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| Annie Ernaux |
A Memoirist Who Mistrusts Her Own Memories
By Madeleine Schwartz
April 13, 2020
A young woman has her first sexual experience. She is pleased to be desired by someone. She does not feel humiliated. But, later, she is mocked, tormented by others who believe that she has debased herself. Those whom she thought of as her friends now treat her like nothing. She feels shame. Is the shame hers? Or is it a reflection of what is expected of her?
“To go all the way to the end of ’58 means agreeing to the demolition of all the interpretations I’ve assembled over the years,” Annie Ernaux writes in “A Girl’s Story” (Seven Stories), published in French in 2016, and now in English, translated by Alison L. Strayer. The book is an account of a sexual encounter Ernaux had as a teen-ager, and it is both a reconstruction of events and a deconstruction of feelings. The emotional history, she hopes, will be the most personal one, the truest one. The challenge of being a historian, however, is knowing whether what she felt—and what she still feels—really comes from within.
The book circles around the summer of 1958, when eighteen-year-old Annie is working as a camp counsellor in northern France, in a town she calls “S.” She is sheltered and naïve; aside from a trip to Lourdes with her father, she has barely left home. At camp, she develops a crush on a man she calls H. He looks like Marlon Brando: “She does not care that the other female counselors murmur to each other that he’s all brawn, no brains.” She thinks of him as “the Archangel.”
What draws her to H is a need to be seen. No one has ever looked at her with such a “heavy gaze.” They dance at a counsellors’ party. “Seduction” is not the right word for what happens next. But Ernaux doesn’t give these events a single name. Instead, she describes, as clearly as she can, how she follows H to her room, how “she feels his sex prod at her belly through her jeans. . . . There is no difference between what she does and what happens to her.” Soon, “a thick jet of sperm explodes in her face, gushing all the way into her nostrils.” The precision of this language doesn’t necessarily evoke pleasure, but Annie is consumed by emotion, desperate for H and the possibility of his desire.
Ernaux is an unusual memoirist: she distrusts her memory. She writes in the first person, and then abruptly switches and speaks about herself from a distance, calling past selves “the girl of ’58” or “the girl of S.” At times, it seems as though she were looking at herself in an old photograph or a scene in a movie. She tells us when she is getting lost in the story, and where her memory goes blank. Ernaux does not so much reveal the past—she does not pretend to have any authoritative access to it—as unpack it. “What is the point of writing,” she says, “if not to unearth things?”
In this attempt at unearthing, her prose combines the spare and the unsparing. She seems desperate to put it all on the page: period blood, abortions, contraceptive pills, dirty underwear, erections, and semen. But Ernaux’s writing is rubbed down, simple, almost clinical in its exactness. From the vantage of adulthood, she Googles and questions, she revisits old haunts and reads old letters, as if she were a detective cracking an unsolvable case: the mystery of her own past. But none of this investigating is done, one senses, with the expectation of ever truly settling on a truth. “I am not trying to remember,” she writes. “I am trying to be inside. . . . To be there at that very instant, without spilling over into the before or after. To be in the pure immanence of a moment.”
Of course, our recollections aren’t continuous, and you can’t always get “inside,” no matter how many angles you try. The difficulty of interiority is perhaps one reason that Ernaux, both as a girl and as an adult, can’t help but turn to those around her for cues. As readers, we lose access to “the girl of S,” often at the moments when we need it most. Instead, Ernaux begins to discuss the reactions of the other counsellors:
Reading this book in 2020, one is tempted to think of these gaps and tricks of memory in terms of trauma—the kind of trauma that keeps women from giving, or getting, a full account of their own lives. Completion, we’re told, is a necessary condition for truth. “Don’t tell us the story of your life, it’s full of holes,” the other counsellors like to say. Her peers dig up her letters and read them out loud to one another. They drag her to H’s door. The teen-age Ernaux does not realize what is happening. It is only later that she perceives the effects of this “verbal hegemony.” When someone writes “Long live whores” on her mirror in toothpaste, these words begin to shape how she sees herself.
And it isn’t so easy to look away from the mirrors that society creates for us. When Ernaux leaves the camp, she develops bulimia, and her period stops. “I could not imagine there was a name for my behavior. . . . I thought of it as a moral failing. I don’t believe I linked it to H.”
These links are what Ernaux, as a writer, has always been after. In the sixty years and twenty books since the summer of 1958, she has been devoted to a single task: the excavation of her own life. “I would go so far as to judge my previous books as vague approximations” of reality, Ernaux writes in “A Girl’s Story.” In one, she describes a love affair; in another, the relationship between her parents. Throughout, the contours of her story stay the same—a childhood in Normandy as the daughter of two grocers, the shame of her lower-class upbringing, the clash of these origins with her later literary successes. Her mother “knew all the household tips that lessened the strain of poverty. This knowledge . . . stops at my generation. I am only the archivist,” she writes in her 1988 book, “A Woman’s Story.”
Ernaux’s books are small, simple, rarely exceeding a hundred pages. In each, she is always asking how she can be sure that her memories are correct. In “A Woman’s Story,” she talks about her mother’s death. Nearly a decade later, in “I Remain in Darkness” (1997), she goes back to that moment and declares her recollection incomplete—she hadn’t fully described her mother’s long cognitive decline, the terrors of dementia. A consistent voice guides each of these revisitations: a scientific and searching “I.” The books are whittled down to an intense core—not a confession but a kind of personal epistemology. In France, they have brought Ernaux fame, prizes, and a number of stylistic descendants.
Central to her work is an awareness that the most intimate moments of life are always governed by the circumstances in which they occur—that probing the personal will also involve investigating the historical. This is clearest in “Happening” (2000), an account of an abortion Ernaux had in 1963. Early in the book, she describes going to see an acquaintance who is known as an activist for greater access to birth control. He tries to sleep with her. Then he tells her that he can’t help her. After she has travelled to Paris to obtain the abortion, she hears that “a woman who lived round the corner would do it for three hundred francs. . . . Now that I no longer needed them, suddenly, bevies of abortionists were springing up left, right, and center.” By the time Ernaux published the book, abortion had been legalized. But a victory in legislation does not make disclosure any easier. “When a new law abolishing discrimination is passed, former victims tend to remain silent on the grounds that ‘now it’s all over,’ ” she writes. “So what went on is surrounded by the same veil of secrecy as before.”
In typical Ernaux fashion, she reads over her old diary to compare what she still remembers with what she experienced at the time:
Writing from a very different future, she is struck by her own “euphemisms and understatements.” The pages of a diary are, ostensibly, the safest, most honest record of a self—and yet even here Ernaux sees her internal narrative being shaped by external pressures, such as laws. Her most private experiences, she sees, were not really her own at all.
There’s a fair bit of feminism in this idea. Ernaux often refers to Simone de Beauvoir, whose “Second Sex” sought to show how a woman’s choices, decisions, and even thoughts were molded by economic and social conditions. These conditions create a kind of corridor through which one’s life passes. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” de Beauvoir wrote. One way to read Ernaux’s book is as an attempt to understand that opaque, painful, essential process of “becoming.” (Ernaux sent her first book to de Beauvoir, and also her second. De Beauvoir wrote to say that she preferred the first.) Where de Beauvoir describes the process in theory, Ernaux renders it in visceral detail: the food that she eats, the food she purges, the sight of blood in her underwear.
She does this most successfully in her 2008 book, “The Years,” a kind of hybrid memoir of postwar France. It moves chronologically from the Second World War until the beginning of the twenty-first century, but the scope and the point of view of the story are always changing. Here is a description of the end of the war, and here is an account of a teen-age girl’s first experiences masturbating. Here is the rise of the Internet, where “we could research the symptoms of throat cancer, recipes for moussaka, the age of Catherine Deneuve, the weather in Osaka . . . buy anything from white mice and revolvers to Viagra and dildos.” And here, just a few pages later, is an intimate story of watching one’s children have children of their own.
This pastiche of images and insights can seem like a haphazard swirl, but it is, Ernaux’s books suggest, the only authentic way to twine the personal and the historical. In “A Girl’s Story,” Ernaux finds herself toggling between the understandings she has reached in her seventies and the confusions she endured as a teen-ager. Just ten years after she left camp, the country was overtaken by the sexual revolution. Sexuality became something to celebrate, not something to hide. This both does and doesn’t matter:
It is almost impossible to consolidate knowledge and memory into one. “Must I, as of now, move back and forth between one historical vision and another, between 1958 and 2014? I dream of a sentence that would contain them both, seamlessly, by way of a new syntax,” she writes. But a story that is fully continuous, a story without gaps, escapes her.
At the end of the book, Ernaux describes visiting the camp a few years after working there. It should be a moment of closure. But she looks around and sees only gray walls and empty gardens. The location does not speak to her. It seems, she writes, “less familiar than I had thought.” Instead, it is she who feels the urge to speak. Returning to the camp, she writes, is a “kind of propitiatory gesture” that allows her to see her memories as inspiration rather than as a source of shame. It is after this visit that she begins to write—that she begins, step by step, to move toward an elusive whole.
Published in the print edition of the April 20, 2020, issue, with the headline “Living Memory.”
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