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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 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: In the last episode, we considered a paper by Lucy O'Brien, entitled Shameful Self Consciousness, which was published in the European Journal of Philosophy in 2020, alongside Pages 51-92 of Annie Ernaux’s The Years in the Fitzcarraldo edition.
Alice Harberd: In this episode, we're going to be talking about a paper by Jennifer Robinson entitled Style and Personality in the Literary Work, which came out in the Philosophical Review in 1985, alongside Pages 92-137 of The Years.
Scarlett Baron: As faithful listeners will remember, we'll begin with the philosophy story, move on to the literary story, and then let these blend together in the interdisciplinary story. Alice, are you ready to lead us through our philosophy story today?
Alice Harberd: Yes, I am. The main task of this paper for Robinson is to push against a sort of default conception of what literary style is and offer an alternative and then explain how she thinks her alternative can answer some philosophically puzzling questions about literary style. So, the kind of basic view that she thinks she wants to work against is this view that what style is in literary work is something that consists of verbal elements. So a style might include, for example, using lots of indefinite articles or lots of negatives or lots of abstract words, or particular sentence length, structures, etc. But she thinks that this view can't explain a number of puzzling questions we might have about style. For example, why it is that the same verbal element, like say negatives or something, can be part of one author's style, but also be something else another author does and yet not really be part of their style? Or why it is that the same verbal element can play different roles in styles? And she thinks that explaining these and other such questions bring us onto a new view which she wants to advance, and this is that style is a way of doing things, which is analogous to the way that we do things like dress ourselves, communicate with others, something that can be expressive of a personality. So she thinks essentially that literary style is a way of doing things with words that authors characteristically have to do, shings like characterising a setting or delineating a character, she takes these to be actions. And she thinks that the way that an author does this with words expresses a personality. And crucially, the personality that she takes style to be expressive of is not the author's actual personality, so it's not the style expresses the personality of say Henry James, but rather a curated, cultivated personality of the implied author of the work or of the narrator sometimes. So in summary, she thinks that style isn't just about what phrases or words or structures an author characteristically uses. What makes something part of style is that it contributes to how the author expresses a certain kind of aestheticized internal personality to a literary work.
Scarlett Baron: Brilliant. Thanks so much. That's really bringing the paper back to me in all its vivid interest and controversy. I have a couple of questions about it. But before I begin, I'd like to fill in some of the context which I think Robinson has conspicuously, to a literary person, anyway, left out of this paper, and I think that this makes her paper a little bit ignorant of what else has been going on in the 20th century, even if we remind ourselves that she could only have known what was going on before 1985. And I hope that as I say a little bit about the history of thought about style in the 20th century, it will become clear how these ideas put pressure on Robinson's thesis. I do understand that Robinson is a philosopher and not a literary critic, so it's not really her job to sketch out a vast historical panorama. But I do think that some of the things that have been said in the 20th century about style are an important context for what Ernaux does and also render the picture more complex than she seems inclined to allow in her paper. So the only real reference that she makes to literary criticism of a relatively recent kind is one to Wayne Booth's book of 1961, The Rhetoric of Fiction. What I want to suggest is that, there's a great deal more of interest that had been taking shape in the periodicals and the books of the day. Flaubert, one of my all time favourites, is often considered to have been a trailblazer when it comes to the definition of style in the 20th century. And this is what he said very famously in a letter of 1857 to a reader who had been enjoying Madame Bovary and who had been talking about how vividly it brought him to life as a personality for her. So he wrote, ''I've put nothing of my own feelings or my own life into it. On the contrary, the illusion, if there is one, stems from the impersonality of the work. That is one of my principles. You must not write yourself. The artist in his work must be like God in creation, invisible and all powerful. You can sense them everywhere, but you cannot see them.'' Now, Flaubert, elsewhere, sketches out his understanding of style as what he calls an absolute manner of seeing things and this remains one of a number of seminal modernist pronouncements. Someone else in the great tapestry of 20th century writing, who picks up on this very influentially is James Joyce, another of my great favourites, and Joyce has his autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus, state in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, that the personality of the artist, at first, a cry or a mood and then a fluid and lamban narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. At around the same time, Eliot, that is TS Eliot, the poet, wrote what remains his best known essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent. This was published in 1919. And in this, he writes about the necessary process of depersonalisation, that is his phrase, by which poetry is produced. He declares that, the progress of an artist is a continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. The poet has not a personality to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in poetry and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. Now, when Joyce begins publishing Ulysses a few years later, Eliot wrote a review and approved of what he saw, because in his view, the book demonstrated the futility of all the English styles. He adds that Joyce has arrived at a very singular and perhaps unique literary distinction, the distinction of having, not in a negative but a very positive sense, no style at all. This chimes, of course, with those parts of Robinson's paper where she discusses the idea of a lack of style, the possibility, which is perhaps rather dubitable of a text not having a style. So these authors, Flaubert, Joyce, Eliot and others writing in this period, Mallaby, Ibsen, Woolf, came to be regarded as representing a vein of modernist thinking, which prized stylistic impersonality as opposed to stylistic personality above all else. That is writing which was explicitly driven by the objective of eliminating personality from style. The divorcing of the two, style on the one hand, personality on the author being considered a sine qua non of high art. Now, Robinson is absolutely within her rights to question the possibility for any artist of succeeding in this goal, but not to engage at all with this extremely influential view, which has entirely dominated the canon really in the 20th century seemed to me a little bit in need of rectification. And I just want to go on for a second to say that it's not just the writers of poetry and novels in this period who set to work thinking about the issue of personality and impersonality in writing. Those that I've mentioned are very heavily influential on literary theory as it emerged in the 1960s. This is the decade in which Roland Barthes with Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, discard the notion of style altogether, partly because they deem it to be an antiquated cornerstone of capitalist ideology. They argue that capitalist ideology is what has turned authorship into a central myth, because you need an author in order to market the works of an author, and it's therefore regarded as part of a money making machine, and so they replace the idea of style with the idea of writing or écriture in French. It's worth noting that this is a practise which Ernaux absolutely espouses. She always writes about her own writing as écriture and not as having a style. In fact, she regards style as redolent with kind of upper class middle class ideology, habitus, and this is what she is in part writing against. So Barthes’ most famous essay, The Death of The Author, still widely taught on undergraduate courses, maybe also at A level, opens with the debunking of the idea that you can infer a personality from a piece of writing. And so, he's discussing a book by Balzac called Sarrasine. He asks, who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story? Is it Balzac the individual? Is it Balzac the author? Is it universal wisdom, romantic psychology? We shall never know for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with a very identity of the body writing. In the act of writing, Barthes continues, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death. Writing begins. Finally, and this is one of the points that I think puts most pressure on Robinson's quest to establish a tight connection between style and personality, whether of an author or an implied author, Barthes says, ''We know now that a text is a multi dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.'' Did he wish to express himself? He ought at least to know that the inner thing he thinks to translate is itself only a ready formed dictionary. Its words only explainable through other words and so on indefinitely. Here, Barthes stresses the intertextuality of all text as it's come to be known since the 60s.
The notion that every text is a tissue of quotations, that we all speak and write in the public medium of language, and that whatever is inner in us is formed by our encounter with the ready formed dictionaries of language and social life, so what is inner is in fact outer. It is a very limited privatisation of what is the public domain. Other people asserted this view. It wasn't just Barthes, Kristeva referred to any text as a mosaic of quotations or any text as the absorption and transformation of another. Bakhtin, for his part, who is one of the theorists on whom Kristeva draws wrote about the dialogism or the polyphonic heteroglossic dimension of any text. So all of this, it seems to me, puts pressure on the idea that style is ever something from which one can extrapolate a single personality. The picture is one in which it makes no sense to speak of style because style is too totalising a notion. It's the idea that it can be singular at all, whereas they think that all writing is plural. And because impersonality and intertextuality are interconnected in theory, I think together these two notions, impersonality and intertextuality, bring into question what Robinson is saying.
Alice Harberd: Yeah, thanks so much for that because it's such an interesting addition of context, which all too often analytic philosophers leave out. We're not very good at reading theory, we're even worse at writing about it. Philosophers are quite good at thinking, but not very good at actually reading or researching, and I think it's really helpful to have this context on board. But I'm not quite as convinced as you that what it does is give us reasons to think that Robinson's view is wrong. I think what it helps us realise is that for the view to be right, we need the notion of personality at the core of it to be quite minimal. So to start with what you were saying about the idea early on of authors saying that depersonalisation is a really important part of writing really well. I can see two ways of reading that. One way is just saying that essentially writing isn't about the ego and particular experiences of any one author. And I think that's completely consistent with what Robinson says because when she says that style is expressive of personality, she's explicit throughout that the personality in question could be light years away from the actual personality of the author, so I don't really see that part of the context is in any way actually challenging what she says. I think it's just that those authors are using the word personality to refer always and only to their own personalities as actual people, rather than having this sort of more abstract notion of a personality is something that you can craft familiar aesthetic ends rather than it being identifiable to any particular person.
Scarlett Baron: I think that's a completely fair point. I mean, one of my complaints about Robinson's paper is that, the way in which she rescues an argument, which at the outset seemed to be seriously flawed was by introducing all too late, it seems to me, this idea of the implied author. I think it's a peculiar choice to bring this out like a rabbit out of a hat quite late in the essay, because by this point, I find myself raging against a lot of what she's saying, and then suddenly she solves it, and I feel that's an unnecessary dramatic gesture in an academic paper. But I don't think it answers everything. I can go along with a lot of what she has to say, though I don't in the end find it that interesting in these new terms in which I'd like to couch it. It seems to me that when she's talking about the personality of an implied author, the one that the actual author has created through the development of a style which can be characterised as having, say, in inverted commerce a personality. We're talking about an author, the implied author who is made up of words alone, whose existence is thus imaginary, whose existence is an effect of the writing or, to use her word, of the style. Otherwise, put, this author is a creation. For me, it doesn't make sense for her to refer to the style of this implied author as the expression of a personality because this person does not exist. So I think she would save all of her argument for me or almost all of it by referring to it as the creation of an implied author. As Barthes points out in the death of the author, the word expression assumes the priority of the thing expressed, the thing within over the thing expressing the style. First, there's a personality and it is expressed. But an implied author does not precede the style. It follows from the style. We personify this implied author on the basis of the words we get in the arrangement or order in which we get them. So to me, it's just ultimately a question of terminology. If we substitute creation we’re fine.
Alice Harberd: I see what you mean. There are two things in the wide philosophical context here, which I think explains some of Robinson's choices. One of the key debates in analytic philosophy of art for some time, and at that time, concerned the role that the intentions of authors play in determining the meaning of text. Basically, she's writing in a context where a frequently appealed to construct for dealing with those debates is that of the implied author. And so I think what she would be expecting amongst her primary readership is an awareness that when somebody talks about personality, already, philosophers of art would think you're probably not talking about the personality of anybody in particular. Similarly, that when you talk about an author, you needn't be talking about an actual author. So I think that what to those without that context seems like quite a rabbit out of the hat move, to those who are in this field, it's more just like reminding us of a position that would be background to our reading of it anyway. To move on to what you were saying about expression, one other key debate in philosophy of art has been about the expression of emotion in music. And if we were to use expression the way that you're suggesting, it would simply be illogical and incorrect to apply the term expression to a musical work, because in the terms, which it frequently is in that debate, it's quite often put in terms of why is it that music, not a musician, but music can express sadness, for example. So I think you're right to say that it's terminological in that what it is that analytic philosophers mean by a term like express is a little bit different to perhaps what some literary theorists mean by it. And I think to the extent that we see the difference as terminological, I don't think that really means that we need to worry too much. I just wanted to come back to the stuff about Kristeva and intertextuality in Bakhtine because I think that's really interesting. It represents definitely a different line of attack on Robinson. In instead of saying something like ‘but these authors seem to think that the notion of personality is the furthest possible thing from what they're doing’, I think a way of summarising how it is that that comes to be an objection would be something like ‘you're appealing to a notion which is incoherent and which is the result of bad ideology’ or something like that. It’s certainly the case that throughout our reading of Ernaux, In the early parts of The Years, she talks about herself as a writer as someone desperate to undercover their own literary voice and someone who's desperate to find a language, which is particularly theirs. AND Without hopefully this being too much of plot spoiler, by the end of the work, she's achieved a KIND OF understanding of what she does as a writer as somebody who draws on a common language with common tools, which are not privatised away to any one particular individual, which is therefore necessarily communal.
Scarlett Baron: It seems to me that this is really connected to our general theme for all of these podcasts, which is the connection in a way between the self and the ways we represent it, because Ernaux, over the course of the book, over the course of her life, actually seems to me not just to become disillusioned about the possibility of a personal style, but also disillusioned about the coherence or unity, existence even of a self. So the two go together, loss of sense of an original self is connected to the loss of belief in an original style.
Alice Harberd: Absolutely. But I suppose the thing is that I worry that there's a bit of a tendency with some of this theory to throw a bit of the baby out with the bathwater. Essentially, what I'm saying is that I think there are some more subtle and delicate positions you can take in the middle where something like a wholesale rejection of self and style is on one end and thinking that, you know, there are individual styles, we create them originally from ourselves, almost ex nihilo that they spring directly from and are closely related to the selves similarly and personalities that we create, ex nihilo. That's a spectrum, right. It strikes me that it would be a mistake to criticise Robinson for thinking that she's at the far latter end of that spectrum. I think there are options in the middle, which are actually consistent with thinking that, for example, selves are plural text of highly quotation based. For just the same reason that we can not have a belief in a strong substantial concept of self, but also think that among people we meet that there are generally speaking reliable ways they tend to behave. You, for example, have a certain personality which is different from say, that of my friend Helena or different again from my mum. I can think that that's the case, whilst also thinking that there aren't, as it were, substantial uncontextual selves that you've created quite freely on your own from nothing. Similarly, when it comes to style and personality, you can think that all texts are tissues of quotations, but also think that you can meaningfully distinguish features from one text and another, which go towards creating a sense of a voice that distinguishes one from the other.
Scarlett Baron: I mean I completely agree with that. As I was thinking about how I would describe Ernaux's writing/style, it occurred to me that we still need a word like style. Maybe we'll reach for form or maybe we'll reach for traits, stylistic traits. It seems to me, we still need the notion of something like style. That's another weakness in a way with the Robinson is that I end up thinking, what has she, in fact, established that we didn't know before? It seems to me we can describe a style. We can describe, as you say, the particular features which distinguish one text from another, and it seems that my objections have to do with the terminology. But I think that it is right that in a way, it would be more powerful if those terms weren't the ones that she was so prioritising.
Alice Harberd: Yeah, maybe, I can see that. I think most of what she says can be rewritten with very little loss of meaning in the language that you prefer. I just want to pick up in particular on the idea of what it is that she actually establishes. If in fact, this is such a flexible text and we could just rewrite it with whichever critical terms we prefer, then what contribution is it really making? I think to see the contribution it's making, we need to get in view the philosophical questions it's trying to resolve. So one of them is that if we think that we can explain what a style is just by pointing to the particular verbal items a writer is particularly disposed to use, there are a number of questions that remain unanswered, including why it is, for example, that a frequently used verbal item for want of a better term can be a part of style in one text and not a part of style in another, even if they're used just as much. Say there are two authors that like Ernaux does, for example, are frequently referring to themselves in the third person. For Ernaux, it's an important part of her style, but it's conceivable that for another author, it might not be. And I think that what Robinson does is give us a way of understanding why, namely that it's not just about what verbal items an author uses, but about what kind of job they're doing with them. For Ernaux, the use of that third person description of the self is in order to create a kind of clinical objective, depersonalising gaze on one's own life, and that very attitude to the self is characteristic of the personality that I take to be expressed in her work. And sure it might not be Ernaux's actual personality. It might also be a personality that depends very heavily on the kinds of personalities expressed in other texts, which she's drawing on, you know, the way in which she uses Proust, for example, might be important here. But I don't think that presents obstacles to us still calling it a personality because just as we take individual people to have their own personalities, we also think that those personalities are heavily inflected by the personalities of everybody else that they've met and the culture they live in and everything like that, so I suppose my thought is, is that we can accommodate the ideas that the authors you cite have about the influence of cultural features and also the others in our lives on personality without thinking that the notion is somehow bankrupt and that the same would go for style, basically.
Scarlett Baron: There's just so much about what she's writing is already so far in the past for literary criticism, and I find it hard to see that as a particularly useful disambiguation of the word style because there was a fashion, and there are always fashions in every discipline, but there was a fashion a few decades ago for computerised stylistic analysis which was precisely about finding all the categories of word in a book and putting them into columns. You know, there are so many different uses of the past tense, there are these kinds of articles, there are these kinds of pronouns, and that is widely thought to have been a dead end precisely because it's not about itemising the kinds of parts of speech that are privileged. But it's about the relations between all of those elements, and a computer, certainly a computer at the time when this was fashionable was not able to work on this relationality. It's to do with the relations between the component parts rather than just the individual items, and I'm with Robinson on that, but it just seems to me that it feels like that was already established thing.
Alice Harberd: Yeah, absolutely fair. I think often the work of philosophers is to, as it were legitimise the obvious. So I imagine totally obvious to any literary critic that when they're reading literary work, what they're doing is engaging with a particular kind of communicated personality which has been put on the page for them. But for analytic philosophers, that throws up all kinds of metaphysical difficult questions about how that can be quite literally true. And I think some of the most important work that Robinson does in this article is pick out exactly where you might think there to be something like a paradox and then explain how it is that we can resolve it, so I've talked already about the idea that the same lexical item can have different stylistic significance for different authors. Other questions that come up about style might be things like why it is that correctly describing one person's style, mentions some of the privileged lexical characteristics of their work, but not others. Until you bring in this notion of an implied author, it's not really obvious why that distinction could be drawn in a principled way. So I think that essentially what she does is take something that may sound obvious, but then explain how it is that it can resolve all of these things that look confusing about writing. And I think that's where you should see this paper as being most valuable, basically. But I think we should move on, shouldn't we?
Scarlett Baron: Yes, because I think Ernaux actually will allow us to continue this conversation, partly because she is so formed by the kind of 1960s theoretical discourse that I was setting out earlier. So she does, in a way, seem to me to allow for some of Robinson's theory to hit home, but also in some ways to offer some resistance to-
Alice Harberd: They challenge each other quite well, I think.
Scarlett Baron: Exactly.
Alice Harberd: Scarlett, take us to the literary story.
Scarlett Baron: Ernaux presents a very interesting case because she's spoken and indeed written a lot about her own style over the years. Not by using that particular term, which, as I mentioned, she resists, but by using the idea of writing and of her writing as somehow being honed as proof against poetry, against sentimentality, against personality. For example, since 1983, she's repeatedly described her own writing as flat. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, she explained that, and I'm going to quote here, "starting with her fourth book, I adopted a neutral objective kind of writing, flat in the sense that it contained neither metaphors nor signs of emotion." And these kind of meta discursive statements about her desire to avoid style, to write without style, seem to present a continuation of Flaubert, who was one of her great masters and that vein of thinking that travels throughout the 20th century, but also function as an expression of her desire to write sociologically, ethnologically, and autosociobiographically. All of which are her own terms for what she does. Just because Ernaux has repeatedly described her own writing as without style, as having this singular flatness, does not mean that we need to take her word for it. In fact, I've read some very interesting work recently by academics in France who have begun to contest this now received idea that she has been central to of her style as styleless. So our extract, the one that we're focusing on today, runs from the winter 1967, which is remembered via a photo of Ernaux with her young son in a bedroom, all the way through to the summer of 1980, which is remembered via a photograph taken during a family holiday in Spain. And I want to look at this style to humour Robinson for a bit and try and work out how we can characterise what it is that the language of this extract gives us to see.
Alice Harberd: Great.
Scarlett Baron: So it's clearly a style that is forged to maximise sociological resonance and to minimise the traces of her own individual personality. The idea in the book, as we mentioned before, is to capture the nation state of mind, the idea is to render the collective. As Ernaux writes in the final pages of the book, this will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs, and sensibility. And again, she would never write except from inside her language, which is everyone's language. Now, none of all of this suggests that the idea of style, as something one can describe, needs to be, as you say, thrown out of the window. Literary analysis still involves close attention to the syntactical and terminological choices an author makes and to the effects they have on the reader's experience. So I'm going to try and name the formal and stylistic features of the extract. Formal, I used to describe features that are quite large and macro that structure the whole text, and stylistic I tend to use for the effect of smaller units of language. So first, this extract, like the rest of the book is shaped by a number of marked repetitive and leitmotivic structures. The first, most obvious structure is seriality because the book describes the events that unfold year after year after year after year, and this is obviously a highly repetitive structure and it imparts a kind of cadence to the prose. This rhythmical beat is very marked. It's not exactly metronomical, because paragraphs vary in length. It's more akin perhaps to the rise and fall of waves cresting and breaking through the years and the decades. I like this analogy to the waves in the sea because we know that Ernaux is an admirer of Virginia Woolf who also uses the waves in her book, The Waves as a kind of image for something that is rhythmical, but not entirely regular. Anyway, this structure is in a way very constraining because it means that she just has to go through the history of the nation and of her own life year by year by year. This again, connects her to the 1960s when the idea of literature under constraint was huge. It's the idea that actually creativity is kind of freed, released when paradoxically it's placed under constraint, and it seems to me that she is interested in exploring that in a way. It's worth emphasising that in this extract, Ernaux actually tells us how intellectually politically and theoretically she was the product of these 1960s. I'm just going to quote from Page 100 here. We who had remained with the Parti Socialiste Unifé to change society, now discovered the Maoists and the Trotskyists. A vast quantity of ideas and concepts surfacing all at once. Movements, books and magazines popped up everywhere, along with philosophers, critics, and sociologists, Bourdieu, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Chomsky, Baudrillard, Wilhelm Reich, Ivan Illich, Tel Quel, structural analysis, narratology, ecology, a wash in languages hitherto unseen, we didn't know where to start and wondered how we'd remain unaware of it all until now. She refers to herself elsewhere as torn between discourses. I think this is quite interesting because languages and discourses, those between which she is torn, these again, are a kind of foregrounding of the fact that style is out at this time and that she is the product of her time in that sense. This overarching chronological structure, which we could refer to as the march of time in The Years accommodates other more author-focused structures, those which are actually related to Ernaux's own life. Most obviously, the book and this extract is structured by the description of still and moving images drawn from Ernaux's personal archive. So the extract begins like so many sections of the book with a photo of herself with her son. I'll just read the first sentence. In the photo taken indoors, a close up in black and white, a young woman and a little boy sit side by side on a single bed. So there's an empty deixis of that definite article, the photo. This is not an indefinite article, it's a definite article, but it's kind of empty because it's pointing to, gesturing towards an object which we cannot see. We're entirely dependent on the description that follows for access to this memory trace. After gesturing towards this specific object, the narrator uses indefinite articles which emphasise her own distance from the scene she beholds. So on the photo, she is a young woman, her son is a little boy, and together, they sit on a little bed. This choice to forsake any claim to a privileged interpretative status in relation to her own memories, her own life, her own archive is re-enacted throughout the book via the medium of so many such impersonal syntactic formulations. There are adverbs as well, which foster this effect. For example, in the photo with which our extract opens, the narrator observes only that she is probably not thinking of anything absorbed in her enjoyment of their self-contained unit of three. So this is just a hypothesis that she is throwing out about what she might or might not have been thinking in some distant decade, in 1967 to be precise. But as well as hypothesising, speculating about what she might have been thinking, she also supplements the photo with memories that she does have access to. So she conjures the Lego blocks which would have been on the floor on a Sunday evening in 1967, and she conjures the Bach music that she imagines would have been playing in the background at that time. And in almost every case of a photo providing a linchpin for what follows, we get sociological analysis. The photo remarks the author plays a role in this construction, anchoring their little family in the long term. It acts as a pledge of permanence for the child's grandparents who will receive a copy. Another leitmotif generative of a sense of seriality and cyclicality, because many of these repetitions involve the calendar year and the rituals that attach to it is the leitmotif of family dinners. Typically, a section has both a photo, which is described and a family dinner. And through the evolution in the photos and the dinners, we get a sense of the times changing, time unfolding. Moving away from the dimension of time. Another strong stylistic feature is that which consists in the author giving us metaformal commentary on what it is that she's doing. In other words, she's commenting on the form of the book as it takes shape. So in the passage that we're considering today, the narrator comments on the significance of her reading and its role in shaping the book she wants to write. I'm going to quote here. In a Dorothea Tanning painting she saw in a show three years before in Paris, a bare chested woman stands before a row of doors that stand ajar. The title was Birthday. She thinks this painting represents her life and that she is inside it, as she was once inside Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre and later Nausea. With every book she reads, To the Lighthouse, Rezvani's Les années-lumière, she wonders if she could write her life in that way too. So this kind of commentary and allusion to source, basically, is also connected to the extensive practice of quotations in the book, some of which are marked through italics and quotation marks, and some of which are unmarked. But rare in this book are the paragraphs which are not in some way rife with markers of the book's own secondhandness in relation to public language. At a much more micro level, I would like to pick out some of the characteristics of this style, some of the personality markers, I suppose, of this prose. Most obviously, we get the plural pronouns, the we's, the our's, the they's, which constitute the most obvious way in which Ernaux tries to impersonalise or depersonalise or collectivise herself. Collectivise, I suppose is actually the most accurate way of putting it. We would not remember the day or the month only that it was spring and that we had read in the Nouvel Observateur the names of 343 women who stated they’d had illegal abortions. So many, yet we had been so alone with the probe and the spurting blood. The power of this sentence is in a way that something incredibly personal, the experience of undergoing backstreet abortion is collectivised. But in such a way that we don't really know whether this we is more expressive of individual pain or of collective pain, it hovers in between the two. She refers to our own death as a couple on page 130. This sounds very personal, you know, this is about the demise of her own couple. It's ending in divorce. But because of the way the whole book is written in this way, we know that it's also about millions of divorces which are happening across the land because they're increasingly possible because of legal and societal change. There are also lots and lots of indefinite pronouns. This again is part of the impersonalisation, which Ernaux deliberately subjects her prose to. By this I mean the use of one, the use of everyone, everything, nothing and all. But they're also the use of plurals everywhere, plural nouns. So along with a sense of impersonality, there's a sense of proliferation. Almost finally, the markers of time though we know that we're moving through time all the time, the markers of time are relatively vague, so we get references to now or a phrase such as, as the dog days went by, or in the early '70s, in winter. There is a pervasive vagueness, which is an odd counterpart to the seriality, which I was mentioning earlier. It's both taking us through the years literally one by one, but also bringing in a nebulousness about when specifically things happen. That's because at population level, at a collective level, things happen in ways which make it impossible to say it happened on that day. Yes, her marriage happened on this day but nationwide marriages are happening every day, and so I think there's a deliberate looseness there in references to time. And this is my final stylistic point. Totally, the text seems to oscillate between a studied neutrality aimed at actually sidelining her own emotions in favour of a much more generalised national emotion, and cutting irony. Irony which is sometimes directed at herself, for example, when she fools herself in youth that she will never grow old or that she will never be menopausal. But also a much more bitter irony against practices like poverty, tourism, which she is very excoriating about. All of this is to say that as you were saying in your defense of Robinson, we still, as literary critics, or just as readers, end up acting mentally on what we detect of the characteristics of a style, and whether or not we call it a style or writing is up to a point by the by. All right. That was my bit on Ernaux. Time for us now to level up to the interdisciplinary story.
Alice Harberd: Thanks, Scarlett. Yes, I think it's all even more complex when you're dealing with an auto fictional text, even if the author would want to reject or qualify that claim. We're in a situation where on the one hand, we're reading a personality. It's not the author's personality because we've undergone the death of the author, as good, well informed readers of literary fiction in the 21st century, we know the author is dead. However, the author is simultaneously all over the page, explicitly all over the page, and confirming this with literal evidence, photographic evidence. But then again, they're sort of effacing themselves from the page by claiming their experience is universal. So it's a very complicated kind of reading practice with a lot of switcheroo going on. I think maybe one way to press a question about where this leaves us with respect to Robinson is to talk about the rejection of style as a claim of neutrality. Here are two different ways of thinking about style. One is to say that there's such a thing as totally uncharacterized text. Text with no expression happening in it at all, and that style is something we kind of paint on top of that as if we could start with neutral and then keep on tweaking and overlaying until we have a style. On another view, it is impossible to write at all neutrally. Whatever we write, will always have a flavour, a kind of resonance, often one that we're not responsible for, I mean that's the Bakhtinian view about the taste of words, isn't it? And I suppose what I want to suggest is that a lot of resistance to the concept of style comes from maybe a kind of affection for the former view and an idea that by rejecting the notion of style, what we reject is the idea that we can deliberately create on top of neutrality something that's kind of characterised and specific, and that instead, what they want to do is return to neutrality. And I suppose what I would think is that returning to neutrality isn't a flight from style, it is simply a different kind of style. Similarly, having a text with a personality which is a communal personality, the attempt to express the personality of a whole age, doesn't mean that the text lacks personality. It's just that the kind of personality it has is of a macro level milieu rather than the experience of any individual person.
Scarlett Baron: The thing that I find most interesting about what you said there was actually the degree to which this whole debate is complicated by writing, which is explicitly about the self and how in Ernaux's text, we have a book which pulls in completely different directions. On the one hand, it's all about herself. As you say, the self is everywhere, and it is through herself that she accesses the collective. But on the other hand, she is deploying all the resources of her style or of her capacity to style language to erase the traces of herself or only retain those traces of herself that are continuous with the personality of her sociological milieu, or of the national milieu. That is one of the most interesting ways in which Ernaux tests, both Robinson and those other theorists we were discussing.
Alice Harberd: Yeah. One really interesting thing to add here is how we've noticed in the reading group, we've been running alongside this, that people's responses to her style are wildly divergent. Some people read her what you might call mutually as flat, emotionally uninvested narrative. Some people read that as depressed. One member of our group finds the book incredibly depressing. Other people read it as ironic. For example, there are moments where she quotes her own diaries and then comments on them. It's unclear whether what she's doing in that commentary is as if we're making fun of her younger self or lovingly, teasing her younger self or in a completely effectively drained way that indicates no particular relationship with her previous self at all, simply making a claim about it. And I think one place where she really does put pressure on Robinson is in the idea that the personality expressed by a style is ever going to be determinate enough for us to be able to say that it's this rather than that. That particularly in writing of this kind, in the kind where the author seems to be doing everything they can to push themself off centre stage at the same time as showing us the world through their viewpoint. It's going to be particularly difficult to pin down any kind of consistent personality which doesn't differ to the extent that readers will read their own dispositions into what is expressed.
Scarlett Baron: Exactly. And that is completely inevitable because we're all constituted by our experiences of language, and we all have slightly different experiences of language over the course of a lifetime, which means that we will hear in our mind's ear the words on the page in a different way, which is sort of what Barthes is getting at in the Death of the Author. Because the final words of the Death of the Author are, the birth of the reader.And what he beckons is a sense of the proliferation of available readings, and that, I think, does put pressure on the idea that there is a style that expresses a personality in a book, because in a way, there will be as many styles and thus as many personalities of the implied author as there are readers.
Alice Harberd: Yeah, I also think though that in a way that shows that what Robinson's onto in the way that she sets up her theorising is quite promising because we have a similar experience with our encountering the personalities of real people every day all the time. A turn of phrase which I take to be kind of taciturn and sullen, someone else might take to be revealing of great depths and cynicism and wisdom, and it to an extent, has to do with the taste of individual people for who they enjoy hanging out with both literarily and in real life. I don't think that that means that theorising style via personality is not a good idea. I think it just means we have to be a little bit more careful about what we mean by personality.
Scarlett Baron: But it also brings into focus not just the difficulty of coming to any kind of conclusion, rather the impossibility of coming to any kind of conclusion as to what the style of the implied author is in any particular work, but also of the challenge that Annie Ernaux sets herself in the book, which is as an individual to try and read the style of a nation. We all differ in our readings of a particular person or a particular book. But she's trying to through her own experience, tap into the experiences of everyone in France living at the same time as her and to conjure through language, the personality of the nation. Which is an incredibly ambitious objective.
Alice Harberd: Incredibly ambitious, and do we think she actually succeeds in pushing herself completely off the stage? I'm not sure she does actually. I think there are certainly moments where something like her own particular preoccupations come through, for example, the way that she talks about politics throughout the book. For another person, that could simply just not be part of anything that matters to them. And similarly, she talks about motherhood quite a lot as something that squishes out all independent thought. For other people, that's simply not their experience at all. It just feels like a culmination of a way of being that they really enjoy, and I think it's worth noting, therefore that her claims to total abstraction do not always succeed. Although it's a really exciting and interesting ambition from a critical point of view. But I feel we ought to wrap up.
Scarlett Baron: We absolutely need to wrap up. Alas. But we will be back.
Alice Harberd: Next time, we'll be talking about Marya Schechtman’s paper ‘Glad It Happened’ alongside the next excerpt of The Years. We do hope you will join us.