Annie Ernaux’s short yet complex memoirs are extremely vivid evocations of working class, white female experience in mid-late 20th century France. Ernaux has a very original voice which resonated with me even though my experience of women (and men) is as a man. As gendered, aged, ‘raced’, classed subjects we all suffer repression and oppression and the sting of painful experiences in our various unique ways. But when someone articulates an individual voice to such experience the telling by someone as skilled as Ernaux is always compelling. On the other hand, Ernaux’s sociology is somewhat blunt, stereotypical, and her concern with class less precise than that of gender and old age. But her strength as a writer is in her themes of time and memory and how autobiography and memoir as narrative forms might remain truer to experience than the autobiographical fiction of writers like Proust and (in Ernaux’s more direct criticisms) Marguerite Duras.
I was intrigued by Ernaux’s reference in The Years to Poulet’s historical and phenomenological book Studies in Human Time, something that seems to have been overlooked in academic studies of her work. The Years is a relatively late memoir by Ernaux and it is one in which she, not exactly programmatically, but consciously pulls together her mature thought on how the relationship between memory, time, and the form(s) of narrative might be deployed in order to reveal written truth to experience that lies inarticulate, intuitive, enshrouded in her/one’s past.
Ernaux cites Poulet in the context of general academic influences on her in her years as a student, the citation very brief and transitory and no attempt is made by her to convey what Poulet’s position in his study of human time actually is. But Poulet outlines major historical changes in literary and philosophical-theological formulations of time. He starts by noting, firstly, the medieval religio-social sense of time, ‘Angelic time’, a time when time wasn’t thought of as moving progressively like it does in its modern sense as a type of medium. This was the time marked by waiting for the rebirth of Christ the Redeemer. Poulet quotes St Bonaventure who saw this time as one of ‘Grace’ in which: ‘the permanent habitus dwells in the sanctified being’ (24). Poulet then moves along a fairly conventional historiographic outline of major developments, perhaps we might call them epistemes or regimes, in human time - this approach reminded me greatly of Bakhtin’s periodization of popular culture in his Rabelais. So, the time of the Renaissance is depicted as marked by festival time and seasonal recurrence; then the Reformation and Calvinistic ideas of the time of predestination of souls; the Enlightenment and its consequent rationalising of time – this is the ego-centric time of the Cartesian cogito. The Enlightenment was also marked by a sense of time as chronological - something that passes forever and no longer has a redeemable nature either in the second coming of Christ or by seasonal rites and the anticipation of resurrection/recurrence. The 18th century is thus much marked by anxiety about time (and many other things), the start of Romanticism and highly ego-centric experiences of time (Poulet instances Condillac’s idea of time ‘as a succession of instants of consciousness but also a consciousness whose interior progress constitutes a life and a history’ (41).)
After this introduction, Poulet goes on to look at how such changes in these ‘regimes’ of human time are to be found in the literature of the eras. His chapter on Proust notes that the medieval idea of redemptive time is found in secular, quasi-romantic form in Proust’s spontaneous, triggered, involuntary memory. Involuntary memory thus acts critically against more historically absolute conceptions of human time deriving from the Enlightenment, but it also has something of a redemptive character seen in medieval ideas of ‘grace’:
[The Proustian] being [is] always recreated, always refound and always relost, as the human being is in all thought since Descartes, depending also on a precarious grace, as does the human being in all religious thought whether of the Reformation or of the Counter-Reformation, the Proustian being in the final count attains to this total structure of itself which human existence had lost after the Middle Ages. (339)
I am guessing that Poulet’s chapter on Proust would have been read by Ernaux when a student since she acknowledges Proust in many of her memoirs. Like Proust, Ernaux wants to evoke Truth, testimonial, where memory figures as redemptive act. Such capital-T True memory is an act of grace in contemporary-secular form, evoking past experience from loss or ‘oblivion’ (Simple Passion 30). However, Ernaux doesn’t find redemption in an instant of recovered time, as Proust does, but rather in repetition resulting from a willed, conscious practice of reversing time by the act of writing - the actualization of memory in narrative, the willed pursuit of memory. Thus, in Simple Passion she thinks about returning physically to Venice in order to ‘reverse time’ and evoke past happiness of her, now over, affair:
Sometimes the urge actually to return to Venice, to the same hotel, the same room. Throughout this period, all my thoughts and all my actions involved the repetition of history. I wanted to turn the present back to the past, opening on to happiness. (28)
Chloe Taylor and Robin Tierney in separate studies note the relevance here of some of the ideas of post-structuralist theorists like Foucault on the confessional and Deleuze on Repetition. Taylor argues that Ernaux’s hope to repeat experience, good or bad, is part of a more general institutionalization of repressive discourses in society (Taylor, 23). Tierney, in somewhat critical Foucaultian mode, notes that confession is not really subverting-of but intrinsic-to the operation of modern capillaries of power. Taylor is also critical some of the personal claims to Truth in Ernaux’s memoirs, particularly when they attempt to make more general claims to Truth on the part of all women (11).
It is true that, generally, Ernaux engages with memoir as a literary form in order to produce historically-based Truth to past experience, particularly in relation to the major social categories of gender, class and age (i.e. her mother) underlying that experience. In Simple Passion, Ernaux directly states that she considers repetition as integral to re-finding time, a means to the reversing of it (28). Tierney and Taylor object to the linkages made between the two sides – social and personal - of her ‘acts’ of memory. There is no doubt that Ernaux makes a claim to Truth for her work, its status as testimonial, in terms of revealing social conditions underlying individual experience: of the possibility of demonstrating these Truths via the narrative form of personal experience. This is underlined in her conscious distancing of her work from fictional representations of personal memory in writers like Proust or Duras. She states that Duras’ novels ‘save appearances’ (Simple Passion 33), they are ‘ironic’ because they depart from facticity:
I am merely listing the signs of a passion, wavering between the ‘one day’ and ‘every day’ as if this inventory could also be to grasp the reality of my passion. Naturally, in the listing and description of these facts, there is no irony or derision, which are ways of telling things to people or to oneself after the event, and not experiencing them at the time. (Simple Passion 18)
In Positions Ernaux indeed identifies a paradox in her writing in that the more vivid her memories become the less sociological they are: this is a dilemma of truth derived from a subjective point of view (Positions 23). She goes on to state how hard it is intellectually to develop truth to experience in memoir as opposed to fictionalized form:
I find it more difficult to dig up forgotten memories than it is to invent them. One’s memory resists – I cannot rely on personal reminiscence. (Positions 46)
In Simple Passion she argues for the need to suspend moral judgement in the writing of memoir (11), but in writing about one’s past one has authority due to the distance in time in which to reflect honestly upon past events (23). Kawakami notes of The Years that it is Ernaux’s desire to create a position of truth/honesty to (past) experience. Kawakami contrasts the concluding passage of Remembrance of Things Past which is in the 1st person conditional tense, and the conclusion of The Years which is in a 3rd-future tense. Kawakami states this contrast of preference for different pronouns show the temporal distinction between Proust’s fictional voice(s) and that of Ernaux’s which creates a more ‘impersonal, and clearly less fictional space’ (12). Taylor, similarly, argues that Ernaux’s movement between different pronouns in The Years, sustains her claim of adopting/prioritizing a position of ‘transpersonal-I’ (11). She goes on to quote Ernaux on the “certainty of the need to write on the ‘history of a woman in time and in History’”. This can be seen in Cleaned Out, where Ernaux often argues that Truth is a categorical standard.
But I am not sure that Ernaux sustains, or even claims, a trans-historic or transpersonal position of Truth. Truth is never independent of personal experience of social conditions, or of its writing-discursive (re)construction. That is why repetition, her continual return to past experiences of abortion, of failed affairs, of aging parents, of class, in her memoirs is so marked. An idea of Truth is claimed in her work, but it is nearly always qualified, relativistic, depending on the quality, rigour and recognizability of the evocation of personal experience, either of self, others or of social conditions.
Related to a more relativistic idea of truth in Ernaux is the part that embodiment plays in her thinking about truth to personal experience. Roland Champagne notes that Ernaux is concerned to find her ‘internal time’, embodied time, in distinction to what he calls ‘monumental’ or exterior regimes of time (4). Anyone reading Ernaux cannot fail to note how often bodily secretions, sweat, menstruation and pee (this later word figuring regularly, usually as a verb, and a somewhat strange preference for the childish ‘pipi’ in preference to a more adult-connoting (masculine?) ‘pisser’). Champagne discusses this in terms of ‘menstrual time’ (3), and ‘profane time’ in Ernaux. The latter time is notable in A Frozen Woman:
The church they sometimes take me to when there are grand processions is vast, dark, and I am alone. I feel like peeing in a nice way, tingling and sweat. I crouch at the foot of the flaming pulpit, and want to go so badly that it burns inside me, but it doesn’t spurt out. Then I notice the priest staring at me…my desire becomes excruciating. (31)
Similarly, in I remain in Darkness, Ernaux refers to Paul Eluard’s poem ‘Time is Overflowing’ (42), and in Happening she writes of ‘time flowing inside and outside of me’ (19). In her memoir of abortion in Happening Ernaux’s ideas come across in a memoir that is embodied, involving the extraction of, in this case, painful physically-embedded memory of abortion. But she is also aware that embodied memory is not a ‘primitive memory’ or something which ‘choses to portray the past as a basic juxtaposition of light and shade, day and night’ (47). Embodied memory is, ultimately, a type of pragmatic-discursive act, the evocation of deep bodily flows, or their stoppaging, is one of the more graphic tropes Ernaux uses to evoke her own past, and also act as an example of how anyone might want to make their past experience re-emerge.
As noted above, when Ernaux considered returning to Venice in order to evoke a happier time in her affair, she argues that physical, material spaces/places also embody time. In The Years she notes that her past ‘selves…continue to exist in these places. In other words, past and future are reversed. The object of desire is not the future but the past…’ (66). She comments that even if the back street abortionist’s tenement building she went to has been gutted and redeveloped, nevertheless her past time continues to haunt the place. This is ‘palimpsest’ time (or materialized time – see A Simple Passion (18), a time found inscribed under layers of later experience (The Years 159).
Embodied time is marked in A Simple Passion where the ‘outsidedness’ of sexual intercourse to the absolute/monumental regime of time is ‘meaningless and yet a reality’ (34). Champagne notes this as a highly individualized time that is marked by moments of ecstasy or jouissance (10). But in these moments so thoroughly ‘out of time’ Ernaux does not find in them Proustian grace, or anything like Poulet’s idea of medieval Grace. Kawakami argues that Ernaux doesn’t actually find either grace or ‘joy’ in involuntary memory, as in Proust. Instead, he sees in Ernaux a position in which any moments of jouissance are the conscious product of writing, a witness to the intense memory that ‘actualizes’ them (Champagne, 8). Thus, in her memoirs Ernaux wants to reevoke past time, to save past experience from ‘oblivion’. But this is not redemptive, as Poulet thought of in relation to Proust, a past experience freed from some faded regime of time. Rather, surely, if anything it is an act of retribution.
References
Champagne, Roland A (2010) ‘A woman and her own time. Annie Ernaux’s creative writing as a crucible for the temporal salvation of womanhood’ Dalhousie French Studies Vol.90 Spring 147-158
Kawakami, Akane (2019) ‘Time travelling in Ernaux’s Memoire de Fille’ French Studies: a Quarterly Review Vol 73, 2, 253-65 April
Poulet, Georges Studies in Human Time
Taylor, Chloe (2004) ‘The Confessions of Annie Ernaux: autobiography, truth and repetition. Journal of Modern Literature vol.28 Autumn. 65-88
Tierney, Robin (2006) ‘Lived experience at the level of the body – Annie Ernaux’s Journaux Extimes’ Substance 35, 3,III