OPINION
GUEST ESSAY
What Nobel Prize-Winner Annie Ernaux Understands About the Past
Oct. 8, 2022
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Credit...Ed Alcock/Eyevine, via Redux
Sheila Heti
By Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti is the author of 10 books, including “Motherhood,” “How Should a Person Be?” and “Pure Colour.”
This week Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Ms. Ernaux’s parents were shopkeepers in the small town of Yvetot, France. They owned a grocery store and cafe, where her mother served women on the grocery side and her father served coffee and alcohol to men in the cafe. The three of them lived in the rooms upstairs.
Her parents wanted her to receive a proper education, to surpass them, and she did. As she writes of her mother in an early book, “I was both certain of her love for me and aware of one blatant injustice: She spent all day selling milk and potatoes so that I could sit in a lecture hall and learn about Plato.”
Many writers pay a debt to their parents or to the world they left behind. But by making the past a theme, Ms. Ernaux takes homage further than that.
Consider, for instance, the apparent simplicity of her language. It emerged from an aesthetic decision to have her work remain “a cut below literature.” Ms. Ernaux has written that her aversion to playing with metaphors comes from an allegiance to her parents. She doesn’t want to write in a way that is different from how the people she grew up with speak.
Perhaps another indication of her loyalty is that she signs her books with a range of dates (“May-June & September-October 2001,”) marking the period in which the book was written as if to emphasize: These words didn’t just appear on the page. Writing is a form of work, and it happens in time, much like running a cafe.
In 2020 her memoir “A Girl’s Story” was published in English. It tells the story of the summer she was essentially raped by the head counselor at her camp. But the book is less about what happened to her than the impossibility of returning to that time in her life at all.
Most memoirs operate as if the past were right there and can be looked at, like a painting on the wall. But Ms. Ernaux understands that one’s 18-year-old self is a stranger to one’s 70-year-old self. Even considering sex, she asks, “How to resuscitate the absolute ignorance and anticipation of what is considered the most unknown and wondrous thing in life …?”
Ms. Ernaux writes that in the days after the encounter with the head counselor, she felt “joy and peace prevail, the gift of self accomplished. … No words but those of a mystical variety can possibly transcribe.” Although a rumor about their encounter is passed around the camp and she is mocked, she remembers that her younger self is also convinced that, paradoxically, she is “living the most exalted days of her existence.”
Decades later, finding the man’s picture in a small-town paper, Ms. Ernaux examines it. What does this man — a patriarch celebrating his golden anniversary with his wife and his many children and grandchildren — have to do with the boy who assaulted her? There is a relationship between the past and present, but what?
In an important way, that summer forged the person she became: “I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.”
At the height of MeToo (a movement Ms. Ernaux publicly supported), who dared write a book like this? Yet she insists that we, as creatures, are bad at understanding ourselves. And it is from that frustration that her work and, indeed, her very voice emerges. It resolves into a radiant portrait, crafted over a lifetime, of a single human being in a single humble life.
In “The Years” — her most celebrated book, published in 2008 — the main character is no longer her or her family but time itself.
The book traces a white working-class Frenchwoman who, like Ms. Ernaux, was born in 1940 and lives out the decades of the 21st century, up through the 2010s. The book, which has a forward-rushing, fluid tempo, documents the strictly external objects, phrases and events this woman would have witnessed as part of a collective body: as a citizen of the world, of France, and as a member of a family. The tone is intimate, affectionate, yet deeply strange, for it is not an account of her actions but of “the time that courses through her, the world she has recorded merely by living.”
In the years after the war, she writes:
we were continually amazed by the amount of time we saved with instant powdered soup, Presto pressure cookers and mayonnaise in tubes. Canned was preferred to fresh, peas from tins instead of garden-picked. It was considered more chic to serve pears in syrup than ripe from the tree. … We marveled at inventions that erased centuries of gestures and effort. Soon would come a time, so it was said, when there’d be nothing left for us to do.
Ms. Ernaux presents time as something onto which, if just for a moment, the detritus of civilization attaches; it favors no one thing over anything else. Time leaves behind world wars as lightly as it leaves behind the greatest movie stars, sexual mores, one’s parents, grandparents, children.
“All the images will disappear,” reads the book’s opening sentence, which is followed by a list of the specific things that will disappear, including moments witnessed only by Ms. Ernaux (“the woman who squatted to urinate in broad daylight, behind the shack that served coffee”).
Her relationship to time — which demonstrates an almost holy respect for the authentic pastness of the past — developed slowly, patiently, over more than 20 books.
Ms. Ernaux is radically attuned to what it means to look backward. History will always resist our desire to lay our greedy hands on it. This brings a fascinating tension to her books. Despite the writer’s sincerest attempts, the past will always push us away, for it belongs not to us but to a world that was just as complicated as this one, coherent in itself and forever sealed off from the present.
The opening chapter of “The Years” concludes:
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. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. … In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.
The beautiful form of “The Years” is utterly its own, and I find it hard to think of a book more moving. She shows that humans are not their insides but their props and their settings. It is reassuring to imagine the self or the soul as something eternal, but it is harder to think that of a can of peas. It is a resolute — yet somehow euphoric — book about mortality, about how everything is always being lost to time, often without our even noticing it.
Although I don’t understand the need to declare winners in art, I was happy when I heard that Ms. Ernaux had been awarded the Nobel. All one wants for the writers one loves is for their names to never vanish into anonymity.
We can’t delude ourselves about what time does to books and civilizations, but with the help of this prize, hopefully an even more distant generation will remember the name of Annie Ernaux.
More on Annie Ernaux
Annie Ernaux’s Work Dissecting the Deeply Personal Is Awarded the Nobel
Oct. 6, 2022
In Annie Ernaux, a Nobel Laureate Who Plumbs Her Own Passions
Oct. 6, 2022
Sheila Heti is the author of 10 books, including “Motherhood,” “How Should a Person Be?” and “Pure Colour.”
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