Stuck in the present
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on September 6, 2023.
I’m having a love affair with Annie Ernaux who, at 81, was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. Not just because the idea of recognition at that age in other than a eulogy at one’s funeral is sweet, but also because she stoutly defends the need for history that hews as closely as possible to personal reality – a specific body in a specific time and place having specific experiences, shared as nakedly as possible. I am a person who has lived through massive social change – from going to a one-room school on horseback to being bewildered by cyberspace – and I often feel that from whence I came is of little interest or importance, that wanting to share that reality is nothing other than aged self-indulgence.
Annie thinks differently: she thinks that if we do not acknowledge our history, we are unable to hold hope for the future. That makes sense: it’s hard to figure out what to aim for if you don’t know what’s at your back. Annie says that current technology imprisons us in the present – which is another way of expressing the scourge of constant surveillance, of being addicted to your devices, of porous or non-existent boundaries between work and life – in sum, of not having time to gather your thoughts. She doesn’t think technology is bad, but that it is a societal mutation in process that we don’t yet know how it will end. And without history as a foundation on which to stand, we are unable to articulate a preferred end and to act to make that happen. And in this sense of impotence lies the angst and anger that surrounds us.
That’s a sad story, particularly if it rings true.
Here’s how it rings true for me. I do not understand much of the language my grandchildren speak. It’s English, but rooted in an on-line reality about which I know nothing. And even when they explain (and manage not to roll their eyes or sound too condescending), I don’t really understand. I don’t get what it’s all about. Just like they don’t get what my life is all about. So we commune – if you can call it that – across a great cultural divide. A larger gap, I think, than the generational divide that the Boomers went on about when they were fledging into the real world. We did understand enough about our parents’ reality to be clear about what we wanted to change. We definitely had goals (make love not war; Leary’s ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’; King’s ‘I have a dream’), not that we were particularly effective at achieving them.
I worry that where there is no shared culture – when my grandchildren do not know my world, nor me theirs – and with inadequate common language with which to communicate, we cannot create inter-generational community. We cannot join together to do what needs to be done. Perhaps we cannot even agree on what needs to be done, or parse our weaknesses and strengths enough to divvy up a massive job and beaver away, each in our own way, at getting it done. Greta Thunberg et al complain that we adults are not doing what we need to do, and that they are not powerful enough to stem ecological despair and destruction. And they’re right! But how to do better?
Annie Ernaux’s contribution is to write her personal history, which she absolutely acknowledges is political (in the sense of reflecting the power dynamics of the experiences she writes about), as ‘flat’ as she can. Flat means digging deep and bravely for the truth of the experience, being open to discovering what you did not know, writing it without the dilution of niceness, of sentimentality (feelings that are exterior to the experience), of metaphor and comparison. The facts, ma’am, just the facts.
Annie has been a diarist for as long as she can remember. Her journals (if you believe, as I do, that diaries are about what happened, and journals are about what you think/feel about what happened, this is the right word, and in any case, the French word for diaries) are her raw materials. She mines them to find out who she is, the ‘persistence of the person’ through changing times. She uses the instrument of memory, aided by her journals as true, in-the-moment records of reality, to claim time. To escape presentism. To see from whence she came so as to set goals for where she’s going. She believes, as do I, that you need a memory of the past to engage with the present and have hope for the future.
Recollection, if truthfully rendered, is not the meanderings of an irrelevant person, but the foundation on which we can build community to save our world. Check out Annie Ernaux on YouTube to delve further.
