#19: Years and Years
It's not only the personal that's political
I’m going to the theatre tonight, to join my friend’s family for what promises to be a very festive production of Waiting for Godot. So it feels time to finally cover some stage work in this year’s roundup.
Ahead of seeing the adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s The Years at the Almeida Theatre, I finally read the book. It has lost out a couple of times in votes for my book club, but I own it, have seen her speak and even published a guest post on her work for a previous Critmas, so it felt ridiculous that I hadn’t got round to it yet. Best described as a collective biography, The Years uses the first person plural to describe France’s move from post-war to turn-of-the-millennium, the ‘we’ drawing heavily from Ernaux’s experience moving from her ordinary working-class roots and familial expectations, through the academy and out of her marriage in her 40s.
Even though it’s a memoir, there is no ‘I’ and the dominant force in the book isn’t Annie, but Mitterand. Life in France is framed as being pre-M and post-M, which makes sense given his 14 years as President from 1981-1995. That his presidency coincided with Reagan and Thatcher’s right wing dominance in the US and UK is notable, but beyond the scope of this book, which is resolutely local, as most people often are.
Of course, someone like Ernaux is the exception that proves the rule, and her travels through life (including, which gave the former Hendon resident in me deep joy, a stint in Finchley as an au pair) are unusual for a woman of her birth and age. Despite this, the ‘we’ is still interesting and is used to point to cultural assumptions held, around Catholicism being the only way, about settling down early and the number of her cohort’s miraculously large and healthy ‘premature’ babies who seemed to pop out six months after their parents’ wedding. Immigration and elections feature in the book, which is deftly political and personal, with the characteristically unconvuluted prose that makes Ernaux’s writing so easy to get through. The sentences are not there to catch you out — and as we move through the years with this generation, we find ourselves in the company of the opposite of a know-it-all policy bro. If you are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with this microgenre of person, it’s the sort of bore who doesn’t realise that there are many ways into having political views, and just because people don’t brandish the findings of a graph in the FT at all times (nor take it as gospel), doesn’t mean they’re uninformed. Sometimes, they just want to talk about something else, in a different register.
When the action moved to the stage, though, something was missing. The Years on stage, which is transferring to the West End in the new year and will probably be the last big success of Rupert Goold’s tenure as Artistic Director of the Almeida, is performed by five women, each representing a different portion of Ernaux’s life. It’s a composite of a few of Ernaux’s volumes — her abortion as a 1963 student of Happening and the affair of Simple Passion are included too — but best to start with the copy for the play as per the Harold Pinter Theatre website:
Based on Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s fearless masterpiece, five actors create an unapologetic portrait of a woman shaped by her rapidly-changing world.
‘Memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.’
She strikes a pose and the camera shutter clicks: a child playing in the debris of the Second World War. Click. A student discovering parties and men’s bodies. Click. An activist fighting for the right to choose. Click. A wife picking out a velvet sofa. Click. A mother taking her eldest to judo. Click. A lover seducing a younger man. Click. A grandmother presenting her granddaughter to the camera. Click.
Which I think tells the story. The thing is, while it is more immediate, and I absolutely appreciate that theatre is a corporeal form, to reduce the politics in The Years to ‘things that happened to my woman’s body’ is to reaffirm where women sit in the public sphere. I think it is telling and interesting that in The Years, we don’t learn about the ‘I’ of Ernaux’s illicit termination, nor her frenzied affair with a Russian man in early 90s Paris, interesting (refreshingly diabolical) though it is to read her wondering if she had got HIV off him, then maybe she would be left with something from her lover. As a memoirist, she’s not afraid to delve into these topics, so their exclusion in her 2008 book must be a deliberate choice to focus the lens elsewhere.
In the play, the 1968 student movement is one weed-laced party with ashtrays, wine bottles, and strokings of other people’s bodies while you lie down on the floor, heady with your own youth. It is kind of mad to me that it would be distilled to this — as it’s portrayed in the book, and from my own understanding of the time, it felt like a lot of things were being put on the table and were up for grabs. And yes, some of the stuff was lofty: when I was editing my university’s student paper, we had a history student come in to look at the archives from that period to see how the goings on in France had affected students in the UK. Economics students pushed hard, and eventually succeeded, to get a Social Sciences Tripos (undergrad course) available at Cambridge — Sociology was real and it was here to stay! But it reflected a desire to change the framing of things, in order to change the things themselves: without a rigorous critique of society and its assumptions, how can you overturn centuries of the status quo? Even if you accept that 1968 was not for or about everyone, it was certainly a little more than the reading of bad poetry at a party.
When we say that the personal is the political, that’s not to say that only talking about the personal makes up for avoiding the wider political context. The contraceptive pill revolutionised the ways in which people had sex. In some narratives, just showing a character get a new prescription would tell us enough about her hopes and fears. But when you are adapting The Years, a project that is explicitly ambitious about tying the individual concerns and habits of a generation together to try and say something bigger and broader about it all, but not in the same way that an academic male historian might, in a new genre and form, that’s not enough. In fact, it quite misunderstands the source material’s avowed intent.
My friend saw the show and didn’t like it and now it will be an uphill struggle to get her to read the book (on the off-chance you are reading this, A, please give it a try next year! it is pretty landmark). I get it: if my understanding of The Years was via the stage show, it would tell me it’s a not unwanted exploration of a woman coming into her own body and desires, long after society tells us we are past our prime. Which is fine, but would make me wonder what was so surprising and distinctive about this book in particular, versus Simple Passion, for instance, that means people describe Ernaux’s project is formally noteworthy. I get that it is hard to portray history on stage without becoming didactic or boring if you don’t have song to propel the action. It is easier instead to navigate a newly-formed adolescent interest in masturbation, as well as the physical toll of a backstreet abortion, but it does make me wonder why this book of Ernaux’s was chosen as the best candidate for theatrical adaptation.
A note on something from yesterday’s post: if you’re interested, this list of the best-selling albums in the 2000s shows an interesting array of musical output that was huge on landing, versus slower burns (like Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black). I apologise to my friends last night who I said were wrong for suggesting David Gray hadn’t sold over 2 million copies, and am relieved to see that Eminem did make it and The Killers’ Hot Fuss seems to have been only a little bit shy. I kicked off my day by listening to Gray’s ‘Babylon’ — which absolutely still goes off.
I think something that the Almeida could have highlighted more is that it is in fact an adaptation of several of her books - not just The Years.