Chapter 93: When Writing is Betraying

Betrayal is an ugly word, and it’s not a great feeling either; a scar for the recipient, a scab for the perpetrator.

There are many ways to betray in writing when your material draws from flesh and blood who can read you once published. Janet Malcolm gave us the most famous essay on journalists’ alleged propensity for seduction and duplicity, in The Journalist and the Murderer. A distinction can be made when you feel you own the story; when it stems not from a source but personal experience, and when the risk comes from writing too close to home, in what may seem like transcribing.  

Take the story of one of art’s great friendships, between Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne. They met in middle school in southern France and grew up together dreaming dreams of artistic greatness. Emile wanted to be a painter, while Paul favored poetry. It turned out otherwise: the first went on to be one of the defining writers of his century, while the second’s canvases adorn museums the world over. Their paths there diverged, however. Emile was a resounding success before he turned forty; Paul’s recognition came posthumously. 

Still, they kept in touch. From bustling Paris, Zola would send his latest works to the struggling friend who remained amidst Provence's landscapes. In 1886, he gifted Paul a signed copy of The Masterpiece, the novel where he’d put the most of himself and their youthful friendship. It is the story of a failed painter who (spoiler alert!) hangs himself before an unfinished painting. Legend has it that it spelled the end of their long friendship. 

Life is far more nuanced than that, yet endless articles and even a movie extolled the idea that Emile had spoken his opinion on his friend’s craft a bit too loudly, while Paul didn’t heed artistic disclaimers about the resemblance to actual persons being purely coincidental. Whatever the truth, the narrative of the writer betraying his oldest companion for the sake of vivid writing material has resonated for more than a century. Was it worth it, Emile?

Back to the present in the same geography, France’s two most famous non-fiction writers have grappled with betrayal in their own manner. Annie Ernaux recently won the Nobel Prize for uncovering “the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory,” and Emmanuel Carrère and his work is always self-revealing box office. Both have made their lives the subject of their oeuvre, and neither shies away from subjects as traumatic as abortion or shock therapy. 

Nor is their work written in isolation, “Autofiction” – to use one term– has been a distinctive French literary trend for decades. Michel Leiris outlined its perils in 1946 when he compared writing about oneself to bullfighting, with the risks of truth without artifice being the figurative bull’s horns. Yet this chosen danger, for the writer, can also turn the horn’s thrust towards people who didn’t choose to be brought into the ring, to be exposed or made into characters. 

For Ernaux, this risk of betrayal of others is intrinsic to the craft. It is a form of original sin: early on in her work, she considers that she has betrayed her roots and refers to herself as a defector from her social class. Writing is betraying because the path that led her to craft words is the same that drove her away from her working-class origins. How then do you do them justice in writing? How do you write about people who lived outside those literary words, how do you portray them in that proper syntax which to them spelled exclusion? 

In A Man’s Place, the book about her father that marked her shift away from fiction, she chose this epigraph from Jean Genet: “I venture an explanation: Writing is the last resort when one has betrayed.” 

It determined what stories Ernaux would tell and how she would tell them, her themes and style: the choice of writing about those who cannot write themselves, in a manner as truthful to them as possible, almost literal, with no embellishments. 

“The only fair way to evoke a seemingly insignificant life, that of my father, to not betray – both him and the world from which I come, which continues to exist, that of the dominated – was to reconstitute the reality of this life through precise facts, through the words I'd heard,” Ernaux writes in L'ecriture comme un couteau / Writing Sharp As a Knife. To do so, she says, “I have no right to take the side of art first, nor to try to do something exciting or moving. I will gather the words, the gestures, the tastes of my father, the outstanding facts of his life, and all the objective signs of an existence that I also shared. No poetry of memory, no jubilant derision.”

To avoid betrayal, for Ernaux, is to not write about oneself for oneself, but as something that “opposes the possible narcissism of the I, telling one’s life, telling one’s secret, with the idea of deciphering, to unveil something that can pass into other’s memories,” as she said in her Nobel lecture. 

Carrère has no such qualms about narcissism, as he readily admits. You read him for the apparent nakedness of his exposure and confession. Nothing is off the table, he’ll grovel and enchant, as readers are his witness. There is a single rule he won’t break: “I have one conviction, only one, concerning literature, at least the kind of literature I practice: it is the place where one does not lie. This is the absolute imperative, everything else is secondary, and I believe I have always kept to this imperative,” he writes in Yoga.

Yet it is a rule that, after twenty years of writing non-fiction (which he calls literature here), he suddenly confesses to breaking. “I can't say about [his book, Yoga] what I proudly said about many others: everything is true. In writing it I have to distort a little, transpose a little, erase a little, especially erase because I can say all I want, but not about others.”

He explains his reasons for sidestepping the truth, for betraying that “absolute imperative,” by taking a page from one of the darkest corners of his country’s history. He recounts the story of French General Massu, who confessed to using torture during Algeria’s war for independence. His method notably included the infamous “gégène,” which consists of placing electric prods onto parts of the victim’s body. The key point is that Massu obscenely said that this torture wasn’t so bad, and he knew by virtue of having tried it on himself. Yet, as Carrère notes, the point of torture is that you don’t just “try it”: you don’t know when it will stop. This, Carrère explains, is similar to what a non-fiction writer risks doing, the essential difference between what he can inflict on himself when writing, compared to what he can inflict on others.

“Like [General Massu] I can stop whenever I want, I say or keep quiet what I want, I decide where to place the cursor. While writing about others one crosses, or can cross, on the side of true torture, because he who writes has full power and he who is written about is at his mercy.”

Carrère may seem excessive, but he is not just theorizing: he wrote a book years ago in which he believes he crossed a line he shouldn’t have, and in so doing hurt the people he loved most, told secrets they didn’t want to be told. He betrayed them, so a new rule was born: “I promised myself that I wouldn't do it again, and I haven't,” he says in an interview. 

Therefore Carrère, in this book - because he will not risk betraying again - pulls a fast one on his readers with Gallic charm and suave writing: he suddenly confesses he’s writing fiction. One betrayal substitutes another; a much less hurtful alternative. Yet it’s still startling, and its literary gains are meager. Perhaps there is no choice in this book, save not writing it. 

Ernaux is also acquainted with the thorny issue of to whom the story belongs. In response to a lover telling her “You won’t write a book about me,” she does so with the certainty that it is not about him, nor her, not intended for either of them, but rather a transcription of his mark on her life “bequeathed to others.” The story belongs to its readers.

Beyond one writer’s selflessness and the other’s atonement, Ernaux comes closer to the unwavering center. At various points in her work she says, “If I don't write them down, things have not been completed, they have only been experienced,” or refers to “Salvaging something from the time when we’ll cease to be.”

Whatever pitfalls, ideas, or self-deception, the proof will be in the writing and its necessity. That is the one thing they won’t risk betraying.