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Reference to the self is ubiquitous in contemporary culture. But what is the self? Is it discovered or created? To what degree is it shaped by external forces and to what degree is it subject to internal control? How do the stories we tell about ourselves shape our identity? To what extent is it valid to invoke ideas of truth, sincerity, and authenticity in relation to the self? What kinds of self does literature delineate?
These are some of the questions we will be asking in this UCL podcast. In each episode, a literary scholar and a philosopher ponder how present-day literary representations of the self relate to what philosophers have to say about it. The literary focus of the first season is Outline, by Rachel Cusk; the literary focus of the second is The Years, by Annie Ernaux. In each episode, chapters or sections of these books are discussed alongside a relevant intervention in philosophy.
Scarlett Baron: Hello Everybody. Welcome back to Selfy Stories. The podcast in which we consider what the self is, or is commonly taken to be, by considering some of the answers provided by philosophy and literature. I’m Scarlett Baron, an Associate Professor in the English Department at University College London.
Alice Harberd: And I’m Alice Harberd, a PhD student in the Philosophy Department, also at University College London.
Scarlett Baron: Reference to the self is ubiquitous in contemporary culture. But what do we mean when we invoke this nebulous, intangible entity?
Alice Harberd: Is the self fixed or fluid?
Scarlett Baron: How do we account for experiences of personal change over time?
Alice Harberd: Is there such a thing as an authentic or true self?
Scarlett Baron: How do the stories we tell about ourselves shape our identity?
Alice Harberd: And how differently do literature and philosophy raise and answer these questions?
Scarlett Baron: Is our identity something we choose, something we discover or a bit of both?
Alice Harberd: These are some of the questions we will be broaching in this podcast.
Scarlett Baron: As listeners may be aware, we devoted the first five episodes of Selfy Stories, Season 1, as we now like to call them, to a series of conversations anchored in the rich literary soil of Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline. In each episode, we discussed a particular philosophical text and tested its claims against the situations, stories and narrative techniques readers encounter in Cusk’s book, trying, all the while, to raise and ponder key questions surrounding the notion and the experience of selfhood in the 21st century.
Alice Harberd: In Season 2, we’re going to be pursuing these investigations by turning our attention to a book by the French author Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022 for ‘the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory’. Ernaux published The Years, which is widely considered to be her magnum opus, in 2008. In it, Annie Ernaux splices memoir and sociology, not so much to explore her own identity, as to capture the collective experience of a generation and delineate some of the complicated, mutually forming and reforming relations between self and society, displaying and scrutinising the processes by which public discourse and private discourses intersect within the individual life.
Scarlett Baron: A brief word at this point about our choice of works. Clearly, there are many differences of nationality, generation, social class, familial situation between our two authors. But there are also many suggestive convergences, and these have a great deal to do with our selection of their works. Rachel Cusk has, in fact, written a moving essay about Annie Ernaux. Published in the New York Times in May 2023, the piece expresses her deep admiration for Ernaux and what she calls her vocational objectivity. Cusk emphasises the difficulty, or rather the brutality to quote her precisely, of the self examination to which Ernaux submits herself. ‘Her art’, writes Cusk, ‘bears no relation to a privileging of personal experience. On the contrary, it is almost a self violation. How’, she marvels, ‘had she managed to be so daring, so candid, so autonomous, so free?’ Perhaps we’ll have reason over the next five episodes to reflect on the ways in which Cusk’s and Ernaux’s methods of self scrutiny converge and diverge.
Alice Harberd: As in Season 1, we’ll be focusing on a particular philosophical text in each episode of Season 2.
Scarlett Baron: This will allow us to progress from the Philosophical Story, Level 1, to the Literary Story, Level 2, to the Interdisciplinary Story, Level 3.
Alice Harberd: Today, we’re going to be focusing on a chapter by Karl Maton dedicated to the presentation of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, which can be found in a collection of essays edited by Michael Grenfell and entitled Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts from 2012. We’ll be discussing this chapter alongside the opening of The Years, Pages X to 51 in the Fitzcarraldo Edition.
Scarlett Baron: And I’m delighted to be able to say that we have a special guest for the first time in the studio today to help us summarise Maton’s chapter and make sense of Bourdieu’s notion. That guest is Clare Carlisle, Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. Clare is the author of eight books, including a book on habit and philosophical biographies of Kierkegaard and George Eliot. These biographies and Clare’s 2024 Gifford Lectures, soon to be published by Fitzcarraldo as Transcendence for Beginners, explore life writing as a medium for philosophy, which makes her a rare practitioner of the kind of interdisciplinary thinking this podcast exists to explore and promote. We’re extremely lucky to count Clare among the regular participants in our Philosophy and Literature Reading Group and very grateful to her for being willing to join us in the UCL studio today to introduce our philosophy text and chat about it with us.
Alice Harberd: Clare, welcome to Selfy Stories.
Clare Carlisle: Hi, Alice. Hi, Scarlett.
Alice Harberd: Clare, are you ready to guide us through Level 1, the philosophical story, and tell us about Maton’s exposition of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus?
Clare Carlisle: Yes, I am. This chapter by Karl Maton is an introductory text, so it very helpfully explains Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Now, Pierre Bourdieu was a sociologist, but his way of doing sociology is very philosophical, and this concept of habitus draws on theories of habit in the history of European philosophy from pre-modern thinkers like Aristotle and Aquinas to modern thinkers like Hegel and Husserl. So there’s quite a complex history to this concept. That’s part of what Maton outlines in the chapter. Maton does give his own view, I think, in emphasising that relation is the essence of habitus, and by foregrounding the way the concept is supposed to advance our way of thinking about familiar dualisms. For example, the dualism between the individual and the collective, which must be a big question for sociologists, but also between the mind and the body, between freedom and determinism, between subjectivity and objectivity and also, perhaps crucially, between the idea of an inward disposition and external behaviour. Maybe unhelpfully, Bourdieu uses this Latin word to describe his concept, habitus. But it is quite helpful to think about the concept of habit, which we’re all familiar with, just to get a handle on what habitus means for Bourdieu. Now, this word habit can refer either to someone’s pattern of behaviour. So you might say I have a habit of speaking in a certain way, for example, or habit of drinking. So it can refer to a pattern of behaviour, but it can also refer to an inward disposition that is inferred from that behaviour. And in the second, we see the habit as the cause of the behaviour. So we would say that this person acts out of habit. If you say why are you doing that, you might say, well, oh, it’s just my habit. It’s due to habit. So habit does have this double meaning, and Bourdieu understands habitus, in that second sense, as an unseen disposition that is productive that’s generative of certain external, repeated behaviours. Now, those observable behaviours themselves are what Bourdieu calls practises, which is another key concept for Bourdieu. He wrote a book about that concept of practise called Outline for a Theory of Practice. So that’s some background to the concept of habitus. It’s a collective disposition, which practices, produces certain kinds of behaviours. Now, disposition is actually, as philosophers will know, quite a tricky metaphysical concept. We might infer the existence of a disposition from what can be empirically observed, but a disposition can’t itself be empirically observed. It’s this idea of some kind of inner state or inner principle, but it’s not like you can cut the person open and see the disposition. We just assume it’s there because it’s an explanatory postulate, really, for these repeated behaviours, but it would be a disputed concept. Some philosophers would want to have a more behaviourist view. You might not want to suppose that there’s anything inward or anything underlying the disposition. But for Bourdieu, that’s what a habitus is. A collective disposition. Another really important feature of it is this is extremely durable. Now, when we think about habits, ordinary habits, some habits will be quite easy to change, and some will be very difficult. So in the case of ordinary habit, there’s a real spectrum from the more or less durable and entrenched. Whereas for Bourdieu, habitus is extremely durable, not least because it’s collective. It’s something that a whole group of people share, and that makes it really entrenched. I mean, think about the way that we pick up habits from other people, contagious ways of speaking or other people we spend time with. So habit, because it’s collective, it just continually reinforces itself through that shared character. And also, another reason why it’s durable is because it is unseen. It’s something that’s underlying. It’s non-explicit. That’s a theoretical challenge, but it’s also a practical challenge because how can you change something if it’s not even apparent that it exists in the first place. And just to think about what’s Bourdieu doing with this concept of habit. I mean, it’s a habit that he uses in his sociological analysis, but it has a critical purpose. He’s using this concept to critique certain ways of thinking, and his key target here is liberalism. The ideology of free individuals who choose what they say and do. And perhaps that idea of a free or rational agent is also recognisable for many readers of a lot of contemporary analytic philosophy. There’s a free, rational agent posited, whereas for Bourdieu, this idea of a collective disposition would really, certainly problematise the idea that individuals are free. They’re much more the product of their milieu. Their actions are going to be shaped by shared practises, which are, in turn, generated by this underlying habitus. I guess more anecdotally, Bourdieu was interested in criticising the myth of meritocracy in France, which was perhaps tied to that liberal ideology. And that’s an interesting feature of his work that reflects his own working class, provincial background, actually not unlike Annie Ernaux. He had this working class, provincial background, and he then entered the elite education system in Paris. And so his experience of moving from one social world to another, perhaps from one habitus to another, it really shaped his thinking, but he was also wanting to critique that idea of meritocracy, social mobility and to say that it’s much more difficult for individuals to move from one habitus to another.
Alice Harberd: Thank you, Clare. That was so interesting. I’m full of questions, and I want to start by picking up on what you just said about Pierre Bourdieu himself moving perhaps from one habitus to another. Because one thing that he seems to think about habitus is that it’s natural for individuals to make choices that align with their habitus, and yet, he himself seems to have done the opposite. And I’m just wondering if there’s anything in his theory that explains why it is that sometimes people- despite the fact that his theory, generally speaking, seems to predict that we’ll fall in line with our habitus, why it is that for some individuals, they, in fact, do the opposite.
Clare Carlisle: Well, so that would be the idea that even if you are turning against a particular culture, you’re still determined by it. I suppose it’s like a rebellious teenager who rejects everything his or her parents stand for. That background is still formative. It doesn’t necessarily imply conformity, but it would provide the kind of framework for either conformity or rebellion. I mean, it’s not as if, yes, people can potentially move from one social sphere to another, but they would carry their habitus with them, having a regional accent or certain ways of doing things, certain ways of eating meals, for example, what the expectations are. And so even if you’re kind of moving in different social circles, you’ll bring those sorts of things with you unconsciously. I mean, you may well become conscious of them as you transition, and there are different ways of responding to that, of course. You might just sort of carry on and be very proud of your identity that you’ve brought with you and your background, or you might try to mask and fit in. But even trying to mask and fit in is going to be shaped by your habitus, perhaps shaped by feelings of shame that are themselves encoded in social structures and so on.
Scarlett Baron: Annie Ernaux and Bourdieu are indeed very similar in this, that they seem to, in the act of leaving behind one class, at least in terms of their daily activities, find themselves constantly labouring to bring it to consciousness, both within themselves and within the rest of the French nation. One might figure the habitus as kind of unconscious, which those people who become aware of it through their own travels from one class position to another try to alert us too, but that perhaps other people end up just masking or unwittingly performing.
Clare Carlisle: And there’s actually a really interesting parallel there with the philosophy of habit and the relationship between habit and attention because habit is something that’s generally implicit, automatic, unreflective, and some of the philosophers, who’ve really thought a lot about habit, will say that it’s really difficult to change a habit, particularly by force of will. Kierkegaard says this, for example, but he says if you want to be free from a habit, you need to bring attention to it, and he thinks that he or she who knows the habit is saved from the habit. It’s this idea, exactly as you say, Scarlett, that bringing it into the light, bringing it into awareness, reflecting on it has this possibility of transformation, and that can happen through art, or it can happen through intellectual work in the case of Bourdieu, or you might not even want to make a distinction between those two things in the case of Ernaux. Bourdieu’s background in terms of his theoretical background was structuralism. He came out of this French structuralism, which had a Marxist pedigree, and the emphasis there was on the view that individuals were determined by social structures. And Bourdieu is certainly very influenced by that idea. We can see that influence in the concept of habitus. But he’s a post-structuralist, and so the question there is how to find some space within the structure for movement, for change, for freedom, the possibility of revolution. Bourdieu is a big thinker of 1968. This revolutionary moment in Paris. So on the one hand, he’s critiquing liberalism and an idea of autonomy and pure freedom, whatever that might mean. He’s working within the structuralist model, but also trying to think beyond it. Again, it’s not surprising that he then lands on this concept of habitus because habit itself lies somewhere in between freedom and necessity, between, on the one hand, liberalism, on the other hand, a deterministic structuralism.
Alice Harberd: I did want to ask you a bit more about structure because this is a word that comes up quite a lot in Bourdieu’s own explanation of what habitus is. He calls it a structured and structuring structure, and I just wondered if I could call on you to unpack that a bit, to explain what is actually meant by each of those words as it refers to habitus.
Clare Carlisle: Yes. Well, I’m guessing that it’s from that structuralist background. That word structure is so prominent, so he’s thinking against the background of a theorisation of structure and structures. So a structured and structuring structure. Another word that is perhaps useful to think about here is the idea of form. A habit is a form. It’s a way of being. It’s a certain shape, a certain pattern of acting, even just a way of holding yourself. A posture or a set of gestures or something like that. And then the idea that it’s both formed and forming or structured and structuring shows us this combination of activity and passivity. It’s structured. It’s produced, but then it also, in turn, shapes practices in the case of Bourdieu. So that circularity is what’s really interesting. Well, certainly with the question of habit. What comes first? The action or the habit. Because actions produce a habit, but then habits produce actions. So that’s what he’s getting at, I think, with that slightly annoying phrase or perhaps perplexing phrase. But I think also this possibility of change if something is not set in stone. It’s not an eternal law. It’s been formed. It’s been structured, it’s been made, and if it’s been made and constructed, there’s always the possibility of deconstructing it, unmaking it.
Alice Harberd: So one last question. A thing I find very difficult to get my head around with habitus is that, on the one hand, it seems to point to something that is really important, but on the other hand, it seems very minimalistic in the theoretical claims it makes. And I find it very difficult to understand what it is that it is doing beyond identifying a sort of posited, causal thing, and I find it difficult to know what it does beyond just point to something and say, look at this. This is here. I find it, in particular, difficult to work out if any claims are being made about how that causal process works because he seems so keen to maintain neutrality on things like the extent to which we have freedom and the extent to which we’re determined, and I just wondered if you could tell me if you think there are any kind of really clearly distinctive claims that he is making.
Clare Carlisle: Part of what he’s doing is creating certain concepts, and concepts are tools for the sociologist to use. So you’ve got this concept of practise. You’ve got the concept of habitus. You’ve also got this concept of field. He’s got this conceptual apparatus. He’s providing us with theoretical tools for thinking about social structures and social forces. So I’m not sure if it’s the right question, if we should be asking about what claims is he making, but the concept has a critical edge. It’s a concept that he’s using to critique liberalism, to critique a liberal ideology, to critique the idea of meritocracy.
Scarlett Baron: Would that move to redescribe a particular area of human existence not be quite a common philosophical way of proceeding?
Alice Harberd: It’s very common in some areas of philosophy and far less common in others. In the parts of philosophy that I think it’s more natural to think of as overlapping with critical theory, or the parts of philosophy where continental philosophy and critical theory shake hands, say. The kind of work where philosophers posit a concept which helps us better understand the world is very common. But in analytic philosophy, it’s much more standard to go about things instead of by saying ‘here’s a concept, and if you think about things in this way, they’ll become clearer’, to say ‘I think this is the case, and then give reasons for thinking it’s the case’. And it looks to me like what Bourdieu’s doing here is something where it’s a little bit less like he’s saying a way the world is, and then giving arguments to make us think the world is that way, and it’s more that he’s giving us a way of thinking about the world where the proof of the pudding is going to be in the eating. If, by thinking about the world that way, we come to understand it better, and to better understand social processes, what change actually occurs. And if it better maps onto the social realities thinking about it that way than the way we were previously thinking about it, that will be what proves that his intervention is a good one rather than him having made a claim that we can prove to be true.
Clare Carlisle: There’s also a methodological element to it. So it’s a bit like Cartesian doubt, for example. Descartes begins his meditations by doubting everything, and that’s his way of trying to clear the ground and prepare for his philosophical inquiry. It’s not that he’s actually arguing nothing can be believed, but the doubt is a methodological step. And similarly, Bourdieu was very keen on this idea of reflexive sociology or auto sociology, which is interesting to compare with autofiction. This idea that as a preliminary methodological step, the sociologist tries to make their own habitus transparent, tries to map their own field, and that’s an important step to take because for one thing, it would be defying any myth of neutrality or objectivity. But there’s also the hope that in making that more transparent, you might edge a little bit closer to some kind of objectivity while never fully escaping your own perspective, your own way of thinking, but certainly to make that more transparent. And so the concept plays a crucial role in the sociologist or the ethnographers own practise.
Alice Harberd: Yeah.
Scarlett Baron: That rings in tune for me with the fact that Freud began his adventures in the direction of the therapeutic method by submitting himself to a self analysis, which went on for some time, and which mingled with his studies of his patients, led to the books which established psychoanalysis of the now completely omnipresent cultural force that it is, whether or not one chooses to partake.
Clare Carlisle: So it’s not just that sociologists are looking at the world and saying, ‘Oh, here’s a concept that we can use’, but it’s also a concept that he’s trying to enact in a way. Yeah.
Scarlett Baron: It seems to me to have in common with some of the great revolutionaries of the last 200 years, this interest in forging new concepts as a way of enabling new kinds of thinking. So maybe analytic philosophers might be more inclined to use existing vocabularies. ‘Let’s stick with beauty. Let’s stick with truth’, to use extreme examples, but in a way that’s-
Alice Harberd: Yeah. I think that might be selling them a bit short. I don’t think it’s that they think that the conceptual repertoire we have right now is unimpeachable. I think it’s just that they take their project to be more one of working out how best to describe what reality looks like, and they tend to go about doing that just by their method, by trying to state claims about the way the world is as simply as they can and then look for arguments for thinking that those claims are either true or not quite right, and that will involve a lot of refining and changing your concepts as you go. For example, the concept of consciousness or the self or the mind, these are all different ways that philosophers have tried to look at what you might think of as quite a similar thing. You might even call it a soul, if you’re of a particular religious persuasion or tradition. So I think they do do conceptual refinement. It’s just they do it in a slightly different way. Instead of saying here’s a concept, so if you use this concept, it will illuminate the subject for you. They’re more frequently used to saying here’s a claim, and I’m going to defend it.
Scarlett Baron: Sure. But I think the structuralists and the post-structuralists in the 60s were very much influenced by people like Darwin in science – ‘survival of the fittest’, ‘theory of evolution’, quite a lot of coinages involved there; then Freud with the ‘unconscious’; then, perhaps going back into the 19th century, the ‘will to power’ with Nietzsche. I just think that those philosophies/theories that have had the greatest impact have been those with slightly dislodged, existing vocabularies. But shall we move on to the literary story?
Alice Harberd: Yeah.
Scarlett Baron: Right. Time for us now to move on to the Literary story, Level 2. The passage of The Years we’re going to be focusing on today in Alison L. Strayer’s translation spans the first 51 pages of the book in the Fitzcarraldo Edition for anyone who wants to have the text in hand. I’m going to begin by describing the stages of this opening in some detail and then try to reflect on the place of habitus in these pages. So the opening, as I see it, comprises three main parts. Firstly, we get a page of epigraphs, which is not unusual, but which I still think qualifies as a separate part in my reading. It consists of two quotations. One by José Ortega y Gasset, ‘All we have is our history, and it does not belong to us,’ another by Anton Chekhov, which is a little longer, but which I am going to read nonetheless. ‘Yes, they’ll forget us. Such is our fate. There is no help for it. What seems to us serious, significant, very important will one day be forgotten or will seem unimportant. And it’s curious that we can’t possibly tell what exactly will be considered great and important and what will seem petty and ridiculous. And it may be that our present life, which we accept so readily, will in time seem strange, inconvenient, stupid, not clean enough, perhaps even sinful.’ Both of these quotations are about history and specifically about the tension between individual and collective histories and the vanishing of individual memories destined to be drowned out in future accounts of a life or a period. They ask where the emphasis will fall in later interpretations of our lives. Both of Ernaux quotations incidentally feature the first person plural. An ‘us’ which reverberates throughout The Years, and this, doubtless, is one of the reasons why she singled out these quotes for our attention. Part 2 of the opening consists of a prelude. That is my term. No title of this kind appears in the text itself. And this prelude is, in fact, a list of images introduced in a laconic, cryptic and, as it turns out, deeply euphemistic five-word phrase. ‘All the images will disappear,’ colon. Now what is being gestured to here, though it is not stated for many more pages, is death as the cause of this disappearance. I would say the narrator’s own death, except almost everything in the prelude, and certainly everything in this early section of the prelude, conspires to effect the meticulous erasure of the narrator from the text. There are no pronouns at all throughout the first few pages, and this listing structure, which Ernaux adopts, means that the enumerated images syntactically belong to no one. So here are just a few examples that I’ve chosen for reasons probably governed by my own hidden psychic motivation. ‘The woman who squatted to urinate in broad daylight behind the shack that served coffee at the edge of the ruins in Yvetot after the war, who stood, skirts lifted, to pull up her underwear and then returned to the cafe.’ That’s the first of these images that will disappear. The second of the images that I’m singling out is the following: ‘The newborn flailed in the air like a skinned rabbit in the delivery room of the Clinique Caudéran Pasteur.’ Here’s another. ‘All the twilight images of the early years, the pools of light from a summer Sunday, images from dreams in which the dead parents come back to life and you walk down indefinable roads.’ And finally, for my own selection, ‘The image of Molly Bloom, who lies next to her husband remembering the first time a boy kissed her, and she said yes, yes, yes.’ As these examples show, these memories blend seemingly micro events, a woman urinating in the street, personal milestones of presumably great emotional force, the birth of a child, aspects of national history making through the memorialisation of the Holocaust, family memories, those visions of dead parents in dreams and literary memories. That quotation from Ulysses. This prelude, which I’ve begun to describe, itself breaks into two halves, just as the epigraph page broke into two quotations. And it’s only at the end of the first half from which I’ve been quoting that death is named as the telos orienting the catalogue of memories. And with this death, which is immediately experienced by reference to those who have already died whose memories have already been extinguished, appears not the I of the narrator, but that we which links these musings to those of Ortega y Gasset and Chekov and binds Ernaux to her ancestors, parents, children, compatriots and fellow humans. So I’m just going to read this conclusion to the first part of the prelude. ‘They will all vanish at the same time like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents dead for half a century and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are next to our parents and schoolmates, and one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories among their grandchildren and people not yet born.’ The second half of the prelude, separated from the first simply by a line or two of white space, focuses on the words which disappear when a person dies. ‘Thousands of words, the ones used to name things, faces, acts and feelings to put the world in order, make the heart beat, and the sex grow moist will suddenly be nullified.’ And then a second list unfolds of the kinds of words and phrases which make up a person’s life and world, and here are three examples, which I’ve picked out of quite a long list. Firstly, ‘Slogans, graffiti in public toilets, on walls in the street, poems and dirty jokes, headlines.’ Secondly, ‘Anamnesis, epigyny, noema, theoretical. The terms written in a notebook alongside their meaning so you didn’t need to look them up each time.’ Thirdly, ‘Metaphors so tired, it was astonishing to see others daring to utter them. The icing on the cake.’ There are many quotations, clichés, idiomatic phrases in this section, some of them indicated by italics and others not, and notably, a majestic and tragic concluding paragraph, which rather matches that which marked the close of the first part of this prelude. ‘Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed eliminated. All there will be is silence, and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.’ At the close of this prelude, life gives way to death, language to silence, omneity to anonymity. This formerly arresting, defamiliarising prelude is powerful, full of contained but impersonalised emotion. An effect brought through the interlacing of the existential dimensions of life, most obviously the universal fact of death and its sociological and linguistic dimensions. And this interlacing is one of the book’s defining characteristics as well, explore. After this prelude, the main body of the text, as it were, begins, and begins with a set of moves which go on to punctuate the book throughout at intervals. So it begins first through the description of photos. These descriptions account for their subject in the present tense and in the third person, thereby starkly estranging the narrator from her own former self. The approach is precise and analytical, typically ending with a sociological reading. This is an extract from the first page of what I’m calling the main body of The Years. It is a sepia photo, oval shaped, glued inside a little cardboard folder with a gold border and protected by a sheet of embossed semi-transparent paper. ‘A fat baby with a full pouty lower lip and brown hair pulled up into a big curl, sits half naked on a cushion in the middle of the carved table. The misty background. The sculpted garland of the table. The embroidered chemise that rides up over the belly. The baby’s hand hides its sex. The straps slipping from her shoulder onto the chubby arm suggest a cupid or a cherub from a painting. All the relatives must have received a print and immediately tried to discern whose side the child took after. In this piece, a family archive, which must date from 1941. It is impossible not to read a ritual, pretty bourgeois staging for the entrance into the world.’ And that closing sociological comment is typical throughout the book. After the description of photos, four, in this case, comes the description of a family meal and family talk. And this again is one of the time keeping devices which structure the whole of the book. The story of a life, this structure suggests, as did the organisation of the prelude, is a story comprising images and words, examined in that order. It’s over the course of these meals that the family story is imparted and a sense of self is honed. The story of origins is the story of a milieu. As the narrator notes on Page 27, family narrative and social narrative are one and the same. At this point, I want to turn to the question of habitus with which we began and suggest that much of what we encounter in The Years is, for all its striking formal innovations, applied Bourdieu. And indeed, Ernaux clearly had Bourdieu in mind as she wrote the book. In an essay about Bourdieu’s book, Distinction, first given as a paper in 2004, that is four years before The Years was published, she identifies the book by Bourdieu as a total and revolutionary work, one which performed a total unveiling of the social world and offered the luminous confirmation of her experience of a divided world. And the essay goes on to set out the notion of habits as Ernaux understands it. This is what she says: ‘Every being is constituted by ways of living and feeling, of thinking, behaving. That material conditions imprint in him without being aware of it. This marking of the body of our perceptual schemes, effected by objective and economic social structures, is what Bourdieu terms habitus. Habitus is the embodiment of class relations, which makes you act and produces judgements and unconscious strategies.’ That such an analysis is deeply embedded in The Years is clear to see in a passage from the opening in which the narrator states, and I quote that, ‘Memory was transmitted not only through the stories, but through the ways of walking, sitting, talking, laughing, eating, hailing someone, grabbing hold of objects. It passed from body to body over the years, from the remotest countrysides of France and other parts of Europe. A heritage unseen in the photos, lying beyond individual difference and the gaps between the goodness of some and the wickedness of others. It united family members, neighbours, all those of whom once said they’re people like us. A repertory of habits and gestures shaped by childhood in the fields and adolescent years in workshops, preceded by other childhoods, all the way back to oblivion.’ And she writes, too, of the linguistic dimension of habitus. So again, going, in a sense, from images of things occurring to a focus on language. ‘The language,’ she writes, ‘a mangled French mixed with local dialect was inseparable from the hearty booming voices, bodies squeezed into work smocks and blue overalls, single-story houses and little gardens, dogs that barked in the afternoon and the silence that preceded arguments, just as the rules of grammar and proper French were associated with the neutral intonations and white hands of the school mistress. It served as a vehicle for beliefs and prescriptions.’ And with that, I think it is time for us to ascend, finally, to Level 3, the Interdisciplinary Story.
Alice Harberd: Well, perhaps I’ll pick up with the images, which I love so much as an opening to a book because I think they might help me get a bit of a better grasp on exactly how things like images are supposed to be related to a habitus. So I know that for Bourdieu, habitus is a concept that he uses in empirical investigations of sociology. He’s looking at evidence about how someone behaves and what their tendencies are, inferring a habitus back from that. And I thought maybe having a look at some of these images, we could have a go at doing that ourselves. So I suppose what the images might reveal are things like what stands out as unusual perhaps to someone of Ernaux’s habitus, or maybe they reveal things that are normal, or maybe they help to reveal things like the sort of general social rules for behaving as a particular kind of person. So I noticed that her images include a lot of women who are behaving in quite unconventional ways, for example, weeing in the street. But also, oh, you’re thinking maybe that’s not unconventional?
Scarlett Baron: No.
Alice Harberd: Yeah.
Scarlett Baron: So I think that that is quite conventional, and that is, in a way, an indication of the ways of being of the people in the village in which she grew up. This was something that happened. You went outside to urinate. And she happens to have been at the window looking down, and she sees this, but I don’t think we’re supposed to regard this as something that’s particularly unusual. It stuck in her mind for a reason, which is that at that time, something important in French history was happening in Algeria. Something important in Algerian history was happening in Algeria. She uses this image actually as a psychological marker for what she later finds out about history. That is obviously not apparent to a reader who encounters this on the first page of the prelude, but I took it to be not unusual.
Alice Harberd: Right. Well, in which case, it’s just as interesting that it’s usual, right?
Scarlett Baron: Well, exactly.
Alice Harberd: Yeah.
Scarlett Baron: This is not the kind of thing a little girl brought up in a certain comfortable arrondissement in Paris would expect to see through her window. It’s something that would be entirely normal for Annie Ernaux to see from her window, and that tells us something. I think it’s telling something about the proximity of a certain kind of habitus to realities of the body.
Alice Harberd: Yeah.
Scarlett Baron: A certain kind of unfussedness about excretion, which was a much more kind of collective event, I suppose, than it would be in the ever more atomised and privatised lives lived in Paris or in other big cities.
Alice Harberd: Well, so how about the next one then? So the next one you’ve picked out is a newborn flailed in the air like a skinned rabbit. So is that what that would tell us about Annie Ernaux’s habitus something about the prominence of sort of local rabbit catching?
Scarlett Baron: To me, what’s significant about that is that she is writing about the actual birth of one of her two children, which historically happened in the Clinique Caudéran Pasteur. But what’s interesting about it is she refers to the newborn, not my son or my newborn, and that the use of this image, which perhaps has something to do with her childhood in a countrified little town, might come into it. The reason for my selection was just that she’s splicing the existential and the local and the national in this prelude. There’s something about the emotion of the moment, which we sort of expect, and the fact that it’s denied us. It’s contained through this impersonalisation of an individual milestone. I don’t think that those that I chose were necessarily the best places to look for habitus because I was just sort of picking those that stood out for me.
Alice Harberd: Still, though, I mean it’s quite interesting the way that she poises herself between this sort of existential significance of the memories of a single person and experiences which presumably lots of people have, and defamiliarising them and depersonalising them in that way allows you to see the ways in which they might be experiences lots of people have. It does position her, similarly to Bourdieu, in between what’s personal and what’s shared.
Clare Carlisle: Yeah. It seems like there’s this idea of a shared subjectivity that’s dramatised in Ernaux text. And again, one might think that what is shared is objective, and what is just mine is subjective. Whereas, I mean, it goes back to what you were saying about the first person plural. The we. The us. Yeah, shared subjectivity. That’s, in a way, what Bourdieu’s habitus is. It’s not any kind of object in the world. It can’t be empirically observed or investigated. It’s like subjectivity in that it’s a way of being. It’s a way of doing. It’s a way of looking. It’s a way of feeling. It’s a tendency. It’s like a disposition, so it’s therefor something that subjects have. And yet, it is shared, and that very collective character of it makes it impersonal.
Scarlett Baron: I’m just trying to work out how this kind of tension in her works between objectivity and a shared subjectivity, which somehow includes, at points, her own subjectivity or at least is triggered by the narrating of her own life experiences, relates to Cusk, who is also trying to carry out an experiment in understanding subjectivity through an objectifying narrative frame. And I think that all of this seems to me to come out of modernism, and specifically, actually, out of Virginia Woolf, to whom they both refer, and her obsession with finding new ways to narrate the experience of being a self. One which recognises that we can’t just talk about the self without finding a way to render an objective dimension.
Clare Carlisle: I think in Cusk’s outline, there’s a much clearer distinction between the subject, i.e. the narrator and what is out there in the world, whereas in Ernaux writing that is blurred through the plural we.
Scarlett Baron: That’s true. But in a way, in Ernaux you get all of these many different languages. The language of different classes jostling for position within the text, and you get a very heteroglossic, to use Bakhtin’s term, linguistic fabric. Whereas in Cusk, although you do get a narrator who is standing aloof from the stories that she hears and passes on, everyone, in some sense, sounds very similar to the point that it could be that she’s anatomising the sameness that are languages of selfhood, is promoting that we all speak in the same therapised, perhaps prepackaged language of self-understanding. In some ways, there may be a similarity to what they’re diagnosing.
Clare Carlisle: Yeah. People speaking in clichés.
Scarlett Baron: Exactly.
Clare Carlisle: In words that, in some sense, are not their own words.
Scarlett Baron: Yes. Yes. Exactly.
Clare Carlisle: I wanted to ask you about the beginning and this theme of mortality. ‘All the images will disappear.’ That’s the first line.
Scarlett Baron: Yes.
Clare Carlisle: Right. Often, we think about writing as an attempt to somehow transcend immortality. And in a way, you could say that what she’s doing is immortalising those images by writing them down, and therefore, defying her own death. So that would be an ordinary expectation of what might be happening. But then I was wondering if she’s also, in a way, subverting that idea because even though the descriptions are there, the images are in her mind. They’re in her memory. And so if we see her body, basically, as the container of those images, language isn’t going to retrieve those. So I just wonder what you think about that. What’s writing doing there? Is it defying death? Can the descriptions stand in for the images and make the images live, or are the descriptions never going to be the image? The images really will disappear, notwithstanding the existence of this book.
Scarlett Baron: I think that’s a great question. In some ways, she is writing to negate death as the absolute loss of all the traces of a life. She’s obsessed with traces and writing as trace, but also blood as trace, wine as trace, et cetera, et cetera. I think she has a kind of fetishistic desire, as she says in the very last sentence of the book, to save something from the time where we will never be again. So in a way, we loop back at the end to this idea of the whole book as a time capsule in which she’s trying to save traces of her own life, but also, more importantly, I should probably say, of the life of the nation through the stories and the images and the words of her own life. But on the other hand, and perhaps allying myself more to the view you were putting across, there is a sense in which, at times, especially in the final sections, she intimates that really language is insufficient because it always comes to us socially through others, through the parents and the friends who introduce us into the world of language. It always comes to us secondhand, in a sense. It’s never private, and it’s never going to quite be able to tap into all those truly embodied pre-verbal experiences that make up a life. But I think that she thinks the best approximation that she can give is that of words, and that maybe photographs might have a place in that, too. Film, as well, but that traces are all we’ve got.
Clare Carlisle: I mean, I suppose the question is how much irony is there in that opening sentence. But then I’m also thinking about extinction of what good is a book if there’s no one there to read it. Any defiance of death surely is only going to be partial and in itself transient, or even if things go well, and the human race carries on, books get lost and forgotten and neglected and overlooked. So there’s no guarantee of permanence with writing, even if it might mean that the images stay on after her death.
Scarlett Baron: Yes.
Clare Carlisle: We’ve still got that contingency of what gets handed down and what doesn’t get passed down.
Scarlett Baron: And I’m reminded a bit of Julian Barnes’ novel Nothing to be Frightened Of, which is, ironically, all about his absolute terror of dying, and where he imagines his last reader, and I think addresses his last reader. You’re the one. You’re the last one. And all of the decades, perhaps, or even centuries, if he’s lucky, in which he will have forced all his own final disappearance from the panorama of human life. His time will eventually be up and everything will disappear. So I think, ultimately, she knows that to be the case, and that’s what gives it this kind of magisterial and tragic tenor, I think, at points. At the end of the first part of the prelude, you have this sense of all the generations folding one after the other, and there’s that image of herself living on for a while, perhaps in the thoughts of her children and then grandchildren, but then disappearing fully. And there’s also this kind of nested tragedy of the knowledge she has that her children, too, will die, and her grandchildren, too, will die, and that we will all be washed away eventually. So I think that’s part of the existentialism, her book. And I think there is a tacit personal tragedy contained within a larger philosophical acceptance that this is how it’s going to be. It’s like the whole book is a massive defence mechanism against the fact that she will, in fact, die and fade like everyone else.
Alice Harberd: And not just her, but her whole milieu with her. So she says, I think, somewhere towards the end that she wants her book to preserve her circumstance. That she wants to preserve just what life was like for her and those with her. And to steer things slightly back towards Bourdieu, I just wanted to ask a little bit about how you think that she laces the linguistic together with the things that we might think of as more importantly related to habitus. When you think about habitus, it can be quite natural to think, oh, I understand what that concept means when it means certain people will, for example, have more of a tendency to go towards higher education than others. That dimension of it seems quite legible. But the idea that that would be determined and in some important way all tangled up with how me and people like me speak or how people like me do our gestures or just hold ourselves, the connection between those micro-level expressions and the macro consequences, I think, can be very hard to lace together. But it’s clearly something in which Ernaux deeply believes, and she talks about it when she talks about how memory is transmitted, right? And I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about how she thinks that habits and gestures on that micro level end up building up to the macro level, in which she’s also deeply interested with her strong political consciousness.
Scarlett Baron: I’m just not sure that I haven’t sort of drunk the structuralist Bakhtinian Kool-Aid so much that I’m unable to really see it any other way. I do think that the specificities of one’s diction and the specificities of one’s choice of word, rhythms of speech, articulation, volume are all incredibly powerful in determining what happens to one in social encounters with others. I think people often come to a preliminary judgement on someone else willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously, within about two seconds of them opening their mouths. That doesn’t mean that one can’t resist one’s own categorisations, but how many layers of bias does one have to try and strip away to make an enlightened judgement about someone who comes before us? I don’t know. Is that not something that you think is-
Alice Harberd: Well, look, I suppose-
Scarlett Baron: - well established?
Alice Harberd: Sometimes I feel like my job here is to be the sceptic, if that makes sense, is to think, well, if I were coming to this for the first time, what would be the points where I got off the bus? I might think, oh, yes, it makes sense to me to think that maybe social conditioning would make me more likely to choose a certain job or educational path than another. But the idea that that is not just communicated by, but in some way generated or causally implicated with how I move my hands when I speak or something like that, that seems a harder thing to understand. But I think it’s the thing that Ernaux, in a way, so brilliantly brings alive for us, is how those things are importantly linked.
Clare Carlisle: Well, the point is, I think, that these kinds of things like mannerisms and gestures are habits that we pick up from the people that we spend time with. So if you spend time with a certain group of people, you’re going to pick up not just attitudes about education, university, whether it’s for the likes of us, or whether it’s automatically what’s expected. You’re also going to pick up ways of speaking, gestures, mannerisms. So I don’t think there’s any real distinction between one or the other. It’s just to do with the people that you spend the most time with, which, in the first instance, is going to be your family and the school that you go to, the other children that you’re friends with, what your teachers are like and so on. Then there’s going to be more subtle things like just ways of thinking. You get a really strong sense in The Years when you get past the first, that opening of how one generation is very different from another. So when Ernaux’s narrator gets older, and then she has children, and they do things differently. Just as her own generation were different from her parents. And again, it’s because those people are spending time together, and they’re watching the same movies, or they’re hearing the same adverts. Their desires are being formed together for certain kinds of products and so on. So it’s really to do, I think, this idea of it being contagious.
Alice Harberd: A matter of mutual influence.
Clare Carlisle: Whoever you’re with in space and time is going to be part of this shared subjectivity. That’s what a milieu is, really, and that’s what, I think, she’s interested in.
Alice Harberd: Thanks. I think that makes it much less mysterious, and I think it also explains why Ernaux’s text can feel so evocative, even if you aren’t or never were part of that milieu because you can tell that she’s expressing a whole load of shared things that were all absorbed together, even if they don’t trigger off the exact same things for you.
Clare Carlisle: So even if we don’t get the references, we know about the phenomenon that she’s talking about, and I think we can connect with the complex emotions that go with that.
Alice Harberd: Absolutely.
Clare Carlisle: Nostalgia maybe, but also the feeling of transience and things changing, things perhaps being eclipsed. Your own generation rising and falling, and those quite grand ideas.
Alice Harberd: I also think it’s one way in which, on a macro level, reading The Years can feel simultaneously so alienating and also so involving in that much as all the experiences are simultaneously so depersonalising about everybody, but also capturing really important life experiences of Ernaux.
Scarlett Baron: Also, the experience of not getting references or not fully understanding the rules of a particular world, as might be the case for, say, an English reader reading a French text or a text by a French author about French history, is in some ways analogous to the experience of trying to work out how people of a slightly different milieu are behaving around you.
Alice Harberd: Absolutely.
Scarlett Baron: Most people would have had experience of that. One would hope that our milieus are not quite as impermeable as would be required for us not to have any experience of moving in different circles. So I think that’s actually quite a useful way of thinking about what it’s doing for readers, even readers who haven’t actually the experience of being embedded in French culture –
Alice Harberd: Absolutely.
Scarlett Baron: – in a way which would unlock all the references.
Alice Harberd: Making habitus explicit to all of us that aren’t from there.
Scarlett Baron: Exactly. Unfortunately, I think we have to wrap up. So why don’t you tell us what we’re going to be doing next time.
Alice Harberd: Yes. So next time, we will be discussing a paper by Lucy O’Brien called ‘Shameful Self-Consciousness’, and we hope to have Lucy there to take us through it and to field some questions. And then we’ll be continuing our discussion of The Years, and we’ll be focusing on Pages 51 to 92 of the Fitzcarraldo Edition. So we hope to see you then for a discussion of shame.
Scarlett Baron: And thank you very much to Clare.
Alice Harberd: For joining us this week.
Clare Carlisle: Thanks for having me.
Alice Harberd: See you next time.
Scarlett Baron: See you next time.