It was considered more chic to serve pears in syrup than ripe from the tree. Food’s ‘digestibility’, vitamins, and ‘calorie count’ had started to matter. We marvelled at inventions that erased centuries of gestures and effort. Soon there would come a time, so it was said, when there’d be nothing left for us to do. 

– Annie Ernaux, The Years (2008)

 

Organised by a sequence of ekphrases that describe photographs of the author herself from childhood through to the present, The Years is Annie Ernaux’s compilation of histories personal, political, and cultural. By referring to herself in the third person, to the reader in the indefinite second person, and employing the collective pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’, Ernaux all but dissolves narrative centrality, a convention her fellow life-writer, Rachel Cusk, has described as stressful and aggressive. Through this formal erosion, Ernaux resists more broadly the Romantic tradition of the bildungsroman, wherein we see historical events collapse into the history of the individual. Instead, as Alice Blackburn astutely writes, The Years, “seems to want to grant access to [the] mute thickness of historical, collective time.” 

 

In my paper I wish to read The Years in terms of invention, and invention’s interaction with preservation, monumentalising, or maintenance. This seemingly dialectical relationship is straddled, I believe, through Ernaux’s method of inventorying human life. As she engages a multitude of forms (books, films, music, philosophy, advertisements, shopping lists, headlines, diary entries), Ernaux evokes and archives minute moments in the production of communal, quotidian experience.

How do we encode death if not by measurements of before and after, of finitude and disappearance.  Death is inscribed into history by words, art, burial, and the erection of memorials, after all, the threat of oblivion induces commemoration. The shape of death is ontologically both fixed and metaphysically abstract. It is one half of life’s binary, being and nothingness, one determined by realism and rationalism, and the other represented as abstraction and the unknown. William Blake’s artistic vision of humankind in the age of materialist progress against a backdrop of the dark, secularised industrial world, escorted us to the underworld with Virgil and Dante. The translation of death by western cultures and socialised religions, or Eastern spirituality contain complexities that hound or round on each other through theological and philosophical circuits. This paper investigates ways of understanding and seeing the transition of human life, death and the enigma of the afterlife through the visual image, and how art helps us come to terms with the inevitability of mortality, as well as understanding the transcendental passages we use to tap into the aura of death.