Brevity and the genere-less text
Liz TascioThe Years, by Annie Ernaux
Seven Stories Press, 2017.
When the Nobel committee called Annie Ernaux to inform her she had won the prize for literature in 2022, she saw the Swedish number and did not pick up her phone. She assumed it was a prank, because friends had pranked her before, just like this. All of France knew her work—she’d been publishing for five decades—and had considered her a contender for the Nobel for years.
Still, you and I can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing of her at all until last year, when we (and she) first heard her name on the news: Annie Ernaux had won the Nobel, in no small part due to The Years, a memoir she first published in France in 2008. Annie who? asked a vast section of the English-language-reading public. And didn’t Virginia Woolf write The Years?
So, first, a quick primer: Annie Ernaux was born in 1940 in Normandy; her parents pulled themselves out of grindingly hard factory jobs to run a café and grocery. Ernaux knew very early she wanted to be a writer, and she kept detailed diaries from a young age. She moved to London at age 20 as an au pair, and she pursued her education upon her return to France, becoming a teacher and finishing a degree in modern literature. Her first book was published in 1974, titled Les Armoires Vides, literally “empty cabinets”—it is an autobiographical novel of Ernaux’s
absolutely harrowing illegal abortion, in the 1960s. The English title, more brutally, is Cleaned Out
Since then, Ernaux’s writing career has been prolific, and deliberate: in book after book, she assesses and plays with point of view, with the experience of literature as a function of social class and class mobility, with the personal and the global, the universal and the particular. Still, it wasn’t until 2019, when the freshly translated Years was nominated for the International Booker Prize, that English-language readers started really paying attention.
All of her work is autobiographical; Ernaux calls this book a “collective autobiography.”
That term does capture it. The Years is a chronological story of an era in France, lived by the generation of Ernaux’s parents and their friends, by Ernaux and her own generation, and of the generations that have been born since. The story maps both the political and the personal and the ways they touch each other. Everything is here: family dinners, elections, deaths, concerts, classrooms, books, parties, lovers, pets, the uprising of 1968. Ernaux writes exclusively using the pronouns “we” and “she,” never “I,” though the “she” is Ernaux herself. And yes, The Years does contain echoes of Woolf, far beyond the title; and of Joyce and Sartre; and it brings to mind the chaotic intensity of early life in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, which makes one wonder if Ernaux was an influence for those; and it name-drops a cacophony of films, actors, songs, philosophers, and texts. Many paragraphs in the book teem with cultural references, from the canonic to the extremely local. Just like a life.
The chapterless memoir/narrative/history book may be hard to describe—“I’m very interested in the idea of a genre-less text,” Ernaux told an interviewer with The White Review last year, in an understatement—but it is a pleasure to read. Ernaux’s writing has been described as écriture plate, or flat writing: plain language, no
stylistic flourishes, simple. And yet it doesn’t feel plain. The book feels designed, down to the structure of sentences and the spaces between paragraphs, in the best possible sense. The literary choices Ernaux made are simultaneously dazzling and invisible. To read The Years is to be swept along, but never rushed; to be shown the intricate pieces of a puzzle and the whole sweeping finish of it.
The Years depicts a full, detailed life, and a world composed of many lives; it is sometimes gross and funny, weird and hard to follow; it is beautiful to inhabit. It is always the story of one person who could be almost any person—from childhood to sexual awakening to marriage and parenthood to full maturity and loss—and also the story of France in the 1930s, ‘40s, 50s, etc., the story of how we learn about and understand our collective past.
In that interview with The White Review in 2022, Ernaux says:
What I wanted was to write the story of a woman who had lived through an era, but I almost wanted for her to not be there, and I didn’t know how to do this — if I had taken her out completely it would have been a history book, there needed to be a consciousness inside the book. . . . For me the je is not an identity, but a place, marked by human experiences and human events. That is what I try to illuminate through my writing. I say je transpersonnel because it is not the individual, or the anecdotic, that interests me, but that which is shared, whether that be social, or even slightly in the order of the psychological, in the realm of reaction. That is how I may be sure that I’m bringing to light something that isn’t reducible to a personal history.
Though the title evokes a feeling of time passing, accreting, and the rich, slow living of one’s life, the book is really about life’s briefness. It opens with this line: “All the images will disappear.”
Ernaux lists images, and you realize she is listing memories. Then she writes:
Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.
The Years evokes a whole life, one connected with millions of other lives, reaching backward and forward in time, but Ernaux also reminds us that this handful of years has a beginning and an end, even an end to memory, and to others’ memories of us. And now we latecomers to Ernaux have a lifetime of her work to discover, and, I hope, many years in which to read them.
