The use of song in Annie Ernaux's "Les Années": the memorial qualities of musical emotion

Abstract

In the narrative Les Années (2008), which Annie Ernaux describes as an 'impersonal autobiography', memories are woven together in an enunciation that intertwines individual and collective memory. Popular songs play an important role, as markers of generations and markers of the era, unknowingly imprinted on a memory. As voices of the collective, they nevertheless offer a singular path for individuation through the interplay of affects and their memorial anchoring. This dialectic is found in the singular link that the song, and in particular its inclination to iteration, maintains with the feeling of time that the narrator seeks to restore, that of a  diffuse duration, animated by a dramatic tension of desire, offering an alternative to the tragic feeling of photographic time. Building on this opposition between photography and song, the article explores the memorial emotions specific to this musical genre and the way they are rendered in the writing of this narrative.