#passion simple

J'avais peur de paraître moi aussi anormale si j'avais dit "je vis une passion". Pourtant, quand je me trouvais au milieu d'autres femmes, à la caisse du supermarché, à la banque, je me demandais si elles avaient comme moi un homme sans arrêt dans la tête, sinon, comment elles faisaient pour vivre ainsi, [...]

Simple Passion

Calculaba cuántas veces habíamos hecho el amor. Tenía la impresión de que, cada vez, se había añadido algo más a nuestra relación, pero también de que precisamente esa acumulación de gestos y placer era, sin duda, lo que iba a alejarnos el uno del otro. Estábamos agotando un capital de deseo. Lo que se ganaba en el orden de la intensidad física se perdía en el del tiempo.

Annie Ernaux - Passion simple

I picked up Ernaux’s Passion Simple (1991) at the Fnac, partly because it was really thin (under a hundred pages), and partly because, well, that title. After a brief preface about watching porn on a fuzzy TV, it begins: “A partir du mois de septembre l’année dernière, je n’ai plus rien fait d’autre qu’attendre un homme.”  (“Beginning in September of last year, I did nothing else but wait for a man.”) Everything she does, she writes, has something to do with this man. Everything she sees reminds her of him, of some moment they shared, some stray comment he made, some place he had visited or person he had spoken of. I, too, was doing not much besides thinking about, and waiting to hear from, a guy. It is an experience I have lived through several times since, and it is always the same. Present and past and future are suspended into one temporality: the expectant tense. (Tense as the vocal cords straining to sound.) To live sexual obsession is to, in Ernaux’s words, “experience pleasure like a future pain.” I had never seen anyone write about this kind of unabated tension, in which real life vanishes into the margins, and the world is mediated exclusively through memories of the lover. Ernaux’s book was the first time I’d read anything that took sexual obsession as a serious, intellectual topic, instead of as something to be ashamed of. She is simply, radically, writing about desire as though she is its agent, not as its object. Ernaux writes with straightforwardness and honesty; she doesn’t justify or explain herself. The text is so underwritten in places as to resemble, almost, a psychoanalyst’s case study, and Ernaux, with her even, detached tone, is more therapist than patient.