The Years – Annie Ernaux
Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel, The Years, merges ideas about technology, sociology, philosophy, literature and culture to explore the unfolding of time, interweaving the banalities and dramas of with the march of world 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. By shifting from the present tense of each opening ekphrasis to the past tense of the subsequent events retold, Ernaux provides a structural device that is akin to watching a film or a stage play whose scenes each begin with a still image that slowly comes to life, reminding me of Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, a film which itself unfolds generational histories.
Ernaux’s use of the third person provides a critical space between writer and subject and allows her to observe her own life at one remove in a way that is akin to a documentary voice-over. Of course, there are times Ernaux zooms into the minutiae of certain moments (for example describing herself as a young teacher reading Foucault on a train), but there are also others when 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. Indeed, with the ‘I’ erased, the author as autobiographer is excised from the text, perhaps reminding us too of Barthes and those other post-structuralist thinkers that she references along the way.
Choosing a sentence that encapsulates the animus of Ernaux’s book is a challenge. Maybe it should be the opening. But this is five pages long, a breathless panoramic overture to the concerto that follows. Its 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 (such as pissing behind a coffee shack, describing scenes from films she has watched, momentous news headlines). These fragments of memory act as a pre-credits sequence to the novel as a whole.
However, 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 moment speaks of Ernaux’s awareness of the dissonance between the historical and the personal, narratives which appear to her to be 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 readers 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 such remembrances of things past and how these events 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 which describes 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. We are overwhelmed 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 that decades 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 culs-de-sac, 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”, write Ernaux. It's not about history repeating itself, but as a spectre of itself, whether in Le-Pen's case as dynastic re-presentation, or in neo-liberal ideologies that shape-shift into populist messages to preserve the illusion of western deomcracy as a blueprint for capitalist world order. Ernaux's narrative therefore disturbs and wounds time, re-plays it back to us for contemplation. Ultimately, the past as history might have failed us, or we it, but maybe, through recollection, through memory, through writing, there is hope for redemption: “to save something from the time where we will never be again”. 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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