Exteriors: Annie Ernaux

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Annie Ernaux’s new book, Exteriors, is about feeling overwhelmed. It is a collection of journal entries written over the course of seven years (1985-1992), when she lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town forty kilometers outside of Paris. I say that it’s about feeling overwhelmed because, in the preface, Ernaux describes how living in “a place bereft of memories, where the buildings are scattered over a huge area, a place with undefined boundaries, proved to be an overwhelming experience.” But after that, Exteriors is void of emotion and meaning, focusing instead on the physical world — things, people, and their actions — a direct result and illustration of an overload of emotion. There is a ghostlike quality to Exteriors, even in the title. The author is a spectator, rarely ever participating in the world around her — unless it’s standing in line or stepping onto the train (where many of the scenes take place) to then introduce someone else. It is very reminiscent of David Antin’s “talk poems.” As a matter of fact, a lot of the entries in Exteriors read like poems, mostly due to their varying lengths and the fact that there’s this subtle, understatedness to them, which can be taken at face-value or reread and mined for universal truths. Although, in my opinion, both methods are equally fruitful. For the past few years, Ernaux told me, she has had the sense that she has fulfilled a certain trajectory. “No, not a trajectory. A destiny.” She laughed, but she meant it. “Not a destiny that was written from the beginning. One that was constructed, bit by bit, of course.”

The book in which these lines appear, “ Shame,” was published in 1997. (The English translation is by Tanya Leslie.) Its opening is unforgettable: “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” That was in the summer of 1952, when Ernaux was eleven. It took her nearly forty-five years to try to make sense of what this terrifying event meant to her, and, by the book’s end, she is still not sure that she has. “I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others,” she writes. This paradoxical wish, to reveal the darkest parts of herself with such pitiless accuracy that she will be forced to fall silent once and for all, is an extraordinary expression of writerly ambition. In any case, it has still not come true.

In some of the books she tries to be almost ruthlessly unemotional, focusing on cold descriptions of events and relationships. In Exteriors she is maybe more directly reflective. Here’s a kind of similar reflection to the last quotation, a little more expanded:: I devoured – not once, but twice – Fitzcarraldo’s new English edition of Simple Passion, in which the great Annie Ernaux describes the suspended animation of a love affair with a man who is not free. Every paragraph, every word, brought me closer to a state of purest yearning.’ All the while the author is acutely aware that it is hard to move from general observations to the interior or statements on the broader time and age, shown by sentences like: I realize that I am forever combing reality for signs of literature. It was the death of Annie Ernaux’s father that prompted her to write memoir (her previous three books had been novels), as if the assumptions and structures of fiction crumbled when she wanted to recuperate someone she loved from the mass of history. But writing about her father in the early 1980s, more than a decade after his death, she didn’t want to make a gravestone for him, to produce something ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’. As she collected his ‘words, tastes and mannerisms’ in her writing, ‘the external evidence’ of his existence, she found herself reminiscing and then, catching herself in the act, would tear herself away from ‘the subjective point of view’. Her intention was not to commemorate or reanimate him but to discover the ‘nature and limits of the world where my father lived’. She was attempting to see him from the point of view of history and from the point of view of his daughter, to see the bones and the tombstone at once. La Place (1983), translated as A Man’s Place by Tanya Leslie in 1992, won Ernaux the Prix Renaudot and a large readership in France, but, more important, it allowed her to begin feeling out her territory. She had in mind a book she felt she couldn’t write, that was perhaps impossible to write, a book that would tell the story of France itself since 1940, the year she was born. The impossible book was impersonally personal. It would be as if the bones in the Catacombs were made to speak. My Ernaux odyssey continues with the latest republication by the UK publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. Exteriors was first published in French in 1993 and in English in 1996. It takes the form of random journal entries between 1985 and 1992. I don’t think those years have any especial significance once you know when this was first published.

Reading Ernaux, I was reminded of how the pathway to owning the surrounding around us by putting the observations in a tabloid is a very indirect way of knowing ourselves. Meditating on myth and morality. First-person and second-person in writing (the former shames the reader- she adds). Pressing on the importance of the connection between a painting and its description, Ernaux—to me it seems—wrote without fear, which is one of the most critical qualities of a writer. Her sparse writing may suggest an aloofness, but Ernaux is in fact tuned to how non-white bodies are perceived in “fashionable” French spaces in the ‘90s:

Exteriors

Sexism, economic inequality and classism; Annie Ernaux observes a lot of broader society from overheard metro conversations, from shopping in malls, by visiting galeries and observing life in general around Paris. Go home! The man tells his dog; it slinks away, submissive, guilty. The same expressions used throughout history for children, women and dogs. These are some things I jotted down when I was reading the book. I can’t come close to capturing what I see and how I feel like Ernaux, but I find that I need to write something down. Endlessly stimulating author.

However, when it comes to the war of the sexes, the world described by Ernaux matches Houellebecq’s nostalgia perfectly. The fridge and the kitchen are battlegrounds in all Houellebecq novels, with the liberated wife either refusing or not having the talent to cook, and the male protagonist hankering after a France when women were women and men were men. At the butcher’s, Ernaux observes someone say, “I’d like a steak for a man,” invoking a quotidian French world-making in which everything is binary, most of all sex (surely, this is the sentence we have been instructed to look out for in the introduction). Women do all things in a womanly way, men do things in a manly way, and never the twain shall meet. As we have learned from other works of Ernaux, the premium placed on womanly behavior is so high that women learn to look at themselves from the outside at an early age, resulting in Frantz Fanon’s “third-person consciousness.”While all these technologies make it easy to keep in touch with family and friends, what I miss are the strangers. Certainly, I have not stayed in London for the weather. I am here for the crowds that spill out onto the pavement, the ladies’ pond in Hampstead Heath, the chaos of Kingsland Road—what Jane Jacobs referred to as “the ballet of the good city sidewalk.” I live in London for its strangers, for the unknown meetings that might take place. In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs explained that cities “differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.” Jacobs’ impassioned argument had its weaknesses, particularly its refusal to take the role of race into consideration, but she understood the importance of a density of overlapping lives. Strangers represent chance and the ephemeral. They present endless and magical possibilities. A naplószerűség 1985-től 1992-ig tartalmaz bejegyzéseket. Annie Párizs egyik új külvárosában lakik, onnan ingázik Párizsba. Ez a nyolc év az ingázásnak, a bevásárlásnak, a fodrásznál töltött időnek a történéseit örökíti meg nagyrészt, innen származik az élményanyag. Ernaux nem csak megfigyel és rögzít, ez a gyűjtemény, ahogy a könyvei nagy része (nem nyilatkozhatok mindről, még nem olvastam a teljes életművet), társadalomkritika is. Az olvasást feladatként említő fodrászlány (vö. mosás, takarítás stb.), az állampolgárok egy részét lekisemberező köztársasági elnök, az anyagi jólétét spektákulummá fejlesztő szűzérmevásárló házaspár a hentesnél (a szegényebb réteg szupermarketbe jár), a hajléktalanok, a koldusok, a Saint-Lazare pályaudvar, felfüggesztve az időben, mind-mind irodalommá lényegül át. Ernaux meg is jegyzi, hogy noha az ehhez hasonló írásfragmentumok frusztrálják, szükségét érzi rögzíteni ezeket a benyomásokat, ugyanekkor nem szűnik meg irodalmat keresni a valóságban.

There are many things Ernaux does well, but she is unparalleled on desire and love: the full-bodied joy, but also the brutal lows of it. Simple Passion is a sliver of a book that captures the freefall of obsessive love and the manic, mangled why-doesn’t-he-call? time shifts of an affair. Ernaux is superb on the power dynamics and inequality of some relationships. Still, this way of tandem working was new for Ernaux. She has used pictures as prompts before, most notably in “ The Years” (2008), her most expansive book, a sweeping generational portrait in which she marks the passage of time by describing photographs of herself, subjecting her own image to the same frank gaze that she applied to her parents’ bodies. Here, though, she was guided by someone else’s gaze—that of Philippe, the movie’s de-facto cinematographer, who, as Ernaux dryly remarked at the New York screening, died, in 2009, “of a smoker’s cancer.” It never occurred to either of them that she would use the camera herself. Shooting was a man’s job. Ernaux’s attention to France outside Paris is part of a long conversation she is having with her parents, about the ‘gulf’ she experiences between the class she grew up in and the bourgeoise she has become. Her mother wanted more for her, but sometimes saw her as a class rival; her father kept a newspaper announcement of her exam results in his wallet. She has wondered whether she writes because she can’t align those two worlds. But there is a lightness in her writing about Cergy; a delight in things and attitudes, from student graffiti in Nanterre to her publisher’s belief that all writers should have cats. The politics is in the attention she pays to ordinary things, linking her work to that of Édouard Louis and Didier Eribon as well as Flaubert and Maupassant (who wrote about the part of Normandy she is from), and also to all those, the Gilets Jaunes among them, who are fed up of hearing about the Left Bank as if it were the centre of the country, if not the world.Her first book, Les Armoires vides ( Cleaned Out), a novel depicting her early life and her abortion, was published by Gallimard in 1974, when she was 34. Her mother died in 1986 after living with dementia for several years. While her mother was ill she had an affair with a married man; the year before her mother died, she divorced Philippe. In 2000 she retired from teaching; at last she would have the space and time to work on the book she had dreamed of for so long. But then, cancer was discovered in her breast. She wrote all the way through her treatment, recovered, and Les Années eventually came out in 2008 in France (and as The Years in the English translation by Alison Strayer, published in 2018). She became more famous still, the first living woman to have her work appear in the Gallimard Quarto series (the cooler younger sister of the Pléiade), nominated for the Man Booker International, winner of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize and the Premio Strega Europeo. Her children had children; she had other relationships, and sometimes the men moved into the house in Cergy, which she kept in the divorce. Now in her eighties, she still lives in Cergy. By choosing to write in the first person, I am laying myself open to criticism, which would not have been the case had I written ‘she wondered if each man she spoke to was the one they meant.’ The third person – he/she – is always somebody else, free to do whatever they choose. ‘I’ refers to oneself, the reader, and it is inconceivable, or unthinkable, for me to read my own horoscope and behave like some mushy schoolgirl. ‘I’ shames the reader.)" Annie Ernaux reminds me of Joan Didion. Writing that is confessional, possesses the hunt for clarity, quirky observations, and wit that stays with the reader till the end. The truth” is hardly a fixed concept, in life or in literature, and, for a moment, Ernaux lets us glimpse two versions of it at once: the cool crust of material reality, and, bubbling hot underneath, her own emotions, effortfully suppressed. “A Man’s Place,” Ernaux’s fourth book, was her first big success. It won the Prix Renaudot; Ernaux heard from legions of readers, and not just French ones, who felt that she was writing to and about them. This is not how people tend to react to sociology. Ernaux has said that she gave them “a mirror.” In other words, she gave them art. Again, she draws on diary entries she wrote while commuting on the Paris Métro, usually just observing strangers, and seeing how they help her reflect on her own life. Actually, she might say that the exterior life becomes her life, she uses it as a way to reflect on her own memories: