THE YEARS BY ANNIE ERNAUX

 

THE YEARS BY ANNIE ERNAUX 

Translated by Alison L. Strayer

All we have is our history, and it does not belong to us.

-José Ortega y Gasset

Yes. They'll forget us. Such is our fate, there is no help for it. What seems to us serious, significant, very important, will one day be forgotten or will seem unimportant. And it's curious that we can't possibly tell what exactly will be considered great and important, and what will seem petty and ridiculous [. . .]. And it may be that our present life, which we accept so readily, will in time seem strange, inconvenient, stupid, not clean enough, perhaps even sinful...

-Anton Chekhov

Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett

"All the images will disappear." page 7

"-all the twilight images of the early years, the pools of light from a summer Sunday, images from dreams in which the dead parents come back to life, and you walk down unidentifiable roads" page 10

"-the image of Scarlett O'Hara, who kills a Yankee soldier and drags him up the stairs, then runs through the streets of Atlanta in search of a doctor for Melanie, who is about to give birth" page 10

"They will vanish all 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." page 10-11

"-to exist is to drink oneself without thirst" page 12

"- our memory is outside us, in a rainy breath of time." page 12

"-the ones learned at school that gave you a feeling of mastery over the world. Once the exam was over, they flew out of your head more quickly than they had entered " page 14

" 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. Language will continue to put the world into words. 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." page 15

" In the days when people were forced to take to the roads in bands and sleep on straw like gypsies. Not having lived this way would stamp them with a lasting sorrow. They were saddled with other people's memories and a secret nostalgia for the time they'd missed by so little, along with the hope of living it one day.

All that remained of the flamboyant epic were the gray and silent ruins of blockhouses carved into cliffsides, and heaps of rubble in the towns as far as the eye could see. Rusty objects, twisted bedframes loomed out of the debris." page 21

" After The war, at the never endable table of holiday meals, amidst the  laughter and exclamations, our time will come soon enough, let's enjoy it while it lasts, other people's memories gave us a place in the world." page 26

"-respect bread, for the face of God is etched on every grain of wheat" Page 28

"-limits: don't ask for the moon or things that cost the earth, be happy with what you've got." page 29

"-the dread of departures and the unknown because when you never leave home, even the next town is the ends of the earth " page 29

"-pride and injury, just because we're from the country doesn't mean we're stupid." page 29

"July was the Tour de France, which we followed on the radio, cutting photos from the papers." page 40

"When she hears the little pre-school girls in the playground singing Accueillons la rose dans le laisser flétrir, it seems to her a very long time since she was a child." page 53

" it was only right that new and recalled conscripts be sent there to restore order, although everyone agreed it was unfortunate for parents to lose a twenty-year-old son, about to be married. whose photo appeared in the regional newspaper with the cap-tion "Killed in an ambush." These were individual tragedies, a death here, a death there. No enemy, no soldiers, no battle. No feeling of war." page55

" On our binders we pasted photos of Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman, and carved James Dean's initials into our desks. We copied out the poems of Prévert, the songs of Brassens, Je suis un voyou and La première fille, which were banned from the radio. On the sly, we read Bonjour Trist-esse and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The sphere of desires and prohibitions was becoming immense. We glimpsed the possibility of a world without sin. Adults sus-pected us of being corrupted by modern writers and of having no respect for anything." page 57

"The distance that separates past from present can be measured, perhaps, by the light that spills across the ground between shadows, slips over faces, outlines the folds of a dress by the twilight clarity of a black-and-white photo, no matter what time it is taken." page 60

"There is no real happiness except that which we are ausare of while we are feeling it." page 61

" Of all the ways in which self-knowledge may be fostered, per-haps one of the greatest is a person's ability to discern how they view the past, at every time of life and every age; if that is so, what kind of memory can be ascribed to this girl in the second row? Maybe she has no memory except that of the previous summer, almost bereft of images-the incorporation of a missing body, a man's. Two future goals coexist inside her: (1) to be thin and blonde, (2) to be free, autonomous, and useful to the world. She dreams of herself as Mylène Demongeot and Simone de Beauvoir." page 72

"At this moment in time, no inventory could be made of the girl's abstract knowledge or of what she has read. The degree in modern literature she is about to receive is only a vague indicator of level. She is a voracious reader of existentialism and surrealism, has read Dostoevsky, Kafka, all of Flaubert, and is also passionate about new writing, Le Clézio and the nouveau roman, as if only recent books could provide an accurate view of the here and now." page 81

"It seems to her that education is more than just a way to escape poverty. It is a weapon of choice against stagnation in a to lose oneself in a man, which she has experienced (see the kind of feminine condition that arouses her pity, the tendency high school photo from five years before) and of which she is ering and the life of the mind seem incompatible. In any case, ashamed. She feels no desire to marry or have children. Moth. she'd be sure to be a bad mother. Her ideal is the union libre n the poem by André Breton.

At times, she feels weighed down by the quantity of her learning. Her body is young and her thinking is old. In her diary she writes that she feels "hypersaturated with all-purpose ideas and theories," that she is "looking for another language" and "longs to return to an original purity." She dreams of writing in a language no one knows. Words are "little embroi-dery stitches around a tablecloth of night." Other sentences contradict this lássitude: "I am a will and a desire." She does not say for what." page 82

"Only writing - or perhaps a man-can protect her from that, if only momentarily. She begins a novel in which images past and present, her dreams at night and visions of the future, alternate with an "I" who is her double, detached from herself.

She is convinced that she has no "personality." " Page 83

"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." page 89

"We sat amidst the new family, saw the faces glowing with contentment, heard the baby crooning, wanting up from his crib, and a sense of impermanence flickered through us. We were amazed to be where we were and to have all that we'd desired, a man, a child, an apartment." page 91

"In her journal she writes: "Out of extreme narcissism, I want to see my past set down on paper and in that way, be as I am not" and "There's a certain image of women that torments me. Maybe orient myself in that direction." In a Dorothea Tanning painting she saw in a show three years before in Paris, a bare-chested woman stands before a row of doors that stand ajar. The title was Birthday. She thinks this painting represents her life and that she is inside it, as she was once inside Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre, and later Nausea. With every book she reads. To the Lighthouse, Rezvani's Les années-lumière, she wonders if she could write her life in that way too." page 94

"Later, journalists and historians would love to recall the words of Peter Viansson-Ponté in Le Monde a few months before May '68: France is bored! It would be easy to find bleak photos of oneself, full of undatable gloom, of Sundays in front of the TV watching Anne Marie Peysson, and one would be sure things had been that way for everyone-frozen, uniformly gray. And television, with its fixed iconography and minimal cast of actors, would institute a ne varietur version of events, the unalterable impression that all of us had been eighteen to twenty-five that year and hurled cobblestones at the riot police, handkerchiefs pressed to our mouths." Page 95-6

"We who had remained with the Parti Socialiste Unifié to a vast quantity of ideas and concepts surfacing all at once. change society now discovered the Maoists and Trotskyists, Movements, books, and magazines popped up everywhere, along with philosophers, critics, and sociologists: Bourdieu. Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Chomsky, Baudrillard, Wilhelm Reich, Ivan Illich. Tel Quel, structural analysis, narratology, ecology. From Bourdieu's Inheritors to the little Swedish book on sexual positions, everything moved toward a new intelligence and the transformation of the world. Awash in languages hitherto unseen, we didn't know where to start and wondered how we'd remained unaware of it all until now. In a month we made up for years of lost time. It moved and reas-sured us to see de Beauvoir, in her turban, and Sartre again. older but as pugnacious as ever, though they had nothing new to teach us. Andre Breton Unfortunately died to years too soon." Page 100-1

"In order to think, speak, write, work, exist in another way, we felt we had nothing to lose by trying everything.

1968 was the first year of the world." page 102

"On learning of the death of General de Gaulle one morning in November, at first we could not believe it- so we had really blieved he was immortal!-and then realized how Iittle we'd thought about him over the past year and a half." Page 102

"We reflected on our lives as women. We realized that we'd missed our share of freedom-sexual, creative, or any other kind enjoyed by men." Page 104

"Awakened from conjugal torpor, we sat on the ground beneath a poster that read A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle and went back over our lives. We felt capable of cutting ourselves loose from husband and kids, and writing crude, raw things. Once we were home again, our determination faded. Guilt welled up. We could no longer see how to liberate ourselves, how to go about it, or why we should. We convinced our-selves that our man wasn't a male chauvinist pig. We were torn between discourses, the ones that advocated equal rights for the sexes and attacked "the law of the fathers" versus the ones that promoted everything "female": periods, breast-feeding, and the making of leek soup. But for the first time, we envisaged our things. A feeling common to women was on its way out, that lives as a march toward freedom, which changed a great many of natural inferiority." Page 104-5

"We gained self-knowledge and lost spontaneity." page 111

"Our parents and the middle-aged were from another time, not the least in their very insistence on trying to understand the young. We took in their opinions and advice as pure information. And we would not grow old." page 111

" All the things she has buried as shameful and which are now worthy of retrieval, unfolding, in the light of intelligence. As her memory is gradually freed of humil-iation, the future again becomes a field of action.  Fighting for women's rights to abortion, against social injustice, and understanding how she has become the woman she is today, are all part of the same endeavor.

Among her memories of the years that have just gone by, sh finds none she considers to be an image of happiness..." page 114

" More than ever people dreamed of country life, away from "pollution," "the rat race," the "métro boulot dodo," "the con-centration 'burbs" and the "yobs" who lived there. Still, they ocked to cities, urban priority development zones, and resi-ential suburbs, according to their possibilities of choice" page 118

"For us, who as children were enjoined to save our souls with virtuous deeds, in philosophy class to live by Kant's categorical imperative, act only according to that maxim whereby you can will that it should become a universal law, by Marx and Sartre to change the world and who, in '68, had believed that we would-saw no hope in any of it.

The voices of authority were silent on the matter of the trou-bled 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 "disad-vantaged," and had no choice but to inhabit "rabbit hutches" where, in any case, no one could imagine being happy. Immi-gration preserved the face of the helmeted road worker at the bottom of a hole in the highway, or that of the garbage collector beside a dumpster. Theirs was a purely economic exis-tence, 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." Page 124-5

"The time of children replaced the time of the dead." Page 128

"It was the age of the silver-tongued" page 140

"With the Walkman, for the first time music entered the body. We could live inside music, walled off from the world." Page 142

" Schooled together since kindergarten, girls and boys grew up quietly in what seemed to us a kind of innocence and equality. They all spoke the same crude, ill-mannered language. They called each other assholes and told each other to fuck off.  We found them "very much themselves" and "natural" in relation to all that had tormented us at their age, sex, teachers, parents. We questioned them with circumspection, afraid they'd say we were a pain in the ass and got up their noses. We allowed them a freedom we'd have loved to have had ourselves, but discreetly watched over their behavior and silences, as our mothers had done with us. We looked upon their autonomy and indepen-dence with surprise and satisfaction, as something that had been won over several generations." page 143

"The reversal of values from before '68 is already remote; now it is in her body's imperious acquiescence that the "sexual revolution" unfolds, and in her own awareness of the fragile splendor of her age. She's afraid of getting old. She's already afraid of missing the scent of the blood that one day will cease to flow." Page 149

"We couldn't have said how many years the Iranians and Iraqis had been killing each other, or the Russians trying to subdue the Afghans, let alone the reasons why, firmly convinced that they didn't know either. We halfheartedly signed petitions related to conflicts whose causes we'd already forgotten. We confused the warring factions in Lebanon: Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians as well. That people could murder each other over reli-gion was beyond our comprehension. It seemed to prove that these populations had remained at an earlier stage of evolution. We were through with the idea of war." page 153

"We looked elsewhere. The Imam 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 traveled 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 fundamen-talism, 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 with an opportunity to think and suggest that the Arabs were from innumerable consciences when he declared, "France nice for our own good. Rocard had already removed a burden cannot take on all the misery of the world." Page 159- 160

"When it comes to her mother, she remembers the eyes, the hands, the silhouette: the voice, only in the abstract, without texture, The real voice is lost: she has no concrete remnant of it." Page 168

"Dispassion grew.

The world of commodities and commercials and that of political speeches coexisted on television but did not coincide. One was ruled by ease and the call to pleasure, the other by sacrifice and constraint, with phrases that grew increasingly ominous: "the globalization of trade." "necessary moderniza-tion." It had taken us a while to translate the Juppé Plan into images of daily life and to understand we were being screwed." Page 183-4

"The shopping center, with its hypermarket and arcades, became our chief habitat, a place for the tireless contemplation of objects and quiet pleasures, violence-free, protected by secu-rity guards with bulging muscles." Page 188

"In her diary she writes: "He wrenches me away from my gener-ation. But I am not part of his. I'm nowhere in time. He's the angel who brings the past back to life, who immortalizes." Page 193

"Perhaps drugs could bring it on, but she has never taken any, for she values pleasure and lucidity above all else. Now, in a state of expansion and deceleration, she takes hold of the sensation.  She has given it a name, the palimp-sest sensation." though the word is not quite accurate if she relies on the dictionary meaning, "a manuscript on which the original writing has been scratched out to make room for later writing." She sees it as a potential instrument of knowledge that is not only for herself, but general, almost scientific, though a knowledge of what, she doesn't know. In her writing project about a woman who has lived between 1940 and today, which grips her ever more tightly with sorrow and even guilt for not committing it to paper, she would like to begin with this sensation, no doubt influenced by Proust, out of a need to base her undertaking on a real experience." page 194

"Before we had time to think, fear took hold of us. A dark force had infiltrated the world, prepared to commit the most atrocious acts in every corner of the planet. Envelopes filled with white powder killed their recipients. A headline in Le Monde referred to "the coming war." The president of the United States, George W. Bush, insipid son of the one before, ludicrously elected after endless vote recounts, proclaimed the clash of civilizations, Good against Evil. Terrorism had a name, Al Qaeda; a religion, Islam; a country, Afghanistan. The time for sleep was past. We had to be on the alert until the end of time. We were obliged to shoulder American fear, which cooled our solidarity and compassion. We poked fun at their failure to catch bin Laden and Mullah Omar, who had ridden away on a motorcycle and vanished into thin air.

Our image of the Muslim world did an about-face. This complex web of robed men, women veiled like holy virgins, camel drivers, belly dancers, minarets and muezzins, was trans-formed from the state of distant object, variegated, picturesque and backward, to that of a modern power. People struggled to make the connection between modernity and the pilgrimage to Mecca, a young woman wearing a chador and doing a PhD at the University of Tehran. The Muslims could no longer be forgotten. One billion two hundred million.

(The one billion three hundred million Chinese, who believed in nothing but in the economy, and churned out low-end products to sell to the West, were only a distant silence.)" Page 201-2

"Before we had time to think, we were swept into the frenzy of a mass mobilization to save democracy. The summons to vote for Chirac was combined with tips for keeping your soul clean while sliding the ballot into the box: hold your nose and put on gloves, better a vote that stinks than a vote that kills. A virtuous and browbeaten unanimity drove us docile into the Crowds of May 1 and the slogans Heil the Führer Le Pen, Don't be afraid, put up Resistance, I've got the balls J'ai les boules Tengo as bolas, 17.3% on the Hitler scale." page 205

"We remembered our parents' reproach, "Look at all you have and you're still not happy!" Now we knew that all we had didn't add up to happiness, but that was no reason to abandon things. And if certain people were denied, or excluded, that was the price to be paid, it seemed, a requisite quota of lives sacrificed so the majority could reap the benefits of things.

There was an ad that read: Money, sex, drugs choose money." page 209

"The media took charge of the process of memory and forger-ting. It commemorated everything that could be commemorated, the appeal of Abbé Pierre, the deaths of Mitterrand and Margue-rite Duras, the beginnings and ends of wars, the first step on the moon, Chernobyl, September 11. Every day was the anniversary of something, a law, a crime, the opening of a trial. The media divided time into the yé-yé years, the hippie and the AIDS years. It divided people into generations, De Gaulle, Mitterrand, '68, boomers, the digital generation. We belonged to all and none. Our years were nowhere among them.

We were mutating. We didn't know what our new shape would be." page 214

"If we tried to enumerate the things that happened outside us, after September 11 we saw a rash of swift-moving events, a series of expectations and fears, interminable times and explo-sions that paralyzed or deeply distressed us-"nothing will be as it was before" was the dominant theme-and then disap-peared, forgotten, unresolved, and commemorated a year or even a month later, as if they were ancient history." Page 215

"Everything seemed overwhelming. The United States was the master of time and space, which it occupied according to its needs and interests. Everywhere the rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer. People slept in tents all along the Boulevard Périphérique. The young sneered "Welcome to a world of shit" and briefly rebelled."page 215

"Save something from the time where we will never be again." page 231

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معرفی رمان سال‌ها نوشته آنی ارنو (Annie Ernaux)

Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett

(New York: Macmillan, 1916)