THE YEARS
By Annie Ernaux
Translated by Alison L. Strayer
232 pp. $19.95 Seven Stories Press
This is an autobiography unlike any you have ever read; you might call it a collective autobiography. James Merrill used to mock the egotistic memoirs of the day by calling them “ME-moirs.” Ernaux’s is a “WE-moir,” the group memory of her generation (she was born in 1940). As someone also born in 1940, but in the United States, not France, I found her memories both familiar and distancing.
Ernaux was raised in a traditional working-class Roman Catholic family in Normandy, and the first two-thirds of her book is generational; it is the world Édouard Louis so brilliantly updated and dramatized in his recent novel, “The End of Eddy.” It is only as Ernaux moves into the 21st century that she becomes completely individual — retired, divorced, a famous writer (best known to English-speaking readers for the translations of “A Man’s Place” and “A Woman’s Story”), the mother of two grown sons. In the process, as her publisher puts it, “a new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.”
Throughout “The Years,” Ernaux traces the collapse of Catholic prudishness as it’s attacked by secularism, the pill, the legalization of abortion and the women’s movement. While as a teenager she was terrified of losing her virginity before marriage, in late adolescence her unmarried sons begin to sleep with their girlfriends at their mother’s apartment.
The other important theme in Ernaux’s memoir is how we’ve been gradually led, guilt-free, into greater and greater levels of consumerism. By the 1990s, she notes, there were so many kinds of yogurt and dairy dessert that even if you ate a different one every day you couldn’t sample them all in a year. On the other hand, “In nursing homes, an endless parade of commercials filed by the faded eyes of elderly women, for products and devices they never imagined they would need and had no chance of possessing.”
Ernaux certainly isn’t a Marxist, but at the same time she sees history as sociological and the economy as determinative. She uses herself as a “case,” a person who has been conditioned by advertising and consumerism. She marvels at how quickly people have learned to use the mobile phone, computer, iPod and GPS — and she is unable to imagine the devices we’ll be using in 10 years’ time. People must keep up, acquire the latest gadgets; to fall behind would be to accept aging and dying. She remarks on how goods can freely circulate, unlike refugees, who are “turned away at the borders.” She knows that possessions can’t make people happy, but also acknowledges the popular belief that this “was no reason to abandon things.”
Change happens so imperceptibly that only big events like the collapse of the Berlin Wall or 9/11 allow us to establish a “before” and an “after.” Closer to home, photographs set a time line, as do family holidays, and both are used as markers throughout the book. But because everything, no matter how obscure or distant, is now available on the internet, we inhabit “the infinite present.”
Continue reading the main storyErnaux attributes the “I remember” concept that summons up an endless list of events and products, no matter how trivial, to the French writer Georges Perec, but it actually started with the American artist and poet Joe Brainard. Unlike their random lists, Ernaux’s are arranged chronologically, and so she becomes something more than a list-maker: a Greek chorus commenting on politics and lifestyle changes. And yet her recollections are evanescent, unstable, because the media have taken charge of memory and forgetting. And the media have divided people into generations: “We belonged to all and none. Our years were nowhere among them.” The media have become the gatekeepers of the imagination.
Like Proust, Ernaux is always trying to envisage the book she will write — this very book we are reading, in a fluent, idiomatic translation by Alison L. Strayer. “She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation. Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles: how to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas and manners, and the private life of this woman?”
Feelings themselves seem to go in and out of fashion. People now find the words “honor” and “patriotism” absurd. Other, newer emotions are unnamable: “There was no specific word for the feeling one had of simultaneous stagnation and mutation.” Life, caught up in meaningless rituals, feels as if it’s slipping by, but at the same time “progress” has landed us in a place we no longer recognize.
Ernaux comes to despise Christmas, “the most grueling period of desire and hatred of things, the peak of the consumer year.” Because “she feels no particular age,” she feels no older in her 70s than women in their 50s, but she knows that younger women have no doubt about the age difference.
Perhaps, as Ernaux’s book suggests, changes in attitude occur more rapidly in France. I remember when I lived in Paris in the ’80s and ’90s how shocked I was that feminism and gay liberation were considered old hat, fads that had prevailed only in the ’70s. “Feminism,” Ernaux observes, “was a vengeful, humorless old ideology that young women no longer needed, and viewed with condescension. They did not doubt their own strength or their equality. … The struggle of women sank into oblivion. It was the only struggle that had not been officially revived in collective memory.” The opinions Ernaux summarizes aren’t hers; they’re the common wisdom of the society around her. Everything in France is treated as a fad or fashion, which has the virtue of giving every idea its moment in the sun. In America, ideas fade less quickly, protected by the university tenure system.
“The Years” is an earnest, fearless book, a “Remembrance of Things Past” for our age of media domination and consumerism, for our period of absolute commodity fetishism.
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