The Years

by Annie Ernaux

  The presidential election in May was all the more disheartening. A repeat of the previous one, in 1995, with Chirac and Jospin (the latter, Tony Blair-style, shrank from using the word “socialist” but would probably be elected). We remembered with amazement the tension and bitterness of the first months of 1981. So at least in memory we were going somewhere. Even 1995 seemed preferable. We didn’t quite know what was wearing us down the most, the media and their opinion polls, who do you trust, their condescending comments, the politicians with their promises to reduce unemployment and plug the hole in the social security budget, or the escalator at the RER station that was always out of order, the lines at Carrefour and La Poste, the Romanian beggars, all those things that made it as futile to put a ballot in a ballot box as a contest entry form into a drum at the mall. And the Guignols on Canal+ weren’t funny. Since no one represented us, it was only fitting that we do as we pleased, so that voting became a private, emotional affair, governed by last-minute impulse—Arlette Laguiller, or Christiane Taubira, or maybe the Greens? One needed the habit and long-standing memory of “electoral duty” to bother to go to the polling station on an April Sunday in the middle of spring vacation.

  But as it turned out, the day was bright and sunny and the weather mild. Oddly, we retained no memory of all we did on that April Sunday, or of the hours before the results were announced, except perhaps for the anticipation of an evening’s entertainment. And so it happened, the Sayer of anti-Semitic and racist horrors for the past twenty years, the demagogue with his rictus of hatred who played to the gallery, quietly rose and annihilated Jospin. No more Left. The political lightness of life vanished. Where had we gone wrong? What had we done? Should we not have voted for Jospin instead of Laguiller or the Greens? Conscience floundered, caught in the gap between the innocent gesture of putting the ballot in the box and the collective result. We had gone to the ends of our desire and were being punished. It was a guilty event. The discourse of shame was in full swing, and replaced the one about lack of safety, which had been going strong just the day before. The search for someone to blame quickly spun out of control. In a loop, the TV news ran images of pathetic Grandpa Voise, mauled by thugs who had also torched his miserable hovel, of abstainers and people who had voted environmentalist, Trotskyist, Communist. The media “gave the floor” to those who had silently voted for Le Pen, laborers and cashiers who emerged from the shadows and were carefully questioned for the sake of our immediate and futile comprehension.

  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 las bolas, 17.3% on the Hitler scale. Young people who had just returned from the mid-term holiday said it reminded them of the World Cup. Under the gray sky of a teeming Place de la République, at the end of a huge and tight-packed procession that simply would not get moving, we were overcome by doubt. We felt like extras in a film about the thirties. There was a consensual falsity in the air. We became resigned to voting for Chirac instead of staying home. When we came out of the polling station, we felt as if we had committed a completely mindless act. That night on TV, when we saw the swell of faces raised toward Chirac crying Chichi we love you, while the small slender hand of SOS Racisme fluttered over the heads of the crowd, we thought those assholes.

  Later all that we would recall of the election was the month and day of the first round, April 21, as if the forced second round with an 80 percent turnout didn’t count. Was voting still possible?

  We watched the Right retake all the seats. The same speeches that summoned us to adapt to the market and globalization, the same injunctions to work more and longer, blossomed anew in the mouth of a prime minister whose name, Raffarin, stooped posture, and weary affability made one think of a heavy-treaded fifties notary pacing in his office, making the floorboards creak. We were hardly even outraged to hear him speak of “the France from above” and “the France from below,” as in the nineteenth century. We turned away. Even the Bleus were beaten in the World Cup in Korea. We came around again.

  The August sun warmed the skin. On the sand with eyelids closed, we were the same woman, the same man. We basked in our bodies, the same we’d had in childhood on the pebble beach in Normandy and on long-ago holidays on the Costa Brava. Resurrected one more time in a shroud of light.

  We opened our eyes and saw a woman walk into the sea, fully dressed in a jacket, long skirt, and a Muslim headscarf over her hair. A bare-chested man in shorts held her by the hand. It was a biblical vision whose beauty made us horribly sad.

  The places where merchandise was displayed were increasingly spacious, attractive, colorful, and spotlessly clean in contrast with the bleakness of subway stations, La Poste, and public high schools. They were reborn each morning with the splendor and abundance of the first day in Eden.

  Sampling at the rate of one small container a day, an entire year would not have been enough to try every available flavor of yogurt and dairy dessert. There were designated depilatory products for male and female armpits, mini-pads for G-strings, wet wipes, “creative menus” and “roasted mini-snacks” for cats, grouped into categories for kittens, adult, senior, or indoor cats. No part of the human body or its functions was spared the providence of industry. Foods were “light,” or “enriched” by invisible substances, vitamins, omega-3s, and fiber. Everything in existence, air, heat, cold, grass, ants, sweat, and snoring, generated merchandise and products for the upkeep of the latter, ad infinitum, in an unrelenting subdivision of reality and proliferation of objects. The commercial imagination knew no bounds. It co-opted for its own gain all the specialty languages, ecological, psychological, etc. It draped itself in humanism and social justice, enjoined us to “fight the cost of living,” issued prescriptions such as “Spoil yourself” and “Get yourself a sweet deal.” It orchestrated the celebration of traditional holidays, Christmas and Valentine’s Day, and accompanied Ramadan. It was a kind of ethic, a philosophy, the undisputed shape of our lives. Life. The real thing. Auchan.28

  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 center 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 parking lot under the June sun.

  The solicitude of mass-market retailers went so far as to provide a section for the poor: low-end, bulk, and no-name goods, corned beef and liverwurst that reminded the well-to-do of the shortages and austerity of the former Eastern bloc.

  So the events foretold in the seventies by Debord and Dumont (wasn’t there also a novel by Le Clézio?) had come to be. How could we have let it happen? But the predictions had not all become reality. We were not covered in pimples. Our skin wasn’t slaking off as in Hiroshima. We didn’t need to wear gas masks in the street. No, we were healthier and more attractive. To die of an illness was less and less conceivable. We could let the second millennium march on without undue worry.

  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.

  We graduated to the DVD player, the digital camera, the MP3 player, ADSL, and the flat screen. We never ceased to upgrade. The failure to do so meant saying yes to aging. Gradually, as the skin started to show its years and the body to feel the effects of time, the world showered us with new things. We in our decline and the world, marching on, were going in opposite directions.

  The questions that arose with the appearance of new technologies were canceled out as their use became second nature, and required no thought. People who didn’t know how to use a computer or a Discman would become obsolete, like those who couldn’t use a phone or washing machine.

  In nursing homes, an endless parade of commercials filed by the faded eyes of elderly women, for products and devices they never imagined they would need and had no chance of ever possessing.

  We were snowed under by the timing of things. A balance we’d long maintained was upset, between waiting and having, privation and acquisition. Novelty no longer prompted diatribes or enthusiasm, ceased to haunt the imagination. It was our normal environment. Perhaps the very concept of “new” would vanish as the idea of progress had, or almost—such was our fate. We began to see unlimited possibilities in everything. Hearts, livers, kidneys, eyes, and skin were transferred from dead to living, ova from one uterus to another. Women of sixty gave birth, and face-lifts stopped time on faces. Mylène Demongeot, on TV, was the same lovely doll we’d seen in Be Beautiful but Shut Up, preserved intact since 1958.

  Our heads spun at the mere thought of cloning, babies carried in artificial wombs, brain implants, sex wearables, completely undifferentiated sexuality. We forgot that, at least for a time, these objects and behaviors would coexist with an older order of things.

  The ease of everything still left us briefly stunned and incited people to say of new objects on the market, “Very cool!”

  We foresaw that over a lifetime, unimaginable things would appear and people would get used to them, as they had done in so little time with the mobile phone, computer, iPod, and GPS. What disturbed us was the inability to picture our lifestyle in ten years’ time, or ourselves perfectly adapted to technologies yet unknown. (Someday, would we be able to see, imprinted on a person’s brain, everything they had done, said, seen, and heard?)

  We lived in a profusion of everything, objects, information, and “expert opinions.” No sooner had an event occurred than someone issued a reflection, whatever the subject: manners of conduct, the body, orgasm, and euthanasia. Everything was discussed and decrypted. Between “addiction,” “resilience,” and “grief work,” there were countless ways of transposing life and emotions into words. Depression, alcoholism, frigidity, anorexia, unhappy childhoods, nothing was lived in vain anymore. The communication of experience and fantasies was pleasing to the conscience. Collective introspection provided models for putting the self into words. The repertoire of shared knowledge grew. The mind grew more agile, children learned at a younger age, and the slowness of school drove young people to distraction. They texted on their mobiles full tilt.

  With all the intermingling of concepts, it was increasingly difficult to find a phrase of one’s own, the kind that, when silently repeated, helped one live.

  On the Internet all one needed do was enter a keyword and thousands of “sites” would leap on the screen. They delivered scraps of sentences and snatches of text that drew us toward other lucky finds in a thrilling treasure hunt. Real gems were thrown back into the infinity of things we hadn’t been looking for. It seemed as though we could seize knowledge whole, enter the multiplicity of views flung onto blogs in a new and brutal language. We could research the symptoms of throat cancer, recipes for moussaka, the age of Catherine Deneuve, the weather in Osaka, the growing of hydrangeas and cannabis, the Japanese influence on the development of China—play poker, record films and discs, buy anything from white mice and revolvers to Viagra and dildos, sell and resell them. Talk to strangers, insult and chat them up, invent a self. They were disembodied, voiceless, devoid of odor or gesture; they didn’t get under our skin. What mattered was what we could do with them, the law of exchange; pleasure. The great desire for power and impunity was fulfilled. We made our way around a world of objects without subjects. The Internet engineered the dazzling transformation of the world into discourse.

  The quick jump-click of the mouse on the screen was the measure of time.

  In less than two minutes, one could locate classmates from Camille Jullian high school in Bordeaux, second C2 class, 1980 to 1981, a song by Marie-Josée Neuville, an article from 1988 in L’Humanité. The web was the royal road for the remembrance of things past. Archives and all the old things that we’d never even imagined being able to find again arrived with no delay. Memory became inexhaustible, but the depth of time, its sensation conveyed through the odor and yellowing of paper, bent-back pages, paragraphs underscored in an unknown hand, had disappeared. Here we dwelled in the infinite present.

  We never stopped wanting to click on “save” and keep all the photos and films, viewable on the spot. Hundreds of images were scattered to the four winds of friendship, a new social use of photos. They were transferred and filed in seldom-opened folders on the computer. What mattered most was the taking of the photos, existence captured and duplicated, recorded as we were living it—cherry trees in bloom, a hotel room in Strasbourg, a baby minutes after birth, places, events, scenes, objects, the complete conservation of life. With digital technology, we drained reality dry.

  Our photographs and films—filed by date and viewed onscreen, one after the other without a pause—were pervaded by the light of a time that was unique, no matter how diverse the scenes and landscapes. Another form of past came into being, fluid, with little real memory content. There were too many images for us to stop at each and recall the circumstances in which they were taken. Inside them, we lived a near weightless, transfigured existence. The signs of our existence multiplied and put an end to the sensation of time marching on.

  It was strange to think that with DVDs and other media, later generations would know all the most intimate details of our daily lives: our gestures and ways of eating, speaking, and making love; our furniture and underwear. The obscurity of previous centuries would disappear forever, driven away by the camera on a tripod at the photographer’s studio, or the digital camera in the bedroom. We were resurrected ahead of time.

  And inside ourselves, we had a great, vague memory of the world. Of almost everything we retained little beyond a word, detail, or name that would later make us say, like Georges Perec, “I remember,” whether it concerned Baron Empain’s kidnapping, Picorette candies, Bérégovoy’s socks, Devaquet, the Falklands War, or the Benco breakfast. But these were not real memories. That was the name we gave them, but in fact they were something quite different: time markers.

  The media took charge of the process of memory and forgetting. It commemorated everything that could be commemorated, the appeal of Abbé Pierre, the deaths of Mitterrand and Marguerite 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.

  The moon, when we looked up at night, shone fixedly on billions of people, a world whose vastness and teeming activity we could feel inside. Consciousness stretched across the total space of the planet toward other galaxies. The infinite ceased to be imaginary. That is why it seemed inconceivable that one day we would die.

  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 explosions that paralyzed or deeply distressed us—“nothing will be as it was before” was the dominant theme—and then disappeared, forgotten, unresolved, and commemorated a year or even a month later, as if they were ancient history. There was April 21, the war in Iraq, which fortunately did not include us, and the death of John Paul II, another pope whose name we hadn’t retained, let alone his number, the bombing of the Atocha station, the great festive evening for the No vote in the European Constitution referendum, the incendiary nights of rioting in the banlieue, Florence Aubenas, the London terrorist attacks, the Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Saddam rooted out of a hole and hanged (no one knew when), nebulous epidemics, SARS, avian flu, the chikungunya virus. During the summer that brought the big heat wave, American soldiers were sent home in bags from Iraq, and little old men and women who died from the heat were stacked in refrigeration chambers at the Rungis market.

  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. Only the retired were satisfied, and sought advice on how to save and spend their money, traveled to Thailand, shopped on eBay, and visited Meetic online dating. Where could revolt come from?

  Of all the information we received daily, the most interesting, the kind that mattered most, concerned the next day’s weather. The rain-or-shine monitors in the RER stations displayed predictive, almanac-style knowledge that provided us with a daily reason to rejoice or lament, thanks to the surprising and yet invariable factor of weather, whose modification by human activity profoundly shocked us.