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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, everyone. Welcome back to Selfy Stories, the podcast in which we consider what the self is 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 at University College London. In the last episode, we discussed a paper by Jennifer Robinson entitled Style and Personality in the Literary Work, alongside pages 92-137 of Annie Ernaux's The Years. This week, we're going to be focusing on a paper by Marya Schechtman called Glad It Happened: Personal, Identity and Ethical Depth, which was published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2020, as well as on pages 137-182 of The Years, as translated by Alison Strayer for Fitzcarraldo.
Scarlett Baron: As regular listeners will remember, we'll begin with the philosophy story, move on to the literary story, and intertwine the threads of both in the interdisciplinary story. Alice, are you ready to guide us through the philosophy story?
Alice Harberd: I am.
Scarlett Baron: Great. Tell us what Marya Schechtman has to say in this paper.
Alice Harberd: This is a paper about something philosophers would call the phenomenological structure of human consciousness. Now, that's quite a mouthful. Essentially, the main claim that Schechtman makes in this paper is that it's distinctive of human life to constantly have in view a local sense of yourself and also a sense of yourself as extending over your whole life. And that a lot of the more complex emotions that we experience or complicated ethical questions that we have to grapple with come from the way that these two perspectives intertwine in our lives. This is a bit of a departure for Schechtman in some ways because she's most well known for being one of the foremost modern defenders of what's called a narrative theory of the self. Narrative theories of the self have been offered by all kinds of different philosophers and they vary a great deal in their commitments, but core to Schechtman's idea is essentially that what the self is is something that we construct by telling a story about what's happened to us in our lives. It's not that you or I need to have a constant readout going on in our minds about, you know, what happened to us last Thursday or so forth, and that's what's necessary for having a self. My sense of myself will come out of kinds of narratives that I might have in the background about what's happened to me in the past, how it relates to who I am and what I tend to do and value in the present, my plans for the future and so on. And there are various different views of this kind. Philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre think that having a narrative sense of myself entails seeing my life as a kind of quest for the good, so both for me to work out what the good life would look like and then a quest to actually live and realise that life. So it's not just that I need to have a rough accounting for what's happened to me in the past and how it affects the present or the future. It's that I need to see my life as playing out almost like a bildungsroman style, Holy Grail like story in order to have what he would consider a determinate self. Schechtman's view is much weaker. She just thinks that we need to understand certain experiences in our lives as things that have a bearing on what we're like now, and that we need to understand that if someone were to ask us a question about our past to try and explain stuff about who we are right now, we’d think the question was intelligible and probably be able to give a rough answer to it. Doesn't require me kind of, you know, narrating some master life narrative in the back of my head as if I, you know, were hearing voices or something all the time. It's actually a much more minimal requirement. And this paper can be seen as a response to one of her most prominent critics in this view, who is the philosopher Galen Strawson. Galen Strawson objects to narrative theories of the self, not just Schechtman's, but everybody else's, basically because he thinks that his own self experience is a counter example to them. So he claims that he has no perduring sense of self, such that he feels that he is the same person materially to who he was when he was seven or even quite recently in the past, he doesn't think of his sense of self as perduring for a very long period of time at all. And so, essentially, he thinks that the idea that his self is something determined by a story that's told for the entirety of his life just doesn't match what his experience is like, because he just doesn't identify with the person he's been for the entirety of his life. Of course, the argument is more complicated but I think that's the crucial bit to get in view for the paper we're talking about now. Because the paper we're talking about now is, to some extent, an attempt to recognise what Strawson writes about while maintaining some of the really explanatorily helpful parts of the narrative view. What I mean by explanatorily helpful is things about the narrative view that help us account for facts about human life and human selfhood. And so she starts by talking about human experiences that have a particular kind of odd emotional character where you can be glad that something happened, but very sad that it's over. What she's talking about is times when I'm sure that the future holds all kinds of promise and excitement for me, but I'm still sad that one valuable experience has ended for me. And she thinks that this experience typifies a particularly interesting facet of the way that human experience is structured. She uses this essentially to rebut Strawson's view that if I don't identify with myself when I was seven completely, a narrative self conception is not necessarily the best way of making sense of my experience. She wants to concede to Strawson that there's a lot of discontinuity in our experience of selfhood. The way Strawson expresses this is by saying that there's one thing that's himself and another thing that he calls Galen Strawson, which is, you know, the person who was born as Galen Strawson, the biological entity identical with him. And the way that she sort of wants to accommodate what he says about that is to say that actually the Galen Strawson experience and the self experience, which is very local, perhaps only to the particular year that Galen Strawson identifies with, that those are two kinds of experience that all of us have all the time, and that acknowledging that can help us explain the complex emotion that she was talking about earlier, so the idea that I can be sad that something's over, but also glad that it happened. And she likens this kind of experience to the experience we have when we're keeping track of a literary narrative. She notes that when we're reading a literary narrative, we're aware that every bit that we read is part of a structure that has a beginning and a middle and an end, and that in the background as we read, we have an awareness of where the bit we're reading fits into that structure. She thinks that the same goes for living a life, that to some extent, we're all aware of the idea that lives have beginning, middles, and ends. That there are characteristic things that happen at particular times in our lives. She notes that we know what we mean by saying, for example, that a life ends too soon or even too late in some cases, and that's because we have a sense of what the ideal structure of a human life might look like. And she notes that some of these structural factors are given by our culture, so an expectation that say there might be a particular age at which you choose a career or, you know, get married or have children or retire, any of these things, and she's keen to stress that such expectations can in fact be rather oppressive. But that doesn't mean that they're not there and that it doesn't mean that we could do without them all entirely and still be the kinds of beings that we are. Her claim is essentially that not necessarily all the structures that we put around life are positive, but that we live our lives in the background of them. Maybe that's enough to get us started.
Scarlett Baron: Absolutely. My first question to you, Alice, is this, in this paper, one of the things that we get is an opposition between Schechtman's view of the self as having diachronic extension as perduring through time and Galen Strawson's sense of his own episodicity. This seems to be a difference between two presumably genuinely held experiences of selfhood. So what does philosophy do with the fact that people simply experience their selves in different ways. How can one define it given such cases of something verging on contradiction or opposition between lived experiences.
Alice Harberd: Yeah, it's very difficult, and I think constantly, something that philosophers are prone to do is to overgeneralise their own case as if it applied to everybody because we're not always as good as I hope we might become at doing philosophy together with other people and shock horror with people who aren't full time philosophers, because we also, like any other group of people have certain characteristics we tend to share in common, and that as it were, colours the data set for everything we do if we only abstract from our own experiences and the experiences of philosophers that we talk about these things with. The thing is though, is that reaching something that looks like a contradiction and experience is there doesn't need to be the end of the road for philosophising. Indeed, some people thought that all that philosophising was made of, is like finding contradictions and then exposing the general truth that lies behind them. I mean, that's essentially Hegel's method of dialectic without wanting to get too much into that.
Scarlett Baron: What would the essential truth that lies behind the contradiction be in this case?
Alice Harberd: Well in this case, Schechtman wants to say that the truth is that both of us have both perspectives and that how dominant either perspective is for any of us is completely down to individual variation. Some of us may be obsessed with the whole life long perspective and spend very little time thinking about, you know, the day to day and the immediate. Otherz of us may be very invested in the day to day and the immediate and not spend very long at all, thinking about the whole life perspective. But nonetheless, both of our perspectives are there for everybody, and explaining how they relate to each other in our experience helps us work out why a lot of initially puzzling human experiences are as they are, such as this phenomenon that she discusses of feeling glad something happened but sad that it's over. That might make it sound like she's been too conciliatory to Strawson and there are a lot of things they have genuine disagreements on. This is not, for example, how Strawson makes sense of that disagreement. His way of making sense of the disagreement is to say that he's aware of himself as himself locally and he's aware of himself as Galen Strawson, but that there's no kind of unity or interaction that needs to be explained as far as he concerned between those two experiences. There's just my experience of myself as myself and my experience of myself as Galen Strawson. On his view, it sounds like one would toggle between the two of those in one's mind in almost quasi intellectual fashion where it's like, ooh, well, now I'm going to bring in the perspective from Galen Strawson's whole life. Now I'm just going to think about me right now. The thing that Schechtman wants to say is a corrective to that, is that she thinks that's the wrong way of generalising between two seemingly conflicting experiences, and that just because he has maybe a lesser identification than most people with the whole lifelong perspective of Galen Strawson, it doesn't mean that his lifelong perspective and his immediate perspective don't interact and colour each other in quite important and interesting ways. Basically, I think that she thinks that Strawson and others who affirm the importance of the local self perspective. Take those people saying, that we should dissolve a sense of self and see ourselves only as we are in the present to be disagreeing with her, but she doesn't think that they do actually disagree with her views, she thinks that her generalisation can, as it were survive their perspective. Because she thinks that their concern isn't about the idea that there is an interrelationship between our local perspective and a lifelong perspective. But rather it's an objection to particular ways of relating those two perspectives. She notes that, for example, even just to say seize the day, i.e. make the most of the present, includes an awareness of the fact that life is finite, because the reason to seize the day is because you don't know what's coming tomorrow and your life is finite. I think what she wants to say is that essentially, the reason that her argument does count as a generalisation away from these perspectives is because those perspectives themselves entail an awareness of the lifelong perspective in telling you to focus on the local one.
Scarlett Baron: One of the places where she seems to me to be most persuasive in the stance she takes against Galen Strawson, is that where having said that his conception is indeed a rather intellectual one as, as you put it toggling between different perspectives, she considers instead, the ways in which our sense of self is the product of socialisation. And that brings us back to the very beginning of Season 1, where we consider Dover and the importance of conversation to the formation of the self. But also Charles Taylor's sense that the self is fundamentally dialogical. It's built in dialogue with our parents and with our social circle throughout our lives. And this seems to me a claim that is very strong, or at least it seems very persuasive to me. She states that our sense of our lives as salient units surely runs much deeper than this. That others will see us as continuing individuals from roughly cradle to grave, and that there are certain expectations that follow from this fact is not something we are taught as we are taught the rules of the road or how to act in a fancy restaurant. It is something we are socialised into from earliest childhood, which is reinforced every day in multiple waves, through our interactions with others and through our sociocultural institutions and practises. We thus internalise this sense of ourselves. We come to see ourselves as continuing throughout our human lives, much as we see others continuing in this way, and as they see us. Our sense of our human life as a single unit is not first and foremost a matter of reflection or deduction, nor is it primarily a matter of thinking or believing in a proposition. I found it pleasing that she was chiming with other philosophers like Dover and Taylor, who I also found persuasive for this reason that they allow the rest of the world into the room.
Alice Harberd: Yes, well, I think it's a real advantage of this account that it's neither too strongly social nor not social enough. Worries that people often have about saying X or Y or Z target concept is socially constructed is that sometimes it might feel that that entails that it's kind of arbitrary, like it could have been any old how and she's very clear that that's not what she's saying. She talks about this quite persuasively when she talks about the social constructs we have about what measures the form of a life, so expectations that particular things happen at particular times. And she kind of anticipates the objection, oh yes, but these expectations about what we should do when are actually bad things, and they hurt us. They mean that people can feel like they've not achieved as much as they should have done in life by certain times and they cause shame, they cause anxieties, et cetera. And her response to that is to say that that's a concern about the particular expectations that we have, not the idea that there are expectations that shape the form of a life in general. I think one thing that brings that out quite nicely is the idea that just to think that we spend a lot of time educating children, right? And even if you don't educate them by sending them to school or whatever, there's a sense that childhood is in some way preparatory. It's meant to give you the skills to enjoy a human life of some kind, and, you know, you could fill that in a million different ways but can you really imagine a coherent human life in which the experience of childhood wasn't seen as in some way learning or preparing for a kind of adult existence? I can't really.
Scarlett Baron: Childhood is not unique. Old age is also overridden with narratives about decline or pain or loss or depression or perhaps occasionally, freedom. But also middle age is also overridden with narratives, the mid life crisis, but, maybe a little bit before that, marriage and children. There are all sorts of ways in which culture is instilling it in us from the get go a sense of as Schechtman put it, the finitude of our life. That is a way of telling us that we live in time, that time is limited, and that, you know, ideally, from a social point of view, people would go about life with a sense of this scarcity of time ahead.
Alice Harberd: Related to this discussion of the way that on Schechtman's view, the self is formed socially, is some stuff that she says about the value of having a self that has these two different perspectives in it, a local perspective and a long term perspective. So I discussed earlier her response to people saying that, we should only focus on the local perspective and forget the lifelong perspective. Well, one reason that you might think that that might not be a good thing to do is this very fact of the social thing, so the idea that if you did succeed in psychologically ridding yourself of a sense of your perduring self, and if you did manage to live in the most intense way, almost like meditation in the moment, you'd kind of lose all your community with other human beings. It would be impossible to plan a life together or even to really relate to one another, to support one another emotionally. There's even extent to which you might think you'd stop being the same thing as other human beings if you did achieve that. I think it brings out really nicely the thing that also Taylor talks about, which is that our sense of ourselves isn't just a descriptive matter, it's about having an account of who we are that yields a life that's worth living and yields a life that's meaningful and what sets the terms of a life that's meaningful or worth living is all the other people that we live in community with and so, you know, taking the really extreme no self view does seem to kind of lose you that sense of community with others, basically. But I think it might be time for us to move on. Please, Scarlett, will you take us through this week's Ernaux excerpt in the literary story.
Scarlett Baron: Alright, I'm going to try my best to do that. Our extract today runs from 1981, the year in which François Mitterand was elected, and the new Pope was shot, to July 1985, when a terrorist attack took place on the Parisian tube network and when worries about mad cow disease led many in France to drop beef from their diet. Now the top line of my interpretation of The Years in this context is that the book lends itself very well to the illustration of the perspective discussed by Schechtman. Indeed, I take Ernaux’s text to reflect the structural tension or dual perspective, as she put it, which characterises human life and accounts for its moral and experiential depth. That is, it portrays the imbrication within our experience of time of our sense of self in the moment and our sense of ourselves as continuing over time, our experience, as she calls it, of self in time. Several times in the extract, which we've set ourselves to scrutinise this week, we get Ernaux reflecting on her capacity to re-inhabit her past selves. So towards the beginning of this extract, she finds herself in bed with her lover, and I quote, she recalls other times she is curled up this way in the daytime. At these moments, she thinks that her life could be drawn as two intersecting lines, one horizontal, which charts everything that has happened to her, everything she's heard at every instant, and the other vertical with only a few images clinging to it, spiraling down into darkness. So in this moment, she feels herself connected to other selves who have found themselves lying in a similar position, in bed in the middle of the day. And this axis of her life, the diachronic axis seems to be a contrast to the horizontal axis, which is a kind of repertory of everything that has happened to her. Later on in the same extract, she writes that when she can't sleep at night, she tries to remember the details of all the rooms where she has slept. Sometimes she manages to feel she is back inside her former body. She doesn't know what she wants from these inventories, except maybe through the accumulation of memories of objects to again become the person she was at such and such a time. So these are two quite strong examples in which through an effort of memory, she is able to re-inhabit a past body to reconjure for a moment what it was to be a younger Annie Ernaux. Having said this, I immediately need to caveat this take by recognising that The Years goes out of its way, it seems to me to emphasise something rather like Galen Strawson’s sense of episodicity, as well, fostering in us a marked impression of her own alienation from her past selves. So this is a diametrically opposed sense of what it is to be a self in time. This effect is most obviously generated by her use of photos, and the deliberate effect of self estrangement which is produced by her description of these photos, intent as she is on conveying the externality and temporal distance involved in looking at images of one's own past. The second way in which she conveys this sense of episodicity or of selves giving way to other selves in time is her refusal to use an I pronoun, which would conjoin past and present. This is the typical way, I think, in which we nurture a narrative sense of ourselves through the use of a first person. It's possible, in fact to see in this syntactical choice, this splitting of the narrating from the narrated self, a version of Strawson's use of asterisk to disaffiliate his writing self from the proper names and pronouns, which denote versions of his past self. Here is an example of episodicity of this kind in the section that we're considering. As she waits at the hypermarket checkout, she occasionally thinks of all the times she stood in line with a cart heaped with food. She sees the vague silhouettes of women alone or with children circling their cart. They are faceless, distinguished only by hairstyle, a low chignon, hair cut short, in a bob, or loose and medium long, and clothing, the 70s maxi coat, the black midi coat from the 80s. She sees them as images of herself, taken apart and separated like Matryoshka dolls. She pictures herself in 10 or 15 years with a cart filled with sweets and toys for grandchildren not yet born. But she sees that woman as improbable, just as the girl of 25 saw the woman of 40 whom she has since become and already ceased to be. So in this paragraph, there's a rather impressive marrying of the two axes, which we were discussing earlier. On the other hand, the women in the supermarket queue evoke earlier versions of herself, and they are separated like Matryoshka dolls. But of course, the thing about Matryoshka dolls is that after having been separated, you put them back together again. There's this sense that any moment in time can be understood both on a kind of vertical axis or a horizontal axis. Also, it's worth bearing in mind that although Ernaux does allow herself to put across an occasionally Strawsonian sense of differences between her selves, she does so as part of a specific project to render herself in this way from a sociological point of view. Her aim in this book is not psychological realism or immediacy. It's not ala Virginia Woolf to render consciousness as a semi transparent halo i.e to place a premium on phenomenological accuracy. Her purpose is to externalise what she herself has interiorised of the exterior world. In this way, through this paradox, there is something in The Years which recalls Outline, which was also about this endlessly reforming calibration between objective and subjective. The dichotomy or tension between two superficially opposing positions seems to me to become increasingly attenuated or dissolved by the book's more and more prominent preoccupation with its own writing. The effect of Ernaux’s increasingly frequent reflections on the form of the book she is planning to write and then writing is to emphasise the union of the author's self and person, the physical person that she is, as she draws together all the strands of the book we have in hand, connecting the public and the private, objective traces and subjective memory. In other words, the body people see and the body she experiences, the march of time versus her own very personal experience of biological time, evoked, for example, through her worry about the cessation of her periods and other signs of age taking its course in her. I'm going to pick up a few examples in this section of moments where Ernaux comments on the form of the book itself and her sense of it emerging and yet of not quite knowing yet what the right way of executing her project is. Because in her re-found solitude, she discovers thoughts and feelings that married life had thrown into shadow. The idea has come to her to write a kind of woman's destiny set 1940-1985. It would be something like Maupassant's A Life and convey the passage of time inside and outside of herself in history. A total novel that would end with her dispossession of people and things, parents and husband, children who leave home, furniture that is sold. She's afraid of losing herself in the profusion of objects that are part of reality and must be grasped, and how would she organise the accumulated memory of events and news items and the thousands of days that have conveyed her to the present? These are quite talismanic phrases that she uses to call attention to her task, this idea of a total novel, which is the reconciliation of a private history with a small h and public History with a capital H. These are moments when she goes from having not had a clear project to being in a stage of gestating a work which has not found its form and, which therefore demands that she looks to other forms of literature like Maupassant's A Life for inspiration. A little later, she writes that she would like to assemble these multiple images of herself separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II, up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular, but also merged with the movements of a generation. Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles. How to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas, and manners, and private life of this woman. How to make the fresco of 45 years coincide with a search for a self outside of history, the self of suspended moments transformed into the poems she wrote at 20. Her main concern is the choice between I and she. There is something too permanent about I, something shrunken and stifling, whereas she is too exterior and remote. The image she had of her book in its non existent form of the impression it would leave is the one she retained from gone with the wind, read at the age of 12, and later from remembrance of things past and more recently from life and fate, an image of light and shadow streaming over faces. So I think these statements are very important. We haven't yet reached the final section of The Years, which we'll be discussing next time. But here already there's a gathering sense of the kind of narrative and formal glue which is going to hold together these different axes, these different selves. Finally, just before I stop, I want to emphasise that Ernaux seems to be at one with Schechtman in her sense of the finitude of human life and her growing awareness of the fact that her life is going to be winding down, coming to an end and that this somehow governs how she goes about her life and experiences those experiences that she does have. For example, she remarks that that this world is now behind her is a shock, and a little later in Italics, I have only one life. And so I think in many ways, therefore, Ernaux is very useful and literature is very useful in general for allowing these contending conceptions of selfhood to co exist, which I suppose is Schechtman's point.
Alice Harberd: Fantastic. Thank you so much for that summary. I'm now going to take us up to level three, the interdisciplinary story and bring out a few details about how what you've said about Ernaux, I think relates to what Schechtman has to say. What I find really interesting is that whenever she seems to be talking about one perspective rather than the other, whenever she seems to be talking about, you know, what's really local and relevant to, you know right in that moment in time, her awareness of it is almost always coloured by her awareness of where she is in her life. But also that when she talks about her whole life and where she is within her whole life, she does so by drawing attention to the very details that make the local perspective what it is. So to me, what she seems to illuminate so well is the idea that trying to understand one of these perspectives seems to be very difficult to do without invoking the other one, and vice versa. And to me, that's the best confirmation you could have of what Schechtman is trying to say. I was thinking, for example, about what she says about light. I love the way she talks about light in this book, all the way through it. There's a bit where she talks about wanting to capture the light on people's faces cast by a previous time. When she talks about these specific photos in an earlier part of the novel, but she talks about how a photo could not capture the sensation of heat created by light striking on her in a particular place when the photo was taken, and so, to me, her discussion of light, although it clearly has a lot to do with photography, it's more that light and photography seem to me to be trying to get at a similar thing, which is a particular existential condition. So I've just said the word existential. I don't like using that without explaining what I mean by it. So, you know, if you're a good and you're an omnipotent being, for example, you don't have this kind of existential predicament because your life lasts forever so you're not constantly imagining every moment as one of a limited number or in a particular structure because that structure is simply absent. When I talk about existential, I'm basically talking about the idea that there are facts and constraints to do with human existence that colour it and make the experience of it the way it is, just to gloss that. And I think that she uses both light and photography to capture elements of the way that human existence seems often very fleeting. The idea that when we're trying to make sense of a moment, the moment has already gone, even just now, and now I click my fingers right now to demonstrate it that if I were trying to understand that, I'd still be understanding it in memory, not in kind of direct perception. In a sense, our minds can never catch up with the present because they've never really caught up with the past. So I find that quite an illuminating way of thinking about the way that the present features in our lives. Strawson talks about the idea that his sense of self is not perduring over a whole life but instead is quite local. It's got to perdure a bit. It's not that he thinks that he had one self a second ago and his second self the second after that. It's just that the units of time that he's using to comprehend himself are shorter, perhaps, than an entire life long. But the thing Ernaux seems almost more interested in is capturing the sense of this exact time when the light is striking me right now and right here versus a whole life. There's something even more challenging about that.
Scarlett Baron: I mean, I couldn't agree more, and one of the things about Schechtman’s paper for me is how much it reminded me of how infuriated I am by the Strawsonian position. There is a real phenomenological problem with that account of the self. I just, Ifind no sympathy for it in myself. But leaving that aside, I want to agree very much with everything you were saying just there. I mean, the first sentence of The Years, which I'm sure we discussed a few weeks ago, is ‘all the images will disappear’. It's a book which is about the certainty of death and about a particular atmosphere of mourning, which therefore attaches to everything in life, because our movement through time entails constant loss of the moment as it turns into another moment. And one thing that I suppose I find slightly or very frustrating about Strawson is that his experience of selfhood seems to be one that's either constructed or simply arises out of a denial of this sense of time passing and of the losses that it entails, if yourself were constantly new, then perhaps you're shielded from all of the losses of life, the losses of people, the losses of places, the losses of dreams. And it seems to me that in that sense, he's completely at odds with Annie Ernaux, who's writing a kind of collective remembrance of things past. That's the reference to it in that bit that I read out. But as you say at the very end, it closes on this incredibly mournful passage, which is about light. She writes of events turning into photographs in real time, not literal photographs, but the photographs that the mind makes.
Alice Harberd: Yes, of memory
Scarlett Baron: Sometimes the analogy is to cinema as well. I think she's interested in both of those visual ways of capturing the past. She writes, "Now, more than anything, she would like to capture the light that suffuses faces that can no longer be seen and tables groaning with vanished food, the light that was already present in the stories of Sundays in childhood and has continued to settle upon things from the moment they are lived, a light from before, to save the little village fête, etc, to save something from the time where we will never be again." It just seems to me that most people can really relate to this kind of nostalgia in advance, sometimes for the things that one knows oneself not to be able to experience again, and I feel that there's something inhuman about the Strawsonian perspective, which both insulates him from mourning what's gone, but also, in a sense, postulates him from looking forward to certain kinds of future or indeed dreading certain kinds of future because Ernaux is as interested, maybe not as interested, but very interested in the future.
Alice Harberd: Yes, politically, certainly. Yeah.
Scarlett Baron: Politically. Why politically?
Alice Harberd: Well, I find it interesting that she comments throughout the book on the political situation of, you know, what we, meaning she and her friends, thought of the current government, what hopes they had for the political future, how they felt about the next election. There's a lot of elections in this particular passage. I mean, she's still quite a politically active campaigner today in some ways. She makes a lot of comments, for example, on the situation with Israel and Palestine.
Scarlett Baron: Yes, that's true.
Alice Harberd: My way of understanding her interest in politics is as an interest in a future that she might not be part of, but which her children and her children's children will be part of. And just as she has an interest in the past, which she came from, because she's interested, as she says, I write to avenge my race. I write to avenge the group of people that I'm from. Her interest in politics, I feel an acknowledgment of her vulnerability and commitment to a future, even if she's not going to be in it. Which is something that as you say, the Strawsonian picture completely protects you from.
Scarlett Baron: I think that's absolutely true, but at the same time, the way I was meaning it initially, this sense of her investment in the future was also an investment in her own future also as a private citizen, so in that type of market. She's thinking about what it will be like to be in that queue in her 80s buying things for her grandchildren. She's also genuinely repeatedly worried about the cessation of her periods and what her menopausal body will be like, what it would be like not to have sex? What it would be like have a body which is no longer attractive or striking to anyone.
Alice Harberd: The thing that Strawson insulates himself for by saying that the self is very local is a concern about the personal future about, you know, what will my ageing be like? She comments on her body in this passage, doesn't she, on her own naked body in the mirror. What she seems to feel almost relief over is that it is the exact same body that she's had since she was 16. Though she does comment on features of it, which are clearly changed over ageing, that she can still recognise continuity in it. I wanted to pick up on that because of what you were saying about nostalgia and anticipated nostalgia. I often wonder if the palette of vocabulary that we have to describe our own orientation to the imagined past and future is actually a little bit impoverished sometimes. Because the only word that we really have to explain, even a sense of just uneasiness or loss about the past, is nostalgia, but nostalgia can have so many different flavours, and there's a lot of different ways that Ernaux talks about her own past. So it's not always that she talks about the past as something that she has, you know, feelings that one would instantly identify as nostalgic in the sense that she wishes they were happening again. So she says this when thinking back to when her children were very young and when she was married, and she asked herself whether or not she would like to be back there, but she knows that the question is meaningless. I'm misquoting, I'm sure. But that suggests to me not a nostalgia a refusal of nostalgia. I find a similar impulse to acknowledge the very many different complex ways there are relating to the past and the challenges of memory. The bit in this passage where she talks about giving a talk to some school children, and the schoolchildren ask her, you know, What was it like being young? What was it like when you were 16? And she was saying, well, to work that out would take ages because I have to immerse myself in all my diaries and so forth. I think that this discussion of how difficult it can be to relate to the past is really striking in reference to the echoing in her work with Marcel Proust because in the Proust experience, you can't remember remember, and then you eat the madeleine, it all comes flooding back, right, that's the point. Whereas for her, it's very rare that she explains experiences of Ernaux life time travel, either to the future or the past, which aren't actually extremely effortful. There are very few experiences where it does seem to happen almost automatically, but I take that as a complication of the picture that there's two ways of identifying with the past. You know, there's being stuck in the past and nostalgic, and then there's being stuck in the present and never thinking about it. Whereas her way of talking about it is much more involved and varied with that, you know, it acknowledges that our involvement in the past can be incredibly effortful and that it can be really difficult to recall it. Simply in terms of getting all the stuff together and thinking about what it was like, and that we can have feelings about it, which can be even mute, but that feeling mute about the past is still a way of feeling about the past and so it still entails a Schechtman idea that our relations to the present are always coloured by our relations to the past.
Scarlett Baron: I have a lot of sympathy for it because of the labour that she puts in to re-conjuring past moments. But also because I just think that that is the way to live a life. I mean, I just feel that everything that she does in terms of thinking about herself in the past and the future involves investment. It's about how to live a life that is engaged politically, but also personally, and literarily speaking. It feels to me as though Galen Strawson's depiction of his own experience is one which valorises disinvestment, detachment. Maybe it's just, you know, an aesthetic difference. Maybe that's all it is. I feel very sympathetic to the kind of valuation of each moment.
Alice Harberd: She gives a kind of weight and importance and dignity to all of these moments. I also think it's really interesting that a lot of the moments she aestheticises, are moments where she's not doing very much. You talked about the axes earlier. One of the experiences that gets plotted along this axis quite often is an experience of being dozy or sleeping. And quite often it's going to sleep after she had sex with somebody, but it's also having a nap with her mom. There's a time where she's an au pair and it's her going to sleep on a random afternoon. This is when she lies down and recalls all the different bedrooms that she's lived in and things like that. I find it interesting that what is anchoring and binding together, where the staples as it were go in between the different pages of her life is an experience, not where she's doing something extremely meaningful like, you know, writing a book or running a marathon. It's not an achievement. Instead, what seems to be glueing her life together are these completely, you might think of as boring, inactive moments, but by bringing out the symmetry in this way between them all, there's something beautiful, almost harmonic about it, and I find that similarly to be a lovely aesthetic choice and an aesthetic choice that depends entirely on seeing her life as within a formal structure.
Scarlett Baron: Just picking up on where you began there. This emphasis on moments in which she's in bed and perhaps in an already dazed state. It seems as though these are the states which somehow facilitate time travel for her, as though there's something about the relaxation of one's control over the events of one day somehow looses the self from its moorings and allows it to remember related occasions in her past.
Alice Harberd: Which is really interestingly different from what some narrative theories of the self say about what joins the whole life together. A really important part of the view of theories like Macintyre and Ricoeur and Charles Taylor, is that what makes the self narrative is the idea that it all can be summed up into one overarching agential quest for the good. They will have different ways of spelling this out, but what I mean by saying agential there is that for them, what makes my past joined together with my present, my future, is that all my actions are embedded in an overall aim that I'm aiming at in the future. On that view, what glues my life together is its intentionality. It's being directed at something rather than this lassitude and escape from the world of desire, or aiming at anything in particular and I find it a much more appealing view, the sense that a life can have continuity through a form that doesn't have to do with the form of our will. Her relationship to local time is very frequently structured by things that she's trying for. She talks about wanting men to come into her life so that she'll wait by the phone all excitedly, and you buy new clothes, project a version of herself that she still finds attractive into the future. So it's not as it were that she sees herself as unconnected from desires, plans, time, planning. But that often refers to quite local time. The men allow her to furnish a localised, structured existence in time. But what binds her whole life together is not these kind of structured willings, actually. It's the complete opposite, and I find that very interesting.
Scarlett Baron: Just seems to me a great example of, this text, of the ways in which a work of literature can, without troublesome contradiction, accommodate so many different philosophical approaches. And it just brings into focus really the difference between literature and philosophy. That you read, you know, Strawson's paper, Taylor's paper, Macintyre's paper, Ricoeur's paper, and there's been a great attempt to make space for their argument by pushing aside and disqualifying certain other ways of viewing things. But in an actual human life, as Ernaux shows, many of these different positions may come into view for us at different times. And the clever thing to do is perhaps like Schechtman to try and incorporate more than one argument into a paper to gradually, even in philosophy, accommodate more perspectives on a topic.
Alice Harberd: Well, I certainly think that's the way to do really great philosophy. And I suppose to that extent, I don't really see it as a clear down the line difference between literature and philosophy. I think literature is particularly good at helping us entertain multiple different ways of relating to something and see what they all have in common or don't. I think basically that's literature at it's most philosophical sometimes and that similarly, when philosophy can do a really good job of generalising just enough, not too much, not getting too het up on defending particular views, when that's not always the same as explaining experiences, the two can have a lot more in common than perhaps it might look.
Scarlett Baron: What a nice way
Alice Harberd: to bring this episode to a close. Thank you very much for listening, and please do join us next time when we're going to be talking about the end of The Years and a paper by me with a special guest to give me a proper grilling.
Scarlett Baron: Absolutely. I can't wait. See you next time.