The Years – WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE by Annie Ernaux

Author:Annie Ernaux [Annie Ernaux]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910695791
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Only facts presented on TV achieved the status of reality. Everyone had a colour set. The elderly turned it on at noon when the broadcast day began and fell asleep at night in front of the test pattern. In winter, the pious had only to watch Le Jour du Seigneur to attend Mass at home. Housewives ironed while watching the soap operas on channel 1, or Madame Today on 2. Mothers kept children quiet with Les Visiteurs du mercredi and Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Colour. For everyone, TV spelled the availability of immediate, low-cost distraction and peace of mind for wives, who were able to keep their husbands home on Sundays with the televised sports. It surrounded us with a constant and impalpable solicitude that bobbed along on the unanimously smiling and understanding faces of the show hosts (Jacques Martin and Stéphane Collaro), their easy affability (Bernard Pivot, Alain Decaux). We were increasingly united by the same curiosities, fears, and satisfactions. Would the heinous murderer of little Philippe Bertrand or the kidnapped Baron Empain be caught? Would the master criminal Mesrine be run to ground? Would Ayatollah Khomeini return to Iran? It gave us a power of quotation that was constantly renewed by current events and news items. It provided information on medicine, history, geography, animals, etc. The bank of common knowledge grew. It was a happy, inconsequential kind of knowledge which, unlike the kind one learned at school, didn’t need to be accounted for anywhere but in conversation, as long as one began with They said… or I saw on TV that… to indicate distance from the source or proof of veracity, depending.

Teachers alone accused television of keeping children from reading and of sterilizing their imaginations. The kids couldn’t care less. At the top of their lungs they sang À la pêche aux moules moules moules, imitated the voices of Tweety and Sylvester, delighted in repeating Mammouth écrase les prixs, Mamie écrase les prouts; les Muppet Show et les durs pètent froid19.

An eclectic and continuous recording of the world was achieved thanks to television. A new kind of memory was born. From the magma of the many thousands of virtual things, viewed, forgotten, and divested of voice-over commentary, items floated to the surface, superimposed – infomercials, faces in the news or generally famous, and strange or violent scenes – so that Jean Seberg and Aldo Moro appeared to have been found dead in the same car.

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