Exteriors: Annie Ernaux

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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.’ Many people go to Ernaux for passion, relationships and the human condition, so Exteriors feels slightly out of sync with her other work. It’s no less worthy, and sees the writer step out of the often claustrophobic, interior world of her interpersonal relationships and into the outside world. Ernaux offers us a glimpse into spaces that intersect with her own life: dentist’s waiting rooms, hypermarkets, train stations, all presented as lyrical snapshots. Reading it reminds me of Natalia Ginzburg’s writing about objects, or Maeve Brennan’s encounters with public spaces in New York. 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. Exteriors" also gives us a look into Ernaux's writing process, and the way literature so completely engages her mind — something I found both enviable and amusing. Graffiti plays an important role throughout the text. Of course, there’s something bleak about a new town already vandalized, but it also signifies verve and humanity. Ernaux does a marvelous job balancing the two and showing that blemishes are a part of life, and should be appreciated as such: “On the walls of the railroad station in Cergy, after the October riots, one could read: ALGERIA I LOVE YOU, with blood-red flowers between ‘Algeria’ and ‘I.’”

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.All this – the suffering and anxiety of waiting, the brief soulagement of lovemaking, the lethargy and fatigue that follow, the renewal of desire, the little indignities and abjections of both obsession and abandonment – Ernaux tells with calm, almost tranquillized matter-of-factness [that] feels like determination, truth to self, clarity of purpose.’

anonymous figures glimpsed in the Métro or in waiting rooms . . . who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us." To commute is to travel regularly, to follow the same route, and this is what Elkin—and, to a lesser extent, Ernaux—has decided or feels compelled to do. Elkin maps the 91 and 92 busses, Ernaux her new town; Exteriors, too, opens with public transit, though not on a bus but in the parking lot of an RER station. The Réseau Express Régional is the transit system that serves Paris and its suburbs. Cergy-Pontoise, where Ernaux lives, was established as a commuter’s town in the mid-1970s. The town forms the terminus (or perhaps the origin) of two RER lines. On the wall of a parking lot, Ernaux reads the graffitied “INSANITY.” That evening, she drives along the “gaping trench excavated to extend the RER,” feeling as if she is “riding towards the sun.”If Annie Ernaux were a lesser memoirist, it would be easier to lay out the bare facts of her life. She was born in Normandy in 1940, to parents who worked in factories in Lillebonne before moving to Yvetot to run a café-épicerie, but for a reader it is much easier to remember that they sold hazelnut milk chocolate but no whisky. Her parents had another daughter, Ginette, who died of diphtheria at the age of six, before Ernaux was born. Annie was sent to a private Catholic school, where she was often top of the class. She went to train as a teacher in Rouen, abandoning her studies when she realised her heart wasn’t in it. She then spent six months as an au pair in Finchley, before heading to Bordeaux to work on a PhD on Marivaux. She had an abortion when she was a student, when it was still illegal in France. At university, she met Philippe Ernaux, got married, and had two boys, Eric and David. She returned to teaching, working for 23 years at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance, a sort of French Open University. The family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a new town on the end of the RER A, on the north-west edge of Paris. Her father died in 1967 after a short illness. She wrote while her children napped, once the teaching and housework were done. One of the key observations, which Ernaux makes in the introduction, is that for twenty years she has lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town forty kilometres outside Paris. It is a “place bereft of memories”, widely spread and with undefined boundaries. A no-man’s land. This made her listen closely to the conversations on the trains and in the supermarkets. Her attempt to convey the reality of an epoch. The most interesting moments are the contempt a customer shows for a cashier, or the interactions with a man begging for money. I realise that there are two ways of dealing with real facts. One can either relate them in detail, exposing their stark, immediate nature, outside of any narrative form, or else save them for future reference, ‘making use’ of them by incorporating them into an ensemble (a novel, for instance). Fragments of writing, like the ones in this book, arouse in me a feeling of frustration. I need to become involved in a lengthy, structured process (unaffected by chance events and meetings). Yet at the same time I have this need to record scenes glimpsed on the RER, and people’s words and gestures simply for their own sake, without any ulterior motive. 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. 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::