tone that has nowhere to put shame, and the effect is more radical than any defence could be, because a defence concedes that there is a charge.

Ernaux has a name for how she writes, and it is not flattering to herself. Since La place in 1983 she has described her prose as une écriture plate — flat writing — a language emptied of metaphor, of lyric cadence and of the small signals by which a sentence tells you how to feel about it. The Swedish Academy, setting out her work in 2022, recorded that she distances herself from what it called the poetry of memory and advocates plain writing, related the term to the zero degree of writing that Roland Barthes described, and quoted her own description of herself as an ethnologist of herself rather than a writer of fiction. Her book-length conversation about method was published in France under a title that calls writing a knife.

The other term that follows her is auto-sociobiography: the writing of a self as a case, examined for the class, the language and the period that produced it. The Academy’s account of her begins with Yvetot in Normandy, where her parents ran a combined grocery and café, and with a childhood in a household that had climbed out of proletarian survival into a small bourgeois foothold. Her subject across four decades has been the distance travelled from that household, and the cost of the journey in language. Simple Passion is the book in which she turns that apparatus on an appetite.

It was not received calmly. The sociologist Isabelle Charpentier, studying the reception in the journal Politix in 1994, records a book that sold about a hundred and forty thousand copies in six weeks and split its critics along lines sharp enough that a French radio programme devoted an edition to arguing it out between supporters and detractors. The French press at the time reported eventual sales of around two hundred thousand copies and translation across Europe, in the United States and in Japan. Ernaux was already an established writer with a major prize behind her; the controversy was not about her competence.

None of that is the reason to read the book here. It is context, and it explains why the book is famous. The reason to read it here is narrower, and it has to do with what the sentences are doing rather than with what the affair was.

There are three different things a writer can do about shame, and they are not variations on each other.

The first is to argue against it. This is the common move, and it is what most contemporary writing about women and desire performs: the want is defended, its legitimacy asserted, the double standard named and rejected. The trouble with a defence is structural. To answer a charge you have to state it, and stating it installs it in the room. The reader now has both the want and the accusation in front of her, and a verdict has been requested. Even an acquittal leaves the court standing.

The second is to make the content innocuous — to select material that nobody would find shameful and write about that. This is easier and it costs nothing, and it is why so much frank writing about desire is frank about things that were never in danger.

The third is what Ernaux does. The content stays maximally shameable. What changes is the grammar available to the account. The book is largely an enumeration of particulars: what she bought, how she spent the hours, what her body did, what the waiting consisted of. The narrator says at one point that she is not giving the account of a liaison but listing the signs of a passion, hesitating between one day and every day. That form is the argument. An inventory has no moral grammar. It has no slot for an adjective of self-assessment, no place where a word like foolish or pathetic or brave could be inserted without breaking the form, and it does not address anybody who might be about to rule.

This is why the book unsettles readers who would have been unmoved by a defence. A defence can be disagreed with. A flat inventory offers nothing to disagree with, because it has not asserted anything about its own worth. The reader arrives carrying the ordinary evaluative apparatus — she should not have, at her age, with a married man — and finds no surface on which to put it down. That is not evasion. It is the removal of the furniture the judgement needs in order to sit.

The second refusal is harder to praise, because it removes the thing that usually makes a book recommendable.

Almost all writing about wanting is instrumental. It wants the reader to do something, or to conclude something, or at minimum to feel that the wanting was worth the telling. The affair is a stage in a growth; the obsession is a symptom of a wound; the abasement is a cautionary tale; the appetite is reclaimed as a political good. Each of those is a consolation, and each of them pays the reader for her time.

Simple Passion pays nothing. It does not present the period as a development, and the narrator does not emerge knowing more than she did. It does not diagnose the passion, which would have made it a case. It does not make it tragic, which would have made it beautiful. It does not recommend or warn. Readers have reasonably summarised the book by the position it arrives at, which is that the meaning of such a passion is precisely to have none.

The form supports the refusal. There is no plot to speak of, because the events are repetitions. The publisher’s own account of the book notes that the writing runs from September 1990 into the period of the Gulf War, and the war enters the book as a marker of when, not as significance. Time in the book is not narrative time. It is the time of a person who has divided the day into before a call and after one.

It is worth saying plainly that a reader may find this unbearable, and that the reaction is not a failure of comprehension. A book that will not say what a period of a life was for is withholding the one thing readers reliably want from an account of a difficult year. That withholding is the price of the register, and it is a real price.

Ten years later Ernaux published the diary she had kept while it was happening. Se perdre appeared from Gallimard in 2001, and in English as Getting Lost, translated by Alison L. Strayer, from Seven Stories Press in 2022. It covers 1988 and 1989, it is several times the length of the earlier book, and it concerns the same man and the same months.

She has given an account of why. In the foreword she describes rereading the untyped pages and finding in them a truth different from the one in Simple Passion — reviewers quoting her render it as something raw and dark, without salvation — and she states that in copying the diary out she altered and removed nothing, on the ground that words set down to hold a particular moment are as irreversible as the time they were written in. In the book he is A. In the diary he is S., and the diary is where he becomes a Soviet diplomat rather than an initial.

This is an experiment almost no writer has run, and its result is the most interesting fact about the pair. Two texts, the same eighteen months, the same person, separated by a decade and by a change of register. What it demonstrates is not that one of them is true and the other is literature. It is that the flatness of Simple Passion was made.

The diary is not the unedited original of which the book is the polished version. It is a different composition written under different conditions — written during, to survive the waiting, addressed to nobody, with the outcome unknown; the book written after, with an outcome, with a reader in view, and composed so as to subtract the writer’s stance from every sentence. The raw pages are full of stance. They are frightened, repetitive, adoring, humiliated. The book is none of those things, and it covers the same ground.

So Se perdre is simultaneously the best evidence for this essay’s claim and the best evidence against the way the book is usually praised. It proves that a register in which shame has no place can be constructed, because here is the same material in a register where shame has a great deal of place. It also proves that the flatness is an achievement rather than a temperament, which means anybody calling Simple Passion unmediated honesty has the relationship backwards. One further fact matters for readers here: the standard listings of Ernaux in Japanese translation do not show a Japanese edition of Se perdre. A reader working in Japanese can reach the composed book and not the pages it was composed from.

The book’s closing movement is where the whole method is either vindicated or exposed, and it is the reason this essay exists.

Near the end the narrator turns to the finished pages and records what looking at them produces: astonishment, and something resembling shame. She is explicit that this is not an emotion she had while living the passion, or while writing about it. She locates its cause precisely. It is the prospect of publication, which brings the account nearer to other people’s judgement and to what counts as normal.

Notice what she does not then do. She does not argue with the judgement. She does not pre-empt it, does not soften the material to survive it, does not add the sentence that would tell the reader how to take her. She does not change register. The arrival of judgement is entered into the record in exactly the tone that recorded the telephone and the clothes, and the account is handed over — the book describes what it has produced as a kind of offering made to other people.

This is subtler than the thing it is usually reported as. The move is not a declaration that the reader’s judgement is irrelevant, which would be a claim, and a claim can be contested. The move is to count the judgement as one item in the inventory. Not dismissed, not answered, not ranked above or below the day she bought a particular coat. Just entered. And an inventory that includes the judge among its entries has quietly dissolved the court, without ever having addressed it.

That is a reading of the final pages, and other readings are available. A reader who finds in them an admission rather than a refusal — a woman who did feel shame after all, once it was going to be read — is not misreading the sentences. The difference between those two readings is whether you take the recording of an emotion to be the same as being governed by it. This Library takes the view that it is not, and that the distinction is the most useful thing the book has to offer anybody.

What follows is a claim about registers available in a language and its literary conventions. It is not a claim about Japanese people, it is not a claim about Japanese women, and it is not a claim about what any reader of this page feels. A register is equipment. Which equipment a language and its written tradition hand you ready-made is a fact about a stock of conventions, not a fact about anybody’s interior life, and the two must be kept visibly apart.

With that held in place: Japanese supplies unusually rich equipment for three treatments of a want, and unusually thin equipment for a fourth.

For a want that is confessed, the language hands over a whole apparatus. Kokuhaku is not merely a word but a named genre with its own occasions and its own grammar, and zange carries the weight of religious penitence into ordinary speech. A person reaching for a way to say what she wants finds the confessional frame already assembled and waiting, complete with the posture it requires.

For a want that is apologised for, the equipment is even more abundant. There is an entire register of self-lowering, and there are evaluative adjectives that arrive at the scene before the speaker has decided anything — hashitanai, mittomonai, iyarashii. These are not neutral descriptions with a negative connotation attached. They are verdicts in the shape of adjectives, and they are the first words to hand.

For a want that is aestheticised, there is more equipment still: setsunai, jonetsu, the vocabulary of longing that carries its own weather, and a seasonal apparatus that can turn any private condition into something with a shape and a beauty.

What is thin on that shelf is the fourth register — the want recorded, with no stance towards it at all. And there is a structural reason it is thin. Japanese sentences are heavily oriented towards a listener. Politeness level, sentence-final particles, the choice between plain and polite forms: a Japanese sentence usually has to declare a relation to somebody before it can be finished. A register with no stance is therefore not something a writer picks up. It has to be built and then held for eighty pages against the pull of the grammar, and that is difficult in a way it is not difficult in French.

One small piece of evidence for the pull. The French title puts an unglamorous adjective beside the noun. The Japanese edition is Shinpuru na Jonetsu: it keeps the loanword for simple and then supplies jonetsu, a word with heat in it, the vocabulary of ardour. That is one translator’s solution to a genuine problem and nothing here is a criticism of it. But the direction of the drift is worth noticing. The title reaches for temperature where the original reaches for plainness, and that is what the available equipment does when you pick it up.

The claim above has to be narrowed at once, because in its wide form it is false and a reader here would know it immediately.

Japanese literature does not lack unsparing first-person writing about illicit want. It may have more of it than French literature does. Uno Chiyo’s Iro Zange was serialised in Chuokoron from September 1933 to March 1935 and published as a book in 1935, and it is an unembarrassed account of a man’s entanglements built out of what she had heard and lived. Setouchi Harumi’s Natsu no Owari was published by Shinchosha in 1963, drawn from her own position inside a triangle involving a married writer and a younger man, and it won the Joryu Bungakusho that year. Candour is not what is missing. Candour is abundant, and it is old.

Look at what the two titles are made of. One of them is a penitence word: zange is confession in the religious sense, and putting iro in front of it names the material and the posture in the same breath. The other is a season ending. The available frames are contrition and elegy, and both of them do something to the account before a reader has read a line: one makes it a matter to be forgiven, the other makes it a matter to be felt beautifully about.

There is a further fact about the second writer that has to be handled carefully. In 1973, at fifty-one, Setouchi was ordained at Chusonji in the Tendai school and took the name Jakucho. This Library makes no claim whatever about why. She has given her own account of that decision, it involves a different relationship, and a person’s religious life is not material for an argument about literary register. What can be said is about the culture rather than the woman: an arc that runs from frankness to renunciation is a shape an account of a life can be fitted into afterwards, by other people, and once it has been fitted the account is resolved. The shape is available here. It is used.

So the claim narrows to something defensible. What is thin in the available equipment is not candour. It is the register in which candour is not simultaneously a performance of contrition, of sorrow, or of a later renunciation — the register in which there is nothing for the account to resolve into, and in which the writer neither asks to be forgiven nor asks to be found moving.

That is what Simple Passion supplies, and it is why a book from Normandy about a Soviet diplomat is worth the time of a reader who has no interest in French literature. The use of it is not that anybody should write like Ernaux. It is that reading a register you do not have makes visible how much of what feels like your own private feeling about a want was supplied to you, pre-assembled, by the words that were nearest.

Three earlier pieces of work in this Library stand close to this one, and the argument here is not usable until it has said where it differs from them.

This Library has read Marguerite Duras’s The Lover as a book in which memory rewrites desire: a woman near seventy assembling an account of a girl of fifteen, and showing you the assembly while she does it. Ernaux is the instructive counter-case rather than the counter-example. Her entire method is an attempt to author as little as possible, to get the account down with the composing hand removed from view. And Se perdre demonstrates that the attempt does not succeed, because the pages written during the thing read nothing like the book written after it. The two essays therefore agree more than they appear to. Duras displays the authorship; Ernaux subtracts the signs of it; neither of them escapes it. What differs is what the reader is invited to do with that, and this essay says that a made register can do work that an honest one cannot.

This Library has also read Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation as a novel in which the shrinking is not the price of the attention but the product being purchased — relief from the work of being a self. Ernaux’s narrator is also entirely organised around a man, and she does not shrink, which is worth noticing precisely so that the earlier argument is not over-applied. Nothing in Simple Passion is a performance staged for him. The book is about what happened to her time, not about what happened to her personality, and the two conditions look similar from outside and are not the same thing.

The closest neighbour is the recent essay on Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, which argued that the decisive variable in a life organised around a want is not the wanting but the audience the want acquires, and that the only purchase a person has is a partial, occasional choice over who ends up holding the account.

This essay parts from that one at exactly that point, and the difference is the reason it was worth writing. Ernaux does the opposite of selecting her audience. She hands the account to the largest and least chosen audience available — a general readership, in print, permanently, under her own name, with the judgement arriving in the numbers a French bestseller attracts. She has no protection from the selection of witnesses, because she made no selection. What protects the account is the register it is written in, which offers the audience no seat to judge from.

So the two arguments locate the leverage in different places. The earlier one puts it in the choice of who holds the account, which is a real lever and a scarce one. This one puts it in the form the account takes, which is a different lever and, for what it is worth, one that remains available to a person who has no ability to choose her audience at all — which is the situation most readers are actually in. The essays are compatible. They are not the same essay, and anybody who only had the first would be missing the option that does not require a choice of witnesses.

Four objections, and the last of them is the one that should worry a reader most.

First, the flatness is a literary construction, and praising it as unmediated honesty is a category error that the book profits from. Écriture plate has a history. It stands in a line that runs through the French novel of the 1950s and has a relation to the zero degree of writing that Barthes described, as the Swedish Academy itself noted. It is a technique with predecessors, deployed by a professional at the height of her powers. And the proof is now in print: the diary exists, it reads nothing like the book, and it was written by the same woman about the same months. A reader admiring the absence of artifice in Simple Passion is admiring the artifice.

Second, the man is barely a person in it. He is an initial. His speech is scarce, his interior life is not attempted, and he exists in the book mainly as the variable that determines the shape of her waiting. A book that will not permit its author to be turned into an object of judgement has no comparable scruple about him. The freedom the register buys is bought partly at his expense, and he did not publish anything. The later diary extends the problem rather than resolving it, since it supplies a different initial and more identifying detail about a real person who had no part in the decision.

Third, the register is held up by a position. By 1991 Ernaux was an established writer with a major prize behind her, a Gallimard imprint, a salary from a teaching post, a house of her own, a divorce a decade in the past, and a national literary culture that grants a certain licence to a serious writer that it does not grant to anybody else. Flat registration is not free-standing. It is expensive, and she could afford it. A reader with no publisher, no public standing, no financial independence, and a workplace and a family who will all read her, does not come into possession of the same instrument by copying the sentences.

Fourth, and sharpest: an essay that recommends this register to a reader who has no such position may be recommending exposure without protection. That objection is not answered by pointing out that nobody was told to publish anything. A register that works in print for a woman with standing can work very badly in a group chat, in a marriage, or in a small office, where flat registration reads as brazenness and where the absence of contrition is itself the offence being punished. An essay that praises a tool without saying what holds it up has handed over the blade and kept the handle.

A good deal of all that lands, and the honest response is a narrowing rather than a rebuttal.

On construction, the objection is conceded and was conceded before it was raised. This essay has never claimed the book is unmediated. Its claim is that a register can be built in which shame has no grammatical place, and that building one is a more powerful move than arguing. The construction is the point, not a defect in it.

On the man, the objection is conceded with nothing offered in return. This Library does not think the asymmetry is repaired by anything in the book or by anything in this reading of it, and a reader who finds it disqualifying is not being argued with.

On position, the objection is conceded and is the reason this essay does not recommend that anybody write this way in public. What is recommended is reading, which costs nothing and exposes nobody.

On exposure, the only honest answer is a restriction, stated plainly. Nothing here should be read as encouraging any reader to tell anybody anything. The register is proposed for private use — for what a person writes for herself and does not send, or for the sentences she uses inside her own head about her own life, where there is no audience standing by to be protected from and none standing by to rule. What the book shows is that such sentences are possible. It does not show that they are safe to say out loud, and this essay does not claim they are.

This house sells private companionship, and that interest runs through the argument above in a way a reader is entitled to see stated rather than to detect.

A reading that says a want can be recorded without shame is convenient for an arrangement in which wanting is the reason people arrive. If shame is a feature of the register rather than of the person, then a place that supplies a different register looks useful. The convenience is real and it is not cancelled by the argument also being, as far as this Library can tell, correct.

So the constraints, stated as restrictions on what may be claimed rather than as a disclaimer. This house diagnoses nobody. Nothing in this essay says that a reader who feels shame about a want is suffering from anything, or is in error, or has a problem that a paid evening addresses. This house claims no outcome of any kind: not relief, not confidence, not healing, not the recovery of anything. What is on offer is bounded, scheduled and paid for, and an evening does not confer a register on anybody.

And this house claims no relationship to the book or its makers. Annie Ernaux, her publishers in France, the United States and Japan, her translators, and every scholar cited here have no connection to this house, no knowledge of it, and no part in anything it says. Naming a book is discovery and nothing else; there is no arrangement of any kind behind the recommendation.

This essay is a reading. It is not clinical guidance, it prescribes nothing, it promises no outcome, and it diagnoses no reader.

Nothing here is a statement about Japanese people, about Japanese women, or about national character of any kind. The argument about registers concerns the conventions a language and its written tradition supply ready-made. It is this Library’s interpretive claim, not a linguistic finding, and no reader should take it as a description of herself or of anybody she knows.

The publication details are drawn from the Swedish Academy’s bibliography, the author’s own site, National Diet Library records and publishers’ pages. Catalogues differ on whether the first Gallimard edition of Passion simple is dated 1991 or January 1992; this essay follows the Academy and the author’s site in giving 1991, and the discrepancy is noted here rather than hidden. The statement that no Japanese edition of Se perdre appears is a statement about standard listings consulted at the time of writing and not a claim that none will exist.

No passage of either book is quoted here. The contents, the method and the closing movement of Simple Passion are described from the English translation as reported in published reviews and publishers’ materials rather than from an inspection of the French text, and the description of Ernaux’s foreword to the diaries rests on the same kind of source. Where this essay says what the book does, it is reporting a reading of a translation at one remove, and a reader with the French in front of her may reasonably disagree.

The affair described involves a living person other than the author, identified in the published work only by an initial. Nothing here presents his thoughts, his motives or his experience as established, because the record contains only one side of it and that side was composed by a writer.

The passages about Uno Chiyo and Setouchi Jakucho report what was published and when, and one biographical fact about an ordination. They make no claim about either writer’s motives, inner life or religious conviction, and the argument they support is about the frames a culture keeps available, not about the women who worked inside them.

This house’s commercial interest is stated in the body rather than only here. The counter-reading is not a rhetorical device: the objections in it are the ones this Library could not dispose of, and on at least one of them nothing is offered in reply.