The Years – Annie Ernaux
Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel, The Years, is not just a life retold, but one that creates a dialogue between self and the world, merging ideas about technology, sociology, philosophy, literature and culture to explore the unfolding of time and the interweaving of a life with the march of history. Structurally fascinating, it is a life retold through a series of carefully selected tableaux introduced chronologically through descriptions of photographs, home movie videos and digital images (another unfolding, this time of technological time). Each introductory image is then described in detail as if through a microscope before opening out into a narrative of the significant events of that particular period in her life. It is a structural device akin to watching a film or a stage play whose scenes each begin with a still image that slowly comes to life. Indeed, the comparison to a microscope is appropriate: Ernaux’s use of the third person enables her to observe her own life at one remove and, once the minutiae of the opening ekphrasis is complete, the subsequent events are offered to us in a way that is more like a documentary voice-over with the third person perspective lending a critical space between writer and subject. With the ‘I’ erased, the author as autobiographer is excised from the text, perhaps reminding us of Barthes and other post-structuralist thinkers that she references along the way. At times Ernaux zooms into the minutiae of certain moments (for example describing herself as a young teacher reading Foucault on a train), at others her feelings about what must have been particularly traumatic events are kept in check. Witness the moment when she recounts the events of her divorce which reads more as a news-reel with the dialogue turned down. Later on, Ernaux writes “she would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence ... that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation”. This interplay between language, power and social structures is all part of the post-structuralist toolbox and one in which Ernaux implicates herself in her referencing of post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault and Barthes but it is also the story of a story unfolding.
The sentence which crystallises, for me anyway, the feel of this book is this one:
“No doubt the information she receives about world events is transformed into sensations, feelings, and images with no trace of the ideologies that initially provoked them”
Appearing as it does early in the book, this sentence speaks of Ernaux’s awareness of the dissonance between the historical and the personal which appear as if they are travelling on parallel tracks. Childhood events are set alongside the trauma of major historical upheavals: images of Soviet tanks in Bucharest; the “blood-soaked earth” of Algeria. But none of these images, as Ernaux confesses, make their way into her diaries of the time; instead, the third-person perspective provides the necessary distance for her to cast an objective glance at her own past, the young girl’s longing for longing. Thus the absence of the ideologies from which these events are born; instead, Ernaux attempts to capture the innocence of youth with a burgeoning awareness of the world into which she has been born: the body and mind of the younger Ernaux absorb the surrounding world, like a solar panel converting the heat of contemporary life and transforming it into an energy that propels her forward through life. It is perhaps noticeable then that, as the narrative progresses, those ideologies become more pronounced, when the negotiations of youth make way for the experiences of maturity.
As Ernaux’s life unfolds, so we as reader become more aware of the political voice within. Her style of social observation wedded to the third-person perspective reminds me of Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy of films. Keiller’s visual essays describe his fictional character’s journeys through London and then Britain through the words of an unnamed companion, creating an even greater distance between writer and reader. For example, the following observation, voiced by Keiller’s anonymous narrator, accompanies murky autumnal images of Trafalgar Square and ‘ultra-monarchists’ laying wreaths at the location of James 1st’s execution:
“The failure of the English revolution,” said Robinson, “is all around us in the Westminster constitution, in Ireland, and in poisoning English attitudes to Europe ... everywhere we went there was an atmosphere of conspiracy and intrigue”.
The absent ‘I’ who narrates Keiller’s film, world-weary and laconic, creates a visual dissonance between word and image, forcing meaning from between the seams. Ernaux’s observations are equally incisive and critical, drawing parallels between contemporary French politics, its history and a hauntological sense of failed potential, those lost futures that haunt our present, such as this following the election of Francois Mitterand as President in 1980.
“Everything was possible. Everything was novel. ... The air seemed lighter, life more youthful. Certain words and turns of phrase were coming back, like ‘bourgeoisie’ and social class. Language ran riot”.
Hauntology, as Merlin Coverley writes, speaks of “unfulfilled promise of that which never came to pass but which may yet do so” and Ernaux’s book is filled with a remembrance of things past and how these things might, if followed through to their logical conclusion, have brought about significant and positive social change. But there is also another element of the hauntological spirit in Ernaux’s reflections which Simon Reynolds refers to as retromania, the saturation of nostalgia within contemporary culture. Ernaux’s 21st century observations explore the overspill of technology, the constant exposure to representations of life on social media, in the thousands of photographs we take and never look at, and we are overwhelmed and destroyed by the infinity of representation, another Semele caught in the nuclear glare of an unfiltered world. Indeed, just as Coverley and George Monbiot identify the 1970s as the hauntological era of choice, so also does Ernaux reflect upon its possibilities:
“There was no memory or narration, only recollections of the 1970s, which seemed desirable to those of us who had been there and those who had been very young and remembered only objects, TV programmes, music, iron-on knee patches, Kiri the clown, the slot-load portable record player, Travolta and Saturday Night Fever.”
Or this:
“We clung to photos and family objects, amazed to think of how many we’d lost in the seventies without regret, whereas we missed them so much today.”
As one reads Ernaux’s book, one is struck by the sliding doors of history, its possibilities, its cul-de-sacs and its wrong-turns. Simple statements that appear as throwaways, come back to haunt us in the present: “A figure from the far Right, Jean Marie Le-Pen, made a comeback”. The narrative device, its shift from the present tense of each opening description to the past tense of the events retold, disturbs, wounds time and re-plays it back to us, for contemplation, for edification. Ultimately, the past as history might have failed us, or we it, and whilst there is still redemption for us as individuals, as Ernaux’s last words surrender to the power of memory: “to save something from the time where we will never be again”.
I should like to have chosen the opening sentence of the book to encapsulate the animus of Ernaux’s book, except that it is about five pages long, a panoramic overture to the concerto that is the work that follows. The portentous opening clause, ‘All the images will disappear:’ complete with the drama of its colon, speaks starkly of mortality, of the eventual darkness that engulfs us all, of the fading of memory, a pessimistic declaration of the inevitability of dissolution. However, what follows in that opening sentence (and indeed the book itself) contradicts this prophecy: a news reel of images from a life, a defiance of its opening assertion, a montage of moments, idioms, epithets, (pissing behind a coffee shack, film scenes, news headlines) fragments of memory that act as a pre-credits sequence to this remarkable account of a life. As a memoir, it is a memoir for all of us – or, at least, for white western Europeans who share the collective experience of life as it is lived by Ernaux in the second half of the twentieth century and the early years of this one.
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