The end of Eddy

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The End of Eddy (French original title: En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule ) is the autobiographical debut novel by the French writer Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule ). It was published in February 2014 by Éditions du Seuil and a German translation by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel was published by S. Fischer Verlag in February 2015 . The book is about the childhood and adolescence of the author who became aware of his homosexuality in a homophobic, rural milieu in Picardy in northern France .

content

Eddy Bellegueule grew up in a simple family in a village in the rural, structurally weak Picardy in northern France. He is the first child of his parents, and the family also includes a son and a daughter from the mother's first marriage.

Right from the start, little Eddy did not meet the masculinity expectations of village society and especially his father. One expects a boy to spend his free time with sports and fights and later to become a “tough guy”, a womanizer who can also get his way with petty criminal methods. Eddy, on the other hand, is rather quiet, related to his mother and deals with "girl's things". This, his slim figure, his allegedly girlish gait and his surname ( Bellegueule , in German for example: Schönmaul ) mean that he remains an outsider throughout his school years, who is often left out, smiled at, teased, beaten or humiliated . He had his first homosexual experiences with boys from the neighborhood, whom he “met every day for a certain time, undressed them, penetrated them or was penetrated by them”, until his mother discovered the boys' occupation. When Eddy becomes aware of his homosexuality , he wants to hide it and flirts with girls, but to no avail. Only when he was admitted to the Lycée in the regional capital Amiens as a good student and moved into the associated boarding school , he was able to escape the narrowness of the village and the oppression. There he is spontaneously addressed as "Édouard" by his classmates, who consider "Eddy" to be a diminutive. So that's the end of "Eddy" .

Sociology of Submission

In describing the story of the young homosexual's maturation up to his escape from his home environment, Louis also describes a psychogram of staying. Because the same humiliating experiences are “repeated generation after generation” as well as “the persistent resistance to change something.” He documents this conflict “between total submission and constant rebellion” in many linguistic micro-sequences from everyday family life. In this practice contradicting discourses combine to reproduce social submission.

Above all, it is the pride of perseverance, the pride of having somehow made it through the worst of circumstances, at the bottom of the proletariat , that absorbs the energies of change. In the basic experience of poverty, early pain of emaciated bodies and silent anger, a cult of the male body and character that women also share develops. Male strength becomes the source of a pride, which is lived out in brutality and drunkenness as momentary liberation and which is homophobic and racist to differentiate itself from other masculinity. In the brawls, Eddy's father is given the greatest possible autonomy ; but after these excesses he and the other heroes lie helpless in the gutter and have to be looked after by their friends and families.

The complementary incorporeal, mental self-assertion is used to reinterpret external circumstances into self-induced effects: poverty becomes a conscious “decision”, physical wear and tear “lies in the family”, and the desire to have fun is paid for with a “simple life “, The poverty of others is the result of shirking.

The women of the village second their husbands by passing on the stories and role models that demand submission from girls and boys: women who are still childless , less dependent women are “ lesbian ” or “ frigid ” or have to be “really fucked up”, urban youths Clothing is seen as a sign of fornication and the will to learn or rise is denounced as arrogance .

Both genders sometimes feel an energy that is too much for their home, but miss a - theoretically - possible departure by practicing certain forms of thinking and behavior. Only Eddy can ultimately, driven by his sexual orientation, by the determination of his body, escape this comprehensive self-restraint.

Political context

Building on Gramsci 's theory of hegemony , theorists such as Michel Foucault , Pierre Bourdieu and others have repeatedly examined the participation of the subaltern classes in their domination; Examples are the study Fun at Resistance by Paul Willis or the British sociologist Stuart Hall , who examined the popularity of Thatcherism in the English working class.

Together with the biographically oriented literature by Anni Ernaux and Didier Eribon , Louis supports this approach through his observations of the incoherence of everyday consciousness in the context of his origin. He confirms the existence of social classes as a relatively permanent, bundled unequal distribution of life opportunities ( Niklas Luhmann ), in which the weakest settle independently despite everything.

reception

The book, which due to the contacts of his mentor, the author and sociologist Didier Eribon , was immediately published by one of the major French publishers, quickly became a literary sensation and, alongside German, into Albanian, Chinese, English, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian , Swedish and Spanish translated.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy. Novel . 2nd Edition. S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2015, ISBN 978-3-10-002277-6 , pp. 22nd ff., 38 ff .
  2. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy. Novel . S. 146 .
  3. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy. Novel . S. 141 ff., 171 .
  4. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy. Novel . S. 157 ff .
  5. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy. Novel . S. 189 ff .
  6. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy. Novel . S. 203 .
  7. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy. Novel . 2nd Edition. S. 44, 56, 68 f .
  8. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy . 2nd Edition. S. 37, 88 .
  9. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy . 2nd Edition. S. 69, 83 ff., 179 ff .
  10. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy . 2nd Edition. S. 37, 56 f .
  11. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy . 2nd Edition. S. 27, 65 f., 107 .
  12. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy . 2nd Edition. S. 21st f., 65 f., 107 .
  13. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy . 2nd Edition. S. 29, 38 ff., 43, 139, 172 .
  14. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy . 2nd Edition. S. 88, 94, 102 .
  15. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy . 2nd Edition. S. 16, 36 f., 67 ff., 88 .
  16. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy . 2nd Edition. S. 55, 158, 178, 192 .
  17. ↑ Édouard Louis: The end of Eddy . 2nd Edition. S. 24, 77, 143, 155 f., 165 ff .
  18. ^ Paul Willis: Learning to Labor. Enjoy resistance . Argument-Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-88619-489-6 .
  19. ↑ Although Louis calls his autobiography a "novel" in the title, he emphasizes in an interview with Dirk Fuhrig on Deutschlandfunk Kultur: "I wanted to match literature with the truth as much as possible. There is no fictional strand in my story. It is about my own childhood. " That is why the reproduction of the original languages ​​is very important to him. [1]