Annie Ernaux’s piece, Diary 1988, opens with a preface. In high school, my English teacher told me to never, ever preface anything, writing or otherwise. Ernaux’s preface serves to be a kind of retrospective defense of her diary. Maybe that’s what all prefaces are. She shares that she had already published a book detailing her passionate love affair with S. but the book was written only after S. left France. The writing in her diaries, recorded during the love affair and contained within these diary entries presents a different “truth” than the book: “something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation.” I haven’t read the book, critically and maybe fatally.
The preface concludes: “words are set down on paper to capture the thoughts and sensations of any given moment as irreversible as time – are time itself.” Words, on paper, as time, is an interesting idea. In demanding translation from thought to page, from sensation to sensibility, words give form to feelings and experiences only after they have been distanced from the experience. Possibly, the distance between the moment and its being captured on a page, to be made into something legible, foreclose the capacity for words to be time itself. The very idea that thoughts and sensations of a given moment can be captured, in words on a page, illustrate a central conflict of Ernaux, which is constituted by having been caught. What is it about the gaze of others, their hand around our waist or throat, that makes us more certain we are real? Ernaux’s assertion that words that capture sensation are irreversible presumes a linearity of time that stands in direct contrast to memory’s (and history’s) mutability. Every time a memory is called to mind, a sentence is reread, it possesses the capacity to be changed in or by one’s mind. Which is not to say that it is changed, necessarily, or that it is impossible to believe that what is being felt is that same as what was felt at the time of its transcription. But even the best writing can only ever be that – a retrospective, grasping wildly at what is incomprehensibly rich about experience.
I love him, I love him not, says the Disney princess with her butter eyes half shut, plucking petals off of a wilting flower. This image brings me to this point: romance is terrifying because it promises and does not promise all at once. Its condition of possibility is faith and trust. Romance is dialectic, which makes it also precarious – its existence precipitates its nonexistence. What could be more terrifying than that?
Ernaux writes, on Thursday, September 29, “I want perfection in love, as, I believe, I attained a kind of perfection in writing… That can only happen through giving, while throwing all caution to the wind.” Ernaux desires from love what she feels she has attained from writing: perfection, or some “kind” of it. She believes it is possible, only “through giving,” though she withholds what, exactly, she plans to give and whether this giving will be a giving up or a giving away. We learn as we keep reading that Ernaux gives her time, her attention, and her desire away to S. In some ways, she gives her dignity, though I would argue not to S. And in exchange for giving, Ernaux desires to be kept; she asks, “How do I go about this so that my attachment doesn’t show too quickly and so that the difficulty of keeping me becomes apparent to him, at least once in a while?” She wants to be kept, but only alongside the recognition that her keeping is precarious, that her fascination with him doesn’t equate to codependence.
So much of romance reads like blind fascination. It is the opposite, I think, of writing. It is often illegible, its boundaries unclear or maybe just moving. What to do with this desire? Ernaux asks, constructing desire as something that needs an action or a place to be deposited, lest it eat her alive or, worse yet, rot away. Ernaux writes romance as the ravenous thumbing through a cabinet, an objectless desire to be attached to the foremost and shiniest bag of chips she encounters.
It is curious to me that Ernaux quotes a song by Édith Pilaf that uses the word adorer, adore, as Ernaux’s desire rarely feels like an expression of adoration. Adore connotes love and respect. Ernaux’s desire, in constraint, is hungry. Ernaux writes immediately after the quote, “The longer I live, the more I abandon myself to love.” Again, we encounter giving away, expressed by the word “abandon,” only this time the gift (herself) and the recipient (love) is specified. It is worth asking, I think, what to make of Ernaux’s pivot to love, to demand an answer of Ernaux: is this love, do you really think so, and, if so, why does it hurt so much?
It occurred to me tonight, with extreme clarity, standing next to a beach where we used to trespass at night (I did not trespass tonight) that what we had was certainly love, and that the important question is not whether what we had was love but at what cost did we have it?
Maybe Ernaux is wary to write the word love as it relates to S. because that would mark her as having it for him. Navigating the boundary between love and desire is an arduous task, particularly when it requires one to think critically about why they desire what they desire. Proceed with caution, as desire, so often raw, unprompted, and deeply sensual, can really hurt to understand. A few entries later, we encounter Ernaux playing again with how love might integrate her relation to S.: “He said ‘my love’ once but will not say ‘I love you,’ and that which remains unsaid does not exist.” If that which remains unsaid does not exist, then what of that that remains unsaid but is projected into a diary entry, published in a literary journal thirty years later for the world to read? In Ernaux’s own words, what she writes is irreversible, stamped by permanence in its having been written down in the moment. This line brought to mind the line from Taylor’s Swift’s “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version)”: “And I was thinking on the drive down, any time now / He's gonna say it's love, you never called it what it was.” While Ernaux’s statement plausibly denies what is unspoken as being possibly real, Swift writes that it was love, in spite of or despite (or maybe, to spite) “him” never calling “it” that. What do we make of these two women, both consumed by what is not being said?
When Ernaux later writes, on Thursday, November 24,
“Today’s disappointments:
He still hasn’t said the tender things I’ve been waiting for.
After the France-USSR association event, he left with the girls from the embassy without driving me back to Cergy.
And I realize that my article on the Revolution is appallingly bad. Sleep, yes.
And I’m already wondering (but with revulsion), When will he call?”
The metamorphosis of Ernaux’s “desire” to an object of revulsion marks Ernaux by her attachment, whereby her desire becomes more appropriately classified as compulsion. (How do we draw a line between desire and compulsion, if we wanted to? Does it feel good, even, to desire?) Her day is marked by lack: lack of the tender things she waits for him to say. Marked by waiting – waiting for the words, waiting for his call.
Is it possible to give ourselves to love, or anything else? Or do we simply relinquish one self for another? Or perhaps that self was inside us the whole time. The following day, Ernaux lights “candles in church for success in love” then goes to a book store and buys two books about sex. She uses cash “so no one will know [her] name.” She will read the books in private. In spite of her meticulous writing, recording the contours of her desires and their deformation, what is real or true becomes confused. Writing doesn’t really bear the promise of certainty that she presumed of it in the preface, embodying time. Writing becomes a way of filling her time and marking it, but not in a way that makes sense of time. To make time make sense, as in experiencing time as a sensory experience, would foreclose writing as a way of recording it. Writing takes time, and recording events exists on the timeline of writing and not on the proper timeline of events. It always comes back to that distance, the variable between the event and its transcription.
Ernaux affirms this when she writes in her last entry: “Admit it: I’ve never wanted anything but love. And literature. I only wrote to fill the void, to give myself a way to tell and endure the memory of ‘58, the abortion, the parents’ love.” If writing is to fill a void, it becomes a provisional way of managing the past. Ernaux uses writing to manage her present and past: to take up the space between romance and to attempt to transmute her desire into love. Can writing be time itself when it is deployed primarily as a means of escape?