Lost Books – Positions

Although The Years did not win the Man Booker International Prize, its short-listing is one example of the rapturous response which Ernaux’s work has recently received in the UK, a reception which has already seen her begin to return to print. Though the scope of The Years is very different to what she has written before, the method is not entirely new, and something she touches on in Positions when she decides to write about her father’s life:

“If I wish to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach, or attempt to produce something ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’.”

Positions, translated by Tanya Leslie, was published by Quartet Books in 1991, its title varying from the same translation in the US where A Man’s Place was chosen to convey the French original, La Place. The variation is interesting as, whereas the American publishers placed the focus on gender (and perhaps also as a counterpoint to A Woman’s Story), in the UK the emphasis is on class (presumably the French title conveys both). The word appears only once (meaning social class) in reference to the customers of her father’s café:

“It was a café of regulars, habitual drinkers who dropped in before or after work, whose place was sacred: gangs from the building site, as well as a few customers whose position meant they could have chosen a less proletarian establishment.”

Social class is, however, at the book’s heart. It begins as Ernaux qualifies as a teacher, perhaps the point at which she feels her class has irrevocably changed. When her father dies shortly after, even the funeral is described in terms of class:

“In distinguished society grief at the loss of a loved one is expressed by tears, silence and dignity. The social conventions observed by my mother, and for that matter the rest of the neighbourhood, had nothing to do with dignity.”

Unlike Edouard Louis, who escaped his poverty in one bound, Ernaux’s parents’ act, to some extent, as bridge between their working-class origins and her middle class existence. From working-class origins they rise to run their own business, a shop and café, leaving her father “both worker and shop keeper.” This leaves them to some extent alienated from both the class they have left and the class they have not yet entered:

“Behind their backs, they were referred to as the rich, which was the worst possible insult.”

It also leaves them with a fear of returning to poverty, “afraid they would lose everything and lapse back into working-class poverty.” Her father’s greatest fear, however, is of embarrassment:

“He was always afraid of being ashamed or out of place.”

Ernaux reports, “One day he said to me proudly: ‘I have never given you cause for shame.’” One area of possible ‘shame’ is language:

“My father saw patois as something old and ugly, a sign of inferiority. He was proud to have stopped using certain idioms.”

This was something I immediately recognised from my own childhood, where the language my father used at work was different to the one my mother taught us to speak at home (and then was surprised later when there were words or expressions I didn’t know which she knew from her own parents). Ernaux goes as far as to say “anything to do with language was a source of resentment, far more than the subject of money.” It’s an important reminder that class is not simply a matter of income but a more subtle sense of confidence and agency – one reason why, on meeting Ernaux’s future husband, “all they asked from the boy was that he had good manners.” Ernaux understands the difficulty of escaping from the class one is born into:

“Now I often say ‘we’ because I shared his way of thinking for a long time and I can’t remember when I stopped doing so.”

Again, I recognise the difficulty (which she, as a successful writer has managed much better than I) as I still don’t entirely feel I belong in middle class settings (such as, ironically, book festivals). She also admits to the difficulty class creates in writing about her past:

“As I write, I try to steer a middle course between rehabilitating a lifestyle generally considered to be inferior, and denouncing the feelings of estrangement it brings with it… I am constantly wavering between the two.”

It is Ernaux’s ability to analyse her own responses, as well as penetrate the thoughts and motivations of the characters she writes about, that make her such a rewarding writer, somehow both subjective and objective, both emotional and analytical, at the same time – exactly those qualities which made The Years such a success.

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Happening

“I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled,” Annie Ernaux insists at one point in Happening, one of the many thin books through which she has delivered her life in slices over the years, continuing:

“There is no such thing as a lesser truth. Moreover, if I failed to go through with this undertaking, I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by the patriarchy.”

This has long been the raison d’etre for her work, now finally beginning to reach a wider audience since the appearance of her life-long chronicle of France, The Years. Happening, translated by Tanya Leslie, and originally published by Seven Stories Press in 2001, tells the story of an abortion Ernaux underwent as a student, which also formed the basis of her first novel Cleaned Out in 1974. It begins with Ernaux waiting for the results of an AIDS test, and the difficulty she still feels in connecting the potential consequences to the act:

“I couldn’t associate the two: love-making, warm skin and sperm, and my presence in the waiting room. I couldn’t imagine sex being related to anything else.”

In a book which is about memory, it is at this moment she is reminded of the abortion:

“I realised that I had lived through these events at Lariboisiere Hospital the same way I had awaited Dr N’s verdict in 1963, swept by the same feelings of horror and disbelief.”

When Ernaux falls pregnant (the father is a fellow student with whom the occasional sexual encounter has not been representative of any deeper relationship) she immediately decides she cannot have the baby, which she describes as “a shapeless entity growing inside me which had to be destroyed at all costs.” Abortion is, of course, illegal at this point, but she says she had little fear of it:

“I wasn’t the least bit apprehensive about getting an abortion. It seemed a highly feasible undertaking, admittedly not an easy one, but one that did not require undue courage.”

Her problem is the legality as she does not know who to turn to:

“Girls like me were a waste of time for doctors. With no money and no connections – otherwise we wouldn’t accidentally end up on their doorstep – we were a constant reminder of the law that could send them to prison and close down their practice for good.”

The book is as much the story of the time attempting to find someone that will help her as it is of the abortion itself. At one point she reminds herself:

“I must resist the urge to rush through those days and weeks, and attempt to convey the unbearable sluggishness of that period as well as the period of numbness that characterizes dreams, resorting to all the means at my disposal – attention to detail, use of descriptive past tense, analysis of events.”

The first person she confides in, a married student, attempts to seduce her. Typically, Ernaux conveys her attitude at the time rather than applying further outrage in hindsight: “It was an unpleasant episode but of very little consequence compared to my condition.” When she is eventually directed to a woman who will perform the abortion for her (in return for payment) it is described in excruciating detail, both the process itself and the aftermath, which will eventually see her taken to hospital. Ernaux is always a very physical writer and does not shy away from the torments of the body as well as the mind, though she is equally brutal with the psychological truth, describing the abortion as “giving birth to me” –

“At that point I killed my own mother inside me.”

Ernaux creates the truth of the book in layers: her recreation of the events, quotations for her journal of the time, and discussion of the process of writing, often delivered in parentheses. She does not proselytise, presenting the abortion neither as a courageous choice or a terrible mistake. Though her books are deeply felt, they are, in a sense, dispassionate, attempting neither to excuse nor justify:

“Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

The Years

In 1985, as described in her newly translated (by Alison Strayer) autobiography The Years, Annie Ernaux begins to consider writing the book we are reading:

“…the idea has come to her to write ‘a kind of woman’s destiny’, set between 1940 and 1985. It would be something like Maupassant’s A Life and convey the passage of time inside and outside of herself, in History, a ‘total novel’ that would end with her dispossession of people and things: parents and husband, children who leave home, furniture that is sold.”

It is worth noting that at this point Ernaux had been a published writer for over ten years working in the autobiographical genre, and that what she was imagining was clearly something which went beyond the work she was already producing. Previously her books have tended to focus on one aspect of her life: of the two I have read, for example, Cleaned Out relates her experience of abortion and I Remain in Darkness tells of her mother’s dementia. Now the intention was to produce something all-encompassing and cumulative, a new form which would require a new method, which, twenty years later, she describes:

“It will be 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… There is no ‘I’ in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ‘one’ and ‘we’, as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before.”

It begins in valedictory fashion: a series of memories introduced with the phrase “All the images will disappear.” The conclusion to this prelude is equally certain:

“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.”

What follows both answers and emphasises: The Years preserves the memories within it, but in presenting a lifetime in two hundred pages it encapsulates the brevity, the impermanence.

Ernaux uses the frozen images of photographs as milestones on her journey, beginning with one of “a fat baby with a full, pouty lower lip and brown hair”. She begins, not with her own memories, but with those of the adults around her in her post-war childhood:

“The voices of the guests flowed together to compose the great narrative of collective events, which we came to believe we too had witnessed.”

Ernaux intends not only the milestones of her own life, but the milestones for France in the second half of the twentieth century, ‘the great collective narrative’, while at the same time distrustful of that narrative, noting that the adults “lacked the talent and conviction to speak of things they’d been aware of but had not seen.” Ernaux lacks neither talent nor conviction, and manages a tone that is both incisive and bemused, observant of the tides of change while not immune to being washed along; she is both camera and subject.

What most astonishes in reading The Years is the pace of change. Partly this is material: in her childhood Ernaux tells us:

“We lived in a scarcity of everything, of objects, images, distractions, explanations of self and the world…”

As an adult she sees the development of the ‘consumer society’:

“The increasingly rapid arrival of new things drove the past away. People did not question their usefulness, they just wanted to possess them and suffered when they didn’t earn enough to buy them outright.”

(In case this seems rather distant and high-handed, Ernaux will happily satirise her own behaviour, teaching the dangers of advertising while buying all the latest technology “with a sense of using modernity to intelligent ends” – “For us and by us, consumption was purified.”)

By the book’s end, we find a very different world to that of her childhood:

“We lived in a profusion of everything, objects, information and ‘expert opinions’.”

Similarly there are striking changes in attitudes, to women, for example, and sex. Sex is a topic Ernaux returns to again and again, beginning with the judgements of her youth:

“The unwed mother lost her entire worth and had nothing to hope for, except perhaps a man who would sacrifice himself and take her in, along with the fruit of her sin.”

The contraceptive pill changes everything for women, though initially “we didn’t dare ask the doctor for a prescription and the doctor didn’t offer, especially if one wasn’t married.” Later, too, Ernaux reflects:

“With the pill they had become sole rulers of their lives, but word hadn’t got out yet.”

Ernaux also charts the political scene, the wars (Algeria, Vietnam), the elections, May 1968 and its aftermath. Of course, some of this is less fascinating for the non-French reader, but much of it mirrors political movements in Europe as a whole.

Ernaux’s real success, though, is in combining all of this – political, social, economic – with the personal in a seamless narrative which is breath-takingly sustained. Time and again she finds exactly the right phrase to bring a new experience or thought to life (a Walkman, for example, is “the first time music entered the body”). The overall effect is intelligent, moving and, at times, revelatory.

Cleaned Out

Annie Ernaux’s Cleaned Out (translated by Carol Sanders) begins with an illegal abortion (first published in 1974, this scene takes place in 1960). Ernaux spares no detail – the story, as with most of her work, is autobiographical:

“I was on the table, all I could see between my legs was her grey hair and the red snake she was brandishing with a pair of forceps. It disappeared. Unbearable pain. I shouted at the old woman who was stuffing in cotton wool to keep it in place.”

The abortion, however, is the novel’s endpoint rather than its subject. Ernaux is instead intent on exploring the journey which has taken her narrator, Denise Lesur, from childhood to this moment:

“First I was the storekeeper’s daughter, always top of the class. Then a great big lump wearing socks on Sundays, the scholarship student. Then screwed up by a back-street abortionist, and that might be the end of it.”

It’s the story of a young woman caught between two cultures – her working class background and the middle class world she has entered via education – but belonging to neither of them:

“I didn’t always hate my parents, the customers, the store… I hate the others too now, those with education, the professors, the respectable people. I’m sick to death of them.”

Her parents own a store and bar in a poor neighbourhood, providing a level of prosperity which sets them above their customers. Denise’s childhood is a happy one – “I was like a fish in water” – the store means she never has to want for anything on its shelves, and the bar provides her with all the adult attention, unsavoury as some of it is, she needs. She is sent to a private school – a claim on entering the middle classes which her parents shrug off with, “not that we’re snobs, but the private school is nearer.” Though uneducated (or perhaps because they are), her parents place their faith in education – her father pronounces ‘school’ in the same tone as ‘church’. Denise is studious, but finds school “strange, indescribable, I was completely disorientated.” School and home seem like two different worlds: “Not even the same language.”

Denise, of course, does not fit in with the other pupils:

“In feel clumsy and awkward in comparison with the private-school girls, who are confident, who know just what to do.”

Her stories from home are “in poor taste.” Her marks, however, continue to be high:

“The others recognised that I got good marks and was at the top of the class. That knowledge made me feel free, warm, protected.”

The better she does at school, however, the more distant she feels from her life at home:

“I’m not like them. I’m different. I have nothing to say to them.”

School and home also create another dichotomy in Denise’s life. Her sordid origins become connected in her mind with sex; school, on the other hand, represents purity. As her sexual desire develops she sees it as something else that singles her out, a view exacerbated by her Catholic upbringing:

“There’s a monster growing between my legs, a flat, red cockroach, unclean. Don’t ever look at it, don’t ever touch it, don’t let anyone see it, the Devil’s down there…”

She sees her sexuality as something to resist, and her inability to resist it a sign of her own inadequacy, her true, inherited nature which she cannot escape through learning.

Cleaned Out is a fierce, physical book. In Ernaux’s hands, Denise’s emotions are often tangible, spreading through her senses. In an afterword, she talks of, “describing a life in all its aspects, including the affective and sensual, the taste of food, the smell of summer Sundays…” It’s a coming of age story, but also a coming to terms, in which Denise must wrestle with who she is before she can decide who she wants to be.