by Annie Ernaux
It was a nasty speech that hit hard and met with assent from the majority of TV viewers, unperturbed to hear the minister of the interior declare that he wanted to “clean out with a Kärcher pressure washer” the “scum” of the banlieue. Traditional values were waved about, order, work, national identity, freighted with threats against enemies that “honest people” were left to identify: the unemployed, suburban youth, illegal immigrants, sans papiers, thieves and rapists, etc. Never (or not for a long time) had so few words propagated so much faith, words to which people abandoned themselves, as if made dizzy by all the analyses and data. Disgusted by the seven million poor, the homeless and the unemployment statistics, they put their trust in simplicity. Of those surveyed, 77 percent say that the legal system is too lenient with offenders. The old-new philosophers on TV rattled off their stale discourses. Abbé Pierre died, the Guignols were still not funny, and Charlie Hebdo nursed the same old indignations. We sensed that nothing would prevent the election of Sarkozy. Nothing would prevent people’s desire from going to term. There was a renewed yearning for servitude and obedience to a leader.
Commercial time invaded calendar time with renewed vigor. Christmas already, people sighed as toys and chocolate besieged the hypermarkets, just after All Saints’ weekend. They were depressed, already feeling the vise-grip of the holiday season, which forced one to think of oneself, one’s loneliness and purchasing power as compared to the rest of society—as if Christmas night were the crowning moment and end of all existence. It was a vision that made us want to go to sleep in November and wake up in the new year. We entered the most grueling period of desire and hatred of things, the peak of the consumer year. With loathing we stood in overheated lines, and performed the consumer act like a sacrifice, a duty of spending offered up to who-knows-what god in the name of who-knows-what salvation. Resigned to “doing something for Christmas,” we bought decorations for the tree and planned the menu for the holiday meal.
In the middle of that first decade of the twenty-first century, which we never referred to as “the noughties,” at the table where we’d gathered the children, now getting on forty (though with their jeans and Converse sneakers they still looked like teens), and their partners—the same for several years now—and the grandchildren, and also a man who’d graduated from transitional secret lover to stable companion, eligible for family gatherings, conversation began with a swarm of back-and-forth questions about work, insecure or threatened by downsizing as a result of new ownership, modes of transport, schedules, holidays, how many cigarettes a day and quitting, leisure activities, photo and music downloads, recent purchases of new objects, the latest version of Windows, the latest model of mobile phone, 3G, attitudes toward consumption and time management, everything that helped them refresh their knowledge of one another, assess the other’s lifestyle while privately confirming the excellence of their own.
They compared views on films, cross-referenced critics from Télérama, Libération, Les Inrocks, and Technikart, expressed enthusiasm for Six Feet Under and 24. They urged us to watch at least one episode, convinced we would do no such thing—wanting to teach us but refusing to be taught, betraying their conviction that our knowledge of things was not as up to speed as theirs.
The talk turned to the upcoming presidential elections and they tried to outdo each other in ridicule of the campaign. They vented their anger at being force-fed Ségo-and-Sarko, mocked the “just order” and “win-win” of the Socialist candidate, her limp and well-reared manner of stringing hollow phrases together. Alarm was expressed at Sarko’s populist talent and his irrepressible ascension. People confessed to an inability to choose between Bové, Voynet, and Besancenot, and truth to tell, didn’t want to vote for anyone, convinced this election would not be life-changing, though at least one could hope that things would not get worse with Madame the Socialist candidate as president. They finally came around to the great subject of conversation, the media, its manipulation of public opinion and the ways of getting around it. None could be believed but YouTube, Wikipedia, Rezo.net, Acrimed on the web. The critique of media mattered more than the information itself.
All was derision and gleeful festive fatalism. The banlieue would blaze again, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was incurable. The planet was headed for disaster with global warming, the melting of the polar ice caps and the death of bees. Someone exclaimed “And your point is?” and then “What about avian flu?” and “Is Ariel Sharon still in a coma?” This sparked an enumeration of other forgotten things—SARS, the Clearstream affair, the anti-unemployment movements—whose object was less to acknowledge collective amnesia than castigate media control of the imagination. The disappearance of the most recent past was stupefying.
There was no memory or narration, only recollections of the 1970s, which seemed desirable to those of us who had been there and those who had been very young, and remembered only objects, TV programs, music, iron-on knee patches, Kiri the Clown, the slot-load portable record player, Travolta and Saturday Night Fever.
In all this lively exchange, no one had the patience to tell stories.
We listened, quietly interjected, mindful to play the role of moderator and prevent the “add-on” guests from being left out. We placed ourselves above the collusion of couples and family members, careful to divert the stirrings of discord. We were tolerant of teasing about our ignorance of technology and felt ourselves become the indulgent ageless chief of a uniformly adolescent tribe. We did not yet fully grasp that we were a grandparent, as if this title was forever reserved for our own grandparents, for a sort of essence that their deaths had done nothing to alter.
Once again, amidst the closely packed bodies, the passing of hors d’oeuvres and foie gras, chewing and jokes and avoidance of serious subjects, the immaterial reality of the holiday meal was built. It was a reality whose strength and density we felt when we escaped a moment to smoke a cigarette, or check the turkey, then returned to the buzzing table to find ourselves a stranger to the new conversation. We felt that something of childhood was being replayed, an age-old golden scene: people sitting at a table, blurred faces, voices talking all at once.
After coffee, they settled with gusto in front of the TV and installed the new Nintendo console and the Wii. They played virtual tennis and boxing, shouting and swearing and hurling themselves about in front of the screen. The smaller children played hide-and-seek in all the rooms, abandoning the gifts from the day before, which lay scattered on the floor. We returned to the table to cool down with a Perrier or a Coke. Silences foretold an imminent disbanding. We looked at the clock. We emerged from holiday meal time, which had no minute or second hands. Toys and stuffed animals were gathered up with all the nursery paraphernalia that accompanied every visit. After the effusions and thanks upon departure came the orders to the children to give us a kiss, and the circular questioning “We haven’t forgotten anything, have we?” The private worlds of couples re-formed and dispersed in their respective cars. Silence descended. We removed the leaf from the table, started the dishwasher, and retrieved a piece of doll clothing from under a chair. We recognized the weary plenitude of having once again “been a good hostess,” harmoniously navigated all the stages of a rite in which we were now the oldest mainstay.
In this photo, selected from hundreds contained in Photo Service envelopes or stored in computer files, a middle-aged woman with reddish-blonde hair and a black low-cut sweater sits in a big multicolored armchair, tipped almost all the way back, with her arms around a little girl. The girl wears jeans and a pale green zip-front sweater. She sprawls across the woman’s legs, one of which is visible, sheathed in black nylon. The two faces are close together at slightly different levels. The woman’s is pale with flushed patches that appear after meals, a little gaunt, with fine lines on the forehead. She smiles. The child is olive-skinned with big serious brown eyes. She is saying something. The only similarity between them is rumpled hair of identi
cal length. A few strands, swept to the front, mingle on their necks. The woman’s hands in the foreground, the joints pronounced, almost gnarled, appear oversized. Her smile, her way of staring into the lens and holding the child express an attitude that is less one of possession than of offering, as one might see in a photo of generational transfer—grandmother presents granddaughter, an establishment of filiation. The bookshelves in the background are streaked with light reflected by the plastic-covered spines of the Pléiades. Two names stand out, Pavese, Elfriede Jelinek. The traditional decor of an intellectual, who keeps the books separate from the other cultural media, DVDs, videocassettes, CDs, as if for her, the latter belonged to a separate, perhaps less dignified realm. Written on the back of the photo, Cergy, December 25, 2006.
She is the woman in the picture. When she looks at it, she can say with a high degree of certainty, insofar as the face in the photo and her face of the present are not noticeably different, that nothing further has been lost of what will eventually be gone for good (but when and how this will happen, she prefers not to think about). This is me = I see no additional signs of aging. But she doesn’t think about those signs either, and generally lives in denial—not of her age, which is sixty-six, but of what it represents for the very young. She feels no age difference with women of forty-five or fifty, an illusion which the latter destroy in the course of conversation, without malice but implying that she doesn’t belong to the same generation as they, and is seen by them in the way she herself sees a woman of eighty, i.e., old. Unlike adolescence, when she was sure of not being the same from one year or even one month to the next, now she feels immutable in a world that moves ahead in leaps and bounds. Although between the photo from the beach at Trouville and the one from Christmas 2006, a number of events have occurred. If we omit details such as the degree and duration of upheaval surrounding each, and the causal relations that may have existed between them, the list appears as follows:
—the breakup with the man she called the young man, a separation she slowly, secretively, and tenaciously pursued, and which became irrevocable one Saturday in September 1999, when she watched a fish, a tench he’d just pulled from the water, thrash and jerk on the grass for minutes before it died, and which she ate with him that evening in disgust
—her retirement, which had for so long been the most distant point she could imagine in future time, as menopause had once been. Overnight, the course materials she’d created and the reading notes she’d used to prepare them ceased to have a purpose. For lack of use, the scholarly language she’d acquired was erased inside her, and now when she seeks and does not find the name for a figure of rhetoric, she is forced to say, as her mother once had about a flower whose name escaped her, “I used to know what that was called”
—jealousy vis-à-vis the young man’s new middle-aged partner, as if it were necessary to occupy the time freed by retirement, or become “young” again through romantic torment he’d never caused her to feel when they were together, a jealousy she groomed for weeks on end, like a new career, until the only thing she wanted was to be rid of it
—a tumor of the kind that seems to burgeon in the breasts of all women her age, and appeared to her a normal occurrence, almost, because the things we most fear, happen. At the same time, she received the news that a baby was growing in the womb of her eldest son’s partner—the ultrasound revealed a girl, and meanwhile she’d lost all her hair as a result of chemotherapy. This replacement of herself in the world, with no delay, profoundly disturbed her
—in the period between the confirmation of a birth and her own possible death, she met a younger man, who attracted her with his gentleness and his penchant for everything that makes one dream, books, music, films. This miraculous coincidence gave her a chance to triumph over death through love and eroticism, and continued later as an affair in separate residences, an alternation of presence and absence, the only scheme that suited them and their difficulty to be, and not to be, together
—the death at sixteen of the black-and-white cat of common species, who had returned after years of quaking fat to the frailty of the photo from the winter of 1992. She covered the cat with earth from the garden during the heat wave while the neighbors jumped screaming into their pool. With this gesture that she had never performed before she felt as if she were burying all the people in her life who had died, her parents, the last aunt on her mother’s side, the older man who’d been her first lover after the divorce, and had remained a friend and died of a heart attack two summers earlier—a burial that foreshadowed her own.
These events, happy or sad, when she compares them to others that happened longer ago, do not at all seem to have modified her ways of thinking, tastes, or interests, which became settled when she was about fifty in a kind of inner solidification. The series of gaps that separate all the past versions of herself ends there. What has most changed in her is the perception of time and her own location within it. And so she realizes with amazement that back at the time when she was asked to do dictations from Colette at school, the author was still alive, and that her own grandmother, who was twelve when Victor Hugo died, must have had a day off school on account of the funeral (but by then she already worked in the fields, no doubt). And while the loss of her parents grows more and more distant in time (twenty and forty years ago now), and nothing in her way of living or thinking resembles theirs (indeed hers would “make them turn over in their graves”), she feels she is drawing closer to them. As the time ahead objectively decreases, the time behind her stretches farther and farther back, to long before birth, and ahead to a time after her death. She imagines people saying, perhaps in thirty or forty years, that she was alive for the Algerian War, just as they used to say of her great-grandparents “they were alive for the War of 1870.”
She has lost her sense of the future, a kind of limitless background on which her actions and gestures were once projected, a waiting for all the good and unknown things that lived inside her as she walked up Boulevard de la Marne to the university in the fall, or finished the last page of The Mandarins, and, years later, jumped into the Austin Mini after class to fetch the children, and even later, after her divorce and the death of her mother, left for the United States for the first time with L’Amerique by Joe Dassin playing in her head, and up until three years ago, when she threw a coin into the Trevi Fountain and made a wish to return to Rome.
The future is replaced by a sense of urgency that torments her. She is afraid that as she ages her memory will become cloudy and silent, as it was in her first years of life, which she won’t remember anymore. Already when she tries to recall her colleagues from the lycée in the mountains where she taught for two years, she sees silhouettes and faces, some with extreme precision, but she cannot possibly “put a name to them.” She tries desperately to retrieve the missing name, match the name with the person, join the separate halves. Maybe one day all things and their names will slip out of alignment and she’ll no longer be able to put words to reality. All that will remain is the reality that cannot be spoken. Now’s the time to give form to her future absence through writing, start the book, still a draft of thousands of notes, which has doubled her existence for the past twenty years and is thus obliged to cover a longer and longer time.
She’s given up trying to deduce this form that is able to contain her life from the sensation she has on the beach with her eyes closed or in a hotel room, that sense of replicating herself and physically existing in several places she’s known over her life, and thus attaining a palimpsest time. So far, the sensation has not taken her anywhere in writing or any field of knowledge. Like the minutes after orgasm, it creates the desire to write, nothing more. And somehow, by erasing words, images, objects, people, it prefigures if not death, then the state she’ll be in one day, sinking, as the very old do, into the contemplation of trees, sons and grandchildren (her view of them quite blurred due to “age-related macular degeneration”), stripp
ed of learning and history, her own and that of the world, or afflicted with Alzheimer’s, unable to name the day, month, or season.
What matters to her, on the contrary, is to seize this time that comprises her life on Earth at a given period, the time that has coursed through her, the world she has recorded merely by living. She has mined her intuition of what her book’s form will be from another sensation, the one that engulfs her when, starting with a frozen memory-image of herself with other kids on a hospital bed after tonsil surgery, after the war, or crossing Paris on a bus in July of ’68, she seems to melt into an indistinct whole whose parts she manages to pull free, one at a time, through an effort of critical consciousness: elements of herself, customs, gestures, words, etc. The tiny moment of the past grows and opens onto a horizon, at once mobile and uniform in tone, of one or several years. Then, in a state of profound, almost dazzling satisfaction, she finds something that the image from personal memory doesn’t give her on its own: a kind of vast collective sensation that takes her consciousness, her entire being, into itself. She has the same feeling, alone in the car on the highway, of being taken into the indefinable whole of the world of now, from the closest to the most remote of things.
So her book’s form can only emerge from her complete immersion in the images from her memory in order to identify, with relative certainty, the specific signs of the times, the years to which the images belong, gradually linking them to others; to try to hear the words people spoke, what they said about events and things, skim it off the mass of floating speech, that hubbub that tirelessly ferries the wordings and rewordings of what we are and what we must be, think, believe, fear, and hope. All that the world has impressed upon her and her contemporaries she will use to reconstitute 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.