by
Annie Ernaux
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There are beings who are overwhelmed by the reality of others, their way of speaking, of crossing their legs, of lighting a cigarette. They become mired in the presence of others. One day, or rather one night, they are swept away inside the desire and the will of a single Other. Everything they believed about themselves vanishes. They dissolve and watch a reflection of themselves act, obey, swept into a course of events unknown. They trail behind the will of the Other, which is always one step ahead. They never catch up.
There is no submission, no consent, only the stupefaction of the real. All one can do is repeat this can't be happening to me' or 'it is me this is happening to, but in the event, 'me' is no longer, has already changed. All that remains is the Other, master of the situation, of every gesture and the moment to follow, which only he foresees.
Then the Other goes away. You have ceased to interest him. He abandons you with the real, for example a stained pair of underwear. All he cares about is his own time now, and you are alone with your habit of obeying, already hard to shake: alone in a time bereft of a master.
wow
Over ten years have passed, eleven summers that raise to fifty-five the number of years that have elapsed since the summer of '58, with wars, revolutions and explosions at nuclear power stations, all in the process of being forgotten.
The time that lies ahead of me grows shorter. There will inevitably be a last book, as there is always a last lover, a last spring, but no sign by which to know them. I am haunted by the idea that I could die without ever having written about 'the girl of '58', as I very soon began to call her. Someday there will be no one left to remember. What that girl and no other experienced will remain unexplained, will have been lived for no reason.
No other writing project seems to me as - I wouldn't say luminous, or new, and certainly not joyful, but vital: it allows me to rise above time. The thought of 'just enjoying life' is unbearable. Every moment lived without a writing project resembles the last.
I have still not stepped through the portico of the camp. I am making no progress in my attempt to capture the girl of 58. It is as if I wanted to 'build her profile as meticulously as possible, adding never-ending psychological and social determinants', too many strokes to the portrait, thus rendering it illegible, whereas I could summarize with: 'Good student from a religious school in the provinces, raised in a modest home, aspires to an intellectual, bourgeois-bohemian lifestyle. Or, to adopt the language of magazines, 'a girl raised in an environment empowering to her self-esteem,' or, another variant, 'a girl whose healthy narcissism has been allowed free exercise.' I do not know if the girl in the car on her way to camp would have recognized herself in these descriptions. They certainly do not reflect the way in which she expresses or thinks of herself, though the words of Sartre and Camus on freedom and revolt may do. [...]
[...] should I adopt the view of French society in 1958, which reduced a girl's entire worth to a question of 'conduct', and say that in her naivete and lack of guile she is pathetic, laying the entire blame at her feet? Must I, as of now, move back and forth between one historical vision and another, between 1958 and 2014? I dream of a sentence that would contain them both, seamlessly, by way of a new syntax.
Quite often I felt I was living out this passion in the same way I would have written a book: the same determination to get every single scene right, the same minute attention to detail. I could even accept the thought of dying providing I had lived this passion through to the very end—without actually def ining “to the very end”—in the same way I could die in a few months’ time after finishing this book.
IN FRONT OF people I knew, I tried not to betray my obsession by words, although to exercise such self-control continually is extremely taxing. At the hairdresser’s one day I saw a talkative woman to whom everyone had been speaking perfectly normally until she announced, her head tilted back over the basin: “I’m being treated for my nerves.” Immediately, the staff stiffened and addressed her with distant reserve, as if this irrepressible confession were proof of her insanity. I feared I would also be considered abnormal if I had said: “I’m having a passionate love affair.” Yet when I was among other women, at the supermarket checkout or at the bank, I wondered whether they too were wrapped up in a man. If they weren’t, how could they go on living this way—that is to say, judging by my previous standards, with nothing else to wait for but the weekend, a meal out, the gym class, or the children’s school results: things for which I now felt aversion or indifference.
(Am I the only woman to return to the scene of an abortion? Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.)
Now it’s April. Sometimes I wake up in the morning without immediately thinking of A. The prospect of rediscovering “life’s little pleasures”—meeting friends, going to the cinema, enjoying a good meal—has become less horrific. I am still in the age of passion (one day I will no longer be aware that I wasn’t thinking of A when I woke up) but it has changed, it has ceased to be continuous.6
Whether or not he was “worth it” is of no consequence. And the fact that all this is gradually slipping away from me, as if it concerned another woman, does not change this one truth: thanks to him, I was able to approach the frontier separating me from others, to the extent of actually believing that I could sometimes cross over it.
I measured time differently, with all my body.
I discovered what people are capable of, in other words, anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myself turned to them. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world.
When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.