“I don’t expect life to bring me subjects but unknown structures for writing. The thought ‘I only want to write the texts that only I can write’ refers to texts whose very form is provided by the reality of my life. I could never have foreseen the text we are writing. Though it definitely came from life. Conversely, the writing under the photos, in multiple fragments which will themselves be broken up by those of M., as yet unknown, give me (among other things) the chance to create a minimal narrative out of this reality.” -Annie Ernaux.
Between the administration’s cuts to NEA grants that now put dozens of literary venues at risk of shuttering, and venture capitalists pushing software built on plagiarism and prone to error (branded under the umbrella term “artificial intelligence”), this country’s leadership has thoroughly cemented its disdain for the written word.
I had the privilege of articulating my own specific syllabus policy on AI for my university’s magazine this spring. As an English teacher, I emphasize to my students that writing itself is thinking, or a process of decision-making that allows people to articulate their own original ideas in a way that others can comprehend. What I tell my students is that good writing is not about “rules you have to follow” but rather “understanding actions and their consequences.” That language is inherently idiosyncratic, a consequence of the actions that its participants take. Its value derives from its dexterity, from being put to the limit. E. E. Cummings broke the conventions of grammar, and the consequence is that his poetry is thought-provoking, confronting, memorable. Shakespeare invented almost 3,000 words. George Orwell’s fictional world-building remains a popular lexicography for expressing the devaluation of language to “Newspeak” ordained by “Big Brother.”
Generative AI cannot innovate our language in the same way because it is not a writing machine, but a customer service machine designed to give people answers that will 1) satisfy them and 2) make them come back to the customer service machine again. Imagine a slot machine that always gives you the exact amount of money necessary to pull the lever again, but never more.
Annie Ernaux articulates the value of writing as an exercise in self-expression in The Use of Photography, a memoir of the roughly one-year period when she underwent treatment for breast cancer. The book is a series of reflections about photographs she took of piles of her and her lover’s clothing during their affair during the same time period. Each photograph is followed by a reflection by Ernaux, and one by her lover at the time, the journalist Marc Marie. Strikingly, the project is about the wide gap in each co-authors’ memory about the specific intimate moment captured with each photograph.
At one point, Marc jokes that Annie got cancer “just so she could write about it,” which she jokingly concedes but also rejects because she sees life not as source material for writing, not as “subjects” but as “structures.” Cancer creates a structural change that the author then occupies and, subsequently through the act of writing, volunteers to make sense of.
“I only want to write the text that only I can write” shouldn’t strike me as profound, but it does. It justifies my profession and my art in a context in which the most powerful people want to replace my work with software. What makes Annie Ernaux such a compelling writer is the specificity of how she uses language to express herself.
There are many memoirs about breast cancer. It’s an unavoidable subject if one studies memoir as a genre. Terry Tempest Williams places it in the context of her Mormon heritage as a downwinder from Utah in her essay “The Clan of One-Breasted Women.” Anne Boyer’s memoir The Undying takes a maximalist approach, connecting the history of medicine to Youtube video essays and the drugs involved in chemo. Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals takes a critical view of the empty promises carcinogen-producing corporations make when adopting pink ribbon logos one month a year. Each memoir is an artifact of the author’s individual exploration of their own experience, decades condensed into paragraphs, minutes extended into chapters. As memoir, each artifact attests to the individually specific nature of empathy. Each author has something different to say. As the reader, I anticipate friction, contradiction, distinction.
Ernaux decides to explore her own cancer treatment in one of the least obvious ways possible, through romantic entanglement expressed through photographs of clothes, removing concrete depictions of her body entirely and thus relegating the illness and treatment alike to memory that she then shares with another person, layered beneath the topography of intimacy and fulfillment.
In an interview with Alison L. Strayer in Southwest Review, Ernaux explains that for a lot of people, “when you have cancer, pleasure is not allowed. End of story. You do your chemo and you don’t bother other people with all that. The less they see you, the better it is for everyone. Because there’s that, too: people don’t talk. They don’t know how to be around someone who has cancer.”
In writing about an uncomfortable subject, Ernaux, like many other women before her, opens up avenues for a difficult subject matter to be made accessible to those who may encounter it in the future, and to those who should learn to empathize with those who share her experience. Writing, then, is an act of creating pathways where there had previously been none. Readers live in a richer, more textured world because they have access to a wide variety of very different memoirs about breast cancer, and memoirs about military experience, and novels about gardeners and poetry about addiction recovery and short stories about truckers and immigrants.
The destruction of literary venues and the expansion of a plagiarism machine both threaten to obscure the value of the written word as a mode of empowerment. To put it differently: I don’t study cooking because I intend to cook every single meal I eat, but because the ability to cook for myself and for others, whenever I want to, is valuable in itself. I’m tired of having to explain this to tech bro losers and their devotees, but I will never stop explaining it as long as I have to.
Ernaux, Annie. The Use of Photography. Seven Stories Press, 2024.
Keene Short 