Nan Goldin - "Risé and Monty Kissing, NYC' From the series 'Ballad of Sexual Dependency" (1988)
This is a slight Ernaux collection, made up of pieces written over the last few decades, including political writings and some fiction. It's not particularly galvanizing, but there are a few pieces that shine.
The first one is entitled "Hôtel Casanova" and recounts an affair Ernaux had with a married man as her mother's health deteriorated. Their trysts took place at a local hotel. Reading this piece made me realize why I love the way Ernaux writes about sex and desire.
When a woman writes about sex, she is often confronted with a double-bind. On the one hand, if she is too honest, she can be accused of exhibitionism and attention-seeking. On the other hand, if she is not honest enough—if she lets shame or embarrassment limit her language—she betrays her own erotic experience.
There is another issue, and that is what audience a woman is writing for. There are women who write about sex with the intent to arouse a male reader. Writing like this leaves me cold and alienated.
Then, there are women, like Ernaux, who write for a female reader. The difference is stark. It is the difference between self-objectification and making oneself a living, breathing subject.
Ernaux does not always portray herself in a flattering or empowering light. She is neither male fantasy nor feminist role model. She is willing to be ravenous, aching, and unraveled by her desire for a man. She has the "blood of longing" on her lips, to quote C.P. Cavafy.
For instance, Ernaux candidly describes masturbating while fantasizing about the man before they meet at the hotel. After their encounter, she makes note of her semen-encrusted hair. Not all women would share these details, but Ernaux understands their power. The female reader might locate herself in these moments—her own fantasies, her own encounters.
But later that night, to my surprise, I felt a violent urge to make myself come while thinking of him.
Ernaux is not just writing about the mechanics of sex. She knows that sex is always about more than just sex. She is writing about the unbridled hunger that drives her to the man in the hotel room. Why she keeps going back. Why she needs him. What she is escaping when she has sex with him.
Over the spring of that year, as my mother’s state inexorably declined, I made love like a madwoman with P. at the same hotel where we had gone the first time, the Hôtel Casanova.
[...]
In these rooms, I sometimes thought of my mother. It seems to me that I needed to come in order to bear the image of her shrunken body, her soiled underwear. That I needed to go as far as possible in the exhaustion of pleasure, to the point of dereliction through sweat and semen to erase—or perhaps attain—her own state of dereliction.
Ernaux makes love to the man because it blots out the horror of watching her mother's body fall apart. This is not a sexual encounter that is neutral, and her writing about it is not meant for titillation. This is a a terrified woman confronting illness and mortality.
She rushes into the arms of this man as a way to escape death. She surrenders to the pleasure and transcendence of the orgasm—that brief gush of euphoria that is both of the body and seems to liberate one from the body.
In another piece, called "Literature and Politics," Ernaux writes about the connection between writing and society. She has never endorsed the view that writing is apolitical. In fact, she believes the opposite. I was quite moved by what she shares about the way literature can shape our inner worlds and affect society at large:
I’ve never ceased to feel this connection between the act of writing and injustice in the world, and I believe that literature can help to change society, as political action can, albeit in a different way. It cannot put an end to war, give work to the unemployed, and ensure that the children of La Courneuve have as bright a future as those of Neuilly; the effect is never immediate. Over the long term, it can permeate the imagination of readers and make them more sensitive to realities of which they were unaware, or bring them to see in a different light things they have always viewed from the same perspective; it can enable them to say (first of all to themselves) what they have never said before.
[...]
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”: This phrase of Rousseau’s continues to burn brightly for many people. It is a phrase whose extreme beauty is inseparable from its meaning. It does not appear to be literature, yet it is literature, in the highest sense of the word: that of putting all the resources of art into the desire to express and transform the world.
And finally, there is "From the Other Side of the Century," her profile of Jeanne Calment, who was the oldest living person in the world. Ernaux captures a feeling that I've been grappling with as I get older, this sense that the past I lived so viscerally and that once was so alive is now a relic, something that only exists in my memory.
In just a few years, I’ve seen us become historical figures, dated, people of another century. Summer of ’42 and Summer of ’80 will belong to the time-before, to prehistory. The disappearance of the franc will quickly make anachronisms of us. To say “I earned ten thousand francs” will be enough to slot us away in a bygone era, like nobles of the nineteenth century who still counted in écus. In books, there will be footnotes to explain the value of francs. We will feel as if we’d lived our youth in another galaxy.
[...]
But what unites us the most, perhaps, are sensations that we’d have never thought to define because they were our way of living at the time we felt them. That slowness and silence that prevailed in the fifties, when we were still living in the scarcity of things; the way of speaking from the seventies that burst forth everywhere, in classrooms, on walls; debate as a way of life and that sense of a “new world” we experienced on those evenings in the Ardèche as we sat around a campfire and a guitar player, while the children were allowed to do anything they wanted. And then, the harshness of the eighties, the strange acceptance of things as they were, contained in the withdrawn silence that greeted the terrible voice of exclusion every day in the Métro. Soon, images and words that were in everyone’s heads will no longer mean anything to anyone.
"We will feel as if we'd lived our youth in another galaxy." I certainly feel that way as a millennial. I never expected it, though. I took for granted that life would remain coherent, that how things once were is how they would continue. You don't understand such a dramatic, dislocating shift until you live it yourself.
"Soon, images and words that were in everyone's heads will no longer mean anything to anyone." The truth of that sentence is staggering. It's already happening, as new algorithmic feeds splinter time and rewrite history. The collective past seems remote. The future has never felt more uncertain and immaterial.
Hotel Casanova and other brief texts is written by Annie Ernaux and translated by Alison L. Strayer.
It is published by Seven Stories Press.