THOMAS

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Exteriors by Annie Ernaux (translated by Tanya Leslie) {Reviewed by THOMAS} I would like the work to be a non-work, I thought, though it was not exactly my thought or a new thought. I would like a literature that revealed as much as possible of what we call real life, that was as close as possible to real life, so close, perhaps that it cannot be distinguished from what we call real life. Is such a thing possible, I wondered, as I read Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, a book drawn from her journal entries over a period of seven years, entries in which she is attempting to exclude as much as possible of herself and of her past from her writing and, as much as this is possible, and her work is perhaps testing to what extent this is possible, to observe and record the actual particulars that present themselves to her as she travels on Métro or the RER after moving to a New Town just outside Paris, if it is the case that details are themselves active in their presentation, which is somehting of which I am not certain. “It is other people,” Ernaux writes, “who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us.” She cannot help but write some of her own thoughts, probably more than she knows or intends, which is not surprising, I thought, it is not that easy to excise yourself entirely, everything you notice points primarily to you who do the noticing. “(By choosing to write in the first person, I am laying myself open to criticism. … The third person is always somebody else. … ‘I’ shames the reader,)” she writes. Meticulously recording her observations gives Ernaux insight not just into the people she observes, their lives are mostly withheld from her, after all, there are only the moments, but, I thought, we exist in any case only in moments, but into the society, into the world, for which these particulars are what literary types might call text and what medical types might call symptoms. As Ernaux observes she observes herself being the kind of person who observes in the way that only she observes. “(I realise that I am forever combing reality for signs of literature,)” she says in an aside. “(Sitting opposite someone in the Métro, I often ask myself, ‘Why am I not that woman?’)” For Ernaux so-called real life is a text, but artless, raw. She observes the performative efforts of other people in public places, on public transport. “Contrary to a real theatre, members of the audience here avoid looking at the actors and affect not to hear their performance. Embarrassed to see real life making a spectacle of itself, and not the opposite.” The extent to which artifice can be removed is the extent to which, ultimately, our mostly unconscious responses to the external reveal something about ourselves. This is what it means to exist. “It is outside my own life that my past existence lies: in passengers commuting on the Métro or the RER; in shoppers glimpsed on escalators at Auchan or in the Galleries Lafayette; in complete strangers who cannot know that they possess part of my story; in faces and bodies which I shall never see again. In the same way, I myself, anonymous among the bustling crowds on streets and in department stores, must secretly play a role in the lives of others.” The purpose of art is to remove itself. Or to reduce itself. Just as the perfect crime is one so subtle that is never discovered, so it is with the perfect artwork, I thought, the perfect art ‘passes' as ordinary life. The work becomes a non-work. Well, I thought, I will write no more.