The Un-Autobiography of Annie Ernaux
A Translation of Literature to Cognitive Art
The common autobiography offers readers the reward of answers gleaned through examining the life experiences of an individual, but Annie Ernaux’s The Years, is not interested in providing answers and rather in asking questions.
Where representational books serve up stories as sources for wisdom searching books offer questions that sprout additional questions. This never-ending web of connected possibilities are simultaneously exciting and excruciating.
Unlike the lessons in wisdom provided by stories of representation, The Years is an outpouring of data-like knowledge. Ernaux’s synthesis of word-and-image engages readers like cognitive art using data in lucid redundancy.
The foundational search is the one for how to write the book itself. It begins almost imperceptibly for the reader as a gathering of experiences through an inconsistent pace of movement through time. The result is a stream of consciousness with hindsight.
By replacing the traditional “I” of autobiographies with a more distant “She” Ernaux posits the memories in such a way where they are achingly relatable yet distinctly individual. While the political and social upheavals are specific to her generation the experience of a personal life vying for attention amidst a larger scene of world change is one that is true for any generation. Her writing is anchored in a specific time but its themes are those that continually reverberate in the collective unconscious.
Ernaux’s use of the collective is both sweeping and specific in the way she draws out ancient archetypes in her modern experience. Often this occurs while searching for cerebral explanations of physical experience.
In the photo from Lycée Jeanne-d’Arc Rouen, Philosophy section, Class of 1958–1959 she struggles to come to terms with her first sexual encounter as a young woman and attempts to
“subjugate the body,” “master the language of philosophy” and “repress the desire for food” (Ernaux 70).
She is ashamed of her parent’s café-épicerie and moves away from herself as the working class girl next door, the innocent archetype.
Her pressures and personal pushback are the same that young women have felt for centuries, to conform and to be useful without losing oneself:
“Two future goals coexist inside her: (I) to be thin and blonde, (II) to be free, autonomous, and useful to the world. She dreams of herself as Mylène Demongeot and Simone de Beauviour” (Ernaux 72).
Throughout her adulthood she straddles these archetypes of seductress and philosopher.
Simone de Beauvoir is mentioned 5 times in The Years. The first occurs at the bottom of page 76 amidst memories of missed periods, natural planning attempts, and the limited options available for abortion. It is a wry reference:
“The fact of having read Simone de Beauvoir was of no use except to confirm the misfortune of having a womb.”
However, Ernaux is heavily influenced by Beauvior and later writes on her first appearance on television with respect despite her disappointment in Beauvoir’s appearance as a fortune teller. Despite Beauvoir’s influence on Ernaux she does not spend time discussing her but rather includes her only as part of the larger social events of her generation, the death of Sartre, and later Jean Genet as well as Beauvoir.
Ernaux’s dissatisfaction with the way women are viewed is a driving force for her writing. Even while continuing to search for the book’s form she senses this as key:
“There is a certain image of women that torments me. Maybe orient myself in that direction” (Ernaux 94).
On the same page she revisits images of herself in different times, naming them her “selves.” This repetition of herself which is constant and simultaneously changing brings a data-like richness to her writing.
While data displayed in a table or simple stem and leaf plot is purely representational, like an autobiography, the large sets of data in cognitive art provide a richness to an inventory of knowledge without attempting to extract wisdom.
In his book Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte explains strategies for improving cognitive art: “In particular these methods work for increasing the number of dimensions that can be represented on plane surfaces and data density” (Tufte 13). Like the approaches used by cognitive artists, patterns, and repetition orient readers in Ernaux’s parallel tracks of personal and public memories even as she searches for form:
“How to make the fresco of forty-five years coincide with the search for a self outside of History, the self of suspended moments transformed into the poems she wrote at twenty?” (Ernaux 170).
Her data sets come from experience but by not limiting her writing to individual experience she has a large data set from which to create her work. One of her most used techniques in creating her fresco is repetition.
Repetition serves a purpose in both micro and macro readings. The macro view comes from the recurrence of family meals where history is experienced through the collective memory. Patterns of holiday meals spent with friends and family bookmark annual passages. The collective memory begins with a holiday meal:
“On holiday afternoons after the war, amidst the interminable slowness of meals, it appeared out of nowhere and took shape, the time already begun, the one which the parents seemed to be staring at, eyes unfocused, when they forgot to answer us, the time where we were not and never would be, the time before” (Ernaux 18).
Each time a holiday meal occurs the feeling of overarching time accompanies it.
Memory transference at meals includes physical actions as well as stories:
“…a heritage unseen in the photos, lying beyond individual difference and the gaps between the goodness of some and the wickedness of others” (Ernaux 26).
These memories form the foundation for her world concept and secure her connection to those who came before.
The micro view emerges in the photos which are explained in terms of experiences that while relatable are still unique to the author. The photographs function as a small multiple design.
In Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte puts comparison at the center of quantitative design. A small multiple shows the history of variation over time and asks the question: “Compared to what? Small multiple designs, multivariate and data bountiful, answer directly by visually enforcing comparisons of changes, of the differences among objects, of the scope of alternatives” (Tufte 67). Ernaux’s photographs do this by overlaying frames of herself and varying the speed of time.
Unlike holiday meals which one expects to occur annually the photos appear at irregular intervals and it is only through her descriptions that the reader can reason about the amount time that has passed since the last photo. Each description typically includes a description of her hair.
This comparison of changes gives a general indication of how much time has passed since the last photo while also communicating her place in various life stages. The first and second photos describe baby hair that is short and pulled up or, parted in the middle and affixed with barrettes (Ernaux 17–18). Adolescent photos describe permed hair, short hair, and hair growing long enough for a ponytail. In a later photo, taken at University the description reads:
“She is the girl in the middle, the most ‘womanly.’ Her hair is combed George Sand style in flat bangs on either side of a center part” (Ernaux 80).
The comparison of her own hair continues through motherhood and into later adulthood until page 224 when readers learn she has lost her hair due to chemotherapy.
Towards the middle of her life the descriptions of hair in photos begins to slow. It is accompanied by a slight shift in tone. On page 169 she distinguishes women in a supermarket by their hairstyle:
“She sees them as images of herself, taken apart and separated like matryochka dolls.”
They are Tufte’s “scope of alternatives.”
Ernaux’s search for knowledge does not have an ending, it does not ask readers to make sense of her life but rather to save. Save experience, knowledge, sensation, and emotion. These have been passed from those who came before. Like the collective memories, the heritage passed down at holiday meals, the personal memories too must be saved for only those who are here now can pass down the knowledge of time as it is now for any who will continue to search in the future.
