They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.
Quotes from The Years
by Annie Ernaux
The Years Annie Ernaux quote
From a common ground of hunger and fear, everything was told in the ‘we’ voice and with impersonal pronouns, as if everyone were equally affected by events.
Idiocy from birth frightened no one. Madness was feared because it happened suddenly, mysteriously, to normal people.
Everyone knew how to distinguish between what was and was not done, between Good and Evil. Values could be read in others’ eyes upon us. By their clothing, we could distinguish little girls from young girls, young girls from young ladies, young women from women, mothers from grandmothers, labourers from tradesmen and bureaucrats. Wealthy people said of shopgirls and typists who were too well dressed, ‘They wear their entire fortune on their backs.’
Borne on this tide of emotion, we moved from a slow dance to a cot, or the beach, with a man’s sex only seen in photos, and even then…) and semen in our mouth, having recalled the Ogino calendar just in time and refused to open our thighs. Day broke, pallid and meaningless. Over the top of the phrases we’d wanted to forget as soon as we’d heard them, put my cock in your mouth, suck me, we had to write the words of a love song instead, that morning was yesterday, only yesterday and already far away, to make it beautiful, construct a romantic fiction about ‘the first time’, and shroud in melancholy the memory of a failed deflowering. And if that didn’t work, we’d buy éclairs and sweets - whipped cream and sugar to drown our sorrows, or anorexia to purge them. But one thing was certain: it would never again be possible to remember how the world had been before the night we lay with a naked body pressed to ours.
So, like sick people, three weeks out of four girls took their temperatures to calculate the risks, and lived in two different times. One was everybody’s time, with class presentations and holidays; the other, fickle and treacherous, liable to stop at any moment, was the deadly time ruled by their blood.
They were surprised to discover that by the grace of marriage, they were poor in the face of all they lacked, the cost of which they’d never guessed, nor the necessity, which now went without saying.
In the humdrum routine of personal existence, History did not matter. We were simply happy or unhappy, depending on the day.
The more immersed we were in work and family, said to be reality, the greater was our sense of unreality.
At every moment in time, next to the things it seems natural to do and say, and next to the ones we’re told to think - no less by books or ads in the Métro than by funny stories - are other things that society hushes up without knowing it is doing so. Thus it condemns to lonely suffering all the people who feel but cannot name these things. Then the silence breaks, little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognized at last, while underneath other silences start to form.
To live in the Paris region was:
to be cast into a territory whose geography eluded us, scrambled by a maze of roads travelled exclusively by car
to be unable to escape the goods of leading brands, displayed in vacant lots or along the roads in motley strings of warehouses, on whose outer walls signs touted the oversized and the All - Tousalon, everything for your living room, Mondial Moquette, Cuircenter - and suddenly lent a strange reality to the ads on commercial radio, for home deco and DIY, St. Maclou, of course.
It was being unable to find a pleasing order in anything we saw.
At the entrance to the Gennevilliers bridge, where the immense vista of Paris suddenly opened up in front of us, we would have the exalted sense of belonging to this huge and hectic life. It was a kind of individual promotion. We would no longer wish to return to what had become for us the undifferentiated ‘provinces’. And one evening, as our train plunged into a night studded with the bright red and blue neon signs of the Paris region, the Upper Savoie city we’d left three years before would seem like the ends of the earth.
The voices of authority were silent on the matter of the troubled suburbs and the families who had just arrived, sharing public housing with others who’d lived there longer and reproached them for not speaking or eating like us. These were ill-defined and little-known populations who lived a long way off from the idea of happiness that pulled society in like a vacuum cleaner. They’d drawn the short straw, were ‘disadvantaged’, and had no choice but to inhabit ‘rabbit hutches’ where, in any case, no one could imagine being happy. Immigration preserved the face of the helmeted road worker at the bottom of a hole in the motorway, or that of the rubbish truck beside a skip. Theirs was a purely economic existence, triumphantly assigned to them in a virtuous class debate each year by our students, who were convinced they possessed the best of all arguments against racism, i.e.: we need them for work that the French no longer want to do.
And we, on the threshold of the 1980s, when we would enter our fortieth year, were suffused with a weary sweetness that came of accomplished tradition, and gazed around the table of faces, dark against the light. For a moment we were struck by the strangeness of repeating a ritual in which we now occupied the middle position between two generations. We were overcome with a kind of reverse vertigo, brought on by immutability, as if nothing in society had moved. In the hubbub of voices, which we suddenly perceived as detached from the bodies, we knew that a family meal was a place where one could go mad without warning and push the table over, screaming.
She feels as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.
The certainty of continuous progress removed the desire to imagine it.
Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, a writer of Indian origin whose only crime was having offended Mohammed in a novel. The news travelled around the planet and left us dumbfounded. (The pope also pronounced a death sentence by prohibiting the condom, but those were deferred and anonymous deaths.) And so, three girls who persisted in wearing headscarves to school were perceived as the advance guard of Muslim fundamentalism, obscurantist and misogynistic, and finally provided us with an opportunity to think and suggest that the Arabs were not like other immigrants. We started to see ourselves as too nice for our own good.
Her husband she hardly ever thinks about, though inside she bears the imprint of their life together and the tastes he imparted, for Bach and sacred music, the morning orange juice, etc.
Anomie was catching, Language was depleted of reality, its progressive abstraction considered a sign of intellectual distinction. Competitiveness, job insecurity, employability and flexibility were all the rage. We lived within sanitized discourse that we barely listened to, our remote controls having curtailed the running time of boredom.
It was a dangerous population, always ignored and always under surveillance, right down to its imagination, which annoyed us insofar as it was focused elsewhere, on Algeria and Palestine. They were officially called ‘youth from immigrant backgrounds’, or in daily life, Arabs and Africans, or to employ a more virtuous phrasing, les Beurs and les Blacks. They were IT professionals, secretaries, and security guards. That they called themselves French we privately found absurd, a usurped claim to glory to which they were not yet entitled.
It was a sweet and happy dictatorship that no one contested. One needed only protect oneself from its excesses, educate the consumer (the primary definition of the individual). For everyone, including illegal immigrants crammed into boats off the Spanish coast, the shopping centre wore the face of freedom, along with the hypermarket crumbling beneath its mountains of merchandise. It was normal for goods to arrive from all over the world and freely circulate, while men and women were turned away at the borders. To cross them, some had themselves locked into trucks, inert merchandise, and died asphyxiated when the driver forgot them in a Dover car park under the June sun.
So her book’s form can only emerge from her complete immersion in the images from her memory in order to identify, with relative certainty, the specific signs of the times, the years to which the images belong, gradually linking them to others; to try to hear the words people spoke, what they said about events and things, skim it off the mass of floating speech, that hub-bub that tirelessly ferries the wordings and rewordings of what we are and what we must be, think, believe, fear, and hope. All that the world has impressed upon her and her contemporaries she will use to reconstitute a common time, the one that made its way through the years of the distant past and glided all the way to the present. By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.