Against Amnesia

Thus begins Annie Ernaux’s memoir, Les Années (translated into English by Alison Strayer as The Years, Seven Stories Press, 2017), a narrative at once monumental and microscopic encompassing broad historical swathes while retaining a seismographic sensitivity to the calibrations of everyday life. Paromita Patranobish writes.

“All the images will disappear”

Thus begins Annie Ernaux’s memoir, Les Années (translated into English by Alison Strayer as The Years, Seven Stories Press, 2017), a narrative at once monumental and microscopic encompassing broad historical swathes while retaining a seismographic sensitivity to the calibrations of everyday life. The product is an intricately woven experiment with narrative scale and intersecting temporalities, that foregrounds the position of the individual subject in relation to national (and global) histories. The Years offers the individual life as an alternative, private archive through the optic of which dominant historiography can be refracted to acquire an expanded focal range and new methodological tools. To this end, Ernaux modifies the conventions of autobiography to dramatize the interminable connection between the specificity of the singular life, Ernaux's own in this case, and the social mores, political events, and cultural trends that constitute the generic arc of a certain period, here, France from 1940 to the mid 2000s. She calls this mode of self-narration an “impersonal autobiography.”

The doubled and intertwined structure of the narrative of The Years is articulated in the opening pages that work variously as a photo album, a commonplace book, a scrapbook containing ephemera, a commercial catalogue, a private journal, a collection of intimate memories, and a compendium of journalistic vignettes. The activity of engaging with the past solicits not only the dual roles of memoirist and archivist, historiography— be it of the private self or as a public record—is approached here as a layered praxis that garners multiple acts, gestures, sites, styles, and modes of memory making and representation. The function of these elaborate lists with little ostensible connection with each other except that of a shared impermanence, that flag off Ernaux's autobiography, is to offer a symbolic resistance to potential erasure, through a near ritualistic process of incantatory repetition. The list itself, a frequent leitmotif in the book, as an index of identity and a marker of one’s embeddedness in manifold contextual strata, demonstrates the role of formal patterns of arrangement and juxtaposition in creating a specific structure of experience.

Ernaux uses narrative with sensitivity to the proximity between historical knowledge and representational styles, techniques, and idioms through which this knowledge is made visible, in short, between public memory, social context, and figurative language. Circulating images in various media, popular and elite, clusters of linguistic expressions, slangs, neologisms, sobriquets, names of commodities and new technological parlance, moods and political affects, structures of feeling, fashions and lifestyle preferences—in The Years, these, as much as significant political events, constitute a supplemental register in which historical change gets inscribed. Ernaux’s writing commits itself to recover and relocate on the sociopolitical spectrum the minor cultural inflections that emerge within the historical field: “No doubt the information she receives about world events is transformed into sensations, feelings, and images with no trace of the ideologies that initially provoked them.”

 Major political shifts like the Algerian resistance and September 11 and its aftermath, are thus referenced not only in terms of strategic or diplomatic actions, and large scale public reactions in various mainstream media, but also glossed in Ernaux’s comprehensive narrative through the responses of individuals and communities in her immediate vicinity, often entwined with their everyday activities, dispositions, and habits. Thus the “coup de' etat of May 13 in Algiers” percolates to French middle class neighbourhoods as the economic strain of "stockpiled kilos of sugar, litres of oil in preparation of civil war,” but is also translated simultaneously at the level of cultural mood in the form of a burgeoning euphoria marked by “a time of hope and striving, of grand designs for land, sea, and sky, a time of great words, and great losses, too, those of Gerard Philipe and Camus.”

In an interview she describes the unique blending of different disciplinary approaches to memory that she deploys, as autosociobiographie, a term she coins to signify the impossibility of retrieving a pure and isolated autobiographical interiority that is not also a product of its sociohistorical reality. All autobiographies are simultaneously sociological documents, as twentieth century sociologists of the body and comportment (Elias, Mauss, Bourdieu) have shown, and narratives of the private self serve as potent sites for the overlap of memory and history, speculation and verisimilitude, imagination and fact. The adolescent author accesses the Algerian war of independence for instance less through a sociopolitical lens and more via the affective power of names like Imre Nagy and Kader, and an emotionally charged engagement with artistic and literary works about the Algerian conquest that she encounters in “her ninth-grade history book” and “Rimbaud’s Sleeper in the Valley.” 

One of the most interesting devices that The Years employs is the narratively reproduced photograph, especially individual and family portraits, marking different moments in the author's life. As documentary evidence, the photograph, through its aesthetics of capture, conventions of framing, the careful recording of clothing, posture, material accessories, location, and background details of the its subjects, provides a synoptic snapshot of a particular cultural moment: post war scarcity, May ‘68 protests, cold war hostilities, the Algerian War of Independence, the collapse of communism, the onslaught of digital technology, and the spread of consumerism. The photograph as a social document also embodies and transmits certain ideologies and social formations, for instance, the bourgeois family and its specific use of images as material and mnemonic markers of class. But the photograph as a visual preface and horizon of reference for social location, also provides access to a realm of subjectivity and works as a point of entry into psychic interiority.

In a manner evoked by Walter Benjamin in his theory of the optical unconscious, the photograph in its technologically mediated capacity to accommodate physical phenomena that escape the human perceptual apparatus, opens a space for delineating marginal and microscopic sensations, affects, emotions, gestures, and movements that can alter our hegemonic and stable picture of reality. While analysing one of her own photographs from her youth closely, Ernaux thus observes the role of light in accentuating the particular bodily and expressive signs of an emerging maturity: “The distance that separates past from present can be measured, perhaps, by the light that spills across the ground, between shadows, slips over faces, outlines the folds of dresses.” Here the black and white photograph’s “twilight clarity” becomes a site for a speculative retrospective unravelling of the young Ernaux's private thoughts, reflections, and imaginative forays.

What the photograph most importantly accomplishes is attributing a form of anonymity to the self, allowing the memoirist to both distance herself from the subject of visual representation and translate this exteriority into a mode of approaching personal memory as collective and shared history. Thus, the person in the photographs referenced in Ernaux’s memoir doubles up as both the author herself, as well as a constituency of women with whom she shares a set of social and historical circumstances. The Years eschews the autobiographical ‘I’ in favour of collective pronouns, translated by Strayer as “we,” “she,” “one,” and “they” to refer to the individual self. This style of self-address in the third person constitutes a political gesture, a narrative encapsulation of the “personal is political” whereby the events and responses that make up the trajectory of the ostensibly private life are seen as resonating across generations and social divisions, extending to incorporate reconstructed pasts and anticipated futures beyond the limits of the biographical life-span, although at several points in the book, certain aspects of the self prove to be resistant to this pronominal translation and temporal transcendence, and remain irreducibly personal.

Ernaux’s technique of crafting a narrative of the self in the collective mode is itself a reference to forms of communal oral storytelling at family gatherings in the aftermath of the second world war, which become a significant site for the sharing and preservation of memories of a vanishing era. Her concern in the book then is as much with establishing connections between personal experience and official records as the recovery of what she calls “illegitimate memories,” the mundane, trivial, anecdotal expressions of an age inextricably linked with yet subversive of historical grand narratives, punctuating linear chronology with the rhythms and temporal structures of labour, corporeal life, pleasure, perversity, disease, and leisure: “And so she will never forget the date of the insurrection in Algeria, nor that All Saints’ afternoon, of which she will retain one clear image, a kind of pure fact: a young woman squatting over the grass, as if to lay an egg, and standing again, pushing her skirts down.” 

Photographs in The Years also engender an autobiographical graph that provides a visual parallel to Ernaux’s narrative reconstruction of multiple personal and social histories. Various formative episodes and significant junctures of the author’s life are introduced with a close study of photographs, which in turn are placed in relation to the dominant sociopolitical trends and events of the time. Examining a photograph from 1955, and attempting to recover not only the macro-historical backdrop against which to characterise the period but also the “perceptions and sensations received by the bespectacled fourteen-and-a-half year old” through which this history gets filtered and personalised, the author emphasises the interminable dialogue between the two as the “reflection that collective history projects upon the screen of individual memory.” A black and white group photo from 1959 taken at the Lycee becomes a springboard for a combined reflection on the young Ernaux's psychological state, the anxiety surrounding the body, unrequited love, and possible pregnancy in a milieu determined by silence and taboo around contraception, sexuality, and female desire, her youthful ambition and the lack of supporting vocabulary or social infrastructure to validate it, her exposure to a wide range of books, from prescribed didactic and sentimental texts to underground radical literature, high modernist experimental writing, popular media and auteur cinema, her voracious participation in philosophical and political discourses from existentialist feminism to communist thought, xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiment in Parisian public spaces, ghettoisation and outlawing of the “Arabs” who “lived in slums, laboured on assembly lines or at the bottom of pits,” an atmosphere of internal unrest and demonstrations, the Évian Accords, and “violence and separation in the world. East/West, Khrushchev the muzhik/Kennedy the leading man...Franco/Tito, Cathos/Commies.” Another photo from the late 60s of the author with her infant son becomes a focus for recollecting her transition into the constraining structure of bourgeois domesticity and motherhood, which is then juxtaposed with the contrasting tenor of the waves of political protests, anti-establishment violence, police repression, activist rhetoric, working class uprisings, and the dismantling of hierarchies and traditions, that mark the closing years of that decade in France. The photograph as part of a narrative arrangement, then, serves as an apposite ground for reactivating personal memory and placing it in a dynamic dialogue with a larger impersonal field of cultural memory.

Ernaux’s aim in reactivating these sites of cultural memory is also largely motivated by her feminism. The recovery of the quotidian thus serves this larger agenda of feminist historiography, of retrieving from the patriarchal grand narratives of dialectical movement and teleological progress, a discontinuous, loosely connected, and fragmentary archive of women's private lives, aspirations, struggles, creative and intellectual contributions, and interpersonal relationships and collaborations. Based on her own experience of an illegal abortion, motherhood, divorce, witnessing her father nearly murder her mother, and her relationship with a younger man, Ernaux creates a powerful testimony, transforming the specificity of personal experience into an impassioned commentary about deeply relevant and timely issues of women's reproductive health and rights, access to sexual freedom, information, and bodily autonomy, gender equality in romantic relationships, domestic violence and emotional trauma. Her narrative presentation of French national history is entwined with an incisive sociological analysis of the histories of silence, repression, hypocrisy, invisibilisation, erasure, omission, and apathy around questions of gender, especially those pertaining to the oppression and marginalisation of women across generations and social class. If The Years suffers from a surfeit of overwhelming detail at times, it is deliberately done to disturb and expand the limits of historical epistemology itself by making it accommodate new sites, voices, and semantic configurations for accessing pasts that are excised from collective consciousness. In The Years, Ernaux has written an exhausting and exhaustive account of a life that retains its singularity while serving as a threshold for the recovery from the dangers of collective amnesia of a “common time, the one that made its way through the years of the distant past and glided all the way to the present. By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.”

About the Author:

Paromita Patranobish is an educator and writer based in Bangalore, India. Her work has been published in The Chakkar, Hakara Bilingual, Scroll, The Bombay Review, Firstpost, Quint, and The Assam Tribune. She works as an Assistant Professor of English at Mount Carmel College, Bangalore. When not teaching or writing, she enjoys walks, gardening, volunteering, and cooking. More about her can be found at https://paromitapatranobish.owlstown.net/.