17 - The Consumers Managing (2): Making Do and Producing

Summary

Claire Etcherelli's novel Elise ou la vraie vie, though published in 1967, centres on Paris during the period of the 1950s, at the time of the Algerian war. Thus it overlaps in certain respects with Les Choses, Les Belles Images, and Roses à crédit. Its characters, however, include immigrant workers from North Africa and elsewhere, this time operating on an assembly line in a car plant (based on the Citroën factory). Elise, the narrator, tells how she fell in love with Arezki, an ouvrier spécialisé in the factory who is also a pro-Algerian activist. The daily labour on the assembly line is governed by a time-and-motion operative (‘le chrono’) and a supervisor (‘le régleur’) who monitor the pace of every sequence in the production process. They exemplify what Laurence's father, in Les Belles Images, says about a workforce enslaved by the need to increase output: ‘dans tous les pays l'homme est écrasé par la technique, aliéné à son travail, enchaîné, abêti’ (84). Their life is thus considerably removed from the pleasures of the rising consumer society, despite isolated references to certain self-indulgent individuals who possess ‘un tourne-disque’ (63)² or ‘un électrophone tout neuf et quelques disques’ (231). Elise is saving money from her subsistence-level wages to buy a radio for her grandmother (104).