The Nobel committee’s decision to award Annie Ernaux with the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature communicated a certain message: of writing‘s pivotal responsibility to situate the individual life amidst the ever-elaborating stream of history, and that personal experience—no matter how specific or inward-looking—speaks to the greater picture of a landscape, a culture, and a time. In this following essay, Katarina Gadze takes a close look at Ernaux’s 2008 memoir, The Years, an emblematic work of her masterful collapse of private and public time, of her mind’s stabilizing force as it moves through a constantly shifting world.
In attempting to decipher the uses of autobiographical writing, Sébastien Hubier, in his Littératures intimes, speaks of what he calls reflexivity: “the phenomenon by which discourse refers to its own enunciative activity rather than merely speaking about the world.” Autobiography is then defined by “the narrative of one’s life . . . infused with the critical discourse of the one who writes it.” As a “heuristic project,” it stands for all personal writing that makes, by fact of its production, “a mode of resolution for the conflicts associated with profound shifts in social space.” Objectification of an identity, recourse to writing and the distancing it entails, lends itself to all the symbolic manipulations—reconstructions and redefinitions—of that identity. Such was the mechanism of Annie Ernaux’s writing in The Years, and her lifelong experiments with the autobiographical genre, as well as her construction of temporalities—in relation to both herself and society at large. When the Swedish Academy awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize to Ernaux, they praised her “courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory,” perfectly summarizing her work. Indeed, by penning these paradoxically impersonal texts, she inevitably moves away from traditional autobiography and spares us the usual novelistic practices in The Years; the resulting memoir is less a traditional recollection and more an existential examination of Ernaux’s sixty years, told in the third person. The years meander along in the order of her life events, though chronology comes second to Ernaux, whose goal is to expose the illusion (or delusion) of time. She moves through time in leaps and bounds, talking about what it means to live not just as one person in the present, but as one person (and an entire generation) that exists across centuries.
Autobiography as reconstruction places the past in chronological order, which, as Hubier points out, is illusive. Despite the “temporal linearity inherent in an organized retrospection” that probes collective memory, to write truly of the constant scrambling that is our general experience of time interferes with the reader’s ability to feel any dynamic flow—which treads backwards into the past, the opposite direction that the narrator claims. Ernaux interrogates this literary device by highlighting the intertwining of its present, past, and future dimensions, as well as its inevitable divide into two distinct temporalities: personal identification and cultural identity:
Then, in a state of profound, almost dazzling satisfaction, she finds something that the image from personal memory doesn’t give her on its own: a kind of vast collective sensation that takes her consciousness, her entire being, into itself. She has the same feeling, alone in the car on the highway, of being taken into the indefinable whole of the world of now, from the closest to the most remote of things.
By closely observing these braids of historical time and narrative time, the goal of Ernaux’s writing reveals itself; her narrative and personal discourse can also, to quote Hubier, be doubled with a “metadiscourse in which the gloss of reported history comes to nourish the writing itself.” Ernaux aims to, as she says in The Years, “seize this time that comprises her life on Earth at a given period, the time that has coursed through her, the world she has recorded merely by living.” In fact, the narrator’s inner experiences and perception of reality determine this subjective time. Between what happens in the world and what happens to the narrator, there is “no point of convergence . . . no relation between her life and History, though traces of the latter remain fixed in her mind.” There are, instead, “two parallel series: one abstract, all information no sooner received than forgotten, the other all static shots.” This psychological dimension of the book, which creeps in like an internal time, allows the narrator to escape the confines of a historical and linear time that we see emerging in her retrospective narrative. Psychological time, composed of ruptures and accelerations, opposes “the two temporalities, the real and the psychological.” In the document of The Years, Ernaux’s time oscillates between phases of acceleration and deceleration and even exhibits elements of circularity, with the rapid expansion of consumer society in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries exacerbating these fluctuations, changing our perception of time, memories, and methods of preservation.
As early as the late 1970s, Ernaux felt that the “bond with the past was fading.” As a result, in this leaping world, notions of past and future became completely distorted, and a sense of immobility overcame her. As a result of accelerating social change and collective time, collective memory was also being transformed—even lost—with technology playing a large part in this erasure. The speaker of The Years expresses surprise at the impact of rapid social growth on the decline of collective memory: “There was no memory or narration.” It seemed that the past was disappearing completely, with no one having any “patience to tell stories,” and trying to enumerate recent events outside themselves was as difficult as remembering a distant past. People seemed only to be related to a specific period in the context of important world events, while dwelling in the “infinite present” alongside a digital technology that disrupts and supersedes memory: “What mattered most was the taking of the photos, existence captured and duplicated, recorded as we were living it—cherry trees in bloom, a hotel room in Strasbourg, a baby minutes after birth, places, events, scenes, objects, the complete conservation of life.” It was a time absent from the history books, but rich in what makes life itself—normalcy, patterns, matters of the day-to-day. With the advent of the Internet, collective memory was anchored in new ways and at different intervals, and “memory became inexhaustible.” The Internet became a new storehouse of memory, infallible and permanent. By enriching it with videos and photographs, “another form of past came into being, fluid, with little real memory content.” As more and more aspects of people’s lives shifted online, it accumulated more and more information in its vast database, asserting that what remained outside its archives would disappear forever into obscurity.
In The Years, the narrator’s intense fear of growing old and dying skews the general perception of the future: “It is the painful awareness of the passage of time [. . .] that thus explains both the diffuse sadness that accompanies autobiographical writing, real or fictional, and the political or ideological meanings of it.” This fear, coupled with instances of temporal acceleration, affected Ernaux’s perception of the future in numerous ways. Though impatient to grow older in childhood, eventually the passing of the years comes to nominate the past, instead of the future, as object of desire. Through this account of this inversion, we witness the genesis of The Years: “In her journal she writes: ‘Out of extreme narcissism, I want to see my past set down on paper and in that way, be as I am not. . .’” One recognizes here the double dialectic Hubier speaks of—“that of the taste for immediacy and the will to hold on to this transience, the will to know oneself practically and the refusal to recompose oneself through writing.” As an observer of her own reality, Ernaux’s writing provides insight into this temporal dialectic, as well as the dialectic of the particular and the universal. In her early adulthood, the tumultuous political events of the time are mere details, while the future was “limited to drawing boxes around the days of vacation in our date books, starting from the beginning of September.” As the dates pass, the rituals and traditions repeating their circuity, Ernaux eventually finds herself in “the middle position between two generations,” as if the erasure of the past and the latent ambiguity of the future have left a trail of immutability. Through this simultaneous loss of memory of the past and repetition of the present, the perception of time, of moments, is blurred.
Then, in 1980, she comes to the realization that she has only one life: “She embraces [her youth] whole with the eyes of the present and discerns nothing specific. That this world is now behind her is a shock.” With her narrative having already begun, she must live, and in doing so continuing this act of physical telling. But it is almost as if, knowing what is gone, she anticipates the present’s transience, as well as that of her life story. Thus, from her first doubts about writing the book she always wanted to write, she finally decides what she truly wants to create—“‘a kind of woman’s destiny,’ set between 1940 and 1985. It would be something like Maupassant’s A Life and convey the passage of time inside and outside of herself, in History, a ‘total novel’.” Albeit afraid of losing herself in the indispensable profusion that makes up one dimension of reality, she wants to “assemble these multiple images of herself, thread them together with the story of her existence” to create a singular existence that is equally “merged with the movements of a generation.”
Paradoxically, writing her story “grips her ever more tightly with sorrow and even guilt for not committing it to paper,” and to remedy this, the narrator again expresses a desire to save everything around her, as well as “her circumstance.” As the end of the twentieth century approaches, the need to catalog, classify, and evaluate everything becomes clearer, and with nothing left in front of them, the “everything” completely sealed its vision of the future: “What disturbed us was the inability to picture our lifestyle in ten years’ time, or ourselves perfectly adapted to technologies yet unknown.”
Eventually, Ernaux loses her sense of the future. Toward the end of the book, “the limitless background” onto which her gestures and actions were once projected is now replaced by an urgent torment—that one day, she will no longer remember. The awareness of this fleeting memory and the fear of not being able to name reality eventually lead her to “give form to her future absence through writing,” and culminates at the end when she decides to write The Years.
Hubier has the same impression: death is a “generating principle” of the intimate writings, which themselves are a “response to a lack of,” or rather “the repair of a missing object.” Ernaux wants to revive through writing what will die or soon be forgotten, but like all intimists, she soon realizes that it is death itself that she must consult to preserve the meaning of her life. Although she reflects on death and its inevitable consequence of anonymity, she still attempts to delay this moment of extinction, if only by trivializing the very concept. Ultimately, it is a matter of “reassuring oneself, of continuing to think that one still has years to live, as if old age, though obviously fatal, is not synonymous with the end.” As she approaches an age when endings outnumber the beginnings, she writes to remind herself of a past that seems to be slipping away, to “have a sense of satisfaction with one’s passage in time.”
Ernaux, however, does not write only for her posthumous existence. For her, the images disappear anyway—the best she can do is write to capture the moments at their vanishing point. She writes to breathe life into such moments caught in the passage, to describe a generation for others to come. The Years’ last pages, the most fragmentary and touching, thus mark an existential and literary turning point in her life. It is as if she had freed herself from the social “I” to make visible the innermost universal shadow that lurks within, to ultimately “save something from the time in which one will never be again.”
Katarina Gadže is an editor, translator, and essayist from Croatia. She studied English and French philology and translation studies at the University of Zadar and the Sorbonne, and now lives and works in the heart of Europe—Brussels.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: