Katie da Cunha Lewin
A Fish in the Stream
The Years, Annie Ernaux, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018, 240pp, £12.99 (paperback)
Happening, Annie Ernaux, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019, 96pp, £8.99 (paperback)
What does it mean to make your life the subject of your writing? For French writer Annie Ernaux, this is a complex question that goes well beyond simple narration, plot or emotional truth, but to a deeper understanding of how one life is produced in its history. Ernaux has been writing since 1974 and quickly turned from writing fiction to memoir; most of her literary output has taken the form, tackling various subjects such as the lives of her parents, her marriage, Alzheimer’s and her relationship with her daughter. Though the idea of the memoir may seem self-evident – its etymological history always suggesting it as a ‘written record’ – Ernaux’s astonishing writing not only troubles the genre but actively transforms the way in which we think about what a life is and how it is made.
Ernaux has been published in English since the 1990s by Four Walls Eight Windows, Dalkey Archive and Seven Stories. In recent months, British press Fitzcarraldo Editions have brought out two of her works, The Years in November 2018 and Happening in February 2019, with another, I Remain in Darkness, slated for September. Since the publication of The Years, the UK has been experiencing somewhat of an Ernaux fever and Fitzcarraldo’s publication timeline (three works in less than a year) is a testament to the ready hunger from the British reading public for Ernaux’s distinctive writing. Before I read her work myself, I had heard her name mentioned several times in conversations amongst friends and acquaintances, and was enthusiastically recommended these books by many of them. Her work has been widely reviewed and The Years was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019.
But what is it that so captures the reading audience? There is something strikingly new in her writing, though the techniques she uses do not immediately seem radical. In an interview for The Guardian in 2019 she explains her methodology for what is most widely considered as her masterpiece The Years: ‘In the autobiographical tradition we speak about ourselves and the events are the background. I have reversed this.’ This technique has been referred to as the ‘collective autobiography,’ that is, a method of writing which examines life through specific demarcations that are not interior or subjective – though of course Ernaux does not discount these as important – but shared. In The Years, Ernaux writes in ‘she’ not ‘I’ and recounts what other writers may disregard as ‘detail’: music people listened to, films they watched, brands they bought. Ernaux looks for a common language of life.
In Happening, Ernaux’s focus is much more specific, narrating the events of her life in 1963 when she found herself, still a young woman studying at university, unexpectedly pregnant. Happening opens on Ernaux’s visit years later to the hospital in which she first found out, and returns back to those months as she decides to have and then undergoes an abortion, illegal at that time in France. Though tackling a difficult subject, Ernaux’s approach is remarkably clear-headed, an examination of the time where ‘[t]he law was everywhere.’ She writes not only of her memories, but also reads and remarks upon her diaries, reading between lines of description: ‘To convey my predicament, I never resorted to descriptive terms or expressions such as ‘I’m expecting’, ‘pregnant’ or ‘pregnancy’. She’s close-reading here, analysing the experience at the time through the way she recorded it. It is a remarkable way to approach one’s own life.
For many readers thinking about memoir, the distance between the Ernaux the writer and Ernaux the person may seem vast. But for Ernaux, this distance is necessary. Much like reading her old diary for what it can tell her, she also reads photographs. The photograph does not evidence her feeling but it gives her material from which to work; she reads the photographs as if they were a stranger’s. In one photograph from her time at the University of Rouen, she looks at her class image for signs of what is not there: ‘Her face bears no sign of the events of the summer before.’ In another, from 1966-7 – the date gleaned from the hairstyle and clothing – she surmises ‘It is definitely a Sunday photo…as lunch simmers fragrantly on the stove’. She seems to purposefully distance herself from each image, in order to keep pulling more from it. These specifics understood through the photos are then contrasted with events going on around the world; she returns to the Algerian War, French politics and the important ricochets from the student protests of 1968. These are always noted exactly: as she says in Happening, ‘Mentioning the date for me is an absolute necessity that reflects the reality of an event’.
What also binds these works together, along with her oeuvre as a whole, is her discussion of class and how it operates. Along with other French writers currently writing, such as Édouard Louis and Jean Baptiste del Amo, Ernaux demonstrates the knack that French literature has for engaging with issues of class without any of the reserve of their English counterparts. Though in independent publishing class is a central topic for many new writers and editors – for example, Kit de Waal’s anthology Common People published through Unbound or Dead Ink’s Know Your Place – it does not seem that mainstream publishing is as comfortable with confronting its profoundly middle-class origins, as if the problem can be ignored until it simply goes away. This wilful blindness also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how class and politics have always been profoundly entrenched in novel- writing. Though the bourgeois novel – of the kind Johnathan Franzen still writes – was actively promoted as the sole form of the novel by the CIA in order to wield it worldwide as form of soft power during the Cold War, the novel in the UK actively perpetuates or at least harnesses a certain kind middle class life as its dominant aesthetic to this day – as we see in the work of writers such as Olivia Laing or Rachel Cusk.
In a way, Ernaux’s writing seems to be influenced by the long tradition of French sociologists, such as Émile Durkheim, Pierre Bourdieu and René Girard. For Ernaux, class is not an aesthetic but provides a legible language through which to understand important shifts in post-war France. In the same Guardian interview as above, she speaks of the ‘distance’ that University put between herself and her family, but this distance is one that many would have experienced in France and elsewhere during the second half of twentieth century as children’s lives took radically different paths to their parents and as people moved from the country to the city. Her attention to the signifiers of class reasserts the dominance of it in our everyday life, and exposes the penetration of capital.
Can we ever plot or give shape to a life? Ernaux’s pages are not neatly laid out, but made up of jagged paragraphs, lists of long lines, unevenly scattered. Though this may seem a minor point, her pages speak to her refiguring of life and signals a new way of imagining narration, not sentences gradually accumulating but sometimes at odds with other, describing contrasting images of life. Both books feel like notebooks or perhaps a shopping list, perhaps jotted down absent-mindedly. And in this layout, we see not only what is there, but everything that is not there. Though Ernaux recounts and unpicks the possible shapes we give our lives, there is a profound sense of loss in her writing, of what is not recalled. Writer and academic Mark Fisher writes that ‘In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost;’ under the throes of ubiquitous recording technology, everything we do can be revisited, regardless of its import. In Ernaux’s writing, what she recalls is also troubled by the incompleteness of that recall; she often writes of fleeing or disappearing images: or images that have already gone. As she writes at the opening of The Years: ‘Everything will be erased in a second’. Virginia Woolf, famed for her novels but also an extraordinary memoirist, wrote in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ that: ‘I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream.’ In Ernaux’s work, she attempts to give language to that flow of water.
Words by Katie da Cunha Lewin.
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. The Years won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008, the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work.
To buy The Years, Happening, and a number of other books by Annie Ernaux, visit Fitzcarraldo Editions.
This review essay originally appeared in the Oct / Nov 2019 edition of The London Magazine. To buy that edition, as well as our other back issues, go here.
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