 So, when you write in the chat, do you feel like you're going down deep into the depths of your soul to produce your comments? Or do you feel like you're rising up out of the abyss? Do you feel like you're deepening some ineffable experience that you're already holding? Have you considered putting together your YouTube comments into an uvra? That's what this New Yorker essay on our current Nobel Prize winner in literature evokes for me. It is titled Memory Search. 1997. The English translation is by Tanya Leslie. Its opening is unforgettable. My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June in the early afternoon. That was in the summer of 1952. Oh, that sounds good, doesn't it? That sounds like a compelling piece of writing. So, she writes in-depth about how much she suffered because when she was growing up in Spain it was stigmatized to have sex outside of marriage and it was considered shameful to get pregnant outside of marriage. Can you imagine how she suffered? Then she went and had sex without being concerned about birth control and shockingly she got pregnant and then abortion was illegal in France until 1975. So, she had to go around as a 23-year-old woman to try to find an illegal abortion. I mean, she got the Nobel Prize in literature as a response to the United States Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, overturning a woman's automatic right to an abortion anywhere in the United States. So, three cheers for any new. She basically just writes about herself, but so beautifully and in such a French way. When Erno was 11, it took her nearly 45 years to try to make sense of what this terrifying event meant to her. And by the book's end, she's still not sure that she has. Oh man, this sounds great. I gotta read this book. I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward. The sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much what drives my YouTube live streaming. I want to produce live streams that are impossible to talk about afterwards and that make it absolutely impossible for me to withstand the gaze of other people afterwards. I mean, I just feel like that my soul and any new soul are just like commingled. We are one. We are two fine soul people. She writes, this paradoxical wish to reveal the darkest parts of herself with such pitiless accuracy that she will be forced to fall silent once and for all is an extraordinary expression of rightly ambition. Yeah, not just rightly ambition. This is what drives me the humble YouTube live streamer. In any case, it has still not come true. Still not come true for me either and I'm 56. Okay. Any new is 82. The purpose of Elno's writing, she believes, is not merely to record things that have happened, but to make things exist. Yeah, that's the same way I feel about my live streams. I'm not just here to record what's happening. I'm here to make them exist such as this boat that's now entering from the right side of the frame as I look at my phone moving towards the left frame. I summoned this, but I'm making it exist. This is strong, but it is hardly the strongest thing she has to say about her work. I am a medium, she told me. I feel that I'm someone who can transmit things. Much of what Elno trans- Wow. Wow. She's a medium. She's someone who can transmit things. This is powerful stuff. I mean, I think I'm a medium too. Like I'm someone who can transmit things. What it is to grow up working class in a society that is contemptuous of workers. Yeah. So do you feel like you're here to transmit things too? Are you ready to talk about what it's like to grow up in a cruel society that is contemptuous of workers? Like this is a time to speak your truth. What it is to be a woman dispossessed of her body by the laws of the state. I too feel like a woman who's been dispossessed of my body by the laws of the state. I mean, do you feel like a woman right now? Do you feel like you're a woman who's been dispossessed by the state of the right to her own body? That's just what I'm feeling right now. Maybe we could feel like women together. Doesn't that sound like jolly fun? I think so. Or by the overpowering prerogatives of desire. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is an open space. This is a safe space for you to share what it's like for you to be overwhelmed by desire. So when men are overwhelmed by the prerogatives of desire and they have the opportunity, they rape. So how sublime is that? I mean, she's sublimely overwhelmed by the prerogatives of her body. Let's hear from the men in the chat who too are sublimely overwhelmed by the prerogatives of their bodies. I mean, if you feel something, then you must act on it, right? You don't want to repress your feelings. You don't want to give the state. They're the key to your soul, do you? I've made her a literary model. Even a hero. To those who have shared similar experiences or points of view. Oh, yeah. This is my hero. This is my hero, man. How wonderful to hear from someone who suffered from the prerogatives of the body, where the body just takes over and she submits to the body's desires. I mean, this is such edgy stuff. This is amazing. What world are you in? I am in Sydney Harbor, mate. And any anew, she lives in France where she had to live her life submitting to the state. Here it is pitched back and freezing. Well, we had a hailstorm about 45 minutes ago. It was very exciting. Erne's book, Happening, in which she describes seeking an illegal abortion as a 23-year-old student is a feminist touchstone. Oh, yeah. I just haven't read enough feminist touchstones. Boy, that sounds good. I really want to know what it's like to be a 23-year-old student in France seeking an illegal abortion after having sex without making any considerations of birth control. Boy, this sounds like great stuff. Powerful feminist theory. Adopted last year into a movie by the director Audrey Duane. So it is now 2.48 p.m. in Sydney, Australia. And I'm here to create a safe place for you to share about what it was like to be overcome by the prerogatives of the body's desires. Let's share some of our recollections from the male point of view. Just like Didier Eribon, Edouard Louis, and Marie and Di are openly indebted to Erno in both substance and style. Wow, I never knew that. I can't believe how indebted we are. It is now Wednesday, 2.28 p.m. Sydney, Australia. Erno has been asked if she is proud to have been adopted as a kind of literary godmother or even as a spokesperson. Yeah, I too feel proud to be adopted as a live-streaming godfather. Yes, I'm living in the future, but I'm reaching out to speak to you in the past. I'm here to warn you that if you don't mend your ways, this is the type of place where you'll end up, mate. I'm speaking as the ghost of your Christmas future. Heed my words, my son. Because he feels that pride is the wrong word. I never wanted to write for, Erno told me. I write from. Yeah, that's the same experience for me. Like I've never wanted to live-stream for. I just want to live-stream from. Such a profound difference. All right, I'm not here to serve an audience beyond the audience of me. Let's talk about me. So her entire Uber is just writing about herself and it's marvelous stuff. She produces feminist touchstones, guys. Still, she was moved by the joy with which readers greeted the Nobel announcement. I will never forget my joy when I learned that any who knew had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I'll never forget where I was. I assume I was at work somewhere. Oh, such joy. Such sweet delight. Do you consider the prize a collective achievement? Yeah, I consider these live streams a collective achievement. But it's you and me having social intercourse. Am I a cannabis user? No, I looth cannabis. Looth, looth, looth cannabis. I've never tried marijuana in my life. I've never tried any illegal drug in my life. I don't drink. I looth, looth, looth these things. The same things that make many people love Erno make many others despise her. Relentlessly personal in her art she has in public life taken on the role of the écrivain engagé outspokenly committed to a host of left-wing political causes. Wow, who would have thought that someone else both in league committed to a host of left-wing causes who have drawn a negative reaction from the right? This is shocking stuff, mate. Wow. Can't believe this. And while she was being appreciated in New York, accusations lobbed by her conservative detractors were flying fast in France. Erno was an anti-Semite. She supports the boycott divestment sanctions movement as a way of... She's not any Semitic. She just believes that Jews are the one people in the world who don't deserve to have their own state. Just because she singles out Jews as the one people in the world who don't deserve their own state, that doesn't make her anti-Jewish. Does Donald Trump have a shot in 2024? Yes, he has a shot. I'd say he probably has a what a 50% chance of winning the Republican nomination and then another 50% chance of winning the election. So we're outside the crown royal casino on Sydney Harbour right now. Absolutely. Answering the Palestinian cause. An Islamophascist. She considers French antipathy to the hijab to be a means of silencing women. A pet of... Yeah, antipathy to the hijab. If you don't want women walking around in a hijab, if you believe that women should show their faces in public, that means that you hate women. Does love change for the worse in Australia depending on who is... Does life change for the worse in Australia depending on who is elected to power in the United States? Well, guess what? Life doesn't really change for the better or the worse depending on who's elected to power in the United States for Americans. Right? Life under Joe Biden is indistinguishable from life under Donald Trump unless you're a political junkie. So whoever has chosen president in the United States practically makes especially no difference to how ordinary people live their lives and it doesn't really make a difference to how Australians live their lives either. Right? If you completely ignored politics, all right, your life would just go on. It wouldn't be crippled. Right? What difference does it make to your life practically? Yeah, but everyone's suffering from inflation right now. What first war nation is not suffering from inflation? If Donald Trump was president, we'd be suffering from inflation. Now, maybe it'd be a point lower, maybe even be two points lower, but it wouldn't be more than two points lower. So instead of suffering 8% inflation this year, we'd only be suffering 6% inflation. Her latest book Le Journain recounts an affair that Erno had in her 50s with a man some 30 years her junior, Wolkiste. Oh boy, I can't wait to read that. I love reading books about 50-year-old women who have affairs with men 30 years they do it. Yeah, lower the better. So inflation points are small, but if people are struggling with inflation primarily means they don't have their lives together. I think Ed Dutton was right. We're not suffering through an inflation crisis nearly as much as a disgenic crisis. People have gotten so soft, so flabby. People have gotten out of discipline themselves to save money. People have gotten how to plant their own food, how to cook their own food, and they've just become so pathetic and weak that they're just getting smacked around by an increase in inflation or anything that goes wrong. They're absolutely devastated because they live in such precarious ways. So when I had to move in 2011, that was devastating for me because I was in such straightened economic circumstances. If I'd had more money saved and if I'd been in a better position in life, I would have been so devastated by moving. But when your hold on life is fragile, when you don't have it together, then the smallest disruption can be devastating. Smart budgeting types are not being devastated by inflation of 8%. If you're being devastated by 8% inflation, there's something wrong with you. Something wrong with how you budget. Something wrong with how you save. There's something wrong with how effectively you work and earn money. Now, it definitely makes life more difficult, particularly if gasoline prices double and you depend on driving three hours a day. So it certainly makes life more difficult. But the better shape you are, the more centered you are morally, spiritually, financially, the more savings you have, the more capable you are, the more friends you have, stronger your community, then the better you're going to be able to deal with any threat. Like, what's the best way to survive inflation? Have friends and community. What's the best way to survive an earthquake? Have friends and community. What's the best way to survive a war? Have friends and community. What's the best way to survive a recession or depression? Have friends and community. What's the best way to overcome medical crisis? Have friends and community. What's the best way to overcome suffering a car accident? Have friends and community. What's the best way to survive being disabled at work? Have friends and community. What's the best way to survive the loss of your parents? To have friends and community. What's the best way to survive your computer not working? Have friends and community. What's the best way to survive the loss of a relationship? have friends and community. What's the best way to survive a car that doesn't start? Have friends and community. What's the best way to survive losing your job? Have friends and community. The best way to survive any crisis, any difficult situation is to have friends and community and to reason socially. To have people you bounce things off where they learn from you, you learn from them. We learn much better when we learn together. This is from the New Yorker. Memory serves about our latest Nobel Prize winner in literature. She got the prize because it was a reaction of the Nobel Committee to America overturning Roe v. Wayne. The same things that make many people love Erno, make many others despise her. Relentlessly personal in her art, she has in public life taken on the role of the écrivain engagé, outspokenly committed to a host of left-wing political causes. And while she was being appreciated in New York, accusations logged by her conservative detractors were flying fast in France. Erno was an anti- So guess what? If you become an Asian provocateur for the right or left, the other side politically is going to oppose you. For every action there's a reaction. Semite. She supports the boycott divestment sanctions movement as a way of advancing the Palestinian cause. An Islam-o-fascist, she considers French antipathy to the hijab to be a means of silencing women. A pedophile, her latest book Le Journain, recounts an affair that Erno had in her fifties with a man some 30 years her junior. Okay, if you're in your fifties having a affair with a man 30 years your junior, that has absolutely no connection, nothing to do with pedophilia. Wauquist. She is a proponent of hashtag me too and of the gilet jaune. Decidedly, this academy of old shriveled bigwigs has gone a step further into the absurd and the indecent, railed one editorial beneath the headline, the Nobel in literature definitively discredited. Well, I didn't know about you, but how excited was I to find out that our latest Nobel Prize winner in literature was a French woman? I mean, that just had such overwhelming meaning to me. In the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, a writer disparaged the decision to award the high priestess of auto-fiction for a lifetime spent writing about herself. They think I'm not legitimate, Erno said to me. What disgusts them is that there are people who have found in literature something that speaks to them and that those people aren't CEOs or company bosses. Okay, so I don't really know any in you. I don't really know about her critics and I didn't know her box and I didn't know the criticisms of a box. I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say, I reckon that the criticisms of her have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that people who aren't CEOs can enjoy literature. I mean, what a fatuous statement she just made. Erno is also the first French woman to win the Nobel and that doesn't work for them at all. Oh no. For years, she has dealt with sexist criticism of her work and not just from the right. Hey, no, sexist criticism. Guys, because she's a woman, she should not be criticized at all. To criticize her, a woman is to be sexist. To criticize the person of color is inherently to be racist. I didn't want to do any of that. Come on, remember guys, we have sacred groups. You need to be immune from all group level criticism or even personal criticism. You can't criticize sacred groups, protected groups, guys. He published Simple Passion, a soul-bearing account of a love affair with a married man, a literary critic at the Liberal Weekly, Le Nouvelle Observateur, took to calling her, Madame Auvary. Oh, thank God that she published this memoir about her affair with a married man who's a literary critic. Boy, can't wait to read it. I suggested to Erno that there might be something validating in the present outpouring of loathing. Haven't she been writing for years about the contempt of the rich for the poor, of men for women, of the dominant for the downtrodden? It's proof, she agreed. Still, it depressed her. In the uproar, Erno saw a renewal of the frightening wave of outrage that had engulfed her 10 years ago when she published a column in Le Monde, decrying a literary elegy for Anders Brevik, a barely concealed apologia for the Norwegian mass murderer by Richard Mille, an author and editor at Gallimard. While condemning Brevik's crimes, Mille blamed them on multiculturalism and the erosion of European Christian identity. Erno called his text a fascist pamphlet that dishonours literature. Okay, I think there are a lot of things more important. All right, an apology for Anders Brevik. Sounds disgusting. Doesn't necessarily have anything to do with fascism. He can just be opposed to mass murder and be revolted by mass murder and absolutely revolted by what Anders Brevik did. Three days later, Mille stepped down from Gallimard's prestigious reading committee. Yeah, if you write articles apologising for mass murderers, there will probably be some negative repercussions. Many others shared Erno's disgust. For instance, J.M.G. Le Cuisieu, nobeled in 2008. But Erno's column, counter-signed by 118 fellow writers, was seized… That's what I love when people write these columns that are counter-signed by 120 other writers or 88 other writers. Who needs all these intellectuals signing on to your column? Come on. I just… I'm not a big fan of group things. Became a kind of referendum on what wasn't yet termed cancel culture, with Erno denounced as a harridan intent on enforcing politically correct censorship at the expense of a man's career. Look, if you're a guy writing an apology for a mass murderer, all right, and you suffer some social consequences, that's your own fault. I was called a killer, Erno said. She herself felt that it was really a alali, a hunting call, with Erno as the chaste stag. Yeah, she's the victim here, all right. It's very easy to feel like the victim. One of the phrases most associated with Erno, transfuge de classe, can seem derogatory. A transfuge is a defector. But Erno herself uses the term, partly as an objective description of her situation, as a woman who, by dint of education, rose to the middle class, and then, by force of talent, to the cultural elite. And partly, it can seem, as a kind of deserved epithet that expresses her own ambivalent feelings at having moved so far from the world of her parents. Well, her parents weren't in particularly good shape, all right, they were in desperate shape, so I'm not sure exactly why you'd feel so ambivalent about that. Let's fast forward through this story. The courage of willing captivity. During the months of her affair with A, as she calls her lover, Erno bends toward him as a flower toward the sun. She stays at home when she should go out. She doesn't use the vacuum cleaner for fear of covering the phone's ring. Okay, so she's a sex and love addict, and here she is having an affair with a man three decades younger than her, and this is her in her fifties. So it sounds like classic sex and love addiction. A is a foreigner, an Eastern European. His weakness for Western luxuries reminds Erno of herself as a teenage parvenu, craving the dresses and vacations that her richer friends had. A shares none of her intellectual interests, but so what? She herself can only listen to love songs. After A returns home, Erno grows morbid. If he has given her AIDS, she thinks, at least he would have left me that. And yet? Yes, if only he'd given me AIDS. There's nothing that kind of warms the heart like a departing lover who leaves you with the ongoing gift of AIDS. As she explains in simple passion, the passage of time can also be a comfort, even a creative necessity. Naturally, I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written, when only I can see them, from the moment when they will be read by other people. Okay, if you win the Nobel Prize for Literature, you make your living writing about yourself, yeah, no need to feel shame. And if you're an ordinary bloke who's going to blow up his life publishing things like this, then yeah, you probably shouldn't feel shame. The moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died. A war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at 16, or make love without contraceptives at 20, without thinking about the consequences. Yeah. So usually it's a really good idea to think about the consequences, but when it comes to writing, sometimes you need to forget them for a while, at least during early drafts. Erno sometimes ends her books with the dates of their composition. Oh, how lovely, so nice. Inspired applause, but happening when it was published got a tepid response. Right, so this is a novel about getting an abortion, right, her lightly ordered biographical novel about getting an abortion. That's why she won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. But she can focus only on her own female reality. In a strange way, my inability to write my thesis was far more alarming than my need to abort Erno writes. I had stopped being an intellectual. I don't know whether this... Well, guess what? When you have a toothache, you stop being an intellectual. And if you break your leg, you'll stop being an intellectual. If you have severe constipation, you'll stop being an intellectual. If you're on the path of having an orgasm, you'll stop being an intellectual. If you get exhausted working out, you'll stop being an intellectual. If you're shopping for food, you'll stop being an intellectual. Healing is widespread. It causes indescribable pain. A different kind of pain follows a failed attempt to solve her problem with a pair of knitting needles. All the while, she feels time flowing inside and outside of me. The common calendar moving forward, her private one moving back. It has been speculated fairly that Erno's writing on abortion may be why the Nobel jury saw fit to award the prize to her this year. Less than four months after Roe v. Wade was overturned. So remember when Barack Obama about two months into office won the Nobel Peace Prize? Like he hadn't done anything. But because the Nobel Prize Committee so low, George W. Bush, they gave Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize, even though he hadn't done anything. They give this Sheila a Nobel Prize for literature, primarily because she wrote about abortion. During her October visit to Barnard, Erno was asked, almost as if she were a politician, if she wished to say something to American women. She found it extraordinary, she replied, that the U.S., which had legalized abortion before France, should return to savagery. So get what savage? Savage isn't extinguishing life. Savagery isn't killing babies. Savagery isn't murdering fetuses. That savagery is not making it the law of the land that is absolutely legal to carry out this killing. That's savagery from her perspective. This remark inspired applause, but happening when it was published got a tepid response. It was a book that bothered people. Erno told me. Aside from the events themselves, rendered with almost unbearably claustrophobic exactitude, the abortion and what happens afterward is so brutal that even the film adaptation seems gentle by comparison. There is Erno's total lack of guilt about what she did. Well, why did Erno feel no guilt about having an abortion? Because there is not a widespread powerful movement in France to call abortion, abortion murder. Women in Australia don't feel guilt after having an abortion. Any women in America do because it's socially constructed. That's what we feel guilty about is socially constructed. Societies that try to instill guilt upon having an abortion, all right, they are frequently successful. Societies that don't have hot button culture issues such as abortion and widespread movements to declare abortion murder, all right, you're going to be much less likely to have women feel guilty about having an abortion. Guilt is socially constructed. There may be no parade, but for years she celebrated the night of the procedure as an anniversary. Well, now that's pretty cold for the past few years. She celebrates the anniversary of having an abortion. Wow, oh, she celebrates it. She celebrates her extinguishing a life that was growing within her. What a lady. Though told me. She has had the sense that she has fulfilled a certain trajectory. No, not a trajectory. A destiny. She laughed. Yeah, she fulfilled her destiny by having sex without paying any attention to birth control, being absolutely careless, and then killing the growing life inside her. What a destiny. Powerful stuff. But she meant it. Not a destiny that was written from the beginning, one that was constructed bit by bit, of course. One big reason for that is a girl's story, which Erno published in 2016. The book deals with the summer of 1958, when Erno, nearly 18, left home on her own for the first time to work as a counselor at a summer camp. On her third night there, she is selected by the 22 year old head counselor for a trist, though to put that word to their encounter would be to imply romance, or at least enjoyment. Annie is a protected only child of extreme social naivete. A girl who does not know how to make a telephone call has never taken a shower or bath. Doesn't know how to make a telephone call, has never taken a shower or bath. How did she bathe in a tub? Like, went for a swim in the lake. So she's so naive, she bears absolutely no responsibility for this trist happening. There's nothing she did. She played zero role in this happening. Abortions, their life, lovers, divorces, all these things just happened to her. She's just passive receptacle. Who feels herself free and on the verge of life ready to escape home, have adventures, fall in love. Now she is laid down on a strange man's bed and watches as her body is used for his pleasure. So this is a great time for you to share in the chat how people have used your body for pleasure. Now think about what Uncle Wally did to you and you're just a wee lad and couldn't resist because you're you're experiencing so much pleasure at the time. But the experience is neither one of horror nor shame, only an obedience to what was happening. Far from seeing herself as a victim, she becomes slavishly devoted to the fact of her submission before this indifferent master. Yeah, so this is a great time for you to talk about the slavishness, the slavish nature of your submission to, you know, dominant masters, right? This is a safe space for you to share. That searing episode forms the kernel of the book. Around it, Erno builds a kind of detective story. The Annie from 1958 is a missing person. No photographs of her from that summer exist. The diaries she kept were burned by her mother. But Erno knows that the girl is still alive. She has been living inside her for decades. She is at the root of everything Erno has become as a woman and as a writer. And now she must be faced on her own terms. There seems something liberating in this, but Erno disagreed. I never considered writing to be a form of liberation. So when you write in the chat, do you find that a form of liberation? Right? Do you find it a way of reaching up or reaching down? Said the image that I have is always of descending, of deepening something. So is that your experience of writing in the chat that you're traveling down and descending and reaching for something? And there isn't much freedom down there, not really. Often when I speak with other writers, with female writers, really, the image we have of writing really varies. Some of them say that for them, it's a way of going up towards something. So when you write in the chat, do you experience that as an explosion of freedom akin to an orgasm? Feel free to share. But for me it's the absolute opposite. Not going underground exactly, but into a well. What draws her down? An idea of some kind? No, an obsession. The image of the well brings to mind a rescue mission. Erno, so devotion to chronicling what she calls the stupid faction of the real, has a mystical side too. All right, so do you write in the chat because you feel compelled to chronicle the stupid faction of the real? I can understand why that might drive you. It seems to me that I have finally freed the girl of 58, broken the spell that kept her prisoner for over 50 years. Thank God. Have no rights of her younger self. This is triumphant, magical. Amazing. It would make a wonderful ending. Wonderful. But it is not the end of the book. Only it's halfway point. Amazing. All endings in Erno's world are temporary. Incredible. The meaning of what she describes keeps shifting as time does. Preciant. Critics will be tempted to refer to Erno's output, this 50-year spelunking of the self as an oeuvre. An oeuvre. But she hates that word. An oeuvre. An oeuvre is something that's closed, she told me. And mine will be closed when I'm dead. Wow. So please, please consider collecting your most prescient chat posts and collate them into an oeuvre. Society would be better for it. God bless.