What does the tension between memory and history—both personal and shared, the “I” and the “we”—teach us about both remembering and documenting our time spent? How do we view and engage with the past? Are memory and experience and memory and context intertwined? And how might we reconcile these?

Annie Ernaux, the France-based 2022 Nobel laureate for literature, earned fame and renown as a writer who is deeply entrenched in the power of memory—as a repository of lived experiences, as a cistern of hope and hearth, as an existential paradigm. When announcing the honor last fall, the Nobel Committee cited “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” Her masterpiece The Years, from 2008, recounts her own history and that of post-World War II France, and explores how the two narratives intertwined and diverged.

The Super 8 Years, an essay film she made with her son David Ernaux-Briot, premiered at the New York Film Festival days before she was anointed the 2022 Nobel laureate. The Super 8 Years spans the 1970s and early 1980s and might be construed as a cinematic investigation into that period through home movies. The Years covers those decades within its exploration from 1941 to 2006.

Watching The Super 8 Years in tandem with The Years gave me a deeper insight into both works—and into Ernaux’s sensibility. Ernaux’s two works together, by overlaying images on her literary self-examinations, allow her to construct both a remembrance of things past and a reconstruction and reconsideration of their remembrance, resulting in, to this reader/viewer, a diptych-esque response to Proust’s masterpiece.

The Years is a reconciliation with the history of France as Ernaux lived it, observed it, and processed it—from her point of entry during World War II through the waning days of colonialism; from the presidential administration of Charles de Gaulle to that of Jacques Chirac; during teetering toward and away from socialism; amid persistent undercurrents of classism and racism.

Ernaux is ambivalent about herself; she refers to herself as “we,” rather than “I,” sublimating a part of herself and blending in with the collective. Hers is a foot soldier’s view of history, and a quest to find one’s role and assert one’s place within it.

The Years approaches memory as a fluid force. In a section that takes us to 1953 and 1954, for example, Ernaux lists:

-the great train strike of the summer of ’53

-the fall of Dien Bien Phu

-Stalin’s death announced on the radio, one cold morning, in March, just before children left for school

and juxtaposes these moments in world history with her own childhood memories, some idyllic:

-the Tour de France passing through her town

-embroidering a napkin ring

some bittersweet:

-reading the summaries of films she will not see and books she will not read

and some harrowing:

-The scene between her parents … when her father tried to kill her mother, dragging her to the cellar … where they kept the sickle planted.

In a way, The Years and Ernaux’s writing of it are acts of alchemy—making the past present and the present past, morphing them together with an artist’s light, illuminating the crevices, brightening the corners. It is not that she’s completely oblivious to the world as it turns; it’s that she is a work in progress—observing and engaging that parallel evolution, while reckoning her own. They are mirror and window.

It makes sense, then, that The Super 8 Years picks up so deftly where the book leaves off.  Ernaux and Ernaux-Briot stitched the film together using home movies chronicling family life: vacations, and the mundanities of middle class and middle age in 1970s and 1980s France. The movies are grainy, and they are silent.

Ernaux adds the music, environmental effects, and narration—again, using “she/her” and “we/us,” as if the Annie she beholds on celluloid is a doppelganger, filmed against her will. Philippe, her then-husband, documented the family’s domestic life and its attendant milestones such as birthday parties and holiday gatherings, as well as vacations to Morocco, pre-Pinochet Chile, Albania, Egypt, Spain, and the Soviet Union, among others. Fifty years later, Ernaux, as narrator, assesses her engagement with those places in Cold War history in the past—both as vacation destinations and as validations of her progressive leanings—and from her present perspective, where she questions her place in a postcolonial, vastly changed landscape.

Philippe operates the camera at all times. He is the scenarist, auteur, director, producer, cinematographer. Annie is the unwitting protagonist—mildly annoyed, always self-conscious. It’s an engagement that perhaps betrays the fragile state of their marriage. He would later leave the footage with her, and take the camera with him.

When one engages the home movies as sui generis, Annie is the subject, frozen in a moment in time when she was vulnerable to Philippe’s camera. Her truth lingered beyond the frame. But fortified by her discerning narration 50 years later, The Super 8 Years is a reclamation process—a sort of rescue by interrogation and recontextualization. Ernaux the narrator and future Nobel laureate considers her cinematic self, whose career as an eventual literary icon is in its nascent stages, as defined by a patriarchal apparatus. On film, she is a homemaker, wife, and mother, navigating her way through the trappings of womanhood.

These are images of an irretrievable past, of a context that no longer exists, within a disintegrating marriage. As in The Years, Ernaux is probing memories, of her narrative and of “our” broader history.

Ernaux’s memory of her experiences, these chapters in her life, do not always match what she beholds in the footage. The act of remembering and remembrance is an act of editing and subconscious omission, brought to fruition in film. It is also an affirmation of self. Ernaux has in the end reconciled history and memory, collectively and individually. She, as “we,” is the author, the writer, the scribe, the narrator/filmmaker. She, as “she,” in the photos and footage, is preserved in a past moment, yet beckoning the future self for a dialogue. “She” is past and everlasting, unrevivable, yet resurrected.

As the artist, Ernaux is an alchemist, a preservationist, a reanimator of a world that is just memory and history. She may not have answers to what the footage provides, to what the past beckons, but she has questions—for herself, for history, for us. And she leaves it up to us—the sum total of our personal narratives, our fictionalization of them, our collective history and our relations to and reconciliation with the filmed, written, and recorded records.

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Dylan closes his Nobel lecture with this timeless invocation—alongside his interpretation of Odysseus’ encounter in the underworld with the greatest of Greek warriors, Achilles. In Hades, Achilles laments that it’s better to be a live slave than a dead king. “That’s what songs are too,” Dylan suggests. They are “alive in the land of the living” and are “meant to be sung, not read.” Shakespeare on the page is like Achilles in the underworld: regal but dead. Meanwhile, even the slightest folk tune cheers the tongue, taps your toe, and dances in your ear. Music keeps words lively.

A stretch? Maybe. But it adds an intriguing twist to the central argument raised when Dylan became the first songwriter to receive the literature Nobel: Is music literature? As far as Sara Daniu, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, is concerned, in the case of Bob Dylan the answer is yes. “We’re really giving it to Bob Dylan as a great poet,” she declared. Since the announcement of the award, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and all of Twitter have also weighed in on the question of music as literature.

On June 4, Dylan added his own voice to the debate by giving his Nobel lecture, a prerequisite for picking up the award’s prize money. But Dylan did not just deliver a piece of writing to the prize committee. He made a recording of himself performing his piece, which at times sounds like word jazz set to lounge music. A boozy piano track by former band member Alan Pasqua accompanies Dylan’s voice—that reedy, wheezy, nasal twang that sounds like he’s swallowed one of his own iconic harmonicas. And in the background you can sometimes hear—by accident? by design?—shuffling paper that reminds us of literature’s primary status as a written form.

But the lecture does more than blur music/literature boundaries. It also raises the stakes. At one point during the lecture, Dylan mentions how Melville’s Moby Dick mixes “all the myths.” Dylan is using one myth in particular, which he does not mention by name but that nonetheless lurks behind all that he says about music and literature. It’s the myth of Orpheus “psychopomp,” Orpheus “leader of souls”—the story of how Orpheus tried to use music and his ears to guide his dead wife back to the land of the living. And failed. Spectacularly.

George Frederick Watts, Orpheus and Eurydice. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Overcome with grief at his wife Eurydice’s untimely death, Orpheus descends to the underworld. Through music alone, he charms the three-headed dog Cerberus, gives Sisyphus surcease, and convinces the death god himself to give his wife a second chance at life. His wish is granted on one fateful condition: During his return journey to the land of the living, Orpheus must not look back to see if Eurydice is following him. He must lead her out of Hades using only his ears to tell if she, whose very name means “beautiful voice,” is still following him. If he should turn back to verify her presence with his eyes, he will lose her forever. Tragically, inevitably, mere steps away from daylight, Orpheus turns. This “Orphic turn” shows that even the Greeks’ greatest musician cannot believe his ears. He must see to believe.

It’s a common urge. Like all performance, music is ephemeral. But unlike drama and dance, which tend toward the visual as well as the ephemeral, music is invisible. Faced with its evanescent and ineffable form, we often feel the need to turn music into an object, something we can hold on to, something we can see. Orpheus desires to visualize sound for the same reason he descends to the underworld in the first place: He wants to make the impermanent permanent. Music is like mortal life itself, fleeting. Because Orpheus does not accept his wife’s death, he tries to bring her back to life. Because he does not trust the testimony of ephemeral sound, he turns around.

This Orphic turn has been repeated endlessly throughout history and across an infinite variety of techniques, stories, and cultures. Even—though subtly enough that we might miss it—in Dylan’s lecture.

There, he describes a transformative moment, his first and only attendance at a Buddy Holly concert. Dylan focuses on Buddy’s “face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit.” To Dylan’s eyes Buddy seems “permanent.” The description crescendos to epiphany when Buddy seems to transfer to Dylan all his musical power. This transformation does not come in a communication from vocal cord to eardrum or strummed guitar string to dancing hamstring. Instead, the magic zings from eye to eye: “He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.”

As with Orpheus and Eurydice, this gaze heralds death. A day or two later, Dylan tells us, Holly died. While it seems coincidence, the storyteller in Dylan sees a connection between the visual and the lethal. When we try to preserve music as a visual object—as a work of literature, as something that has permanence—we sometimes end by killing it.

Among the ancient Greeks, music and literature went hand-in-hand. And yet time and circumstance long ago stripped ancient Greek lyric, tragedy, and epic of their musical accompaniment and sent them out into the cold historical night naked and shorn of song. Today we have only the epithets to Homeric epic, the lyrics to Sapphic love songs, the scripts to Aeschylean tragedies. Beautiful, yes, but these works have forever lost something integral to their existence. Same with Dylan’s lyrics: If you’ve only read them, then you literally don’t know what you’re missing.

Of course, without the literary traces of certain works we would have nothing left at all. This is the case not only with Greek masterpieces but also with other, later, works—many 18th- and 19th-century folk songs, for example, which were preserved in collections known as “garlands” or “minstrels.” These volumes did not always print the melody along with the text—because of printing costs, the technological abilities of a given press, and the fact that some tunes were so well-known at the time of publication that printing them was superfluous. And yet these lyrics have lost something essential to their life as well. Songs are like magic spells: The charm is in the chanting.

That’s why, toward the end of his lecture, Dylan encourages fans to continue to experience his “lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.” One might read such a caveat as Dylan thumbing his nose at the Nobel Prize in “literature.” This would not be out of character.

But this emphasis can also be read as Dylan’s attempt to solve the paradox of how to preserve something without killing it. Audio recordings have a way of making a piece of music permanent without destroying its charm. It is for this reason that Dylan does not simply give a paper copy of his lecture to the Nobel committee but performs it, records it, and bequeaths it to posterity the way he wants it to be heard. (Dylan also continues to perform his work live—through the Never-Ending Tour, a non-stop concert juggernaut that he has been on since 1988.)

This keeps music and literature, hearing and seeing, together—and gives us a chance for permanence without death. If Hades punishes Orpheus for turning around, that’s just because the gods always get nervous when they see us mortals believing ourselves worthy of immortality. Despite what the gods may do and despite our own urges to separate this or that work of art into literature or music, the Orphic turn is there to remind us that we also want to unite the arts.

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