On Reading Annie Ernaux’s "The Years" in Paris
“It will be a slippery narrative composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes, all the way to the final image of a life.” Annie Ernaux "The Years"
This “slippery” narrative (Les Années, trans. by Alison L. Strayer) shaped the two weeks I spent in Paris this January that already seems like months ago. Ernaux’s “collective biography, written in third person (the girl or the woman) or collective first person (we, never I) in “unremitting continuous tense” begins long before my own continuous tense began, but Ernaux’s movement through her life reads with such deep familiarity and a sense of having been where I could not have been, like so much great literature.
The Years unfolds with lists of photographs and stories absorbed by a younger girl or a younger “we,” most dramatically stories of WWII told by older relatives, stories coaxed into the conversation around the family table after dinner, during drinks, stories that feel conflicted by desire to forget and wonder at mere survival. This sense of a haunted past trembles all the way through the book, a sense of the continuous thread of stories as they are absorbed by a narrator who understands early the undertones of what is not being said.
Similarly, on a research trip to central Illinois in 2023 when interviewing my parents’ contemporaries of their childhood memories of World War II, I sensed a similar reticence, an almost-collective desire to put that part of the past away. “We didn’t talk about those years,” a woman who’d told me a remarkable story of how she became a schoolteacher at 13 years old due to the teaching shortage. “No one did. Those years were sad.” And yet that same week, at a social gathering, more and more stories poured out.
In Ernaux’s Years, which spans 1941 to 2006, the narrator and those around her grow up, incrementally gain a sense of who they are, get married, have sex inside and outside of marriage and alone. They argue, have children. Lose people they love. Let go of dreams (writing) and get them back again (writing). Abandon traditional family life and replace it political awareness and activity. (On the unnerving comeback of the far-right politician Le Pen: “No more Left. The political lightness of life vanished. Where had we gone wrong?”) Observe how political and environmental traumas become collectively absorbed and how technology changes what it means to be young. Hear young women’s condescension toward feminism as a “humorless old ideology,” no longer needed. Shared moments become more and more important, looking on with dazed love at the many “blurred faces, voices talking all at once.”
Photographs frame sections, providing the sensation of simultaneously looking forward and backward. “. . .but there is your hand seeking out others,” the narrator says looking at a girl who was once herself, wondering at how names and memories of people who once meant everything to us can be thoroughly forgotten. “The palimpsest sensation,” the narrator calls her stylistic invention, “a state of expansion and deceleration” and a way of writing through real time.
While in Paris, I went with MBF to the impressive Surrealism exhibit at the Centre Pompidou and found myself enthralled by Dorothea Tanning’s famous, “Birthday, 1942.” Three days later while walking down Rue St. Dominique listening to The Years, I hear, “In a Dorothea Tanning, painting she saw in a show three years before in Paris, a bare-chested woman stands before a row of doors that stand ajar. The title was Birthday. She thinks this painting represents her life and that she is inside it. . .”
Such visceral and coincidental reading experiences, that feeling of being “inside” a book can feel pedestrian. Until they don’t. In this case, the experience made Ernaux’s evocation of the ‘palimpsest sensation” quite real, part of the narrator’s “continuous present.” In a note, the translator identifies this focus on the painting as an intended model for Ernaux’s self-conscious search for a way to structure this very book, which she composed for years.
I’ve been a journal writer off and on for much of my life. I read writer’s diaries and journals, including volumes of Woolf and Emerson. I’ve always been drawn to their fragmentary nature, how thoughts trail off as new ones come enter. The Years makes the impulse to record and capture the details of daily occurrences more understandable. My own lists of books read or still reading (right now-The Odyssey (Wilson translation), Bend Sinister, “Tyrants Destroyed” and The Sound Museum-all at once) music, recorded and live, conversations overheard, theatrical performances, relationships, reflections on the vulnerability of childhood, the physical “odyssey” of the body, career successes and humiliations. Family notes. Disappearances. Daily odes to New York City. And, yes, politics…. . .
“Memories are not memories,” the narrator of The Years says while invoking George Perec, but “time markers.” A catalog of a life.
Always love Paris!🥰
I enjoyed taking in these moments and pieces of art and life with you