The Years

Hello Gentle Reader

When it comes to Scandinavian literary trends of recent memory it has been divided between: frost ridden noir crime novels (such as the catalyst “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,”) and the deeply personal virkelighetslitteratur (‘reality fiction,’ also known as autofiction) with the focal point being, Karl Ove Knausgård and his mammoth cycle of autobiographical novels: “My Struggle—Volumes 1-6.” Of course autofiction, roman à clefs, memoirs, confessional poetry and autobiographical testaments have been around for a lengthy period of time, they go hand in hand with the publication of personal diaries, journals and correspondence. Despite its otherwise lengthy history of recent memory, the memoirs and autobiography is often been described as being self-indulgent, wrapped up in the advertising histrionics and spiced with heavy narcissism. Those who choose to write and practice in the area of introspective indulgence have become known as superficial. A dreadful stock that in the pursuit of fame, are willing to divulge and air their private demons, personal predilections, and perverse desires. They unabashedly describe sex. They unapologetically take stock of their failures. They shamelessly share their opinions, records and recounts of their prejudices. At the end they tie it off with revelations of redemption through enlightenment; they find comfort in love, or solace in coming to terms with the comfort of themselves and their shadow. Other times they recount horrifying situations, and detail the visceral reality with acute exactitude that it comes as a cheap discourse to find some semblance of survival at the end. Critics lambast them of having no literary aspiration or merit. The work is critically assessed as one would review reality television, the endless accountancy of tasteless narratives produced for guilty consumption. The appeal of Karl Ove Knausgård has been his ability to turn the personal into the universal. According to critics, the appeal of “My Struggle,” is Knausgårds ability to capture and capitalize the empathetic elements of a shared human experience, whereby a reader has stumbled upon a personal and private record of someone else’s life, and yet found their own secrets. Knausgård has been praised for moving the autobiographical novel into heightened realms; all the while readers in Norway, America and elsewhere are eager to consume and read his work. In France the reception was muted, as the French literary scene has a long exemplary list of writers who have practiced the notion of autobiographical novel, and nothing or no one could trump the monolith modernist classic of Marcel Proust: “In Search of Lost Time,” (“Remembrance of Things Past,”), which is often seen as the first novel hiding itself as an autobiographical chronicle. It is of course no surprise that Karl Ove Knausgård is often deemed the “Norwegian Proust,” for his obsession with time and memory, which have served the author well as he’s received numerous awards and honours.

Despite the success of Karl Ove Knausgård and his “My Struggle,” the notion of autobiography, memoirs, diaries, resists any inclination that they aim to achieve the higher pursuits of literature. Rather they bring to mind the superficiality of solipsism, narcissism, and histrionics, due to their private and personal nature. Though empathy is a powerful humanistic trait, it carries the notion of sentimentality and sensationalism, which in turn sabotage the will to achieve literary recognition. Annie Ernaux is by all accounts an autobiographical writer and chronicler, but escapes the pitfalls of the usual autobiographical novel or memoir, by eschewing exaggerated displays of sentimentality and sensationalism. In lieu of cheap sentiments and melodramatic pyrotechnics, Annie Ernaux utilizes personal experience, observations, and records as a central focal point to understand the more macro events shaping, progressing, evolving, and eroding the societal and global realm. Where other writers focus on the empathetic, emotional, and personal obsessions, which endear and enamor their readers, who through the pages find their own open secrets displayed, now only being experienced and lived by another; Annie Ernaux exchanges empathy for objectivity; personal obsession with sociological critical analysis distilled through the lens of private and introspective experience. In this regard, Annie Ernaux writes with the insight and critical eye of a social scientist.

“The Years,” is a generational memoir seen through a detached perspective. The narrative is navigated through by ‘She,’ and at times ‘We,’ rather than more the intimate ‘I.’ The eponymous ‘She,’ is of course Annie Ernaux, who begins “The Years,” in the early years of the nineteen-forties, as the end of the Second World War comes to a close, soldiers return to their families and homes, whereby France is liberated from Nazi occupation. From there it is back to life as normal, though the war is brought up frequently around the table by adults from there on out. They discuss rations, outages, food shortages, curfews, and biting resistance. The Second World War was a persistent social and historical scar that lingered and itched ever forward. Childhood after the war remains much the same as before; one riddled with lasting social conventions, class divisions, and the vice grip of the Catholic Church over social values, expectations and etiquette. Education had taken greater prominence, and becoming a generational divider, between children and their parents. Children are no longer expected or excused to shake apples from trees, or participate in harvests, or help out on the farms. Instead they are expected to remain in their confines of desks and order. The school year had since replaced the seasons. Education despite its new found importance also becomes another social barrier, where distinctions of superiority are made by the educations measurement of capability:

“Those who failed knew the weight of indignity at an early age. They were not capable. The speeches that praised education concealed its meager distribution.

[. . . ]

“If we met a former schoolmate who had enrolled in a commercial school or been sent to apprentice, it wouldn’t occur to us to speak to her, although she’d shared our desk all the way to secondary school. Nor would a notary clerk’s daughter with her fading ski-tan, proof of her superior social rank, so much as glance at us outside of school.”

The Forties move into the Fifties and then the Sixties. French society changes over the course of the decades. In the years past, Ernaux expressed fear of losing her virginity before marriage; the pitfalls of sex and love, and the taste of the carnal pleasures of flesh. Time dusts away these fears with progressive perspectives, and the introduction of the pill, women rights, and the legalization of abortion; the erosion of the Catholic Churches vice grip on morality and social values begins. There is a sense the previous generation has been cheated as they age in the era of contraception, while they endured the insufferable sexual repression and hypocrisy of the past. Despite the sense of being socially treated by outdated social norms of the past, they get married and then divorce, at which point they will take lovers, and rendezvous in their bedrooms or hotels. Their children are also more liberal in their sexual adventures. Ernaux recounts her teenage sons bringing home their girlfriends and spending the night in the room next to hers.

When it comes to the student protests of May ’68, and the subsequent general strikes nationwide, the suppressing attempts of the government, and President Charles de Gaulle’s own conservative cowardice observed, it sets the stage for France to begin to move forward and change. Yet for the older generations questions are asked of where they stand in this new movement; this demand for the new world, a new society, as they’ve now established themselves in professions and careers, they have homes and families; these concerns subside as the movement has neither care or concern for this, as it was a movement of the people for them to speak and to be heard, regardless of their social rank, intellectual pursuits or lacking education. These protests become one of the major turning points of “The Years,”—a time of hope, dreams, and hard won rights:  wage increases, and demands for dignity. However, Hope does not burn endlessly. Though the protests, the strikes, and the uproar created considerable change in French society, it too became another note in the history books, remembered with the wistfulness of nostalgia, and recounted with disappointment. It’s both a badge of honour worn by participants, while also being a bone of contention riddled with concessions and consignments, selling out in the end.

The following years blend in a continual procession of time, aging, and seasons. The presidency of France revolves between liberal and conservative ideologies that in turn are voted in and voted out. They are elected on the winds of change, and unimpeachable ideals; following such a high comes the light of political and public life shining with cynical scrutiny. Beneath the glaring blaze of high expectations each politician has the wind knocked out of their sales. Economics, governance, politics, bureaucracy; each institution slowly erodes their vigor, and ages them viciously. They make their speeches, they backtrack on their promises, they offer caveats and consignments; meanwhile the tides turns against them, the electorate grumble, they protest, and discuss their political failings over dinner. They are either voted out or they die. Death almost absolves the political, the public, and the intellectual celebrity of their previous caricaturized failings. When ‘The General,’ Charles de Gaulle dies, there is a sudden shock, surprise, and albeit hard to find sadness in his passing; his long governing shadow suddenly absent, his immortal image now confirmed mortal nonetheless.

“Simone de Beauvoir died, and Jean Genet, no, we definitely did not like that April, moreover snow continued to fall in Île-de-France.”

From there on out—as it had begun—“The Years,” salts and peppers political and gravitas international events anchoring the narrative in history. The global, the political, and the personal collide in a continual procession of symbiotic relationship, one continually influencing the other.

“[ . . . ] We didn’t like May either, though we’re not unduly disturbed by the nuclear power plant explosion in the USSR. A catastrophe the Russians had failed to hide, surely the results of their incompetence and inhumanity commensurate with the Gulag (though Gorbachev seemed a nice enough fellow), but it didn’t affect us.” 

Fear is the most primordial experience that afflicts both beast and human with equal potency, trumping apathy and cynicism every time. Pestilence, afflictions, viruses, and disease always brings to mind the slow suffering of the end time that is on par with nuclear annihilation; which during the Cold War had lost its relevancy due to the continued stalemate posturing; though this beat the alternative: complete annihilation.

“The fear of AIDS was the most powerful fear on record. The emaciated and transfigured faces of the famous, dying; Hervé Guibert, Freddie Mercury (in his final video, so much more handsome than before, with his rabbit teeth), demonstrated the supernatural character of the ‘scourge,’ –the first sign of an end-of-millennium curse, a final judgement.”

The AIDS scare slowly erodes in the following years. Just as the May ’68 protests are lost to time, or the diminished Catholic Church’s status and its societal power, or the Second World War now looked upon as a milestone of history, no longer remembered around the table. The millennium brings to mind a once in a lifetime opportunity. The chance to run into the future without hesitation.

“The year 2000 was on the horizon. We could not believe our luck in being there to see it arrive. What a shame we though, when someone died in the weeks before. We couldn’t imagine that it could proceed without a hitch. There were rumours of a Y2K computer bug, a planetary malfunction, some kind of black hole protruding the end of the world and a return to the savagery of instinct.” 

Throughout the course of “The Years,” Annie Ernaux presents the social and political upheaval and changes of French Society over the previous decades, but also shows the economic turns and the rise of consumerism. In the postwar period, it was a preoccupation to purchase greater material and goods, in order to improve one’s life. Appliances, homes, clothes, cars; replaced the previous hereditary social standings of society, with a ravenous consumerist need for more, and for the new. This is remarked with sardonic cynicism, when Ernaux points out that there existed so many different types, brands, and flavours of yogurt that even if someone tried a new one every day for a year, they still wouldn’t have tasted them all. On the flipside Ernaux points out how the endless barrage of commercials, advertisements, and marketing schemes blare without question or concern or without scruples.

“In nursing homes, an endless parade of commercials filed by the faded eyes of elderly women, for products and devices they never imagined they would need and had no chance of possessing.”

Yet as Ernaux points out with matter of fact certainty, society has been conditioned to accept the constant bombardment of commercial solicitation without a second thought, and in the process continue to drive the economy by purchasing the products as they are produced. There is a marvel at the devices being developed, produced and consumed, and how quickly they become intricate with daily life, as if technology has become an adaptable extension of human evolution. In this Ernaux cannot imagine the devices that will be manufactured in the coming ten or more years (“The Years,” were originally published in French, in 2008).

“The Years,” has been deemed Annie Eranux’s crowning achievement of her literary career, as well as her masterpiece. Throughout her career as a writer, Annie Ernaux has focused almost exclusively on autobiography as a literary mode of expression. What has continually separated Ernaux from other writers of autobiographical narratives is her preoccupation with how the external and the internal touch and influences each other, which is reviewed and recounted under her critical eye. “The Years,” is by no means any different, other than its generational perspective. Rather than her previous work which focused on immediate concerns: marriage, her father, her mother suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, her divorce and affair—“The Years,” takes stock of a life through sixty years, one that is framed by historical importance, social changes, political discourse and upheaval, and slogans, advertisements, and the modern marketing machine force feeding the economic practices of consumerism. Ernaux never comes across as a solipsistic narcissist whose self-absorbed delusions of grandeur must be written and published for mass consumption. Rather, Annie Ernaux completely ignores the otherwise blatantly selfishly designed narratives of other writers who dabble in the world of autobiographical narratives, who write transgressive cheap thrills, shock value, and then describe their work as a ‘performance piece.’ Ernaux by comparison maintains a clear perspective on her work, which ensures objectivity supersedes prattling. Ernaux uses the personal, the individual, and the at times private as an anchor point in her narratives, at which point she is able to provide context and understanding of the otherwise larger social concerns, developments, evolutions, and progresses; but also the political changes through the years, the fashionable ideals coming and going in an instant, hopes had and gone in a matter of months. History is carefully captured as well as recounted and reviewed with steady hands, and not without personal commentary which is more apt to being found in the streets then on the fact based news. The slogans, idioms, and expressions of the everyday are quickly woven into “The Years,” to give expression and account that the work is literary in nature, and not infused with the dust ridden dryness of academia. Still, Annie Ernaux positions herself as a social scientists, observing the sociological, political and economic changes of society with curiosity, and objective critical analysis; how far they have come in one moment, and how far they need to go in the next. “The Years,” really is a generational time capsule, one that floods with images, slogans, statements, recollections, records, and careful observations. It’s a unique and marvelous read, which at times can also be alienating. The experiences expressed within “The Years,” is of course tinted with where it is written, by its own language, by its own concerns with its own society, and of course gender; but as one progresses through “The Years,” the differences assimilate in varying degrees of a shared experience of global events. Its testament to French society, memory, political science, sociology, and memoir of a generation is truly an amazing feat. In this Annie Ernaux has moved the idea of autobiographical narratives away from the self-indulgent, scathing, and scandalous; and instead has positioned it as a serious literary form whose potential is still being charted out, Ernaux proves that autobiographical can have very unique effects on observing the sociological, political, psychological, interpersonal, and economic impacts of the society on the individual, by becoming its own case study. “The Years,” is most certainly a remarkable and unique book to read.  

Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader

Take Care

And As Always

Stay Well Read

M. Mary