Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Mace 9781907975868

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Photography and Proust
2 Hervé Guibert: Photography and Love
3 Annie Ernaux: Photography and the Real
4 Gérard Macé: Photography and Self-Creation
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Interview with Annie Ernaux
Appendix 2: Macé’s photo-texts
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Photobiography Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Macé

lEGEnda legena , founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an Editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies, the British Comparative literature association and the association of Hispanists of Great Britain & Ireland.

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Editorial Board Chairman Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French) Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish) Professor Anne Fuchs, University of Warwick (German) Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish) Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English) Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of London (French) Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian) Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian) Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics) Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics) Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese) Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English) Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (German) Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian) Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French) Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish) Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese) Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK www.legendabooks.com

Photobiography Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Macé ❖ Akane Kawakami

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2013

First published 2013 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2013 ISBN 978-1-907975-86-8 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Contents ❖

Acknowledgements



Introduction

ix 1

1 Photography and Proust

17

2 Hervé Guibert: Photography and Love

39

3 Annie Ernaux: Photography and the Real

83

4 Gérard Macé: Photography and Self-Creation

131



Conclusion

171



Appendix 1: Interview with Annie Ernaux

177



Appendix 2: Macé’s photo-texts

182



Select Bibliography

183



Index

191

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v

The idea for this book emerged out of a conversation over coffee with Rachel Bowlby. Annie Ernaux generously answered my questions and read my work, and waited patiently for me when I was late for our first appointment; Gérard and Anne Macé were as generous as ever, opening up their home and photograph collection to me. Kathrin Yacavone calmed my last-minute Barthes-induced panic, and Colin Davis and Graham Nelson, of Legenda, have been supportive and encouraging throughout. I owe a great debt of gratitude to these and many others. The sections on L’Image fantôme and Le Seul Visage in chapter 2 have been adapted from my article, ‘Un coup de foudre photographique: Autobiography and Photography in Hervé Guibert’, Romance Studies, 25 (2007), 211–25; and parts of the section on L’Usage de la photo in Chapter 3 have been adapted from my article, ‘Proof of Life: Annie Ernaux’s Plural Self-Portrait in L’Usage de la photo’, French Studies, 64.4 (2010), 451–62. I am grateful to the editors of Romance Studies and French Studies for their kind permission to re-use this material. English translations of À la recherche du temps perdu are taken from Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. by D. J. Enright (vol. vi trans. by Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, rev. by D. J. Enright), 6 vols (London: Vintage, 2000 [1992–93]). Translations of La Chambre claire and Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes have been taken from Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. by Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Translations of À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie are taken from Hervé Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, trans. by Linda Coverdale (London: Quartet Books, 1991), and those of La Place and Une femme are taken from Annie Ernaux, Positions, trans. by Tanya Leslie (London: Quartet Books, 1991) and A Woman’s Story, also trans. by Tanya Leslie (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1991). All other translations are my own. This book is dedicated to Paul, as always, and to Ryuji. a.k., London, July 2013

Introduction v The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. Walter Benjamin 1

In À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust wonders, at various points, whether new technological inventions such as photography might stretch and increase the capacity of the human senses and mind. Walter Benjamin, in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, suggested that the camera did indeed have the power to alter the ways in which we perceive the world. In this book, I want to show how this same invention has inf luenced the ways in which we see and write about a particular part of the world: our selves. The key question that I will be asking throughout this book will be the following: has photography changed the ways in which we perceive ourselves, and if so, how is this visible in instances of self-writing? Are there ways in which photography has given writers new ways of thinking about the self? Are we now capable, in a way that writers pre-dating the invention of the camera were not, of thinking and writing photographically about ourselves? My examples will be taken from the ever-growing corpus of contemporary photobiography, a particularly fruitful area in recent French literature, as has been noted by various critics in both France and the rest of the world, and as is evinced by the slow but sure acceptance of the term in literary critical studies.2 The term ‘photobiographie’ was first used by Gilles Mora and Claude Nori in their Manifeste photobiographique (1983), which set out the hope for a form of self-writing intricately interwoven with photography.3 Thirty years after the publication of the manifesto, it is clear that the two media have been brought together in a variety of ways; over the period in question, French self-writing has taken a decidedly ‘photographic turn’.4 There are various ways in which these two elements can come together within the covers of a book, as well as a number of variations for both components, but within the larger group of works which bring together photography and writing, known as photo-texts,5 the heterogenous but recognizable group of photobiographic texts is a burgeoning presence. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes is often considered to be the original photobiography, but it has been followed by a number of fascinating works created by writers, artists, photographers, and writer-photographers such as Hervé Guibert, Hélène Cixous, Sophie Calle, Denis Roche, Annie Ernaux, Marie NDiaye and Gérard Macé. An analytical study of French photobiography today, therefore, seems timely. This book will not, however, attempt to offer a comprehensive account of contemporary photobiography. Rather, I will be discussing works by three writers

2

Introduction

who have consciously put this hybrid genre to the test by writing their selves with a strong awareness of the possibilities offered by both media; I will also limit myself to writers who combine their writings with photographs that they have taken themselves. I have chosen to discuss Hervé Guibert, Annie Ernaux, and Gérard Macé because they are differently inventive in their attitudes towards photography, but also because they are both ref lective about their use of photography and still committed to writing as their primary vehicle for writing the self. Hervé Guibert is a pioneer in this field, given that he was one of the first to be an adept of both media, and that he wrote essays on the nature of photography and its relationship with writing. Annie Ernaux, whose recent works are a surprising late addition to the photobiographic corpus, remains first and foremost a writer who uses and writes about photography from a self-consciously amateur point of view. Gérard Macé, who also came late to photography, is more invested than Ernaux in the new medium — he has published several volumes of photographs, created photo-texts in collaboration with other writers, and staged a number of exhibitions — and makes use of both the traditional and digital camera. I believe that tracing the trajectory of their works will give a clear sense of how the genre of photobiography has developed over the last thirty-odd years, and how it is moving us into a new age of writing photographically about our selves. Before exploring the works of these contemporary writers, however, I will be devoting some time to Proust, whom I see as the unlikely precursor of Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé in their pursuit of the self through photobiography. Proust’s lifetime roughly coincided with the invention and popularization of photography, and his use of it in À la recherche du temps perdu sets a precedent which has inspired all three of the younger writers in the domains of both self-writing and writerly attitudes towards the camera. My preliminary chapter on Proust will show that there is a special relationship between the greatest autobiographical novelist of the twentieth century and these other writers from a much later generation, different in each case but intertwined with the ways in which they envision and write themselves using photography and the photographic process as a model. Reference in Photography and Autobiographical Writing As a preliminary to discussing photobiography, I will brief ly contextualize its comp­onents, photography and autobiography, as they themselves are far from homo­geneous categories, and because their variations must be negotiated by each of the writers I will be examining. I also want to discuss their alleged ‘special relationship’ with the referent, which is of course one of the reasons they work well together in photobiographic texts, although their respective relationships to the referent have also been a source of critical and creative tensions. It has been long claimed of both photography and autobiography that they enjoy a special connection to the real. The age-old argument for the referential quality of photography and autobiography goes as follows: if photography is the indisputable ref lection of an object on a photosensitive surface, autobiography is the true record of a life by the person who should know it best. Although theorists

Introduction

3

of both photography and autobiography have shown that these are simplistic views, the fictionality of autobiography and the artistry of photography now being commonplaces in the relevant critical discourses, it is also generally accepted, even in the context of a more sophisticated understanding of the theories and practices underpinning both media, that photographs and autobiographies are linked by similar issues about referentiality.6 Given that these shared concerns about reality have brought autobiography and photography together in various critical contexts over the years, and that the same issues hold for photobiography, I will now cast a critical eye over how thinking about photography and autobiography with regard to the referent has changed and become more complex. By approaching the historical and theoretical contexts through the subject of referentiality, I plan also to introduce some key concepts from photography theory and autobiography studies to be used in the chapters that follow. Autobiography, or self-writing, has always been concerned with its referent, who is of course — at times problematically — also the apparent producer of the text in question. Since the publication in 1975 of Lejeune’s Le pacte autobiographique, the issue of referentiality in autobiography has usually been discussed in the context of genre. This work contains Lejeune’s now celebrated definition of autobiography as a ‘récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent principal sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité’,7 as well as his notion of a ‘pacte autobiographique’ between the reader and author of a work designed to be read as an autobiography: according to Lejeune, only an exact correspondence between narrator, writer, and protagonist produces an autobiography.8 Reactions, amplifications, and developments of this definition soon followed, concerned with the generic specificity and relationship to reality of various forms of autobiographical writing. Indeed, it might be argued that the precision of Lejeune’s definition unleashed a desire amongst theorists and critics to give credit to — and to highlight the literary merits of — autobiographical writings that did not meet its stipulations, of which there had always been, and still are, many. As Rachel Gabara writes, ‘autobiography is always a locus of contact among many genres, at once representation and invention, nonfiction and fiction, in the present and in the past’.9 The Lejeunian requirement that autobiography be a ‘récit rétrospectif ’, for instance, has been much contested, with critics such as Michel Beaujour arguing for the inclusion of more thematically organized or fragmentary forms,10 or by experimental writers creating autobiographical narratives, collectively classified by some as ‘la nouvelle autobiographie’, which eschew continuous and coherent narrative portraits of the self. One consequence of all this discussion is that the preferred collective appellation is now not so much ‘autobiography’, as ‘life writing’ or ‘self-writing’, terms which allow for more variation. In this book, I will be using the term ‘self-writing’ to refer to instances of works created with an intent to represent or ref lect the self, whilst retaining the term ‘autobiographical’ for its more popular usage, meaning ‘from the author’s life’. But in the meantime, a rival thread of discussion — a tributary, perhaps, but one which has at times threatened to engulf the original arguments about the nature

4

Introduction

of autobiography — was started in 1977 when the term ‘autofiction’ was coined by Serge Doubrovsky. As all three of the authors I will discuss have had the term applied to their works, I will now take a few moments to sketch out the genesis and development of this sub-genre. Serge Doubrovsky famously described his book Fils, whose hero bears the same name as the author, on the back cover as ‘fiction, d’événements et de faits strictement réels; si l’on veut, autofiction’ [fiction, of events and facts that are strictly real; autofiction, if you like]. In a later essay, he wrote that his autofictions were a kind of ‘fausse fiction, qui est l’histoire d’une vraie vie’ [false fiction, which is the story of a real life].11 From this starting point, there has emerged a great deal of critical discussion concerning this new category of self-writing.12 The most important rival definition came from Vincent Colonna, a doctoral student of Gérard Genette, who widened the category of autofiction and made it ‘une oeuvre littéraire par laquelle un écrivain s’invente une personnalité et une existence, tout en conservant son identité réelle (son véritable nom)’ [a work of literature in which a writer invents for himself a personality and a life, whilst retaining his real identity (his actual name)].13 Colonna’s definition of autofiction, which may be summarized as spanning ‘l’ensemble des procédés de fictionnalisation de soi’14 [all the procedures of self-fictionalization] and which appeared in 1989, meant that many more forms of self-writing could be entered into this category. Since then the emphasis in discussions of autofiction has shifted to other aspects of the genre: for example, its literary quality (Marie Darrieussecq),15 or its ‘true’ identity as fiction (Philippe Forest).16 In 1999, the originator of the term gave an interview in which he described not so much the finished product as the manner in which he creates his autofictions: Je sens que lorsque j’écris, je louche, parce que mon œil d’un côté regarde vers le référent — l’histoire qui m’est arrivée — et l’autre œil, en même temps, regarde le jeu des mots, la manière dont ils s’accouplent, s’assemblent, etc. Et c’est à l’intérieur de ce jeu de mots que je glisse le référent.17 [I feel as if, when I’m writing, I’m squinting, because one of my eyes is looking at the referent — the story of what happened to me — and the other eye, at the same time, is looking at the play of words, the manner in which they pair up, come together, etc. And it’s into this play of words that I slip in the referent.]

In discussing the works of Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé, I will at times be using the term ‘autofiction’ to refer to texts which emerge out of the kind of writing practice loosely but intriguingly described by Doubrovsky in this interview; narratives which create the uncomfortable sense that the author, and therefore the reader, needs to be looking in two opposite directions at once. This image of an uneasy reading experience is also true of Colonna’s definition, which will be, more generally speaking, the basis for my understanding of the term: autofiction as a work of self-fabulation that nevertheless contains kernels of ‘real facts’ from the author’s life. The belief in photography’s special relationship with the referent is built on the notion of indexicality, which argues that there is a causal relation between the

Introduction

5

photograph and what it pictures. In other words, a photograph is an indexical sign;18 for that reason, many theorists have gone on to argue that it is also causally linked to the referent. Both André Bazin and Roland Barthes, according to Colin McCabe, believed the photograph to be ‘indissolubly linked to the referent’.19 Indeed Barthes has, as we will see, been seen as the champion — rightly or wrongly — of the position which posits a direct link between photography and reality. But many others disagree with this view: Damisch says that this impression of immediate access to reality characteristic of photography is an ‘ontological deception’.20 It is now generally accepted in photography theory that a photograph is not linked ontologically to the referent, and cannot, therefore, prove the existence of what it pictures. It cannot be denied, however, that it possesses a strong ‘psychological reality-effect’.21 Even in our contemporary, digital age, this view of photography is a popular and persistent notion, as we will see, for instance, in the chapter on Ernaux.22 The position which links the photograph directly to the referent is known as ontological realism, as against aesthetic constructivism or formalism, which takes the opposing view that photographs are predominantly constructions or artistic creations.23 The realist view of the photograph, and the related belief in a link between photography and reality, has given rise to a number of powerful and persuasive images in both literature and in photography theory. So Sontag writes that ‘photographs really are experience captured [...] Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world as pieces of it’.24 Photographs are often referred to as frozen pieces of time; or, as Bazin famously wrote, ‘photography [...] embalms time’.25 They thence proceed logically to function as memento mori, both of the death of the person pictured and the death of the viewer. Indeed, as we will see, photographs have often been discussed for their status as oxymoronic objects which simultaneously signify absence and presence. The realist tendencies in photography theory downplay the art of the photographer, but many theorists have argued for the crucial part played by him/her, and shown how the photographer’s vision, his/her choice of subject, setting, lighting and angle, make the photograph into a creation.26 This aesthetic constructivist view has been greatly strengthened in recent years by the birth of the digital camera, which has made us all aware of how easily images can be altered, manipulated and recreated, sometimes to the point of becoming completely unlike the original model. We will see in subsequent chapters how Gérard Macé and Hervé Guibert are both more at ease with this view of photography compared with Ernaux: this is perhaps because they themselves are dedicated practitioners of the art. Macé in particular is fascinated by photography’s connection with illusion, and therefore with the imagination. The acknowledgement of human agency in the creation of a photograph introduces not just the photographer, but other people into the equation, and with them, emotional factors to which the ‘realists’ are also not indifferent. Katja Haustein argues that the photograph must be considered as part of a network of ‘practices of looking’ involving the gazes of at least three people: ‘the photograph is no longer petrified but turns into an animated and mobile “Sichtbarkeitsgebilde”

6

Introduction

[visibility formation] where the various gazes of the photographer, the viewer and the portrayed object(s), both within and without the image, intersect’.27 If these gazes belong to real people, then the notion of affect, according to Haustein, must return — and indeed has returned — to critical discourse, as seeing is not an emotionally neutral process.28 We will see how this aspect of photography is one in which Barthes is deeply invested, and how it is central to Guibert’s understanding of the medium. With the (re)introduction of human agency, we are also made aware of the ethical dimensions of the photographic act; if photographs are the result of an interaction between the photographer and a human model, in what ways should a consideration of their relationship be included in our analysis of the product? I will be discussing such concerns in a later chapter, in particular relation to Macé’s photographs of Africa. Indexicality, absence/presence, affect, and ethics: these are some of the key issues from photography theory and semiotics which will inform my readings of the photographs, and discussions of photography, of Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé in the chapters to follow. As for the term ‘photographic’, based on and derived from the nexus of concerns described above, I will be making use of it in three main senses: literal, metaphorical, and analogical. In the literal sense, ‘photographic’ will obviously refer to a characteristic of actual photographs, those present in photobiographies and photo-texts, and those that are published in collections. So I might describe, for instance, the chronologically ordered sequence of photographs at the beginning of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes as a ‘photographic narrative’. The metaphorical sense of ‘photographic’ can be used extremely impressionistically at times. In this book, I will use it to refer to cases when photography enters a text as a metaphor, that is to say already in the form of language; when past versions of the self, for instance, are reimagined as photographs, or when the human eye is thought of as a camera lens. The third sense in which I use the term ‘photographic’ is described by a theorist of photography in the quotation below: We can characterize photography in terms of technologies for accomplishing or guiding the production of images on sensitized surfaces by means of light [...] without necessarily understanding such images as ‘photographs’. Procedures, structures, materials will then be photographic when they have a place in such technology, whether or not they themselves work by light.29

If we can describe as ‘photographic’ the way in which images are reproduced on any sensitized surface, the specificity of such a process — of which photography itself would only be one instance, given that it can happen in natural phenomena — makes it possible to describe certain writing practices as being analogically photographic. I will be arguing that this is how writing can come closest to assuming the characteristics of photography as a medium, a result of how far photography has succeeded in altering the ways in which we write about ourselves. In this study we will see how the writers in question combine photography and writing in all three of these ways: how they make use of actual photographs, how they employ photographs and the photographic process as metaphors, and also how they adopt analogically ‘photographic’ writing practices. Therefore, although the term ‘photograph’ can and will only refer to the material object with which

Introduction

7

we are all familiar, the term ‘photographic’ will cover a wider range of meanings, from a ‘narrow’ reference to the concrete object described above, through nonmetaphorical but analogical uses relating to the procedures involved in the production of a photograph, to the much wider applications that become possible through the use of metaphor.30 Having given a brief account of the historical and theoretical contexts of selfwriting and photography out of which ‘photobiography’ can be said to have emerged, I will now offer a comparatively brief definition of the newest term. I will use photobiography to describe texts in which the photographic — in a metaphorical, analogical, or actual sense — interacts with forms of self-writing to offer a hybrid representation of the creator’s self.31 Each writer’s understanding of what the photographic is, and indeed what the autobiographical may be, will inf lect their use of each element and result in intriguingly different, and innovative, kinds of photobiography. And what interests me most is how, to return to Benjamin, the writers’ perception of their own selves has been modified by their exposure to the photographic in its various forms. To anticipate, I hope to show how Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé all create differently new forms of self-writing which have in common a structural debt to the photographic. Hailing from an earlier age, Proust believed that new technological inventions had the ability to alter and develop both perception and thinking in human beings.32 One of the aims of my study is to show that he was right, by discussing how this later generation of authors uses photography — and its development over the years — to create new ways of seeing ref lected in novel ways of writing the self. In the remainder of this chapter, I develop further some of the key concepts, introduced above, that bring together the photographic and autobiographical through a brief discussion of Roland Barthes, one of the first and most important writers on photography. Thereafter there will be a chapter dedicated to each of the writers who embodies a specific attitude towards the self through the photographic: Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé. In chapter 1, Proust’s obsession with photographs, and his use of them on various levels in La Recherche, will be examined in relation to his autobiographical novel; I will also discuss the ways in which some of his readers have attempted to make a ‘photo-text’ of sorts out of La Recherche. Chapter 2 will look at Hervé Guibert, writer and photographer, whose largely autobiographical works — whatever their declared genre — are all based on his understanding of photography as an act of love. His invention of the term ‘écriture photographique’, a crucial definition for my study, will also be discussed. Chapter 3 will chart the growing importance of the photograph in the work of Annie Ernaux, a writer not usually associated with photography although always considered to be an autobiographical writer, whose most recent works constitute a culmination of her developing interest in photography.33 In chapter 4, I will examine the photographs and writings of Gérard Macé, whose unique approach to the photographic results in structural self-portraits in both media, in which the self is captured in the very act of creation. My conclusion will consider, as mentioned above, the achievements of these writers as a new kind of self-writing inf lected through the photographic.

8

Introduction

Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) and La Chambre claire (1980) Most recent studies of photography reference Barthes’s La Chambre claire, and its pertinence to autobiographical studies too has been noted and discussed in a wealth of critical material.34 In this section of my introduction, therefore, I will give only a brief analysis of Barthes’s work, concentrating on key issues arising from it which will be useful for my analyses of the photobiographies of Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé. I will start, however, by touching on an earlier work by Barthes which has also become an unavoidable text in any discussion of modern autobiographical writing: Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes.35 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes appears in Seuil’s ‘écrivains de toujours’ series whose titles usually follow the ‘[author’s name] par lui-même’ formula, a formula justified by the fact that each volume contains a large number of quotations from and photographs of the author who is the subject of the book.36 Barthes’s version is, of course, the only one in which the subject is also the actual author, as the tonguein-cheek title declares. Indeed the whole project may look, at first sight, as if it must be a postmodern parody of the genre, especially when one considers that Barthes is the author of ‘The Death of the Author’, the theorist who has consistently rejected the notion of a coherent self, attempted to escape the trap of the first person, and argued that a writer is simply a ‘scripteur’, ‘who neither records nor represents an extratextual reality but instead brings a text into being as this text simultaneously creates him’.37 With characteristic aplomb, however, Barthes embraces the challenge within the remit of this ‘traditional’ series, albeit with many a qualification, the first of which is the handwritten ‘warning’ on the inside of the front cover: ‘Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman’ [All this must be considered as if spoken by an character in a novel]. Even a quick look through the pages shows that Barthes’s take on the standard format is both radical and traditional. Radical, because the text is a series of alphabetically ordered fragments, with titles such as ‘Actif/réactif ’ [Active/reactive], ‘L’adjectif ’ [the adjective], ‘L’aise’ [ease], and ‘Le démon de l’analogie’ [the demon of analogy] for instance, which describe aspects of Barthes’s life, character, and thinking in a third-person voice;38 but also traditional, because the photographs collected at the start of the volume are chronologically arranged shots of his family, himself, the places of his childhood and some of his friends, an ‘album de famille’ [family album]. In other words, Barthes offers the reader two narratives of his life told through the two different media: the disjointedly written text and the coherent photographic one. I will now consider some of these photographs and the place they occupy in the book as a whole. Barthes’s photographs, although they may be of the expected sorts of subjects and more or less chronologically arranged, are not present in the book as a purely traditional feature:39 their visual effect is moderated by the long and frequently theoretical captions. The first caption goes some way, indeed, towards undermining their presence altogether, by arguing that it is in fact pointless to show photographs of a writer: once a writer has begun to write, his writing is where interest concerning his identity should lie, and not his body. Or, as he puts it,

Introduction

9

On ne trouvera donc ici, mêlées au roman familial, que les figurations d’une préhistoire du corps — de ce corps qui s’achemine vers le travail, la jouissance d’écriture. [...] le temps du récit (de l’imagerie) finit avec la jeunesse du sujet: il n’y a de biographie que de la vie improductive. (RB, 6) [So you will find here, mingled with the ‘family romance’, only the figurations of the body’s prehistory — of the body making its way towards the labor and the pleasure of writing. [...] The time of the narrative (of the imagery) ends with the subject’s youth: the only biography is of an unproductive life.]40

In spite of what he says here, the collection does contain some photographs of the mature Barthes, although they tend to appear as contrasts to younger portraits: for instance, a photograph of Barthes as a child of around ten, looking a little bored, is accompanied by two photographs of a much older Barthes looking bored at conferences (RB, 28–29). The only photographs of a mature Barthes which are not offered as foils to images from an earlier age (RB, 42–43) all capture him at work, thus showing us, in a sense, the only photograph possible of the writer: that is, shots of the writer-at-work. There are two other photographs of the mature Barthes, both paired with photos of a younger Barthes. One of these pairs is dated, so we know that the younger portrait is from 1942, and the older one from 1970. They are accompanied by a long quotation about the shock of seeing photographs of oneself. Barthes describes it as a shock of non-recognition: Mais je n’ai jamais ressemblé à cela! — Comment le savez-vous? Qu’est-ce que ce ‘vous’ auquel vous ressembleriez ou ne ressembleriez pas? [...] Où est votre corps de vérité? Vous êtes le seul à ne pouvoir jamais vous voir qu’en image, vous ne voyez jamais vos yeux, sinon abêtis par le regard qu’ils posent sur le miroir ou sur l’objectif [...] même et surtout pour votre corps, vous êtes condamné à l’imaginaire. (RB, 42) [But I never looked like that! — How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? [...] You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens [...] even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the imaginary.] (RB by RB, 36)

A photograph of oneself, as Barthes explains, is the ultimate paradox in that although it is so often ‘unrecognizable’ to the subject, yet we feel it must be ‘real’, because we are used to experiencing photographs as authenticating reality. This prob­lem of the body’s condemnation to the imaginary — which is also the subject’s fate, however much its fragmentary narration in this book may create the illusion that it can escape imaginary unification — will only be resolved in La Chambre claire.41 La Chambre claire is best known for containing Barthes’s theory of photography, but it is also widely recognized as a deeply personal, autobiographical work.42 The book was written soon after the death of his mother, and Barthes’s mourning of her is based on, or rather clings to, a characteristic of photography mentioned earlier. This is its indexicality, its special relationship with the referent: ‘la chose nécessairement réelle qui a été placé devant l’objectif, faute de quoi il n’y aurait

10

Introduction

pas de photographie’ [the necessarily real thing that was placed before the lens, without which there would not have been a photograph].43 This, for Barthes, is the first principle of photography, ‘le noème “Ça-a-été”’ (CC, 120).There has been much discussion of whether Barthes meant by this that the photograph’s indexicality allowed it to access the referent directly, which would then mean that the photograph could authenticate the referent’s existence, or whether the indexical nature of the photograph, although it may create an effect of immediate access to reality, cannot be linked to any notion of ontological guarantee.44 As mentioned above, recent developments in digital media have pushed public opinion, at least, towards the latter view; but for many years previous to the digital revolution, the notion that the photograph can prove existence (whether or not Barthes thought so) has been the single most widespread and persistent notion concerning photography and its difference from other media, and Barthes’s analysis must be read in that context.45 As we will see, Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé all grapple with this belief in photography’s ability to ‘prove’ existence in their different ways. When considering the issues of indexicality and reference in Barthes, it is helpful to consider separately Barthes’s reactions to the photograph, and what he says about the nature of the photographic image: the phenomenology and the ontology. Barthes the viewer of the photograph has a conviction that the photograph depicts a past reality, which is based on believing that the photograph is an indexical sign; however, Barthes the theorist knows that this conviction cannot constitute ontological proof of the referent’s (past) existence.46 But for a son who has just lost his beloved mother, the phenomenological certainty — the ‘ça-a-été’ quality of the photograph — is its most important aspect, and it is a particular photograph of his mother that subsequently convinces Barthes that she, in spite of her recent death, is still the guarantor of his own identity. Having reminded us of the alienating effect of photographs of the self on the self, as discussed previously in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes — ‘c’est “moi” qui ne coïncide jamais avec mon image’ — Barthes offers (in parentheses, as is so often the case with his most important or heartfelt statements) an unexpected maternal antidote to this photographic loss of the self: Hélàs, je suis condamné par la Photographie, [...] à avoir toujours une mine: mon corps ne trouve jamais son degré zéro, personne ne le lui donne (peut-être seule ma mère? Car ce n’est pas l’indifférence qui enlève le poids de l’image [...], c’est l’amour, l’amour extrême). (CC, 27) [Alas, I am doomed by Photography [...] always to have an expression: my body never finds its zero degree, no one can give it to me (perhaps only my mother? For it is not indifference which erases the weight of the image [...], but love, extreme love).]47

This wondering reference to his mother entre parenthèses is not explained, elaborated upon, or given any objective status. It is just a hunch on Barthes’s part, occurring very early on in the narrative and well before he has found the picture of his mother as a child in the Jardin d’Hiver,48 that she will be instrumental to his search for his self — or the self — in photography. We will see how our subsequent writers’ attempts to depict the self also lead to the possibility of identifying the mother as

Introduction

11

the self ’s origin, although none of them develops this theory as insistently as Barthes goes on to do. Once he has found the Winter Garden photograph, one evening not long after her death, Barthes becomes convinced that this photograph of his mother will provide him with the key to a theory: Quelque chose comme une essence de la Photographie f lottait dans cette photo particulière. Je décidai alors de ‘sortir’ toute la Photographie (sa ‘nature’) de la seule photo qui existât assurément pour moi, et de la prendre en quelque sorte pour guide de ma dernière recherche. (CC, 114) [Something like an essence of Photography f loated in this particular photograph. So I decided to derive all Photography (its ‘nature’) from the only photograph which assuredly existed for me, and to take it somehow as a guide for my last investigation. (CL, 73)]

Most photographs of his mother, according to Barthes, do not look like her; they have not captured the uniqueness of her being. This is why Barthes is so struck by the Winter Garden photograph, which — he claims — has fixed his mother’s essence, her ‘true’ self, what he dubs her ‘air’.49 ‘L’air (j’appelle ainsi, faute de mieux, l’expression de vérité) est comme le supplément intraitable de l’identité’ [The air (I use this word, lacking anything better, for the expression of truth) is a kind of intractable supplement of identity], and only occurs in the odd photo, but when it does, it captures the real person: ‘sur cette photo de vérité, l’être que j’aime, que j’ai aimé, n’est pas séparé de lui-même: enfin il coïncide’ (CC, 168) [in this veracious photograph, the being I love, whom I have loved, is not separated from itself: at last it coincides] (CL, 109). In this photo of his mother, Barthes claims that ‘je fais bien plus que la reconnaître [...] je la retrouve: éveil brusque, hors de la “ressemblance”, satori où les mots défaillent’ (CC, 168) [I do much more than recognize her [...] I discover her: a sudden awakening, outside of ‘likeness’, a satori in which words fail] (CL, 109). The reference to satori, harking back to L’Empire des signes, confirms that this is an instance of the phenomenological ‘real’ erupting into our world of signs and resemblances:50 a photo that has caught a person’s ‘air’ affords us a rare vision of the referent, even if it is a past referent. And the verb ‘coïncider’ (‘enfin il coïncide’) echoes his complaint, earlier in the book, that he himself never seems to coincide with his own photographic images (‘c’est “moi” qui ne coïncide jamais avec mon image’). What was suggested then — that his mother would, somehow, give him back the ‘degré zéro’ of his body — hints at a way in which the Winter Garden photograph can not only restore his mother to him, but also restore him to himself,51 although it is not made explicit. Discussing what it means to say that a photo is ‘ressemblante’ [a likeness], Barthes points out that an original identity is often ‘imprécise, imaginaire même’ (CC, 158) [imprecise, even imaginary] (CL, 100), especially when it is of himself: ‘moi qui me sens un sujet incertain, amythique, comment pourrais-je me trouver ressemblant? Je ne ressemble qu’à d’autres photos de moi, et cela à l’infini: personne n’est jamais que la copie d’une copie, réelle ou mentale’ (CC, 159) [finding myself an uncertain, amythic subject, how could I find myself “like”? All I look like is other photographs of myself, and this to infinity: no one is ever anything

12

Introduction

but the copy of a copy, real or mental] (CL, 102). But Barthes can now be freed from this Baudrillardian hell, thanks to his mother, as indeed he had foreseen. The Winter Garden photo, because it has both touched (through chemistry and light) and captured the ‘essence’ of his mother,52 breaks the vicious circle of selfref lecting images and returns him to himself. Because of his conviction as a viewer — phenomenological conviction though it may be, as explained above — that ‘ça-a-été’, and because she is literally his ‘origin’, his own self is guaranteed. The Winter Garden photo is also the origin of Barthes’s text, in which, however, it is not included:53 ‘Je ne puis montrer la Photo du Jardin d’Hiver. Elle n’existe que pour moi. Pour vous, elle ne serait rien d’autre qu’une photo indifférente, [...] elle ne peut fonder une objectivité, au sens positif du terme’ (CC, 115) [I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, [...] it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term (CL, 73)].54 This description of the photograph — that ‘elle n’existe que pour moi’ — shows that Barthes is founding his analysis on his personal, affective response to it; that in this work, famously dedicated to Sartre’s L’Imaginaire, the dominant approach is phenomenological. Indeed, throughout La Chambre claire, Barthes is primarily interested in the viewer’s — that is to say, his own — reactions to photographs, choosing to discuss images whose punctum, in each case, wounds him (‘ces images me sidèrent’, ‘cette image me point’). Guibert also uses the language of love and the emotions when he discusses his collection of photographs, taken both by himself and by others. As a photographer himself, however, Guibert, unlike Barthes, is most interested in the emotional investment of the photographer — the Barthesian Operator — in the photographic act. We will see how Guibert the photographer’s thinking about photography as an act of love adds a new dimension to the affective analysis of photography exemplified here by Barthes. There is one final notion — final, because it comes at the end of La Chambre claire — concerning the nature of photography which we will see being developed by the authors in subsequent chapters: the notion of the photograph as an ‘image folle’. Barthes writes that the photograph, because it both proves the existence of some­ thing in the past and its present absence, is an oxymoronic object: ‘fausse au niveau de la perception, vraie au niveau du temps’. This is the way in which the photograph is a kind of hallucination, rather than an illusion, and can lead to madness: Folle ou sage? La Photographie peut être l’un ou l’autre: sage si son réalisme reste relatif, tempéré par des habitudes esthétiques ou empiriques [...]; folle, si ce réalisme est absolu, et, si l’on peut dire, originel, faisant revenir à la conscience amoureuse et effrayée la lettre même du Temps: mouvement proprement révulsif, qui retourne le cours de la chose, et que j’appellerai pour finir l’extase photographique. (CC, 183) [Mad or tame? Photography can be one or the other: tame if its realism remains relative, tempered by aesthetic or empirical habits [...] mad if this realism is absolute and, so to speak, original, obliging the loving and terrified consciousness to return to the very letter of Time: a strictly revulsive movement which reverses the course of the thing, and which I shall call, in conclusion, photographic ecstasy.] (CL, 119)

Introduction

13

Given that it is a simultaneous experience of pastness and presentness, this ‘ecstasy’ would seem to be related to Proust’s analysis of involuntary memory especially as La Chambre claire is, as has been noted by many critics, a work with strong echoes of Proust.55 Photography is related more obviously to voluntary rather than involuntary memory in La Recherche, but its processes have also been likened to those of the more creative process of the latter.56 On the other hand, it could be argued that these two experiences are completely opposed to each other: the pleasure experienced by Proust’s narrator at his simultaneous experience of past and present sensation allows him to transcend time, whereas Barthes’s ecstatic experience of pastness and presentness in a single image forcefully reminds him of the dominance of time, ‘faisant revenir à la conscience amoureuse et effrayée la lettre même du Temps’.57 This ability of the photograph to suggest simultaneously the reality of both past and present, absence and presence, in a single image will be discussed in all of the subsequent chapters, as it reappears in more attenuated forms in Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé: in all of those cases the experience is never as raw, as mad, as in Barthes. There will be several direct references to La Chambre claire in my chapter on Guibert, whose collection of essays on photography, L’image fantôme, contains numerous intertextual echoes of Barthes’s book. Now, however, we will turn back in time to Proust, whose views on photography are startlingly ‘modern’. Notes to the Introduction 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Extracts from the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in The Photography Reader, ed. by Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 42–53 (p. 51). 2. Some important works that have examined French photobiographic works, and/or focused on the combination of photography and self-writing, are: Timothy Dow Adams, Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography and Autobiography (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Rachel Gabara, From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography, ed. by N. Edwards, A. L. Hubbell, and A. Miller (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); Katja Haustein, Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity and Affect in Proust, Benjamin and Barthes (Oxford: Legenda, 2012) and Fabien Arribert-Narce, Photobiographies: pour une écriture de notation de la vie (Roland Barthes, Denis Roche, Annie Ernaux) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013). 3. Photobiography was and is still used in non-academic contexts to designate a biography told in photographs, but in more academic contexts it is now a standard term to describe books in which photographs are combined with text to tell an autobiographical story. See for instance Fabien Arribert-Narce, ‘A Human Periplum: Denis Roche’s Photobiographic Archives’, Comparative Critical Studies, 8 (2011), 259–75, or any of the essays in Textual and Visual Selves. 4. Véronique Montémont, ‘Beyond Autobiography’, in Textual and Visual Selves, ed. by Edwards, Hubbell, and Miller, pp. 29–49, p. 30. For a brief but helpful account of contemporary phototextual relations, see pp. 29–34. 5. Combinations of photographs and text are known as photo-texts, and much has been written about these. For an authoritative account see Andy Stafford, Photo-texts: Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). 6. See the introduction in Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). There is also a good discussion of this subject in Gunnthòrunn Gudmundsdòttir, Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), ch. 6. 7. Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 14.

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Introduction

8. Claire Boyle’s Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self in Post-war France (Oxford: Legenda, 2007) gives a clear and useful account of Lejeune’s theories, as well as an excellent brief history of how autobiography theory developed subsequently. 9. Rachel Gabara, From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. xii. 10. Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, rhétorique de l’autoportrait (Paris: Seuil, 1980). 11. Serge Doubrovsky, ‘Autobiographie/Vérité/Psychanalyse’, in Autobiographies: de Corneille à Sartre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), p. 69. 12. Jeannelle has given an excellent account of the development of the genre over the last thirty years, in ‘Où en est la réf lexion sur l’autofiction?’, in Genèse et autofiction, ed. by Jean-Louis Jeannelle and Catherine Viollet (Louvain-la-Neuve: Bruylant-Academia, 2007), pp. 17–37. 13. Vincent Colonna, ‘L’Autofiction (Essai sur la fictionnalisation de soi en littérature)’ (PhD dissertation, l’EHESS, 1989), p. 279. I quote from his original thesis because the book version, Autofiction et autres mythomanies littéraires (Paris: Tristram, 2004), is in fact substantially different and expanded. 14. Jeannelle and Viollet, p. 21. 15. ‘Où en est la réf lexion sur l’autofiction?’, pp. 21–23. 16. Ibid., pp. 23–25. 17. Alex Hughes, Interview with Serge Doubrovsky (1999). Online at . 18. T. L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 215. 19. Colin McCabe, ‘Barthes and Bazin, the Ontology of the Image’, in Writing the Image after Roland Barthes, ed. by Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 71–76 (p. 74). 20. See Hubert Damisch, ‘Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image’, in The Photography Reader, ed. by Wells, pp. 87–89 (p. 88). 21. Kathrin Yacavone, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography (New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 147. 22. See ibid., pp. 144–50, for a lucid discussion of Barthes’s views on the relationship between the photograph, indexicality, and the referent. 23. Barthes recognized that these two positions are not mutually exclusive: La photo ne peut pas être transcription pure et simple de l’objet qui se donne comme naturel, ne serait-ce que parce qu’elle est plate et non en trois dimensions; et d’autre part, elle ne peut pas être un art, puisqu’elle copie mécaniquement. (Roland Barthes, Le Grain de la voix, Entretiens 1962–1980 (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 355–56) [a photo cannot be a pure and simple transcription of the object that presents itself as natural, if only because it is f lat and not three-dimensional; and on the other hand, photography cannot be an art, because it copies mechanically.] 24. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1977), pp. 3–4. 25. André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (trans. by Hugh Gray), Film Quarterly, 13.4 (1960), 4–9 (p. 8). 26. See for instance Mary Price, The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Place (Stanford: Stanford Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1994). 27. Haustein, p. 4. 28. Ibid., p. 6. 29. Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 19–20. 30. The difference between analogical and metaphorical uses of the photographic will be exemplified in detail in Chapter 1. 31. A much more detailed discussion of photobiography as a genre is to be found in the Introduction of Arribert-Narce, Photobiographies: pour une écriture de notation de vie. 32. For an excellent discussion of Proust’s attitude to the new technologies, see the chapter on Proust in Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).

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15

33. My recent interview with her on the subject can be found in Appendix 1. 34. See for instance Writing the Image after Roland Barthes, ed. by Jean-Michel Rabaté, and Nancy M. Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography: The Critical Tradition in Perspective (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997); Gabara; Gudmundsdottír; Haustein; Yacavone, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography. 35. There have been numerous critical studies of this work and of its contribution to the genre of autobiography. See for instance Johnnie Gratton, ‘Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes: Autobiography and the Notion of Expression’, Romance Studies, 8 (1986), 57–65; Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Claire Boyle, part II of ch. 1; Gabara, ch. 1. 36. Camus par lui-même by Maurice Leblanc, for instance, contains numerous photographs which are interspersed throughout the book, and the text contains a very large number of quotations. 37. Gabara, From Split to Screened Selves, p. 4. 38. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 47–48. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by RB. 39. Gudmundsdottìr suggests that more ‘conventional’ autobiographies tend not to ‘question the “pure” referentiality of the photograph, and do not doubt its inherent meaning’ (p. 223). 40. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. by Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 3. 41. This brief section on Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes clearly cannot do justice to the fascinating complexities of this work. For a concise but helpful discussion see the aforementioned chapter in Gabara. 42. See references to Gratton and Eakin, in n. 35. 43. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1980), p. 120. Henceforth references to this book will occur in the text, preceded by CC. 44. See discussions in the various works cited above for differently nuanced views (as well as outright disagreements) on this matter. 45. See for instance Adams, pp. 11–12. 46. As I have said, theorists differ in their opinions of Barthes’s argument; this is my own view. 47. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 12. Henceforth, all translations of the French original will be taken from this volume, and all references to it will occur in the text, preceded by CL. 48. There has been, over the years, a great deal of discussion about whether or not this photograph exists in reality, and if so, which one it might be: see for instance Diana Knight, Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 265–66; or Margaret Olin, ‘Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s “Mistaken” Identification’, Representations, 80 (2002), 99–118 (pp. 108–10). But Kathrin Yacavone has recently offered what appears to be the definitive answer to the mystery: she suggests that the Winter Garden photograph is one which Barthes had in his study, and with which he has been photographed on at least two occasions (these photographs are reproduced in Yacavone’s book, on pp. 165–66). For her account, see Yacavone, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography, pp. 164–71. 49. For a discussion of the notion of ‘air’ in Barthes, and what it owes to Benjamin’s notion of ‘aura’, see Yacavone, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography, pp. 172–75. 50. Akane Kawakami, Travellers’ Visions: French Literary Encounters with Japan, 1881–2004 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), pp. 135–36. 51. See Gabara, p. 64. 52. The fallacious reasoning — or at least the wilfully wishful thinking — involved in this miraculous transformation of light into f lesh has been discussed in an excellent article by Elissa Marder, ‘Nothing to Say: Fragments on the Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Esprit Créateur, 40 (2000), 25–35 (pp. 31–32). 53. This idea of the missing photograph has become something of a trope in French self-writings, occurring for instance in Duras’s L’amant, Guibert’s L’Image fantôme, Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance, and various works by Ernaux. I will discuss ekphrastic self-writing in relation to photography in chapter 3. 54. The difficulty with this chain of reasoning, as indeed with the notion of ‘air’, is that it is not

16

Introduction

susceptible to objective enquiry, precisely because it derives the general from the particular (‘la science impossible de l’être unique’, CC, 110). 55. As well as the many references to Proust’s novel footnoted in the margins, and the vaguer echoes which are simply and familiarly acknowledged as ‘proustien’, the argument of La Chambre claire, according to one critic, ‘emboîte fidèlement le pas de l’analyse proustienne’. Jean-Pierre Montier, ‘La Photographie “... dans le temps”: de Proust à Barthes et réciproquement’, in Proust et les images: peinture, photographie, cinéma, video, ed. by Jean Cléder and Jean-Pierre Montier (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003), pp. 69–114 (p. 81). See also Haustein; Yacavone, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography. 56. See Brassaï, Marcel Proust sous l’emprise de la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), ch. 7; Haustein, pp. 140–44; Àine Larkin, Proust writing Photography (Oxford: Legenda, 2011); and Yacavone, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography, ch. 6. 57. Yacavone also points out the obvious but important difference that, for Proust, ‘there are no external, perceptual objects of his engagement with the past [...] Barthes’s pursuit of lost time, on the other hand, is [...] anchored in an actual image, a photograph as a perceptual object that bears a direct material trace of the past’. (Yacavone, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography, p. 190.)

C h ap t e r 1

v

Photography and Proust Proust was no Luddite: on the contrary, he was fascinated by, and knowledgeable about, the effect of mechanical devices on human ways of perceiving the world.1 He lived at a time when certain modern inventions familiar to us today had only just entered the realms of the collective imagination: as a result, the telephone, the camera, X-rays, even the aeroplane all found their ways into La Recherche, at both the thematic and stylistic levels.2 But the camera was a special favourite, and some of the most innovative narrative devices and themes to be found in the novel are ‘photographic’ in a variety of senses ranging from the purely metaphorical to the almost concrete, as we will see in this chapter. Much has been written recently about Proust and photography: most famously by the photographer Brassaï in his posthumously published Proust et la photographie (1997), and more recently in a detailed and comprehensive study by Áine Larkin, with many other books, chapters, and essays in between.3 This chapter does not seek to repeat their work, but aims to look at both the primary and critical material with the specific link between photography and self-writing in mind, in order to show how Proust is the unlikely ancestor of Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé in this field. We will see how his references to photographs and the photographic in La Recherche anticipate the metaphorical, analogical, and concrete uses made of the same by the writers who were to come after him, and how, in at least one passage of his novel, he seems to envision his writing as a form of writing with light. As he is a ‘precursor’, however, this chapter is shorter than those which follow, and contains several sections: starting with Proust’s relationship with photography during his life, I will go on to discuss three instances in La Recherche corresponding to three key aspects of photography, then end on the strange ways in which photography has led to a blurring of the boundaries between the novel and reality for certain celebrated readers of Proust. Proust had a reputation as a benevolent photomane, wont to pester his friends for photographs of themselves and to bore new acquaintances with his vast collection.4 There are plentiful anecdotes, as well as evidence in the correspondence, about his obsessive desire to obtain photographs as well as the eagerness with which he would offer his own. When Charles Maurras asked Proust for a photograph to accompany his review of Les Plaisirs et les jours, Proust immediately wrote back: Quand avez-vous besoin de ma photographie? Si c’est tout de suite je vous en enverrai une qui n’est pas bonne. Si j’avais une dizaine de jours ou un peu plus

18

Photography and Proust j’irais me faire faire chez Otto une photographie digne je ne dis pas de moi, mais de vous.5 [Exactly when will you need my photograph? If you need it at once, I will send you a bad one. If I could have a dozen days or a few more, I will go to Otto’s and have one done which will be worthy, I would not say of me, but of you.]

When the handsome young Armand Duc de Guiche failed to send him a promised photograph, Proust wrote a reproachful, almost sulky complaint at the end of a longer letter: ‘Quand à votre photographie à vous, c’est peu gentil de l’avoir promise et pas donnée’ [As for your photograph, it is not kind of you to have promised and not sent it].6 A couple of weeks later, the reproach having worked and the coveted image duly received, Proust’s tone was transformed by the joy of possession: ‘Il faut toujours vous remercier puisque vous êtes toujours gentil. J’ai reçu la belle photographie, très ressemblante, très précieuse pour fixer les souvenirs d’un oublieux’ [I must thank you, as always, because you are always so kind. I have received the beautiful photograph, very like, vital for a forgetful man who needs to fix his memories].7 Proust was hardly alone in being an exchanger, so to speak, of photographs: it was common practice at the time amongst socialites of Proust’s class. What has been more remarked upon by his contemporaries, and was therefore probably more singular, was his insistence on displaying his collection to others, usually new acquaintances. Many a visitor was obliged to examine, with real or feigned interest, the piles of ‘photos de cocottes et de duchesses, de ducs et de valets de pied de grandes maisons’ in the boulevard Haussmann apartment.8 Why was Proust so keen to show off his photographs? In the eighteenth century, it was customary for men of taste and privilege to have a gallery of portraits of their friends: Pope had one in his house in Twickenham. Such a gallery was an accepted form of self-representation, and Proust’s collection would almost certainly have functioned, at least on one level, as a self-portrait. The gift of a photograph implies trust, so a collection of such photographs would be, effectively, a list of testimonials constituting a glowing portrait of the owner’s capacity for friendship.9 There are darker thoughts that can be associated with the collection of one’s friends’ photographs, however. Collecting has been associated with moral dubious­ ness since the eighteenth century, because of its private and self-indulgent nature;10 it is not just in this sense, however, that Proust’s collecting activities became problematic. The collection of photographs — of small representations of real people, effectively, which can be used and abused without the knowledge of the models — is clearly fraught with taboo possibilities. Proust freely admitted that he used his photographs to f lesh out the characters of La Recherche, to seek proof of how family resemblances, for instance, were passed from generation to generation regardless of sex, but he apparently also enjoyed scouring his friends’ photographs for incontrovertible evidence of ageing.11 Even more worrying are reports that: à l’hôtel Marigny, il aurait un jour tendu un paquet de photos à l’un des jeunes et vigoureux garçons bouchers qui lui tenaient compagnie afin qu’il crache sur les portraits d’amies célèbres: la comtesse Greffulhe, Mme de Chevigné, etc. Et il aurait lui-même craché sur celui de Mme Proust.

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[At the Hotel Marigny, it is said that one day he held out a packet of photographs to one of the young and vigorous butcher boys who kept him company, for him to spit on the portraits of his famous friends: Countess Greffulhe, Madame de Chevigné, and so on. And apparently he himself spat on a photograph of Madame Proust.]12

Whether or not this is true (Céleste Albaret denies it vehemently), such an act is not so much that of a collector as of someone who is using — and abusing — the power wielded by any possessor of a photograph. I have argued elsewhere that the narrator of La Recherche does not have the characteristics of a possessive and self-indulgent collector,13 and it is tempting to conclude that his creator was not one either, on the evidence of the eventual fate of his prized photograph collection. When forced to move out of his Boulevard Haussman apartment, Proust was obliged to dispose of a large quantity of his papers and photographs. In a letter dated April 1919, he writes that he asked Céleste to burn them: ‘j’ai brûlé des autographes précieux, des manuscrits dont il n’existe pas de copie, des photographies devenues rares’ [I burned precious autographs, manuscripts of which there are no copies, rare photographs].14 Self-proclaimed collectors move might and main to ensure the survival of their collections beyond their own deaths.15 Proust’s attitude to his photographs suggests that he did not consider it a ‘collection’ in its own right, to pass onto posterity, but regarded it more as a personal, autobiographical assemblage, or even simply as material for his novel, and therefore not destined to outlive him. Photography and Writing the Self in La Recherche As mentioned earlier, the importance of photography to Proust’s creative imagination — and thence in La Recherche, both on the level of theme and of structure — has been much discussed by other critics.16 What I therefore hope to offer in this section is not a comprehensive account of the place of photography in La Recherche, but some illuminating links between self-writing and the photographic in Proust, uses of metaphors and analogical thinking which firmly embed the photographic into the act of writing the self. I will discuss these through three close readings of passages involving photography in La Recherche: a ‘photographic’ vision of his grandmother; X-rays and composite photographs; and transfiguration of the self through photography as writing. The narrator’s grandmother is photographed on several occasions. One of the earliest instances occurs in the first part of Le côté de Guermantes, where the narrator experiences a moment of ‘photographic’ vision when he sees his grandmother after a period of absence.17 Returning from his travels, the Narrator enters the salon where his grandmother is reading, unnoticed by her: Hélas, ce fantôme-là, ce fut lui que j’aperçus quand, entré au salon sans que ma grand-mère fût avertie de mon retour, je la trouvai en train de lire. J’étais là, ou plutôt je n’étais pas encore là puisqu’elle ne le savait pas, et [...] elle était livrée à des pensées qu’elle n’avait jamais montrées devant moi. De moi [...] il n’y avait là que le témoin, l’observateur, [...] le photographe qui vient prendre un cliché des

20

Photography and Proust lieux qu’on ne reverra plus. Ce qui, mécaniquement, se fit à ce moment dans mes yeux quand j’aperçus ma grand-mère, ce fut bien une photographie.18 [Alas, it was this phantom that I saw when, entering the drawing-room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there reading. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and [...] she was absorbed in thoughts which she had never allowed to be seen by me. Of myself [...] there was present only the witness, the observer, [...] the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that automatically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph.]19

In this moment when he is still ‘not there’, when he is not present as a loving viewer but only as a camera-like, passive set of eyes (‘ce qui, mécaniquement, se fit à ce moment dans mes yeux’), the Narrator sees his grandmother for the first time as she truly is. Usually we do not see our loved ones in this way, because our love and tenderness blur our vision. Occasionally, however, [nos regards] fonctionnent mécaniquement à la façon de pellicules, et nous montrent, au lieu de l’être aimé qui n’existe plus depuis longtemps mais dont elle [notre intelligence] n’avait jamais voulu que la mort nous fût révélée, l’être nouveau que cent fois par jour elle revêtait d’une chère et menteuse ressemblance. (ii, 439, my italics) [(our eyes) set to work mechanically, like films, and show us, in place of the beloved person who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our tenderness has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily it has clothed with a loving and mendacious likeness.] (iii, 156, my italics)

Proust makes it clear that to see a loved one ‘photographically’ is to see her in the context of her impending death. ‘As a mechanical and chemical process, photography acts as the embalming of ref lections past [...] photographic images are effigies’, even when they represent people who are still alive.20 (Indeed photography has even been held responsible for setting off and accelerating the ageing process, as we will see in the next chapter.) Habitually, our love for the person superimposes a younger image onto the ageing face, and it is only when we are given — in spite of ourselves — a moment of photographic vision that we are forced to contemplate the person’s mortality. However traumatic its effect may be, photographic vision is also a way of seeing which makes it possible for us to see a loved person as an other: Moi pour qui ma grand-mère c’était encore moi-même, moi qui ne l’avais jamais vue que dans mon âme, toujours à la même place du passé, à travers la transparence des souvenirs contigus et superposés, tout d’un coup, dans notre salon qui faisait partie d’un monde nouveau, celui du Temps, celui où vivent les étrangers dont on dit ‘il vieillit bien’, pour la première fois et seulement pour un instant car elle disparut bien vite, j’aperçus sur le canapé, sous la lampe, rouge, lourde et vulgaire, malade, rêvassant, promenant au-dessus d’un livre des yeux un peu fous, une vieille femme accablée que je ne connaissais pas. (ii, 439–40) [I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparency of contiguous and overlapping memories, suddenly, in our drawing-room

Photography and Proust

21

which formed part of a new world, that of Time, that which is inhabited by the strangers of whom we say “He’s begun to age a great deal’, for the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished very quickly, I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, day-dreaming, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, an overburdened old woman whom I did not know.] (iii, 156–57)

Proust describes the way in which the Narrator sees his grandmother using terms borrowed from photography, although unlike Guibert, as we will see, his knowledge of the processes is much less specialized and therefore perhaps not quite detailed enough to make this instance of alienated seeing analogically photographic. It is nevertheless a fully developed metaphor, that of one’s eyes working mechanically and creating an image on a film, helped by a particular stage and light source: ‘sur le canapé, sous la lampe’. And the result is an ‘objective’ image of a loved one, taken from the camera’s point of view, not from the self ’s. The Narrator’s grandmother has always been a part of him, until the moment when photographic vision places her in the ‘monde [...] du Temps’, and shows her to him as an ageing woman. It may seem paradoxical that photographic vision should do this, because we usually think of photographs not as putting things back into, but taking them out of time, capturing a moment and making it eternal.21 But Proust here shows how it is the Narrator’s affective imagination that has fixed a false image of his grandmother in his mind’s eye: an idealized, sentimentalized grandmother, hitherto seen always ‘à travers la transparence des souvenirs contigus et superposés’ and therefore as part of his autobiography, rather than of hers. Because he has only ever seen her ‘dans mon âme’, he has never had to love her as f lesh separate from his. This collection of emotional associations that has prevented the Narrator from seeing his grandmother as she is may be described as an aura. Walter Benjamin defined aura both positively and negatively in various works,22 at least once as a ‘Hauchkreis’ (halo); the German word ‘aura’ connotes both aureole and nimbus.23 Mary Price helpfully summarizes his many uses of the term as ‘an atmosphere, or nimbus, obscuring an object’.24 In other words, an aura is something that impedes clear-sighted vision: it is the effect of the viewer’s emotional investment in a loved face or object. This viewer can be the photographer himself, as in the case of Guibert, or simply the person who has been granted photographic vision, as is the case for Proust’s Narrator. So aura, an effect of love, falsifies vision, but this does not mean that photographic vision requires the viewer to suppress his emotions: only that he be mature. The Narrator’s love, which had kept his grandmother fixed ‘toujours à la même place du passé’, is an immature, self-centred emotion. To love her truly for what she is, he must learn to love her unselfishly, to release her from his inevitably autobiographical imagination. Thus photographic vision plays a crucial part in the development of the Narrator into a novelist: it transports the Narrator into the realm of Time, which is the realm of narrative, and so of the novel. Photography teaches him, through the difficult lesson of his grandmother’s mortality, to write about a self existing through time. Set alongside photographic vision in Proust, which functions in the above example as an instrument of self-awareness, are X-ray vision, an aid to self-knowledge, and multiple vision, embodied in the composite photograph.

22

Photography and Proust

Radiography was still a very new invention at the time Proust was writing, but it had immediately made its mark on the collective and popular imagination.25 Accordingly, the first reference to radiography in the novel is made by Françoise. Embarrassed that the narrator’s mother has detected her deep-seated dislike of her own son-in-law, Françoise protests that ‘Madame est pire que les rayons X’ [Madame is worse than X-rays]. The implication is that other people can, like X-rays, reveal things about ourselves to us that we have kept hidden, from others and at times even from ourselves. Sometimes these are aspects of our character of which we are not even slightly aware:26 L’image que les autres se font de nos faits et gestes ne ressemble pas plus à celle que nous nous en faisons nous-même qu’à un dessin quelque décalque raté où tantôt au trait noir correspondrait un espace vide, et à un blanc un contour inexplicable. Il peut du reste arriver que ce qui n’a pas été transcrit soit quelque trait irréel que nous ne voyons que par complaisance, et que ce qui nous semble ajouté nous appartienne au contraire, mais si essentiellement que cela nous échappe. De sorte que cette étrange épreuve qui nous semble si peu ressemblante a quelque fois le genre de vérité, peu f latteur certes mais profond et utile, d’une photographie par les rayons X. (ii, 272) [The image that other people form of our actions and demeanour no more resembles our own than an inaccurate tracing, on which for the black line we find an empty space and for a blank area an inexplicable contour, resembles the original drawing. It may happen however that what has not been transcribed is a non-existent feature which only our purblind self-esteem reveals to us, and what seems to us to have been added does indeed belong to us, but so quintessentially that it escapes us. So that this strange print which seems to us to have so little resemblance to us bears sometimes the same stamp of truth, unf lattering, certainly, but profound and useful, as an X-ray photograph.] (iii, 311–12)

The two images of one’s self — the first created by others, and the other by the self — are set up in stark contrast, to the point that features which exist in the one are completely absent from the other. And the portrait created by others is the one described as an X-ray photograph, the true one, ‘qui nous semble si peu ressemblante’. The X-ray photograph created by the vision of others reveals aspects to the self of the self that it had never imagined it possessed. And these aspects are those which belong to us ‘essentiellement’, traits which are so integral to us that they habitually escape our notice. Thus Proust uses the radiographic metaphor with extreme precision: that is, to designate character traits so deeply embedded that only a viewing mechanism that can penetrate f lesh can identify them. Guibert, as we will see, is another writer who makes use of radiography as a metaphor for an allseeing knowledge of the self that renders the self transparent yet unrecognizable. This quotation also foregrounds a quality of the self that becomes unmissable when viewed in an X-ray photograph: its otherness. The reversing of the visible and invisible offers the self an image that is almost unrecognizable, but which we acknowledge as being ours partly out of pressure (exerted by the medical authorities) but also, depending on the make-up of our bodies, through a process of observation, deduction, and recognition (recognizing a healed break, for instance,

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23

about which the self would be aware as a memory, even if all the symptoms had long disappeared). The experience of the self ’s otherness in an X-ray is therefore much more extreme than in a photograph, although related (like Barthes’s ‘mais je n’ai jamais ressemblé à ça!’ [I never looked like that!]). This otherness is a mixture of extremes: the X-rayed self is completely unique, yet also disturbingly anonymous. X-rays reveal that one has much more in common with other people than one is normally prepared to admit.27 X-rays make the f lesh transparent in order to expose the body’s skeletal structure; composite photographs are created from photographs which render the f lesh semi-transparent. The composite photographs of Francis Galton and Artur Batut, amongst others,28 were made up of separate semi-transparent images of a group of individuals which were then superimposed on one another to produce a single image, with the aim of revealing the ‘type’ to which the individuals belonged. The practice was popular towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and was used to detect family resemblances and shared traits; it had also, like radiography, made its way into the popular and literary imagination.29 In her study, Larkin shows how this view of the self as a composite being is used by Proust in his descriptions of Albertine, of the Guermantes clan, indeed of all of his characters30 — including himself — as they change over time.31 Her analyses highlight passages in which Proust’s vision of certain faces appears to be informed by the techniques of composite photography, such as the following which focuses on the mobile faces and features of the ‘petite bande’: sur ces visages mobiles, une fixation relative des traits était suffisamment commencée pour qu’on en pût distinguer, dût-elle changer encore, la malléable et f lottante effigie. Aux différences qu’il y avait entre eux, étaient bien loin de correspondre sans doute des différences égales dans la longueur et la largeur des traits, lesquels, de l’une à l’autre de ses jeunes filles, et si dissemblables qu’elles parussent, eussent peut-être été presque superposables. (ii, 296–97) [upon those volatile faces a comparative fixity of features had now begun, and had been carried far enough for the eye to distinguish — even if it were to change yet further — each malleable and elusive effigy. The differences that existed between these faces doubtless bore little relation to equivalent differences in the length and breadth of their features, any of which, dissimilar as the girls appeared, might perhaps almost have been lifted from one face and imposed at random upon any other.] (ii, 606–07)

Larkin notes that the ‘paradox of relatively rigid features in the girls’ as yet unfixed faces suggests the later narrator’s sharp awareness of the passage of time’.32 The passage also suggests that Proust was extremely well-informed about the composition of a composite photograph: he knew that, although the features on each individual photograph are necessarily fixed, belonging as they do to separate people, the resulting composite photograph might be said to be mobile as the layers can be rearranged indefinitely. The girls’ faces are thus like a series of composite photographs in which the layers might have been shuff led and ordered differently in each case. They are thus given, as a group (and of course, at this stage in the

24

Photography and Proust

novel, it is crucial that they be considered as a group), a composite identity which is precisely related to the way in which they seem to possess interchangeable features in a variety of permutations; identity becomes a diffuse concept spread across a number of related individuals and across a number of years, slightly disturbing in their proliferation but nonetheless attractive as an image, mainly because the individuals concerned are all beautiful young women. We will see in chapter 4 how the techniques of the composite photograph also seem to be part of Macé’s photographic vision of his self. He too uses superimposition-like effects analogous to the layers of composite photographs, thereby revealing surprising similarities and unsuspected inheritances, but also creating a diffuse effect around the notion of identity, which is both disturbing and exhilarating in its denial of the idea of a singular self. The transparency of the f lesh that is a precondition of radiography and the composite photograph is perhaps what eventually gives rise to the following remarkable image in Le Temps retrouvé. The image occurs in a description of how grief and suffering, although they can ultimately result in death, can also be turned into creative force and knowledge: Puisque les forces peuvent se changer en d’autres forces, puisque l’ardeur qui dure devient lumière et que l’électricité de la foudre peut photographier, puisque notre sourde douleur au cœur peut élever au-dessus d’elle, comme un pavillon, la permanence visible d’une image à chaque nouveau chagrin, acceptons le mal physique qu’il nous donne pour la connaissance spirituelle qu’il nous apporte; laissons se désagréger notre corps, puisque chaque nouvelle parcelle qui s’en détache vient, cette fois lumineuse et lisible, pour la compléter au prix de souffrances dont d’autres plus doués n’ont pas besoin, pour la rendre plus solide au fur et à mesure que les émotions effritent notre vie, s’ajouter à notre œuvre. (iv, 485) [Since strength of one kind can change into a strength of another kind, since heat which is stored up can become light and the electricity in a f lash of lightning can cause a photograph to be taken, since the dull pain in our heart can hoist above itself like a banner the visible permanence of an image for every new grief, let us accept the physical injury which is done to us for the sake of the spiritual knowledge which grief brings; let us submit to the disintegration of our body, since each new fragment which breaks away from it returns in a luminous and significant form to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of sufferings of which others more richly endowed have no need, to make our work at least more solid as our life crumbles away beneath the corrosive action of our emotions.] (vi, 267–68)

From a discussion about the effects of grief on the physical body — a moving and enlightening discussion — Proust moves to an extraordinary image, worthy of a sci-fi film, in which grief causes parts of the writer’s body to break off, only to return as something ‘lumineuse et lisible’: the word is not made f lesh, but the f lesh made word in a wondrous process of transfiguration. In this passage, photography is referred to three times. The first instance both sets up a scientific context for the discussion to follow, and mentions photography in the same breath: illustrating one of the laws of physics, that ‘les forces peuvent

Photography and Proust

25

se changer en d’autres forces’, Proust offers as an example lightning-generated electricity being used to take photographs. Following on from this scientific, physical view of what takes place in the natural world, Proust goes onto describe how our bodies can display visible signs of internal suffering: the repeated ‘puisque’ sets in motion a strong analogical link between the two processes. In other words, as the energy generated by lightning can be used for photography, the energy generated by emotional pain can be transformed into a visible image. And this second process, in which emotional suffering leaves a physical mark on the body, is an analogically photographic process, given that the body here acts as the ‘sensitized surface’ on which grief leaves a visible impression.33 The third reference to photography in this passage is the most extraordinary. The photographic process described above, which leaves marks on the writer’s body, is amplified to a point where this body begins to disintegrate. Each fragment is then transformed into something ‘lumineux et lisible’ which comes back to ‘compléter’ the work, ‘pour la rendre plus solide au fur et à mesure que les émotions effritent notre vie, s’ajouter à notre œuvre’. ‘Lumineux et lisible’, spell out, of course, photo-graphy: are these then a form of ‘photograph’, images of the writer’s mental and emotional processes which are rendered ‘lisible’ for all to see and read? The fragments return to strengthen the writer’s work, although this weakens the body from which they are taken: in other words, the work is built up, literally, at the expense of the life. This is an apt image for what Proust famously did in order to create La Recherche. From a specific point in his life, he made a decision to sacrifice it — his physical, social existence — to his work, a legible and luminous creation which was to ref lect, very precisely, the life from which it had been taken. La Recherche is not autobiographical in the sense that it represents Proust’s life in ‘story’ form; but if we read the luminous fragments described above as a metaphor, we see how it is offered as a more immediate way of writing the self, the communication of an individual subjectivity through the creation of a particular style. The fragments breaking off from the writer’s body might then be seen as unique viewpoints of a singular experience which have been rendered legible for our benefit. We might summarize the photographic elements in the above passage as follows: an analogically photographic process creates visible impressions on a sensitized surface, the writer’s body, which then disintegrates into fragments spelling out ‘photo-graphs’, which are then offered to us as legible pieces — metaphorically speaking — of the writer’s experience. We will encounter thoughts about the writer’s body as the surface on which photographic processes can leave a mark, in the writings of both Guibert and Ernaux, albeit in different configurations; as for the way in which the writer’s self is rendered through a particular style, it is very similar to a characteristic of Macé’s self-writing which will be analysed in the relevant chapter. Proust’s writing is not ‘photographic’ in the sense of ‘l’écriture immédiate’: that is, it is not a writing which attempts to mimic the immediacy of the camera’s activity, copying, or inscribing, events and emotions as they occur. But in La Recherche, the processes of photography are, at various points, woven into the act of writing as an analogical process, as well as through a number of intricate

26

Photography and Proust

metaphors. Photographic vision, as on the day when the grandmother is ‘seen photographically’ by the narrator, is essential to the creation of a narrative; the arrangement of transparent and semi-transparent photographs guides the Narrator’s discovery — in writing, of course — of hitherto unsuspected truths about the self and other; and the ref lection of a self onto — or into — language occurs through an almost physical process which turns emotions into legible material. In this final quotation, Proust sublimates his use of photography as a directly analogical process for writing by incorporating — literally — the processes into his body. Towards the end of a novel which stages a writer whose writing is described in detailed photographic terms, Proust describes the effort of turning self into writing in ‘scientific’ language, in the languages of physics, chemistry, and photography. Selfwriting thus becomes a metamorphic process which supersedes previous attempts at autobiographical writing through the completeness of the self ’s sacrifice, which was mirrored ‘in real life’ in the death of Proust the author. La Recherche as Photo-text? As mentioned earlier, Proust had his collection of photographs destroyed during his lifetime. Furthermore, although he admitted to borrowing both physical and psychological traits from his real-life friends and acquaintances to create the characters of La Recherche, he was never straightforward about direct correspondences between the real and the imaginary (to Laure Hayman, who complained to him about having being used as a model for Odette, he wrote: ‘Odette de Crécy non seulement n’est pas vous, mais est exactement le contraire de vous’ [Not only is Odette de Crécy not you, she is the exact opposite of you]). It is therefore perplexing that several of his readers — at least one of them amongst his most discerning — have attempted to attach a series of photographs to his novel. Le monde de Proust is a collection of photographs taken by Paul Nadar, son of Félix, of people and scenes related to Proust: six portraits of the Proust family, thirty-four of members of the beau monde with whom he socialized, twenty-three of writers and artists of his acquaintance, thirteen shots of typical interiors of the time, and a portrait of Nadar himself. The editors of this volume — of which there have been several editions — are careful to say that the point of their book is not to illustrate the novel, not to donner une représentation des personnages fictifs de A la recherche du temps perdu [...] Le problème des ‘clefs’ est délicat et n’est finalement pas essentiel aux lecteurs de La Recherche. Il s’agit plutôt d’entreprendre une promenade sentimentale à travers la vie de Proust avec les personnes qu’il a connues et aimées. [to give a representation of the fictional characters of In Search of Lost Time [...] the issue of ‘keys’ is delicate, and in the last analysis, they are not essential for readers of In Search of Lost Time. This book is more about undertaking a sentimental walk through the life of Proust with the people whom he knew and loved.]34

Nonetheless, a perusal of this book of photographs induces an uneasiness about what exactly this volume was designed to achieve, if it was not to ‘donner une

Photography and Proust

27

représentation des personnages fictifs’ of the novel. One could argue that a biography of Proust might create similar problems for the reader of La Recherche, as it offers ‘facts’ about the real people upon whom the fictional characters were based, but this is in fact not the case. The difference lies in the impact of the photographic image. In a biography, a verbal description of Laure Hayman, for instance, cannot dominate the verbal descriptions of Odette in La Recherche; but given a series of photographs whose captions juxtapose the biographical details of the real person with those of the fictional one, there is much more of an imperative to equate the two worlds, or to collapse the fictional one into the real. Just twice in this collection, there are quotations from La Recherche in the captions which invite confusion. One of them is about the model for Gilberte Swann, Jeanne Pouquet: Marcel Proust lui fit une cour assidue qui la laissa insensible et comme le Narrateur pour Gilberte Swann, il chercha par tous les moyens à obtenir une photographie d’elle: ‘Pour en avoir une, je fis auprès d’amis de Swann et même de photographes, des bassesses qui ne me procuraient pas ce que je voulais, mais qui me lièrent pour toujours avec des gens très ennuyeux’.35 [Marcel Proust courted her assiduously, but in vain; and as the Narrator did with Gilberte Swann, he sought to obtain a photograph of her by any means possible: ‘To obtain one, I stooped to servilities, with friends of the Swanns and even with photographers, which not only failed to procure for me what I wanted, but tied me for life to a number of extremely boring people.’]

The mention of ‘Swann’ in the quotation ensures that we are aware of its fictional status, but the manner of its introduction — even with the precautionary ‘comme le Narrateur pour Gilberte Swann’ — invites us to conf late Marcel Proust with the Narrator, and Jeanne Pouquet with Gilberte Swann. Even more wilfully confusing of reality and fiction is the book by William Howard Adams, A Proust Souvenir: Period Photographs by Paul Nadar.36 This is a slightly larger collection of photographs, making use of longer quotations more frequently from the novel, and seems explicitly designed to plunge the reader into period nostalgia, to create a photo-text out of La Recherche. Oddly, this forceful attempt to link the novel with the black-and-white photographs of Nadar has a strongly distancing effect: the immediacy of the fictional world is lost, at least for this reader, when it is read in the light of this recreation of the Belle Epoque by the ‘period’ photographs. It is unclear what the reader of La Recherche might gain from this exercise, and there seems to be much, certainly, to be lost from it. One problem in both approaches is their desire to add sentimental value to our readings of La Recherche: as Le Monde de Proust undertakes ‘une promenade sentimentale à travers la vie de Proust’, so A Proust Souvenir: Period Photographs by Paul Nadar indicates, by its choice of words in the title, its allegiance to nostalgia and idealizations of the past. A more sustained, and also much more complex and intellectually intriguing, attempt to link the novel to photographs is that of Roland Barthes. Barthes’s last seminar at the Collège de France, entitled ‘Proust et la photographie’, was never delivered due to his fatal accident on the Rue des Écoles in early 1980: but his notes for it are included in La Préparation du roman, the last volume of the ‘Cours et séminaires au Collège de France’ series. They are mostly fragmentary, and it

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Photography and Proust

is clearly not possible to determine exactly what the seminar would have been like, but read in conjunction with his earlier essay on Proust, ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’, they give us a sense of how he may have planned to validate a new method of reading La Recherche through photography.37 In La Préparation du roman, Barthes sets out his view of how Proust and his novel are linked to reality. According to Barthes, although Proust is no autobiographer, he is a ‘biographologue’, a term he derives from his earlier neologism of ‘biographème’,38 which is developed subsequently and defined thus in La chambre claire: J’aime certains traits biographiques qui, dans la vie d’un écrivain, m’enchantent à l’égal de certaines photographies: j’ai appelé ces traits des ‘biographèmes’; la Photographie a le même rapport à l’Histoire que le biographème à la biographie.39 [I like certain biographical features which, in the life of a writer, delight me as much as certain photographs do: I have called these features ‘biographemes’; Photography has the same relationship to History that the biographeme has to biography.]

Although there is a huge amount of ‘Proust’ in the work (‘Proust, c’est l’entrée massive, audacieuse, de l’auteur, du sujet écrivant, comme biographologue, dans la littérature; l’oeuvre qui ne relève pas du genre biographique est entièrement tissée de lui, de ses lieux, de ses amis, de sa famille’ [Proust is the massive, audacious entrance of the author, of the writing subject, as biographologue, into literature; the work, which does not belong to the biographical genre, is nevertheless woven completely out of him, his places, his friends, his family]), Barthes never suggests that La Recherche is an autobiography: the work is too complex, and there are no one-to-one correspondences between real and fictional that can be established. But as a ‘biographologue’, speaking as a ‘scattered’ subject, Proust succeeds in transforming facts from his own life into literary or artistic truths, through a technique that Barthes calls ‘la vérité de l’affect’ [the truth of affect]. His reader, on the other hand, responds to these truths by experiencing them as personal moments of revelation, ‘moments de vérité’ [moments of truth]. This experience is particularly frequent in the reader who is a ‘marcellien’ [Marcellian]: that is, a reader who identifies not with Proust the legendary writer, but with Marcel the struggling and failing writer-to-be. According to Barthes, then, emotional truths, based on ‘real’ facts from Proust’s life, are transmitted through the work to the reader. There is nothing problematic, as far as I can see, with this reading of La Recherche where the relationship between Proust’s ‘real’ life and his fiction is concerned, and the notion of the ‘biographème’ is one which I will be using in subsequent chapters. The impact of ‘real’ facts within a fictional narrative is undeniable, and biographical readings of La Recherche can be illuminating, as has been amply shown by various Proust scholars. But Barthes goes on in the seminar notes to develop the same equation, only this time replacing these ‘real facts’ — which, we must remember, are still authored by Proust himself in the novel — with Nadar’s photographs. The seminar notes give the strong impression that Barthes, having declared that La Recherche is not a roman à clef, nevertheless wanted to advocate a reading of the novel in which Nadar’s photographs function as an invitation to the reader to play ‘le

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jeu des clefs’ [the key game].40 Still true to his structuralist tendency to categorize, Barthes develops a four-part system of ‘clefs’, and the notes he made beneath each photograph specify the particular ‘clef ’ which might be used to link the real-life person to a character in La Recherche: these range from that of physical resemblance (so the Marquis Boni de Castellane simply ‘looks like’ Saint-Loup) to ‘situational’ or ‘structural’ keys (Marie Benardaky is a ‘situational’ Gilberte because she too captivated the narrator when he saw her on the Champs-Elysées: Mme Benardaky is a ‘structural’ Odette because she is Marie’s mother, but she is not Odette in any other sense). The result is a playful and pleasurable reading, or rereading, of the novel for dedicated ‘marcelliens’, of whom Barthes hoped his seminar audience would consist: he hoped that the reader would be lured by the photographs into reimagining the characters of the novel in relation to his/her own world as well as to that of Proust. Barthes’s reading of Proust through photography was planned in the context of his own desire to write a novel (to which he refers frequently in both ‘Longtemps ...’ and La Préparation du roman), and within that context one can posit at least one possible motive for this exercise: as an aspiring novelist he wanted to put himself in Proust’s place, to look at the people whom Proust transformed into his characters — or at their photographs — from a point of view as close as possible to Proust’s own. He was perhaps also working towards a new theory of reading which would take into account novels written by ‘biographologues’, which would tackle the thorny ontological issues that arise from the conf lation of the autobiographical and the fictional. This is not to say that La Recherche is, or that Barthes was saying that it was, an autofictional work,41 but that the notion of the ‘biographologue’ developed by Barthes can help us to understand writers of autofictions. But what does Barthes’s exercise, as described in the seminar notes, add to our understanding of Proust, La Recherche, and photography? We must not forget that Proust had his bonfire: he had his photographs destroyed, and he was worried that people would read his novel as the story of his life. As a connoisseur of photography, deeply knowledgeable about its processes and the results, Proust wanted to be a photographer in his writing: the characters of La Recherche are his photographs, or his X-rays, or his composite photographs. ‘Proust explique par ailleurs qu’il crée ses personnages de manière composite, en s’inspirant de plusieurs personnes réelles en même temps, “chacun ayant donné son instant de pose” ’ [Elsewhere, Proust explains that he created his characters in a composite manner, drawing inspiration from several real people at the same time, ‘each one having offered his/ her moment of posing for him’].42 Surely this means that we should not attempt to ‘illustrate’ his novel with Nadar’s photographs, which — at most — are nothing more than the portraits of some of the raw materials from which the novel was created? The photographs cannot be Proustian ‘biographèmes’, simply because the textual ‘biographèmes’ scattered throughout La Recherche are all given to us from his, Proust’s, point of view, whereas Nadar’s photographs are not. It is the textual ‘biographèmes’ which are the genuine ‘autobiographèmes’, so to speak, material from his life described from the perspective of his individual, idiosyncratic subjectivity. Whereas the photographs, although they may be of people whom Proust knew

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well, are — to state the obvious — by Nadar, and cannot be made to espouse a Proustian perspective after the event. Both Barthes and the editors of Le monde de Proust invite us to view them from a ‘Proustian’ perspective, often including quotations from the novel in their captions as if to allow Proust to take possession of the images posthumously. But this is an invalid connection, and therefore these photographs can only be, in the final analysis, of touristic value. Touristic value is precisely what is offered to the reader of Proust who makes a pilgrimage to Illiers, only to find that it has been renamed ‘Illiers-Combray’. It is obvious why ‘Combray’ has been added to Illiers: the fictional place is far more famous than the real one, and the reason for most visitors to the village. Upon arriving in the real village, we are thus immediately reminded of why we have come: we wanted to see Illiers because it was the ‘inspiration’ for Combray, the real but superficial model for the fictional creation. We know that Proust’s imagined village was modelled on the real one, but we also know — and realize this more and more as we walk around the place — that he was completely free to add, change, or transform its characteristics for the purposes of his novel. To visit the ‘maison de la Tante Léonie’, to look at the bed from which the madeleine was supposedly offered, dipped in tisane, to the young Proust, is to feel the distance between oneself and the novelist: to measure with one’s own eyes the difference, as well as the similarities, between the real and the fictional. In other words, looking at the real-life ‘models’ for a fictional creation is the activity of a tourist: one who tours and sees, but does not necessarily learn anything more about the work inspired by the reality he is visiting. How does such an activity differ from the way in which some readers of La Recherche — Barthes included, albeit at a highly sophisticated and personal level — have wanted to read ‘Combray’ as ‘Illiers’, at least through Nadar’s photographs? This question is related, of course, to the much larger and thoroughly discussed prob­lem of the generic status of La Recherche. Is it fiction, autobiography or auto­ fiction? There is no space in this chapter for a properly historical account of this subject, which has been thoroughly debated by many eminent Proust scholars and literary theorists; even an account of the discussion surrounding the possibility of calling La Recherche an autofiction, which has inspired lively debate in the last twenty years fuelled by the rise of genetic criticism, would take up too many pages.43 Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer’s carefully-argued essay on the subject, which I will summarize brief ly here, offers a helpful analytical summary of the issue of La Recherche as autofiction. Mauriac-Dyer focuses in the main on the development of Genette’s arguments, for and against the classification of La Recherche as autofiction, from Figures III (1972) and Palimsestes (1982) through Fiction et diction (1991) to Figures IV (1999), whilst evaluating the paratextual evidence offered by Proust himself in his letters, dedications, and interviews. At least one of these instances led Genette to posit a Proustian ‘contrat de lecture’ [reading contract], albeit in scare quotes, on the model of Lejeune’s ‘pacte’, and thence to argue that this tips the balance towards autofiction. Mauriac-Dyer, however, thinks that the paratextual evidence is not conclusive. She suggests that Proust himself never pronounced definitively on the

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subject partly because he himself wished to leave the space of the ‘je’ vacant, ready to be filled in by his readers depending on the context of their readings: Il attend un lecteur compétent, capable de discriminer le ‘je’ du héros [...] et le ‘je’ du narrateur, quand il se distingue assez du précédent pour être le ‘je’ de Marcel Proust, en tant que critique, philosophe, et bien sûr écrivain.44 [He was waiting for an able reader, capable of discriminating between the ‘I’ of the hero [...] and the ‘I’ of the narrator, when he is distinct enough from the former to be the ‘I’ of Marcel Proust, in his capacity as critic, philosopher, and of course, writer.]

I will not develop further here the discussion of the genre of La Recherche, but will contribute to it through showing how the fruitful ambivalence of the identity of Proust’s ‘je’, a consequence of this generic ambivalence, is mirrored in his ekphrastic description of a photograph in the novel. This is a photograph of the Narrator, and is discussed in a bizarrely comic interlude contained in Sodome et Gomorrhe. This passage crystallizes the various issues we have been considering in this section: (auto)fictional but true representation, sincere misrepresentations of the self, and photography. In his Balbec hotel, the narrator makes the acquaintance of two quintessentially French servants who are also sisters, Céleste Albaret and Marie Gineste. He attributes their unstoppable, all-or-nothing personalities to the ‘ruisseaux et torrents’ of their native country, and delights in their strange and wonderful manner of speaking, especially Céleste’s, which he undertakes to record for posterity: Avec une familiarité que je ne retouche pas, malgré les éloges (qui ne sont pas ici pour me louer, mais pour louer le génie étrange de Céleste) et les critiques, également faux, mais très sincères, que ces propos semblent comporter à mon égard, tandis que je trempais des croissants dans mon lait, Céleste me disait: ‘Oh! Petit diable noir aux cheveux de geai, ô profonde malice!’ (iii, 242, my italics) [With a familiarity which I reproduce verbatim, notwithstanding the eulogies (which I set down here in praise not of myself but of the strange genius of Céleste) and the criticisms, equally unfounded but absolutely sincere, which her remarks seem to imply towards me, while I dipped my croissants in my milk, Céleste would say to me: ‘Oh! little black devil with raven hair, oh deep-dyed mischief!’ (iv, 283)]

The narrator promises not to adulterate the authenticity of this portrait of Céleste’s language by ‘touching it up’, using a term which had recently expanded the range of its application to include the photograph:45 the verbal portrait that she subsequently paints of him, however, is described as false but sincere. Céleste then goes on to offer several further portraits of the narrator, a rarity in the novel,46 culminating in what is certainly the only photograph of the narrator to be described in La Recherche. The first portrait is comically zoological, and suggestive of movement so swift that the naked eye cannot capture it: selon elle on ne savait pas quand je dormais, je voltigeais toute la nuit comme un papillon, et le jour j’étais aussi rapide que ces écureuils, ‘tu sais, Marie, comme on voit chez nous, si agiles que même avec les yeux on ne peut pas les suivre.’ (iii, 241)

32

Photography and Proust [according to her, it was impossible to tell when I slept, I f luttered about all night like a moth, and in the daytime I was as swift as the squirrels, ‘you know, Marie, which we used to see at home, so nimble that even with the eyes you can’t follow them.’ (iv, 283)

As has been pointed out, Proust’s narrator is not exactly known for his swift movements.47 This image is therefore in complete contrast to our overall impression of the narrator’s physical identity, but it is also, interestingly, an image that cannot be seized. The earlier suggestion of photographic practice here offers the possibility that a camera might capture his squirrel-like agility, although the naked eye cannot. This slightly improbable and unobtainable image of a rapidly shifting narrator (set against his actual situation in the passage: he is in bed, still in his pyjamas, his only discernible movement that of dipping his croissants in his milk), which would seem to fall into the category of ‘sincere but false’ portraits, is then followed by Céleste’s description of the photograph that she has found in one of his drawers: Tu n’as donc pas vu dans son tiroir sa photographie quand il était enfant? Il avait voulu nous faire croire qu’on l’habillait toujours très simplement. Et là, avec sa petite canne, il n’est que fourrures et dentelles, comme jamais prince n’a eu. Mais ce n’est rien à côté de son immense majesté et de sa bonté encore plus profonde. (iii, 241) [Then haven’t you seen the photograph of him in his drawer, when he was little? He tried to make us believe that he was always dressed quite simply. And there, with his little cane, he’s all furs and lace, such as not even a prince ever wore. But that’s nothing compared with his tremendous majesty and his even more profound kindness.] (iv, 284)

This is a photograph, so we imagine that it must denote the truth: the details (Barthes’ ‘effet de réel’) of ‘sa petite canne’ and the ‘fourrures et dentelles’ give the lie to his own portrait of his childhood appearance, according to which he was always simply dressed. Thus the contradictory portraits accumulate, offered to us from various sources. Marie adds her own contribution, which is followed swiftly by another one by Céleste: Regarde, Céleste, rien que pour poser sa main sur la couverture et prendre son croissant, quelle distinction! il peut faire les choses les plus insignifiantes, on dirait que toute la noblesse de France, jusqu’aux Pyrénées, se déplace dans chacun de ses mouvements.’ Anéanti par ce portrait si peu véridique, je me taisais: Céleste voyait là une ruse nouvelle: ‘Ah, front qui as l’air si pur et qui caches tant de choses, joues amies et fraîches comme l’intérieur d’une amande, petites mains de satin tout pelucheux, ongles comme des griffes, etc. Tiens, Marie, regarde-le boire son lait avec un recueillement qui me donne envie de faire ma prière. Quel air sérieux! On devrait bien tirer son portrait en ce moment. Il a tout des enfants. [...] Vous ne vieillirez jamais. (iii, 244) [‘Look, Céleste, simply the way he puts his hand on the counterpane and picks up his croissant, what distinction! He can do the most insignificant things, and you’d think that the whole nobility of France, right to the Pyrenees, was stirring in each of his movements.’ Overwhelmed by this portrait that was so far from lifelike, I remained silent;

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Céleste interpreted my silence as a further instance of guile: ‘Ah! Forehead that looks so pure and hides so many things, nice, cool cheeks like the inside of an almond, little hands all soft and satiny, nails like claws,’ and so forth. ‘There, Marie, look at him sipping his milk with a reverence that makes me want to say my prayers. What a serious air! Someone really ought to take a picture of him as he is just now. He’s just like a child. [...] You’ll never grow old.] (iv, 285)

We will return to the alleged ‘noblesse’ of the young narrator, but here I want to note first how this portrait by Marie the witness (‘Regarde, Céleste’), described by the narrator as ‘si peu véridique’, nevertheless has the effect of overwhelming him to the point of extinction (‘anéanti’). His ‘real’ self, in other words, has been replaced by these portraits of himself: and as readers of this passage we have no way of judging between them, given that the two sisters have been described as untrustworthy, but that he too has been shown to be a liar (with regard to how he was dressed as a child).48 Céleste then takes up where her sister has left off, forcefully emphasizing the apparent childlike innocence of the narrator (‘front qui as l’air si pur et qui caches tant de choses’), and wishing for a photo (‘on devrait bien tirer son portrait en ce moment’). In lieu of such a photograph, we are given yet another description of his angelic looks: Regarde, Marie, ses traits si fins. Ô miniature parfaite, plus belle que la plus précieuse qu’on verrait sous une vitrine, car il a les mouvements, et des paroles à l’écouter des jours et des nuits. (iii, 244) [Look, Marie, at his delicate features. Oh, perfect miniature, finer than the most precious you could see in a glass case, because he has movement, and words you could listen to for days and nights.] (iv, 285)

This last image portrays him as a collectible item, like a photograph, but better because he moves and talks: the narrator has been reduced to a miniature man, albeit a perfect, precious one, whose eloquence is designed to entertain. This fascinating series of portraits — or snapshots, given that they are taken ‘on the move’ by witnesses, and in at least one case results in a ‘blurred’ photograph owing to the movement of the subject — was a late addition to Sodome et Gomorrhe. It has the f lavour of a private joke between Proust and the woman who knew him (he claimed) better than anyone else, an affectionate gesture to honour the real Céleste Albaret without whom Proust’s day-to-day existence would have been torture. The casually inserted ‘etc.’ at the end of one of Céleste’s descriptions of the narrator above (‘petites mains de satin tout pelucheux, ongles comme des griffes, etc.’) could well be a metanarrative f lourish, the mark of a shared understanding between employer and servant of the nature of their everyday communications. The result is a passage in which Proust the novelist reveals something of his ‘real’ self within his novel through a depiction of his relationship with a real person, or at least with a character who shares a name, physical characteristics, and origins with a real person, albeit teasingly and through a f lurry of ‘portraits’ — one of which is a photograph — whose veracity is contested. But equally, by creating a fictional character called Céleste who is so like the ‘real’ Céleste — down to her name, her origins, and her manner of speaking — that she might as well be the real person, Proust is perhaps warning us against a ‘roman à clef ’ reading of the other characters

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of La Recherche, however much they might seem to resemble a Laure Hayman or a Sarah Bernhardt. By giving us a knowing collection of self-portraits through the eyes of these sisters who are described in the same passage as sincere liars, as well as a photograph of the narrator as a boy which appears to be genuine, Proust reminds us that he is fully aware of the greyness of the area his novel inhabits between fiction and autobiography; and also, perhaps, of how unreliable photographic descriptions can be.49 Barthes claims that La Recherche represents a literary paradox inasmuch as ‘l’oeuvre la plus haute du XXe siècle soit partie de (ait été déterminée par) ce qui peut être ailleurs le plus bas, le moins noble des sentiments: l’envie de promotion sociale’.50 Social class is one of the identifiers which is much discussed, wrongly attributed, and thus deconstructed in this Céleste passage. The two sisters compare the boy to a prince, call him a ‘seigneur’, in whose movements ‘toute la noblesse de France’ is to be found stirring. The boy protests several times, in vain: Ici ce n’était pas seulement Marie qui protestait, mais moi, car je ne me sentais pas seigneur du tout. Mais Céleste ne croyait jamais à la sincérité de ma modestie ...(iii, 243) Here it was not only Marie who protested, but myself, for I did not feel in the least like a grand gentleman. But Céleste would never believe in the sincerity of my modesty ... (iv, 284)

In real life — and in his posthumous reputation — Proust was to suffer similar classrelated misunderstandings. Gide famously failed to read his novel the first time it was submitted to Gallimard, simply because he thought of him as a rive droite snob. The famous portrait of Proust by Jacques-Emile Blanche, and the equally well-known photograph in which he is reclining gracefully on a divan, have created images of Proust as a dilettante, a socialite, an aesthete of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He was all of these things, of course, but this was not true for Proust the author of La Recherche. Marcel Proust, frequenter of salons and admirer of the Comtesse Greffulhe, was clearly a social climber, but ‘Proust’ — the author of the novel — knew himself to be beyond class: at the same time modest and extraordinary. The self who is chronicled through a recreation of his vast subjectivity is beyond matters such as social aspiration because he is completely structural: absolutely vital, yet in a sense completely self less. He is the stuff onto which everything and everyone else is projected, like the photosensitive paper used in the photographic process. The description in Sodome et Gomorrhe of Céleste and Marie’s clay-like faces might be applied directly to him: Leur figures avait tellement gardé l’humidité de la glaise malléable de leurs rivières, que dès qu’on parlait d’un étranger qui était dans l’hôtel, pour répéter ce qu’il avait dit, Céleste et Marie appliquaient sur leurs figures sa figure, leur bouche devenait sa bouche, leurs yeux ses yeux, on aurait voulu garder ces admirables masques de théâtre. Céleste même, en faisant semblant de ne redire que ce qu’avait dit le directeur, ou tel de mes amis, insérait dans son petit récit des propos feints où étaient peints malicieusement tous les défauts de Bloch, ou du premier président, etc., sans en avoir l’air. C’était, sous la forme de compte rendu d’une simple commission dont elle s’était obligeamment chargée, un portrait inimitable. (iii, 246)

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[Their faces had so far preserved the moisture of the malleable clay of their native river beds, that, as soon as one mentioned a foreigner who was staying in the hotel, in order to repeat what he had said Céleste and Marie at once took on his facial expression, their mouths became his mouth, their eyes his eyes — one would have liked to preserve these admirable comic masks. Céleste indeed, while pretending merely to be repeating what the manager or one of my friends had said, would insert in her little narrative, apparently quite unwittingly, fictitious remarks in which were maliciously portrayed all the defects of Bloch, the judge, and others. Under the form of a report on a simple errand which she had obligingly undertaken, she would provide an inimitable portrait.] (iv, 285–86)

As the sisters do in the hotel, Proust the novelist mimics his real-life models: he copies their voices and adopts their grimaces in his portraits of his contemporaries. But he also — like the sisters — makes fictional additions which have the force of truth: ‘des propos feints où étaient peints malicieusement tous les défauts de Bloch’. The result is fiction, based on reality and indeed more revealing, more radiographical, of reality than reality itself. Jérôme Thélot accompanies his brief discussion of the photograph Céleste finds in the narrator’s drawer with the reproduction of an actual photograph. In it Proust looks about nine or ten, beautifully dressed as per the description of the photograph in the novel, complete with elegant little cane. It was almost certainly this photograph that Proust had in mind, or perhaps even before his eyes, when he wrote the section we have been discussing, but here again the point is not the illustration, or indeed the proof that such a photograph exists. Proust’s ekphrastic description, in fact, adds ‘fourrures’ [furs] to the child’s outfit, whereas there are no furs in the real photograph, although there is a very impressive lace collar.51 Perhaps here again Proust is teasing the reader, preferably one of Mauriac-Dyer’s ‘lecteur[s] compétent[s]’, in the guise of a persona who is almost himself, that is to say the one closest to the ‘real’ Proust because it is the one who is known by the almost-real Céleste in the passage we have been discussing. For the photograph in question was given to Céleste by Proust. Proust knew that he would be famous, that his novel would be read by generations to come. Perhaps, then, his verbal description of the photograph was written in the knowledge that it was not impossible that Céleste might, in years to come, end up showing the real photograph to his posthumous readers: in which case, we might speculate that the verbal furs were added for the benefit of such readers, to remind them of the difference between the written self and the historical self, but also of the dangerous yet intriguing problems posed by photographic illustration. Although he said of the sisters — in the novel — that ‘elles ne liront jamais de livres, mais n’en feront jamais non plus’ (iii, 246) [they will never read any books, but neither will they ever write any] (iv, 286), perhaps he knew that the real Céleste would, as indeed she did, go on to publish a book with her name on the cover, a collection of her reminiscences and photographs which offers us competing portraits — verbal and visual — of her former employer, Monsieur Proust. In this chapter, I have tried brief ly to show how Proust makes use of the photographic, literally, analogically, and metaphorically, in his creation of the

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selves of La Recherche. Although his writing is never ‘photographic’ in the sense of mimicking, as a medium, the immediacy of the camera’s activity, photographic processes are embedded into the act of writing for Proust, both analogically and metaphorically. ‘Seeing photographically’ is a necessary first step in his apprenticeship as a writer; transparent and semi-transparent photographs have the effect of rendering diffuse and multiple the notions of identity and the self; and the sci-fi image of the self turning into luminous writing (photo-graphy) is a sublimation of photography as an analogical process for literature, applied directly to the writer’s body. All of these ways in which photography becomes a part of selfwriting exist, in differently developed but recognizably related forms, in the work of the later writers I will be discussing.52 I have also offered an account of several posthumous attempts to make a ‘photo-text’ out of La Recherche, in order to speculate about what Proust may have thought, had he lived to be more than one hundred years old, about the genre of photobiography. Indeed, he may well have imagined the invention of such a genre. The ambivalent generic status of La Recherche, a consequence of both the nature of the text and paratextual indices such as Proust’s letters and interviews on the subject, gave rise to readings of the book as autobiography during his lifetime, and Proust had no reason to think such readings would cease after his death. It is reasonable to suppose, then, that he knew — or at least suspected — that future readers would also attempt to ‘see’ the images biographically: that is, that they would try to match his characters to photographs of their real-life models. As we saw at the start of this chapter, Proust was keenly aware of the power of photographs: he was himself most vulnerable to the attraction of their immediacy. It is thus quite probable that he might have imagined his most faithful readers (Barthes’s ‘marcelliens’) wanting to look at his verbal creations alongside Nadar’s photographs; after all, Nadar was a celebrated photographer during his lifetime, and his photographs were circulated actively amongst Proust’s friends and acquaintances. In the context of such prophetic vision — or foresight — on Proust’s part, the passage analysed above, concerning the narrator’s photograph, can be read as a teasing warning against such simple photo-to-character readings. In the fascinating but playful shuff ling of portraits of the narrator, those created by the expert mimics Céleste and Marie and the photographic one described by Céleste, it is possible to see a sample of his thoughts about a genre that would contain both photographs and self-writing, a genre that had not been invented yet: the photo-text, or rather, photobiography. Notes to Chapter 1 1. Stephen C. Infantino, Photographic Vision in Proust (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), ch. 1. 2. I trace the trajectory of the aeroplane in and into Proust’s novel in Akane Kawakami, ‘When the Unfamiliar Becomes Familiar? Proust, Planes and Modernity’, in When familiar meanings dissolve... Essays in Honour of Malcolm Bowie, ed. by A. Finch, G. Rye, and N. Segal (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 163–78. 3. See Brassaï; Proust et les images: peinture, photographie, cinéma, vidéo, ed. by Jean Cléder and JeanPierre Montier (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003); Infantino; Philippe Ortel, La littérature à l’ère de la photographie (Nîmes: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 2002); Jérôme Thélot, Les inventions littéraires de la photographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003); Patrick

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Mathieu, Proust, une question de vision: pulsion scopique, photographie et représentations littéraires (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009); and Àine Larkin, Proust Writing Photography (Oxford: Legenda, 2011). 4. Roger Grenier, in preface to Brassaï, p. 11. 5. Quoted in Brassaï, p. 30. 6. Correspondance de Marcel Proust, iv (1904), ed. by Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1982), p. 350 (23 novembre 1904). 7. Ibid., p. 382 (12 décembre 1904). 8. According to a young Jean Cocteau, quoted in Brassaï, p. 35. 9. This is one way in which to read Un seul visage, the only collection of Guibert’s photographs to be published during his lifetime, as we will see in Chapter 2. 10. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997), p. 263. 11. Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust: souvenirs recueillis par Georges Belmont (Paris: Roger Laffont, 1973). 12. Brassaï, p. 103. 13. Kawakami, Travellers’ Visions, pp. 36–38. 14. Georges Cattaui, L’Amitié de Proust, avec une lettre inédite de Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1935). 15. This survival may be in the form of catalogues, for instance, if it is not possible to keep the collection together after the death of the collector: see my discussion of the case of the Goncourt brothers in Kawakami, Travellers’ Visions, pp. 23–30. 16. See n. 3. 17. Larkin’s analysis of this same passage interestingly concentrates on the effect of the swiftness of the Narrator’s return to his grandmother on his vision. See Larkin, pp. 115–16. 18. Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes, À la recherche du temps perdu, ii (Paris: Editions de la Pléiade, 1987), p. 438. Henceforth, all page references will be to this edition, and the volume and page references noted in parentheses in the text. 19. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. by D. J. Enright, 6 vols (London: Vintage 2000 [1992–93]), iii, 155–56. English translations are all taken from this edition. Henceforth, all page references will be to this volume, and noted in parentheses in the text. 20. Infantino, pp. 29–30. The link between photography and death is a staple of photography theory, especially since the publication of La Chambre claire. Less well known, perhaps, is the historical relationship between photography and embalming: ‘L’Utilisation de la photographie comme “souvenir” s’accompagna de la résurgence d’une pratique contradictoire avec la volonté de reviviscence, celle de l’embaumement’. Jean-Pierre Montier, ‘La Photographie “... dans le temps”: de Proust à Barthes et réciproquement’, in Proust et les images, ed. by Cléder and Montier, pp. 69–114 (p. 70). 21. This is a standard view about photography, related to its relationship with death. See for instance Erin C. Mitchell, ‘Writing Photography: The Grandmother in Remembrance of Things Past, the Mother in Camera Lucida, and especially, the Mother in The Lover’, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, 24 (2000), 325–39 (pp. 329–30): ‘The process of photography and the photograph itself enframe, capture, and immobilize a human subject [...] Photography immortalizes a moment’. 22. Yacavone chronicles Benjamin’s uses of the word, and his positive and negative definitions of it, throughout the sections on Benjamin in her book. See also Haustein, pp. 97–99. 23. Yacavone, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography, p. 174. 24. See Mary Price, The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Place (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 142. 25. See Philippe Ortel, La Littérature à l’ère de la photographie: enquête sur une révolution invisible (Nîmes: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 2002), pp. 311–12. 26. Philippe Ortel also discusses this passage in his book, ibid., p. 312. 27. Or, in some occasions, it will reveal a distinctive feature that clearly separates the self from others, as in the case of Guibert who had slight deformation of the spine: see Guibert, ‘La Radiographie’, in L’Image fantôme, p. 68. 28. See Larkin, pp. 137–42 for a description of the work of these photographers.

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29. Philippe Ortel sees the composite photograph as a way of seeing individuals typical of Proust’s age, characterizing the Narrator as ‘l’homme transparent et composite des années 1890’ [the transparent and composite man of the 1890s]. Ortel, p. 313. 30. There was an instance of a composite image in the passage quoted earlier on the Narrator’s grandmother: ‘moi qui ne l’avais jamais vue que dans mon âme, toujours à la même place du passé, à travers la transparence des souvenirs contigus et superposés’. 31. Larkin, ch. 4. 32. Ibid., p. 143. 33. Patrick Maynard’s description of photography as occurring on ‘sensitized surfaces’ is pertinent here (Maynard, pp. 19–20), although there is no ‘light’ element in this case. 34. Le Monde de Proust, photographies de Paul Nadar, ed. by Anne-Marie Bernard and Agnès Blondel (Paris: CNMHS, 1991), p. 12. 35. Ibid., p. 58. 36. William Howard Adams, A Proust Souvenir: Period Photographs by Paul Nadar (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984). 37. See Kathrin Yacavone, ‘Reading through Photography: Roland Barthes’s Last Seminar “Proust et la photographie” ’, French Forum, 34 (2009), 97–112, for a discussion of this text. 38. Barthes coined this term in the preface to Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Seuil, 1971). 39. La Chambre claire, p. 54. 40. Yacavone, ‘Reading through Photography’, p. 104. 41. There has been extensive discussion of the possibility of reading Proust’s novel as autofiction, as will be discussed later in this chapter. 42. Ortel, p. 313. 43. Serge Doubrovsky has written on the subject, in La Place de la Madeleine; Gérard Genette has discussed the possibility of calling La Recherche ‘autofiction’ in almost all of his major works, as will be discussed towards the end of this chapter. 44. Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer, ‘À la recherche du temps perdu, une autofiction?’, in Genèse et autofiction, ed. by Jeannelle and Viollet, pp. 69–87. The emphases are from the original text. 45. Le Grand Robert notes in an entry on ‘retoucheur/se’ (1887) that the terms have come to be applicable to photography. 46. As remarked upon by Thélot, p. 208. 47. Larkin, p. 112. 48. As also noted in Mathieu, p. 134. 49. I will discuss this possibility further towards the end of this chapter. 50. Roland Barthes, La Préparation du roman I et II: Cours et séminaires au Collège de France 1978–9, 1979–80, texte établi, annoté et présenté par Nathalie Léger (Paris: Seuil/IMEC, 2003), p. 393. 51. Thélot, p. 209. 52. The appropriation of elements of photographic practice and the photograph in À la recherche du temps perdu, in the context of that most significant of quests which is Marcel’s wish to become a writer, might be seen to prefigure the role they play in the construction of identity in later twentieth-century fiction and art. (Larkin, p. 201)

C h ap t e r 2

v

Hervé Guibert: Photography and Love The greatest difference between Guibert and the other writer/photographers examined in this book is that his career as a photographer was contemporaneous with, and as long as, his career as a writer. Indeed, one of his first published works included both media: his second book, Suzanne et Louise (1980), is a ‘roman-photo’ made up of photographs of his two great-aunts and a handwritten ‘story’. Since his appearance on Apostrophes about a year before his death Guibert has been most widely read as an AIDS writer, but from well before the start of his televisual notoriety he had been publishing all kinds of texts, mostly with the Éditions de Minuit, novels, essays, and photo-texts unconnected with AIDS but always autobiographical to some degree. As for his photographs, apart from the ones contained in the phototexts, only one collection of his photographs was published during his lifetime: Le seul visage (1984), containing fifty-five photographs with a short preface. Since his death, Gallimard has brought out Photographies (1993), and a collection edited by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Hervé Guibert, photographe (2011). Many of Guibert’s works now bear his self-portraits on their covers;1 although this is a standard marketing device used by French publishers for broadly autobiographical works, it is also an appropriate choice for the works of a man whose classic good looks fascinated many, and who was himself obsessed by bodies — especially by his own, and particularly after he became an AIDS sufferer — throughout his life.2 His almost clinical interest in his own condition culminated in his video, La Pudeur ou l’impudeur, in which he filmed himself during his last days, going about his everyday life as a person with AIDS.3 He continued to work on this apotheosis of self-portrayal until just months before his death on 27 December 1991, at thirty-six years of age. It is generally accepted that Guibert’s whole oeuvre is intensely autobiographical, whether it be the writing, the video, or the photography: in all of these media he was attempting to capture his self, both in explicitly autobiographical modes and in some that were less obviously so.4 Indeed although many of the photographs and texts are self-portraits, those that are not can be described as being equally autobiographical. In photography, as in writing, Guibert believes that it is the photographer, not his subject, who leaves his trace in the photograph, through his choice of angles, lighting, and arrangement of the subject. Guibert took many photographs in his lifetime, but he was also much photographed, and nowhere more

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consistently so than in a book of photographs by Hans-Georg Berger, consisting entirely of portraits of Guibert. In its preface Guibert describes — from the subject’s point of view — how the act of photographing takes the photographed subject out of his story and puts him into that of the photographer: Rarement le sujet se retrouve dans sa propre histoire: il en est sorti de force par l’empreinte du photographe, ce déterminisme du cadre qui l’efface un peu comme individu.5 [The subject is rarely to be found in his own story: he is forced out of it by the mark of the photographer, the determinism of the frame which effaces him somewhat as an individual.]

The image of photography as a violent, ‘taking’ act is not new — as Susan Sontag puts it succinctly, ‘to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed’.6 Guibert returns to this image frequently in his essays on photography, describing how the photographer can take possession of his object for his own purposes: ‘en prenant ta photo je te lie à moi si je veux, [...] je t’assimile un peu, et tu n’y peux rien’ [by taking your photo I can link you to me, [...] I assimilate you a little, and you can’t do anything about it].7 But as the ‘un peu’ suggests by illogically softening the action of assimilating the other (it is surely not possible to assimilate someone ‘a little’), Guibert also claims that photography is an act of love. It is also, of course, an act which involves a photographing subject and the photographed object; Guibert is always acutely conscious of the subject/object dynamic in the photographic act, even — or especially — when he occupies both roles himself, as we will see in our later analyses. In this chapter I will discuss Guibert’s photographs, his photographic writing, his photo-texts and his writings on photography, in order to show that for him photography is always an act of love, and thus one in which the photographing self is intimately involved and revealed. There are many different shades of love, of course, relating to different kinds of relationship between the self and the other, which result in different kinds of self-writing by the author/photographer. There is also the issue of the autofictional status of much of Guibert’s work. Guibert is the most openly autofictional of the writers examined in this book, and his works thrive, I believe, on the tensions between the photographic and autofiction’s ambivalent status. Because all of Guibert’s work might be classified as self-writing, and because much of it is ‘photographic’ even when it does not directly involve photographs, I have chosen in this chapter to restrict the focus of my analysis to just five works. This non-comprehensive approach is the most fruitful one to adopt for Guibert in the context of this study, because there have already been several detailed analyses of the place of photography in his oeuvre,8 and my own aim is to elucidate the complex links between self-writing, photography, and affect in his work. We will see how affect in Guibert transcends the presence/absence dichotomy, a chief characteristic of both his writing and his photographs. We will also see how this dynamic sits uneasily but productively with his choice of an autofictional mode of writing. I start my chapter with a consideration of Suzanne et Louise, his ‘roman-photo’ based on his relationship with his two great-aunts. I go on to analyse L’Image fantôme, his

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collection of essays on photography, then focus on the photographs of Le seul visage, both on their raison d’être as a collection and on their individual significances. The final section of this chapter will look at some of the works he published about his illness, and attempts to offer a new angle on the issue of photography and death, within the context of a body of photobiographic works. Barthes, amongst many others, has discussed in detail the relationship between photography and death; but in this chapter I will analyse the link within the context of how Guibert, as a photographing subject, referred to his own impending death — as the photographed object — in his photographs and photographic writings. Suzanne et Louise Suzanne et Louise was first published in 1980 by the Editions Libres Hallier, with a print-run of around 6,000: as a result, until it was republished by Gallimard in 2005, it was very difficult to locate copies of it.9 This may explain why it has not been much discussed in studies of Guibert’s work, and I will give a brief description of it in this chapter as well as a detailed analysis. The book, unpaginated, is described as a ‘roman-photo’ [photo-novel], and tells the story of the eponymous women, who are Guibert’s great-aunts: the story consists of background information about their youth, their everyday life, and the events surrounding the creation of the book itself. It is made up of photographs taken by Guibert, mostly of his great-aunts, and the accompanying text is in Guibert’s own regular handwriting. There are twenty-five ‘sections’ ranging from just one to five or six pages long, most of which are composed of at least one photograph and a matching text. With titles such as ‘L’odeur préférée de Suzanne ...’ [Suzanne’s favourite smell ...], ‘Les cheveux de Louise’ [Louise’s hair], ‘La mort du chien’ [The death of the dog], and ‘Le Carmel’ [the Carmelite Order] (Louise was a Carmelite nun for eight years), the texts and photographs successfully convey a beguiling portrait of the great-aunts, as well as of their relationship with their eccentric great-nephew. All of the photographs are very obviously ‘arranged’, and there is never any suggestion that the models are no less than one hundred per cent aware of, and colluding in, the project. They show the women in various strange poses: Louise with her long, wavy grey hair undone, half-obscuring her face; Suzanne in various ‘dead’ poses, stretched out on a sofa in a white gown; the two of them ref lected in a bathroom mirror. This unconcealed artifice is completely explicable if we take seriously the labelling of the book by its author as a ‘roman-photo’. A popular genre, the ‘roman-photo’ is essentially a comic in which photographs replace the drawings: the photographs are there to illustrate the story, and the models are therefore snapped in the appropriate poses and actions.10 The correspondence between pictures and text in Suzanne et Louise is usually completely straightforward, at times to the point of absurdity: so the page on which we read the text entitled ‘Les jambes de Suzanne’ [Suzanne’s legs] is situated opposite a photograph of her legs. The text entitled ‘Le Carmel’, a relatively long narrative of how Louise joined, lived in, then left the Carmelite order, is accompanied by several ‘illustrative’ photographs: one of a cross, images of Jesus, and several prayer cards propped up on her bedside table;

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one of Louise holding a picture of Jesus on the cross and looking piously down at it; and a final one of the crucifixion image. The naïve straightforwardness of this direct correspondence between text and image, derived from the popular genre, is undermined by the chapter entitled ‘La mort du chien’ [The death of the dog]. The text describes, in great detail and with reference to the corresponding photos, the putting down of his aunt Louise’s muchloved German shepherd: Ces photos ont été prises dans le jardin, le matin du 20 sept. 1978: Louise avait fait venir un vétérinaire pour piquer Whysky, le berger allemand, que la vieillesse et la douleur des os et des articulations empêchaient désormais de descendre et monter les escaliers. [...] Par téléphone elle m’a convoqué: je l’avais priée de me prévenir le jour où elle ferait piquer Whysky. [These photos were taken in the garden, in the morning of 20 September 1978: Louise had called in a vet to have Whysky put down, the German shepherd who had become unable to go up and down the stairs because of his age and the pain in his bones and joints. [...] She summoned me by telephone: I had begged her to let me know on the day when she would have Whysky put down.]

The narrator goes on to tell us that he had asked her to put on a particular outfit, and then describes the event, and the corresponding photographs: La première photo montre le chien couché, et cette aiguille tenue par une main poilue qui transperce ses côtes et insuff le directement dans son coeur un liquide glacé. La seconde photo montre le chien inerte dont on a retiré la muselière [...] les pieds de Louise sont cadrés au bord du trou creusé dans la terre. [The first photo shows the sleeping dog, and the needle held in a hairy hand which penetrates his side and introduces an icy liquid directly into his heart. The second photo shows the inert dog, his muzzle removed [...] Louise’s feet are framed on the edge of the hole dug in the earth.]

At the end of this long and careful description of both scene and photographs, which has the reader looking ahead in his/her mind to seeing the photographs themselves (and perhaps wondering why they are not on the facing page), we are presented with a stark denial of everything that has just been said: Ces photos n’ont pas été prises, car Louise ce matin-là ne m’a pas convoqué. Le chien roulé dans une couverture a été emporté par l’homme dans une camionnette, puis brûlé aux crématoires. [These photos were never taken, because Louise did not summon me that morning. The dog, rolled up in a blanket, was taken away by the man in a van, then cremated.]

The effect of this sudden and complete negation is electric: it throws into doubt the veracity of the whole text, not just the section on the dog’s death, and makes the reader wonder how much, if any, of the story of Suzanne et Louise is true. This shocking betrayal of the reader’s trust is reminiscent of what happens at the end of Mes parents where the reader, if s/he has been reading the text as being more or less autobiographical, is confronted by an event that is completely untrue: the death of Guibert’s parents before Guibert himself. There is in fact a similar negation of the

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truth at the start of Mes parents which involves, interestingly, the two great-aunts. Suzanne tells the narrator the story of how his parents got together, a convincing tale of scandal and iniquity which nevertheless contains one irrefutably ‘incorrect’ fact: she claims that his father had him circumcised, whereas he is in a unique position to know that this is not the case. And it is Louise’s destruction of some important documents that makes the narrator decide to tell the story of his parents. The narrative which ensues is the most autobiography-like of Guibert’s works:11 although it does contain one reference to the writing of ‘un roman qui s’appelerait Mes parents’ [a novel which would be called My Parents], the rest of the book reads like a straightforward autobiography, recounting verisimilar events such as the occasion of a happy dinner with his father where ‘pour la première fois depuis plus de quinze ans nous retrouvons notre amitié’ [for the first time in more than fifteen years we rediscovered our friendship], and at which his father corrects Suzanne’s version of how the parents met and married. In other words, Suzanne and Louise are allied with fiction and slander in this work, with the creation of fantasies that please the narrator and nourish his creative impulses, much as they seem to have done in the earlier Suzanne et Louise. To return to Suzanne et Louise and the imagined description of non-existent photographs in ‘La mort du chien’, it might be argued that the reader’s consequent sense of betrayal will not affect his/her reading of the whole work, simply because there are no photographs of the dead dog. That is to say if the narrative, having described the photographs of the dog and then told us that the event had not been photographed, had subsequently gone on to offer us the photographs, the reliability of the whole work — both text and images — would have been irredeemably compromised. As things stand, the text admits that it lied, then ‘proves’ it to us through the absence of the photographs, which allows photography, at least, to remain on the side of truth-telling. This allows us to continue reading the work in good faith, with some circumspection but with a small sigh of relief: the great-aunts may be good actresses, playing a part for their favourite nephew, but at the same time photography continues to guarantee certain basic truths. If we decide after reading to the end of ‘La mort du chien’ that at least parts of the narrative are true — the death of the dog, the manner of its disposal (not burial, but cremation: the specific nature of the alternative has an ‘effet de réel’ on the reader) — there is still the question of why Louise acted as she did: why didn’t she let her nephew know of the dog’s death, as he had requested? Her action is, of course, the reason for his lies, for the creation of the fantasy scenario in which he was allowed to attend, then photograph, the event. Why, when she has been a compliant participant in various other scenes planned and orchestrated by her great-nephew, did she not cooperate regarding this one? The state of the dog may be a clue: ‘Whysky, le berger allemand, que la vieillesse et la douleur des os et des articulations empêchaient désormais de descendre et monter les escaliers’. In a word, the dog is old, like Suzanne and Louise: like Suzanne, the invalid sister, it is not able to get up and down the stairs. Louise’s actions seem to me to be, on one level, simply a rebellion of the old against the young: a rebellion of the photographed, the objectified, against the powerful wielder of the camera and pen. We discover

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some pages later that Louise also, having allowed her great-nephew to photograph her undone hair, ‘ce qui sont pour elle la chose la plus intime’ [which are for her her most intimate part], claims upon seeing the photographs that ‘ce n’est pas moi’ [that isn’t me] and has it cut short. This act of destruction — which Davis describes as an act of symbolic castration of her great-nephew12 — is reminiscent of the role she plays in Mes parents, mentioned earlier: she it was who destroyed the crucial documents which would have proven the secret of his parents’ relationship, thus creating the necessity for the narrative. It certainly seems that both the cutting of her hair, and the exclusion of Guibert from the scene of her dog’s death, is her attempt to regain control of the proceedings, although in both cases (and in the case of Mes parents) her act results in more writing on his part. Davis points out the obvious but striking contrast between the aged great-aunts and the youth of their photographer: he suggests that, although there is of course much empathy between the two generations, this does not prevent Guibert’s text from ‘using Suzanne and Louise to ward off the prospect of its author’s becoming old’.13 Although she has agreed to be photographed, perhaps in her acts of rebellion Louise is resisting her great-nephew’s attempt to write her into his autobiography, to mould her into something she does not want to be made into for his aesthetic purposes. For most of the text, of course, the ladies are compliant, not rebellious. Indeed much earlier in the text, in ‘La Pose’, we hear how Guibert obtained his greataunts’ agreement to participate in this project through a mixture of persistence and happenstance: Il y a cinq ans, j’ai proposé à mes grandes-tantes de réaliser un film sur elles [...] mais leur refus a été si catégorique qu’il m’a sapé tout espoir de le faire un jour. Deux ans plus tard je me suis mis, en remplacement, à écrire une pièce de théâtre à deux personnages [...] C’est à cette époque, aussi, que j’ai commencé à prendre des photos, presque chaque dimanche [...] j’entassais les planches-contacts, je ne faisais tirer aucune photo. [...] Tout c’est déclenché à partir du moment où je me suis décidé à faire tirer quelque photos, pour voir et à leur montrer. Les images qu’elles possédaient d’elles-mêmes s’arrêtaient à trente ans: ‘on est beaucoup photographié dans sa jeunesse, puis on vieillit et on devient laid, la vieillesse n’est pas montrable’, c’est l’idée commune. Elles ont été surprises par cette image que je leur retournais si tardivement d’ellesmêmes, après une coupure de quarante, cinquante ans. Alors j’ai pu amorcer un travail de pose, de mise-en-scène. Louise, qui n’avait jamais voulu me montrer même ses cheveux, qui sont pour elle la chose la plus intime, a accepté que le je les photographie ... [Five years ago, I asked my great-aunts if I could make a film about them [...] but they refused so categorically that I lost all hope of ever doing it. Two years afterwards I began, as a replacement activity, to write a play for two characters [...] It was at that time that I also began to take photos of them, almost every Sunday [...] I created huge piles of the contact prints, I never had any of them developed. Everything started when I decided to have a few of them developed, just to see, and to show them. The photos they had of themselves stopped at when they were thirty: ‘people take lots of photos of you when you’re young, then you become old and ugly, old age can’t be exhibited’, that’s how things go. They were surprised by the image that I restored to them of themselves,

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so late in the day, after a break of forty, fifty years. I was then able to begin taking some posed photographs of them, setting up some scenes. Louise, who had never wanted to show me her hair, the most intimate part of her, allowed me to photograph it...]

It is fascinating to speculate, if all this is true (the ‘dément’ of ‘La mort du chien’ comes after this, but even at this stage the reader is probably aware that Guibert’s narrators are often far from trustworthy), what it was about the photographs they saw which led the great-aunts to agree to participate. Why did they decide, having refused once so categorically to become the subjects of a film, that they would be happy to be photographed, indeed to pose for photographs? Were the images they saw of themselves — the first, if Guibert is correct, since they were around thirty years old — so ‘other’, so completely different from what they had expected, that they were freed from inhibition? ‘Je n’ai plus de pudeur’ [I’ve no more modesty], says Suzanne after agreeing to have her legs photographed (although it is a very modest, below-the-knees shot). Or is it something to do with the difference between photographs and film? Posed photographs are easier for the subject to control than appearing in a film, and the artificial nature of the photographs would certainly have allowed the great-aunts to have been fully involved in key decisions. Or are they enjoying the fact that the project will give them back their visibility, after having been invisible — in the class of ‘non montrables’, in the taxonomy of commonly held notions about photography — for so many years? In the section entitled ‘La photo’, Guibert professes an anti-intentionalist view of photography: je crois que ce sont d’autres choses, que les objectifs, qui font les ‘bonnes photos’, des choses immatérielles, de l’ordre de l’amour, ou de l’âme, des forces qui passent là et qui s’inscrivent, funestes, comme le texte qui se fait malgré soi, dicté par une voix supérieure... [I believe that it is things other than lenses that make ‘a good photo’, immaterial things, like love, or the soul, forces that pass through and are registered, fated, like the text that is written in spite of itself, dictated by a voice from on high ...]

Davis criticizes Guibert for not practising what he preaches here, arguing that his portraits of his great-aunts are ‘so strongly stylized, so posed and calculated’ that they could not be less anti-intentionalist if they tried to be.14 We have already discussed why, in the context of his ‘roman-photo’, the photographs had to be this way: but if we look closely at these images, it seems to me that these photographs are anti-intentionalist, in spite of their generic need to look staged. What comes through from the photographs — apart from the ‘story’ and its illustration — is the great-aunts’ love for Guibert: their compliance is only possible because of the strong attachment they feel for their photographer. Exactly as Guibert says in ‘La Photo’, what makes these photographs good are ‘des choses immatérielles, de l’ordre de l’amour, [...] qui passent là et qui s’inscrivent’. The fact of the surrounding text, of course, makes it easier for the viewer to notice the presence of these immaterial forces: we know from reading about them that the great-aunts, although eccentric and crotchety, would do almost anything for their young relative, and it is then easier to see that the photographs are the result of complicity between photographer

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and photographed, compliance of the elderly ladies with a youngster’s enthusiasm, and much mature humour, especially in the photographs which show Suzanne pretending to be dead. The two photographs which ‘fake’ the death of Suzanne immediately follow a text entitled ‘un simulacre’, as if to ensure that the viewer will not mistake them, even for a moment, for images of a ‘really’ dead Suzanne. In any case, ‘La mort du chien’ [Death of the dog] has readied us for this fake death: on that occasion it was the text that lied about a death, but this time it is the photos that will — with our knowledge, crucially — pretend. After these images come three ‘live’ shots of the great-aunts, two of Louise and one of Suzanne: there is then a text entitled ‘Le cadavre’ [the Cadaver], which describes what will happen to Suzanne’s body after she dies (she has willed it to medical research). On the page facing the text there is another photograph, of the bottom half of Suzanne’s body on the sofa, with Louise touching her feet gently, as if she has just finished laying out her sister. These photographs constitute the final sequence of images in the book, and is followed by a shot of the three ‘characters’ of the ‘roman-photo’, Suzanne and Guibert seated on a sofa with Louise standing behind them, with a caption, ‘À la fin ils reviennent pour saluer ...’ [They come back at the end to take a bow ...], as they might for the curtain call at the end of a play. And the texts which follow, ‘La mise-en-scène’, ‘Le vernissage’, and ‘Le scénario’, all pertain to the conception and creation of the book, as well as of the play and the exhibition which came out of the project. ‘La miseen-scène’ describes in detail how the three of them discussed and set up the ‘dead Suzanne’ series, and reveals how the great-aunts took a leading role in the process; ‘Le vernissage’ describes their reaction to the opening night of the exhibition in which some of the photographs were shown; and ‘Le scénario’ offers us the last two acts of a film scenario, perhaps of the one that his great-aunts had banned him from making five years previously, in which ‘le générique de fin défile en transparence sur l’image de Louise assise à la fênetre, et sur le premier mouvement de la Sonate de Franck pour violon et piano, [...] la musique préférée de Suzanne’ [the credits roll, superimposed on the image of Louise sitting at the window, accompanied by the first movement of Franck’s sonata for violin and piano, [...] Suzanne’s favourite piece]. The enumeration of these many versions of fictionalization — the exhibition, the book, the play, and the film script — create a sense of demystification at the end of the book, encapsulated in the photograph of the three participants who ‘à la fin [ils] reviennent pour saluer’. The book, in other words, contains both the fiction and the reality: the photographer/writer and his models, having told their story, describe to us, at the end of the exercise, how it was done. Or do they? The ‘explanations’, although very convincing in their detail, still exist within the covers of the book that is billed as a ‘roman-photo’. Moreover, the text of ‘Le vernissage’ is set opposite one last photograph, a shot of Suzanne asleep on her bed. It is surely no coincidence that this image is not unlike the ‘dead’ photographs: on her back, although on her bed rather than on the sofa, she is lying very precisely on one side of the bed in an uncomfortable-looking position. Placed so soon after the ‘dead’ photographs, the question to be asked is obvious: what is the observable difference,

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in a photograph, between a dead person and someone faking it? Does it make any sense to call a photograph of the latter ‘un simulacre’ when all photographs are simulacra anyway? Thus the final image of the work throws its ontological status into question: the only certainty is that Suzanne et Louise is a work of fiction, an embodiment of Guibert’s personal vision of his great-aunts. The reader is left looking at the back cover for the only biographical and bibliographical details which should, at least, be true: Hervé Guibert, né en 1955, est critique photo au Monde. Il est l’auteur d’un roman publié en 1977 chez Régine Deforges, La mort propagande, et collabore régulièrement à la revue Minuit. Des bribes de ce roman-photo, Suzanne et Louise, ont été exposées en octobre 1979 à la Remise du Parc. [Hervé Guibert, born in 1955, is photography critic for Le Monde. He is the author of a novel published in 1977 by Régine Deforges, La mort propagande, and a regular contributor to the Minuit review. Sections of this photo-novel, Suzanne and Louise, were exhibited in October 1979 at the Remise du Parc.]

There is a photograph of Guibert beneath this text. But the title of the book is picked out in pink, reminding us of its popular, ‘roman-photo’ associations, and casting further doubt on the truthfulness of the work. Suzanne et Louise was only Guibert’s second book, but its teasing mixture of fact and fiction, its self-conscious use of different media, and its exploitation of generic expectations are characteristics which are all to be found in his later work. The uneasy but affectionate relationship between him and his great-aunts deserves a much longer discussion than I have been able to offer here, but I hope to have shown that everything about the work is built around the emotions which are inseparable from the photographic act. The give-and-take between young and old, the affection which does have strings attached on both sides, the ‘professional’ desire to portray the other which is also a genuine expression of love on the part of Guibert: all of these feelings are brought into sharper focus by photography. The photographs in Suzanne et Louise are expressive of the photographer’s subjectivity, but also fashioned by the emotions of both the photographer and his models; the emotions that hold between the participants are crucial to their conception, execution, and result. In the final analysis, given that the whole project is born of Guibert’s desire to recreate his great-aunts in accordance with his vision, we might say that it is as much an autobiographical fiction as a biographical one, because they show the women as he sees them, albeit with their agreement.15 L’Image fantôme In the Introduction, we discussed the autobiographical significance of the Winter Garden photograph for Barthes in La Chambre claire: because, according to him, it has both touched (through chemistry and light) and captured the real person of his mother, it breaks the vicious circle of self-ref lecting images and returns him to himself. Because he has photographic ‘proof ’ of her existence and essence, phenomenologically speaking, and because she is literally his ‘origin’, his own self

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is guaranteed. The Winter Garden photograph functions as both the originary image and reality. It is also the origin of Barthes’s text, from which, however, it is famously excluded: Je ne puis montrer la Photo du Jardin d’Hiver. Elle n’existe que pour moi. Pour vous, elle ne serait rien d’autre qu’une photo indifférente, [...] elle ne peut fonder une objectivité, au sens positif du terme.16 [I cannot show you the Winter Garden photograph. It only exists for me. For you, it would be nothing more than an indifferent photo, [...] it would not be able to establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the word.]

Thus the origin of Barthes’s text is a photograph of his mother that we are not privileged to see:17 the origin of Hervé Guibert’s L’Image fantôme, a collection of essays on the subject of photography published the year after La Chambre claire, is a photograph of Guibert’s mother that was taken but does not exist. This is one of the many acts of homage, reaction, and competition that connect Guibert’s book to Barthes’s. Guibert reviewed La Chambre claire for Le Monde, although by the time the review was published Barthes was in hospital, having been hit by a lorry in front of the Collège de France. He died about two months after his accident, but Guibert’s discussion with his friend and mentor on the subject of photography was to continue, in increasingly combative language, in the essays of L’Image fantôme. In ‘La retoucheuse’ [the retoucher], for instance, Guibert attacks Barthes’s thesis of the referential nature of photography by expanding on the subject of the retouch artist: ‘elle peut fermer des yeux ouverts et rouvrir des yeux fermés, elle peut faire marcher les morts’ (IF, 139) [She can close open eyes and reopen closed ones, she can make the dead walk]. In ‘photo d’identité II’, Barthes’s formulation of the self ’s identity crisis when faced with a photograph of himself — ‘c’est moi et ce n’est pas moi’ — is given a further dimension by the mysterious appearance of a complete stranger on the métro who shows him photographs of Guibert himself, taken at a party he knows he never attended: ‘Je savais très bien que ce visage ne pouvait être que le mien (ou celui d’un sosie?), et qu’en même temps ce ne pouvait être moi’ (IF, 59) [I knew perfectly well that this face could only be mine (or a doppelganger’s?), and at the same time, that it could not be me]. And ‘L’image fantôme’, the tale of how Guibert takes a photograph of his mother, is very much a continuation of — as well as an attempt to outdo — Barthes’s mourning of his mother in La Chambre claire.18 L’Image fantôme consists of sixty-four essays, ranging from some that are about a paragraph long to longer ones of more than ten pages. With titles such as ‘l’image parfaite’ [the perfect image], ‘l’image érotique’ [the erotic image], ‘exemple de photo de famille’ [example of a family photo], ‘exemple de photo de voyage’ [example of a travel photo], ‘photo porno’ [pornographic photo], ‘l’autobus’ [the bus], ‘le faux’ [the fake], and ‘le pharmacien de Vaugirard’ [the Vaugirard pharmacist], it discusses the image in a wide range of contexts and how they relate to writing, reality, and love, always from a very personalized perspective. What follows is not a comprehensive description of the collection, but an analysis of some of the key issues, the way in which they can be said to constitute an instance of self-writing, and finally a close reading of the eponymous essay, which illustrates how photography for Guibert is an act of love.

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‘L’image parfaite’ tells the story of how Guibert fails to take a photograph (a fair number of the essays in this collection are about the failure to photograph) of some boys playing on a beach in Elba. Helpless without his camera, he nevertheless finds himself looking at the scene as if he had photographed it: je vois déjà la photo qui la représenterait, et l’abstraction qui automatiquement s’effectuerait, détachant ces quatre garçons dans un espèce d’irréalité. (IF, 23) [I see already the photo that would represent it, and the abstraction that would automatically take place, detaching these four boys into a kind of unreality.]

This is a photographic seeing which is related to but not exactly the same as the kind of seeing that Proust experiences when he sees his grandmother upon his return from Doncières: it is more specialized, the photographic vision of a professional photographer. He goes on to describe his relationship to the scene in some detail, telling us that he knows he would not want to take the photograph on another day, even if it were to be reproduced exactly for him: cette vision recomposée ne me ravira plus de la même façon, [...] car elle aura eu le temps de faire son chemin dans ma tête, de s’y cristalliser en image parfaite, l’abstraction photographique se sera effectuée toute seule, sur la plaque sensible de la mémoire, puis développé et révélée par l’écriture, que je n’ai d’abord mise en train que pour me défaire de mon regret photographique. Il me semble maintenant que ce travail de l’écriture a dépassé et enrichi la transcription photographique immédiate, et que, si je tentais demain de retrouver la vision réelle pour la photographier, elle me semblerait pauvre. (IF, 24) [such a recreated vision would not enthral me in the same way, [...] for it would already have had the time to make its way through my head, to crystallize there as a perfect image, the photographic abstraction would have taken place of its own accord, on memory’s sensitive surface, then developed and revealed through my writing, which I originally put into motion only as a means of getting rid of my photographic regret. It now seems to me that what I have achieved through writing has gone beyond and enriched the immediate photographic transcription, and that, if I tried tomorrow to find the real vision again to take a photo of it, it would seem to me to be a poor substitute.]

What happened in Guibert’s mind when he first saw the boys, when he did not have a camera to hand, is photographic in the sense given to the term by Maynard when he characterizes photography ‘in terms of technologies for accomplishing or guiding the production of images on sensitized surfaces by means of light’.19 The ‘abstraction photographique’ experienced by Guibert results in the production of the image on ‘la plaque sensible de la mémoire’, and writing, acting photographically, then develops and makes visible the image. We therefore have here the description of a photographic act taking place without recourse to a camera, and thence a more specialized version of photographic vision — more specialized, that is, than it was for Proust: a form of seeing that human beings have developed in accordance with technological advances, and their assimilation into ways of thinking, perceiving, and speaking. Walter Benjamin was describing precisely this effect of technology on human perception when he wrote: ‘for the entire spectrum of optical, and

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now also acoustical, perception, the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception’.20 (And in accordance with his predictions, Guibert’s perception is more technologically advanced than Proust’s.) As we will see later, Macé also writes about ‘la photographie sans appareil’: Proust would no doubt have been delighted at this effect of technology on our minds, fascinated as he was in how the modern inventions of his age could stretch the capacity of the human mind and sharpen its tools of perception.21 Another key concept introduced by Guibert in L’Image fantôme is that of photo­ graphic writing, a form of writing that mimics the immediacy and spontaneity of the snapshot. In the essay entitled ‘l’écriture photographique’, he describes Goethe’s style in Voyage en Italie as possessing these qualities: L’écriture de la lettre et l’écriture du journal sont les deux écritures les plus proches [...] d’une même texture, d’une même immédiateté photographique. C’est la trace la plus récente de la mémoire, et c’est à peine de la mémoire: comme quelque chose qui semble encore vibrer sur la rétine, c’est de l’impression, presque de l’instantané. C’est une écriture brute, qui ne supporte pas la retouche, et qui supporte mal le travail de réécriture: on pourrait croire que le journal est comme une planche-contacts, un alignement de prises de vues, en attente d’un développement, mais non. « Je viens de revoir mon journal. J’y trouve bien des choses à indiquer d’une manière plus positive, et cependant je ne veux rien corriger, car ces feuillets sont l’expression de la première impression qui est toujours précieuse, parce qu’elle est la plus vraie », écrit encore Goethe. (IF, 74–75) [Writing in letters and in diaries are the two kinds of writing which are closest [...] of the same texture, the same immediacy as photography. It’s the most recent trace of memory, it is hardly memory: like something that still seems to be vibrating on the retina, it’s an impression, almost a snapshot. It is a raw writing, which cannot be retouched, and which doesn’t take well to rewriting: you could almost believe that a diary is like a contact print, an alignment of shots, awaiting development, but no. Goethe wrote: ‘I have just reread my diary. I have found many things in it that I could rewrite in a more positive manner, but I don’t want to correct anything, because these pages are the expression of that first impression which is always precious, because it is the most true.’]

Here again, something that is not photography is described as being analogically photographic: a trace of memory, or even ‘fresher’, something which has made an impression on the retina (‘comme quelque chose qui semble encore vibrer sur la rétine’). This is the photographic as process, the inscription of an impression onto a part of the human mind and body. At times the (photo)sensitive surface is the memory, as in the earlier instance of the image of the boys on the beach, but in this passage it is the retina. The retina, of course, really is a photosensitive surface, so this image likens the human eye to the camera, in a science-fictional mode allowing technology to be embedded into human beings. It is as if the impression shortcircuits the mind, moving directly from the eye to the diarist’s page. Photography is therefore much more than a metaphor at this point: it is a procedure and a mode of perception incorporated, literally, into the human body. A little later in this passage, Guibert moves back to using photography as a metaphor:

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Le paysage du journal est une sorte de croquis bref, télégraphique, une carte postale. Le paysage du roman a bénéficié du’une pose plus longue: c’est presque un tableau par rapport au paysage photographique du journal. (IF, 76) [The landscape of a diary is a sort of brief sketch, telegraphic, a postcard. The landscape of a novel has benefited from a longer exposure: it is almost a painting when compared with the photographic landscape of the diary.]

Here the metaphor of the photographic process is applied to the writing of scenes in novels. But when he returns to his analysis of ‘l’écriture photographique’ in diaries, Guibert moves from the metaphorical back to the concrete, referring to the brief entries in Kaf ka’s diary simply as photographs: De même, certaines notations brèves du journal de Kaf ka sont de pures photographies: [...] ‘Vieille ville: ruelle étroite et abrupte qu’un homme en blouse bleue dévale pesamment. Escaliers.’ (Hormis la notation de la couleur, on croirait voir un Cartier-Bresson des années 30), ou encore ‘Femme aux cheveux noirs, grave, bouche au dessin aigu, elle est assise dans le hall.’ (IF, 76) [In the same way, some brief remarks from Kaf ka’s diary are pure photographs: [...] ‘the old town: a sudden, narrow street, down which a man in blue overalls is rushing with a heavy step. Stairs.’ (Except for the observation about the colour, it’s exactly like a Cartier-Bresson from the thirties), or ‘woman with black hair, serious, a sharply drawn mouth, sitting in the hallway.’]

And again: Elles [les dernières notations dans le journal de Kaf ka] sont comme des clichés de son état intérieur, un niveau presque radiographique de son angoisse, comme de sa tache pulmonaire, les dernières notations descriptives sont un peu comme les photos mentales d’une homme paralysé... (IF, 77) [They are like snapshots of his internal state, almost X-ray like, of his anguish, as of his diseased lung, his last descriptive remarks a bit like photographs of the mind of a paralysed man ...]

Guibert’s use here of the term ‘cliché’ [snapshot], as opposed to ‘photographie’, denotes the manner of their taking (snapshots are photos taken on the hoof, swiftly), and therefore connotes a lack of constructedness or structural planning. There is also, therefore, a sense that snapshots are more likely to represent reality in its most authentic state (as opposed to a staged photograph). As we will see in a later chapter, Ernaux is a writer who aspires to the snapshot as an ideal for her photographic writing. Guibert himself comes to adopt this style; tellingly, it is when he is writing about his illness — in À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie, or Cytomégalovirus — that this photographic style of writing becomes his medium of choice. In L’Image fantôme, however, when writing about ‘l’écriture photographique’ [photographic writing], Guibert’s style remains elegant if concise: his writing is not yet photographic, but ‘devient un négatif de photographie’ [becomes a photographic negative] (IF, 123). Writing here is the shadow of photography: describing himself in the third person, Guibert notes that ‘il parle de la photo de façon négative, il ne parle que d’images fantômes, d’images qui ne sont pas sorties, ou bien d’images latentes, d’images intimes au point d’en être invisibles’ [He speaks of photography in a negative

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way, he only speaks of ghost images, images that didn’t come out, or else of latent images, images so intimate as to be invisible] (IF, 123–24). Unlike the ‘écriture photographique’ of Kaf ka’s diaries, the writing of L’Image fantôme peoples the spaces around the photographs of Guibert’s life with ghostly presences and shadowy figures, almost-photographs which can only be given an existence through writing. In the introductory paragraph to L’Image fantôme, on a page preceding the first essay, Guibert says of the work that ‘j’ai eu la tentation d’un autoportrait’ [I was tempted to write a self-portrait] (IF, 9). I will now show how L’Image fantôme can indeed be read as an instance of self-writing. The essays may be about his relationship with photography, but as this is in itself a very personal history, the result is a collection of fragments — biographemes22 — of his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. From the essays about family photos (‘inventaire du carton à photos’ [inventory of box of photos]), the photos which he used to sleep with as a child (‘Premier amour’ [first love]), an X-ray of his torso which reveals a congenital defect (‘La radiographie’ [the X-ray]), and an album of photos of himself which he shows his friends (‘L’album’), we learn much about his life: as much, indeed, as from Mes parents, or parts of Suzanne et Louise. Later in the book, Guibert acknowledges that his essays have come to constitute an autobiographical work. Discussing whether or not he should have inserted his favourite photographs (by other people) into the text of L’Image fantôme, he tells us that he decided not to, because the writing has become comme une tentative de biographie par la photographie: chaque histoire individuelle se double de son histoire photographique, imagée, imaginée. Or de quel droit accaparerais-je ces autres images, ces images d’autres, ces positifs? Elles passent dans mon histoire, elles s’y cognent et parfois elles s’y installent, mais elles ne seront jamais à moi. (IF, 124) [like an attempt at a biography via photography: each individual story is coupled with its photographic story, imaged, imagined. But what right have I to take possession of these other images, these images of others, these positives? They enter into my story, they blunder about and sometimes take their places in it, but they will never become mine.]

These are photographs that Guibert has loved throughout his life, and which have therefore become part of his life: even so, he does not want to claim them as his own property, which is what he says will happen if he incorporates them into his narrative. Taking possession of photographs — and of loved ones through photographs — is a theme that we will return to when discussing Le seul visage: I will simply note here that love is always an active ingredient for Guibert when dealing with photographs, as will be seen most strikingly in the following analysis of ‘L’image fantôme’. ‘La photographie est aussi une pratique très amoureuse’ [photography is a very loving act] (IF, 11) begins the essay that gives the collection its title, and in which Guibert describes how, at the age of eighteen, he decided to take a perfect photograph of his mother.23 He describes how he meticulously prepared his mother for the session, removing all aspects of her that had been imposed by his father (her hairstyle, her lack of make-up),24 as well as the man himself:

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la première chose que je fis fut d’évacuer mon père du théâtre où la photo allait se produire, de le chasser pour que son regard à elle ne passe plus par le sien [...] qu’il n’y ait plus que notre connivence à nous, une connivence nouvelle, débarrassée du mari et du père. (IF, 12) [the first thing I did was to evacuate my father from the theatre where the photograph was to be produced, to send him away so that her look would not go through his any more [...] so that there would be nothing apart from our complicity, a new complicity, free of the husband and the father.]

The oedipal situation is emphasized by the fact that Guibert is eighteen (he has come of age), and by the fact that he projects his homoerotic desire onto his mother by getting her to put on a hat which reminds him of Tadzio in the Visconti film Death in Venice (IF, 12).25 He arranges the furniture and the lighting, gets his mother to relax her features as she has never done before, and then takes the photos: Elle était là, assise, majestueuse, comme une reine avant une exécution capitale (je me demande maintenant si ce n’est pas sa propre exécution qu’elle attendait, car, une fois la photo prise, l’image fixée, le processus du vieillissement pouvait bien reprendre, et cette fois à une vitesse vertigineuse; [...] ) Je la pris en photo: elle était à ce moment-là au summum de sa beauté, le visage totalement détendu et lisse, elle ne parlait pas, je tournais autour d’elle, elle avait sur les lèvres un sourire imperceptible, indéfinissable, de paix, de bonheur, comme si la lumière la baignait, comme si ce tourbillon lent autour d’elle, à distance, était la plus douce de caresses. Je pense qu’à ce moment elle jouissait de cette image d’ellemême que moi son fils je lui permettais d’obtenir, et que je capturais à l’insu de mon père.26 (IF, 14) [She was there, seated, majestic, like a queen before an execution (I wonder now whether it was her own execution that she was waiting for, because, once the photo had been taken, the image fixed, the process of ageing could start again, and this time at a vertiginous speed; [...]) I took her photograph: she was at that time at the very height of her beauty, her face completely relaxed and smooth, she wasn’t speaking, I walked round and round her, she had an imperceptible indefinable smile on her lips, of peace, of happiness, as if the light which bathed her, as if this slow whirlwind turning around her, at a distance, was the softest of caresses. I think that at that moment she was rejoicing in the image of herself that I, her son, was allowing her to obtain, and that I was capturing without my father’s knowledge.]

Guibert’s circling of his mother (‘je tournais autour d’elle [...] ce tourbillon lent autour d’elle’) has the effect of underlining the mobility of the scene, as does the repeated use of the imperfect, and the temporal indexical (‘je pense qu’à ce moment elle jouissait de cette image d’elle-même’). This mobility is in contrast with the fixedness of the photograph: the photograph which, tragically, does not materialize in the end because of a mechanical error. Thereafter, as Guibert predicted, his mother ages swiftly, a fairy-tale punishment for colluding with her son’s attempt to take a perfect photograph of her. All that remains of the day is the text, and a ghostly image: Donc ce texte n’aura pas d’illustration, qu’une amorce de pellicule vierge. Et le texte n’aurait pas été si l’image avait été prise. L’image serait là devant moi,

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Hervé Guibert probablement encadrée, parfaite et fausse, irréelle, plus encore qu’une photo de jeunesse: la preuve, le délit d’une pratique presque diabolique. Plus qu’un tour de passe-passe ou de prestidigitation: une machine à arrêter le temps. Car ce texte est le désepoir de l’image, et pire qu’une image f loue ou voilée: une image fantôme ... (IF, 18) [So this text will have no illustration, except for a piece of virgin film. And the text would not have been if the image had been captured. The image would be in front of me, probably in a frame, perfect and false, unreal, even more so than a photo of her in her youth; the proof, the offence of an almost diabolical practice. More than a conjuring or magic trick: a machine that stops time. For this text is the despair of the image, worse than a blurred or veiled image: a ghost image ...]

These are the final sentences of the essay, situated firmly in the present of the writing (‘ce texte [the essay] n’aura pas d’illustration’), in which Guibert seems retrospectively to suggest that it is a good thing that the photo was never taken. It would have been a fine photograph (‘probablement encadrée’, he notes sneeringly) but ‘parfaite et fausse, irréelle’. Guibert does not tell us why he is glad there is no material record of this time in his mother’s life, other than that he thinks it would have been ‘la preuve, le délit d’une pratique presque diabolique. Plus qu’un tour de passe-passe ou de prestidigitation: une machine à arrêter le temps’. It is unclear why the camera’s ability to take something out of time and making it eternal, never seen as a disadvantage in his other essays, is a problem here, especially as he seems to contradict his feeling that it was a good thing the photograph did not come out, immediately afterwards, by describing the text as being ‘le désespoir de l’image’, of the ‘image fantôme’ that was never taken. The ambivalence is indicative of an excess of emotion surrounding this event, clearly a consequence of the special subject of this photograph, his mother. If it had not disappeared, such a photograph would have attested to the youth and beauty of his mother, and therefore to its loss: it would have been proof of an insanely happy moment of collusion between mother and son, and of its loss.27 This is perhaps why the magic of photography becomes an evil in this specific case, because it would have fixed a moment in time only to be proof of its irredeemable disappearance. The ageing of mothers, heralding their death, is a reality that cannot be borne.28 The emotional weight of this event would have ensured that the photograph, had it materialized, would have been full of aura. Benjamin, when defining aura, specified that photographs could not possess auras:29 but it has been argued by many critics since that photography, especially since its evolution into an art form, is as able to command aura as painting, sculpture, or charismatic personages. A talented photographer like Guibert is able to create an aura around his subject through his choice of lighting, angles, positions, and so on. In the photograph of his mother in L’Image fantôme, Guibert is attempting to surround her with his own emotional associations, to photograph her from his, the son’s, point of view. The resulting aura is what makes her uniquely beautiful to her son through the lens. The ‘falsity’ — or, to put it more gently, the non-objective nature — of aura is perhaps another reason why Guibert says that the photograph, had it materialized, would have been ‘fausse, irréelle’.

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But it is not the case that aura is ‘wrong’ in some moral sense: Proust’s Narrator used photographic vision to cut through it, but also described it as tenderness and intelligence. Aura may not be an objective reality, but it exists wherever emotion exists.30 Although there is no photograph to commemorate that day in Guibert’s life,31 the photographic act, ‘une pratique très amoureuese’, did take place: on that day, he saw a new image of his mother through his lens. And this ‘image fantôme’, at least, is lodged in his memory and inspired his text. Indeed, as we saw earlier, in many of the essays in L’Image fantôme, it is most often the non-existent photographs — untaken, failed, or lost — that inspire writing. It is in this way that Guibert’s writings on photography in L’Image fantôme constitute an instance of self-writing, as he writes lovingly about the photographs he remembers, the ones that did not materialize. Photography is the source of stories about the self, even when the photos do not exist. It also triggers stories about those most dear to the self, stories which may be used painfully to distinguish the self from a too-beloved other. A mother’s photograph, imagined or real, must constitute proof of the self ’s origin: this is why it provides autobiographical impetus for both Proust and Barthes. Similarly, Guibert’s unsuccessful photo of his mother is at the origin of his autobiographical essays. Le Seul Visage In the preface to Le Seul Visage, a collection of fifty-five photographs of his friends, cityscapes, landscapes, and interiors,32 Guibert describes the genesis of the photograph after which the collection is named. It was taken when he was in Yugo­slavia, standing with Cartier-Bresson in an auditorium full of people. Guibert watches as Cartier-Bresson takes a photograph, then looks at the people he has just photographed with an expression that Guibert reads as a definitive ‘mise à mort’ [killing]. Guibert contrasts this with his own attitude towards photographing someone: for him, as we know, it is an act of love. Suddenly a face in the same crowd captures his attention: Instantanément j’aimais follement ce visage. C’était pour moi un instant propre­ment photographique: programmé par le hasard et la configuration de l’espace, un coup de foudre photographique.33 [Instantly I was madly in love with this face. It was for me a purely photographic instant: programmed by happenstance and the configuration of space, a photo­ graphic love-at-first-sight.]

So to photograph is to fall in love: but what kind of love is this? Is it, as was suggested in his preface to Berger’s book, a possessive love that takes the photographed person out of his story and puts him into that of the photographer? Given that this declaration comes in the preface to a book containing a number of photographs of his friends, the question is a potentially worrying one. To think of a collection of portraits as a form of self-representation is in fact nothing new. (Proust’s collection of photographs of his friends almost certainly served this function, as was discussed in chapter 1.) In L’image fantôme, Guibert refers to his mental gallery of friends and acquaintances, a collection of photo-like, photographic transcriptions of reality

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onto a sensitive surface: Ces clichés sont des sortes d’abstractions, de certitudes d’existence. Ce ne sont pas vraiment des gros plans, mais plûtot des miniatures de gros plans [...] Ils sont aussi comme la vibration de la dernière vision, les dernières bribes de voix qui résonnent dans le silence, juste avant le sommeil. (IF, 143) [These snapshots are a sort of abstraction, of certainties of existence. They are not really close-ups, but rather miniatures of close-ups [...] They are also like the vibration of the last thing you see, the last echoes of voices that resonate in the silence, just before you fall asleep.]

Guibert’s gallery in Le seul visage might be described as a testament to his friends’ feelings for him, proof of their affection as they agreed to pose for him (in the book they are identified by their first names only, as if to emphasize their closeness to Guibert): this circle of friends thus creates his identity.34 But are the friendships being exploited? Guibert’s preface exhibits an uneasy mixture of motives: a desire to possess his subjects attenuated by thoughts about love and friendship. The ambivalence comes out in the following comment: Tout mon attachement au visage passait par la photo, car la photo était aussi un moyen de m’en approcher (comme le lion, j’imagine, en cercles concentriques autour de sa proie). (SV, 7)35 [All my attachment to the face passed through the photo, for the photo was also my way of getting closer to it (like the lion, I imagine, approaching its prey in concentric circles).

Guibert describes the photographic act as his way of getting closer to it (‘un moyen de m’en approcher’), which seems to indicate a respectful attitude towards his subject. But we are then suddenly presented with the image of a lion circling his prey: into parentheses, like an inadmissible desire, Guibert releases the beast whose intentions towards his prey are anything but pure. (Eating is, of course, a very thorough way of assimilating an other: ‘je t’assimile un peu, et tu n’y peux rien’ [I assimilate you a little, and you can’t do anything about it] (IF, 164).)36 Guibert thus makes it more or less explicit that the ethical import of the photographic act is deeply questionable. What makes it sound plausible here, in spite of this admission, is the simple fact that it is presented as an expression and extension of his love for his friends and family. Of course that does not mean that it is right or acceptable as an act — murders are regularly committed by family or friends, even if they do not necessarily lead to cannibalism, as it does in Freud’s story in Totem and Taboo — but we do have a clear sense that whatever the real tenor of the photographer’s motives, his models have at least all accepted to be photographed, in full awareness of the unpredictable nature of the consequences. Guibert is certainly making sure that his readers are also aware of the ethical issues at stake by writing this preface, which ensures that when the reader looks through the photographs in Le seul visage, she is constantly asking herself whether Guibert’s friends are being assimilated or loved by the photographer; whether each photograph is privileging the photographer’s story or that of its subject.37 There are many to choose from in Le seul visage, but one interesting photograph

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of a close friend and collaborator is the one entitled ‘Mathieu’ (SV, 25). A young man is sitting in a relaxed position in a deckchair, his hands behind his full head of curly black hair, an open book and a pair of glasses on his lap. Almost certainly on holiday in a warm place — his torso is bare — he stares unsmilingly and rather balefully at the photographer, as if he is annoyed that his reading has been interrupted. Next to him is part of a round table covered with a tablecloth, on which can be seen a small pile of papers: a thin book on top of what looks like several files or scrapbooks. ‘Mathieu’ is of course Mathieu Lindon, a writer and journalist and one of Guibert’s closest friends; but even if one had not recognized his face, and this is quite possible given that he is not a film star or much-photographed celebrity, an examination of the photograph reveals some of the interactions and emotions between the photographer and his subject. That the two are close friends is evident from the setting, the relaxed demeanour of the subject and his dress: indeed, it looks simply like a photograph taken whilst they are on holiday together. The pile of papers on the table suggests that this may be a working holiday, or at least a holiday on which both participants are content to do a certain amount of reading or editing. The open book on Mathieu’s lap is a hardback, perhaps even a Pléiade, not a dog-eared noir or suchlike; a serious book, as serious as Mathieu’s expression seems to be. It is a difficult expression to read: the mouth is at rest, neither smiling nor frowning, the eyes staring intently at the photographer, brows almost furrowed but not quite (there is the faintest suggestion of a vertical line in the centre of the forehead). The expression cannot be analysed separately from the pose: the open book and glasses balanced on his crotch, his bare arms in an informal but potentially exasperated (?) position behind his head. The whole effect seems to be one of a slightly impatient young man who is indulging his friend’s photographic whim: oh go on then, he seems to be saying, get it over with so I can get back to my book. That he has taken off his glasses, presumably necessary for him to read, for the occasion can be seen as an act of both compliance and vanity; and his pose, both vulnerable (relaxed posture, bare torso) and unyielding (hands behind his head, book covering his crotch), is possibly suggestive of sexual refusal (‘I’m reading’). Or perhaps he is simply impatient with his photographer-friend’s interest in photography. Lindon, a writer and editor of Minuit, was a collaborator and trusted reader of Guibert’s work:38 in the arena of writing, then, he shared much with his friend, probably to the point of taking such ‘writing’ holidays together. Photography, however, is another genre, and one in which he did not have any professional interest (unlike, for instance, Eugène Savitzkaya). This context explains, to my mind, the combination of openness and suspicion in this subject’s pose and expression: he is giving of himself to Guibert, of his image and his time, out of friendship, but the medium being indulged in by his friend — photography — is not one of which he is personally fond. Another instance of the range of emotions accompanying Guibert’s photographic act can be seen in the photograph entitled ‘Isabelle’ (SV, 27) (figure 2.1). The subject of this photograph is not immediately recognizable: it might take even an ardent fan several seconds to look at the face, match it to the first-name caption, ‘Isabelle’, and come to the realization that it is Isabelle Adjani.39 But the actress was

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hardly anonymous at the time the photograph was taken. The photograph is not dated, but even giving it the earliest possible date of 1977 puts it after the releases of Truffaut’s Adèle H (1975), a Polanski film, and a Hollywood film (The Driver). In other words, the actress was already an international film star and sex symbol at the time the photo was taken. Her image would already have been part of the public consciousness, which means that any photo of her must be considered within the context of her celebrity.40 In this context, Guibert’s photograph is iconoclastic on several fronts. Adjani’s position creates an immediate impression of intimacy, in so far as the photo is a close-up of her lying horizontally, with her face turned towards the camera. But this is an intimacy that is completely non-sexual. Her clothes do not mould her body: on the contrary, they sheathe it in a collection of straight lines that obscure her figure completely. The overall effect, which is forbiddingly angular, is completed by the positioning of her hand on her womb area, as if to emphasize her sexual unavailability. Her face, with its delicate features, cannot be angular, but it lies, expressionless, next to the protected body. In other words, the photograph is the very opposite of a publicity shot for an actress: no sex, no emotion, a refusal to ‘sell’ her image to her fans and viewers. One way to interpret this photograph would be to call it protective: the photographer, who loves Adjani with a disinterested love, wants to protect her from the covetous gaze of her public. In that sense we might call this a photo taken ‘for’ her: a photo which attempts to take her out of the sexualized public narrative that she inhabits professionally and put her back into her private story, a story in which the photographer — Guibert — is her personal friend (as indeed he was). But protective love can also be possessive and suffocating. It might be argued that here Guibert’s desire to protect Adjani crushes her feminine form and obscures her beauty, which is an intrinsic part of her identity whether or not she is in the public gaze. And in so doing, he kills something so integral to her that the famously expressive face seems devoid of life. Indeed the position of her body suggests that she is dead: the hard surface on which she is lying is reminiscent of a tomb or a coffin lid, even an autopsy table.41 If we read the photograph thus, it is possible to argue that Guibert’s photographic act of love has turned into an autobiographical act of possession: writing her out of the public domain and into his own story, the photographer has removed her from her own story, which — given that she is Isabelle Adjani, actress — must of necessity be both private and inescapably public.42 It is interesting to contrast the ambivalence of this photograph with a more obviously exploitative portrait of Adjani by Guibert in an article entitled ‘Adjani, ou la vertu de l’excès’ published in Le Monde at the time of the 24th Cannes Festival. Guibert, attempting to discover the secret of Adjani’s attraction, focuses on her skin, d’une pâleur et d’une matité d’un autre siècle: une blancheur qui n’est pas poudreuse ni cadavérique mais qui tient de la porcelaine, de la lactescence, et où aff leurent si facilement les bouffées roses du trouble [...] Mais surtout, quel magnifique écran, quelle magnifique matière pour recevoir et rejeter la passion.43

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Fig. 2.1. Hervé Guibert, ‘Isabelle’, in Le seul visage, © Christine Guibert [of a pallor and mattness from another century: a whiteness which is not powdery or deathly but which has a porcelain-like, lactescent quality, and on which the pink rushes of emotion f lush so easily [...] But above all, what a magnificent screen, what magnificent material to receive and to reject passion.]

Guibert, in describing Adjani’s skin as a ‘magnifique écran’, is clearly thinking of it as a metaphor for the cinema screen, a human screen onto which the cinema can project its stories, whereas ‘[une] magnifique matière pour recevoir et rejeter la passion’ is perhaps a reference to camera film. Guibert does not spell out either of these metaphors, but goes on to tell us that he ‘uses’ her image as a template for his favourite literary heroines: J’ai décidé qu’elle serait mon modèle d’identification féminine, et, chaque fois, elle apparaît entre les lignes, elle donne corps, successivement, à Charlotte, à Nastassia Philipovna, à Salammbô, et elle ne déçoit jamais l’écriture.44 [I have decided that she will be my model for feminine identification, and each time she appears in between the lines, she embodies, successively, Charlotte, Nastassia Philipovna, Salammbô, and she never disappoints the writing.]

She is a vessel which he can fill with his imagination: he can write her into his private readings of Goethe, Flaubert, and Tolstoy. In contrast with his photograph of her, this written portrait is much more exploitative. Or rather, it makes unashamed use of her as an actress: actors and actresses ‘incarnate’ for a living, so it is arguably permissible to use them as a template for one’s fantasies.45 This only becomes a morally problematic issue when the actor or actress is personally known to you,

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as Adjani was to Guibert, but in this article Guibert is careful to remain within his role as a critic, refraining from making any comments that would betray their personal closeness. On the other hand the photograph, as discussed above, makes no secret of the photographer’s intimate relationship with the subject. It is also the case that in a photograph, it is never possible to compartmentalize an identity in the way that Guibert’s text discusses Adjani the actress rather than Adjani the personal friend. In a photograph the ambiguity — is she an actress or a private individual? — must remain, because the actual body, the physical presence, cannot be elided. So photography, as a medium, leaves more room for ambiguous intentions to circulate. Adjani, who has always been famously difficult about her photographs, must have been aware about the transgressive potential of this medium:46 so, conversely, Guibert’s photograph of her attests to the quality of their friendship, her trust in his re-creation of her in his image. This trust is put to the test in an essay in L’Image fantôme called, tellingly, ‘La Trahison’ [The Betrayal]. It picks up on many of the familiar aspects of his relationship with Adjani: it tells the story of their first meeting, her obsession with her photographs, and his desire, visible in the photograph analysed above, to ‘rescue’ her from her public image. Guibert describes how, at a certain point in her career, the actress takes a professional decision to be photographed only when she is fully made up, and how this ‘banalizes’ her beauty: Le maquillage ne l’enlaidissait pas, mais il la banalisait totalement: il ne restait plus qu’une image plate et froide que je maudissais chaque fois que j’y étais confronté, dans un magazine ou sur une affichette de kiosque. [...] Plusieurs fois nous avions parlé de faire des photos ensemble, et la rage provoquée par la dernière couverture de ce magazine de mode, me semble-t-il, me pressa de les faire: je lui dis que je voulais la photographier sans maquillage, avec une robe noire très simple. (IF, 130) [Make-up did not make her ugly, but it made her look completely banal: all that was left of her was a f lat and cold image that I cursed whenever I was confronted by one, in a magazine or on a poster in a kiosk. [...] We had talked several times about making some photos together, and the rage provoked in me by the sight of the latest fashion magazine cover made me, it would seem, want to do this as soon as possible. I told her that I wanted to take some photos of her without make-up, in a very simple black dress.]

The photo session takes place in the Jardin des Plantes, and despite a mechanical mishap,47 the photographs are good, and Adjani likes them. Several days later, the day before his departure for Venice, Guibert wakes up to a sudden ‘certitude’ [certainty]: he must sell these photographs to a popular magazine. He arranges the sale, goes off to Venice and calls Adjani to tell her what he has done: he then changes his mind and rushes back to Paris, gets the photographs back from the magazine and calls Adjani again, who reacts with generosity and kindness. The essay concludes with an attempt to explain his actions: pour me venger de l’image de I. que je n’aimais pas, j’avais voulu lui substituer, de force, l’image d’elle qui m’était chère, mon image d’elle, une sorte de putsch, en somme. Mais cette explication n’était pas suffisante: je devais me tenir sur mes gardes ... (IF, 134)

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[to take revenge on the image of I. that I didn’t like, I had wanted to substitute for it, by force, the image of her that was dear to me, my image of her, I’d wanted to effect a sort of putsch, basically. But this explanation was not enough: I had to watch out ...]

These three portraits of Adjani by Guibert — the photograph, the descriptive piece, and the story of photography as betrayal — all form part of the story of Guibert’s obsession with capturing Adjani’s image,48 a task complicated by her double identity as a public star and a private friend. It is also the story of Guibert’s relationship with photography: his need to photograph a loved one (IF, 96) and the result, which is always betrayal. The betrayal may simply manifest itself as disappointment on the part of the photographer (when he first sees his contact prints, ‘le premier mouvement, le premier réf lexe, c’est la déception: “ainsi je n’ai vu que ça” ’ [the first movement, the first ref lex, is disappointment: “so that was all I saw”]) (IF, 78). There is also a betrayal implicit, when he takes photos of his friends, in putting the subjects on show.49 But the fundamental betrayal is the fact that a photograph both preserves and kills its subject. Even if the model is pleased with the photograph, even if the photograph seems to do what it set out to do (in the last case, to produce an anti-public image of Adjani), the photograph betrays its subject by taking her out of time: by freezing, albeit momentarily, her temporal existence. Perhaps the explanation for Guibert’s strange actions described in ‘La Trahison’ is that it was a violent reaction to this, the double-edged gift of photography: he got what he wanted, an image of a loved one, but in so doing he killed her by taking her out of time, the only medium in which human beings exist.50 Guibert’s obsessive attempts to capture the image of Adjani may be related to his desire to photograph his mother. It could be said that, in his attempts to capture Adjani as the ‘éternel féminin’, Guibert was in fact seeking a desexualized, maternal ideal. His intimate, protective yet asexual portrait of her in Le seul visage might then be seen as an ‘éternel maternel’, so to speak; not a woman to be protected from the sexualizing gaze of her audience, but a Madonna figure, a mother free of any father, and thus permanently idealized in the eyes of a homosexual son. À l’Ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie, Cytomégalovirus, and Hervé Guibert, Photographe According to À l’Ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie, it was in January 1988 that Guibert tested positive for AIDS. He had been living with the possibility for some time previous to that date, but it was after the confirmation of his fears that he wrote the three books which have come to be known as his AIDS fictions, À l’Ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie, Le protocole compassionel, and L’homme au chapeau rouge, as well as Le Paradis and Cytomégalovirus, before his death in 1991. As is well known, the succès de scandale of À l’ami and his subsequent televisual appearances made Guibert into a public figure, and indeed it is still as an AIDS writer that he is best known. In the AIDS writings and the photographs that he took during this period, Guibert’s tendency to self-revelation and analysis is — extremely self-consciously — taken to a new level: he is both subject and object, more directly so than in his earlier works, and his awareness of his condition seems to give a new detachment

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and poignancy to his gaze. ‘Clinical precision’ was a characteristic attributed to him by critics from as early as La Mort propagande, but it really comes into its own here, both literally and metaphorically. The photographic self-portraits from this period are particularly arresting in their blurred, obscured portrayals of his face, at times of his shadow or ref lection in a mirror. His writing also focuses mercilessly on his physical deterioration and his dark and disturbing thoughts, using at times the kind of ‘écriture photographique’ that he had described in L’Image fantôme. In this section I will be discussing the following works: À l’Ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (out of the three AIDS fictions), Cytomégalovirus, and some of the photographs in the posthumously published collections. I do not intend to carry out comprehensive analyses, especially as these works have been much discussed in various books and articles, but to show how the themes of photography, love/friendship and selfwriting are foregrounded in this new context of illness and death. The term ‘AIDS fictions’ immediately raises the question of the genre of these works: are they fictional? Autofictional? I will discuss the question of their relationship to truth-telling and witnessing later in this section, but want first to confirm my definition of the term autofiction in the context of the Guibertian oeuvre. As described in my Introduction, autofiction has been defined many times, but most critics still refer to Serge Doubrovsky’s original description of it as a ‘fiction, d’événements et de faits strictement réels’ [fiction, of strictly real events and facts].51 Vincent Colonna’s definition of the term enlarged its remit into something closer to self-fabulation. It seems to me that Guibert’s AIDS fictions, and his photographs from this period, fall into this wider category in which real life is recast in a fictional mode, and sometimes even fit into the narrower category defined by Doubrovsky. As Jean-Pierre Boulé points out, facts such as names and places can at times be wrong in Guibert,52 even when the narrator does share a name and surname with the main character; but generally speaking, his selffabulations display that slightly uneasy mixture of seemingly verifiable facts and a linguistic coherence and smoothness which seem to belong to the world of fiction. The autofictional ‘squint’ described by Doubrovsky — ‘je louche, parce que mon œil d’un côté regarde vers le référent [...] et l’autre œil, en même temps, regarde le jeu des mots’ [I’m squinting, because one of my eyes is looking at the referent [...] and the other eye, at the same time, is looking at the play of words] — is always part of the experience of reading Guibert’s works.53 The other crucial feature of autofiction is that there be no formal commitment to truth-telling per se, no Lejeunesque ‘pacte’. This too fits Guibert’s case perfectly, especially as some of his earlier work has been said to betray a ‘passion for falsehood’.54 But the main character is still plausibly Guibert in the works to be examined here, and the facts, although they may not have been rigorously checked, are still taken from ‘real life’. I use ‘autofiction’ and ‘autofictional’, then, to refer to works in which the writer self-fabulates, whilst retaining his/her own name for that of his/her principal character, and which announce no explicit commitment to truth-telling, but nevertheless contain a large number of verifiable facts — dates, names, and events — within a narrative that has recast and reimagined reality into fiction.

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But before starting on the AIDS-related works, I want to discuss another book which has already been mentioned in this chapter, and which was published after Guibert’s death in an expanded version. L’Image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment? Seize photographies de Hans Georg Berger was published in 1988, a book of photographs consisting entirely of portraits of Guibert: as mentioned earlier, the model also contributed the preface. The same publisher brought out an expanded version of the collection in 1992, entitled Dialogue d’Images;55 this book contains forty-one more photographs and a postface by Hector Bianciotti, but the preface by Guibert remains the same. In this preface, from which I quoted earlier when discussing the appropriating nature of photography, Guibert is extremely interesting on issues such as selffabulation, friendship, and the photographic act, writing as he is from the point of view of the model or ‘subject’ rather than that of the photographer. It is undated but was probably written around the time of the book’s publication, in 1987 or 1988, which places it round about the time of his fatal diagnosis; but unusually for Guibert there is no anguish or suffering in this text. Written in a slightly bemused, amused, and wondering tone, a reaction to the photographer’s obsession with his subject, the preface celebrates ‘ces moments beaux’ captured in the photographs, and hopes that they might become ‘des modèles d’une liberté et d’un certain goût de la vie’ [models of a freedom and a certain taste for life].56 Guibert analyses the collection as being ‘davantage romanesque que photographique’ [more novelistic than photographic] because of the photographer’s singular interest in a particular subject, and thence describes the book as a kind of novelistic biography: ‘Hans Georg Berger ne fait de moi que l’acteur d’une biographie qu’il semble inventer en même temps qu’elle se fait mienne’. Composed entirely of ‘real’ elements, that is to say photographs of the real Guibert taken in places which are named and verifiably part of Guibert’s life at the time (the island of Elba, Villa Medicis, and so on), these photographs inhabit nevertheless a fictionalized, reimagined context. This combination of real detail and fictional context is reminiscent of Colonna’s definition of autofiction, except that these photographs are of course not by Guibert, although they feature Guibert. The model finds the book extremely beguiling, not least from a generic point of view: cet individu c’est bien moi, je suis forcé de me reconnaître [...] et pourtant il me dépasse, il me surprend, et je peux parler de lui comme d’un personnage de roman, et peut-être d’un roman que moi-même j’aurais écrit, il y a entre lui et moi toute la distance accomplie dans le passage d’un je à un il [...] En fait c’est le travail qu’il y a entre lui et moi. Celui de la vie, celui de la photographie. Le modèle semble jouer et composer une biographie, peut-être exacte, peutêtre apocryphe. Les moments sur lesquels il s’est découpé sont-il vrais, sont-ils faux? Ils sont souvent « incroyables mais vrais »: indéniablement vécus, en train de se vivre, mais ils surprennent le sujet un peu hors de lui-même, suspendu dans sa pose comme dans une aura, une négation ou un déguisement de soimême. [this individual is definitely me, I am forced to recognize myself [...] but he nevertheless goes beyond me, surprises me, and I can speak about him as I would about a character in a novel, perhaps of a novel that I might have

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Hervé Guibert written myself; there is between him and me all the distance travelled during the passage from an ‘I’ to a ‘he’ [...] In fact, that is the work that exists between him and me. That of life, that of photography. The model appears to be acting and composing a biography, maybe true, maybe apocryphal. Are the moments that make up the backgrounds against which he is pictured true or false? They are often ‘unbelievable but true’: undeniably lived, being lived through, but they seem to have taken the subject by surprise slightly outside of himself, suspended in his position as if in an aura, a negation or a disguising of himself.]

The first paragraph of this quotation describes precisely the effect of the com­ bi­nation of reality (‘cet individu c’est bien moi’) and fictional atmosphere (‘je peux parler de lui comme d’un personnage de roman’), analysed above as being akin to that of autofiction. The second paragraph goes on to revel in the ambi­ valent atmosphere, teasingly wondering whether the context is true or false, and pointing out the oxymoronic nature of moments that are ‘incroyables mais vrais’; the narrativization of these moments — that is, their arrangement into a ‘bio­ graphie’ — allows for the creation of a fictional space, using nothing but ‘real’ photo­g raphs, in which the subject is nevertheless negated or disguised. Again, this is extremely close to a definition of autofictional space, the only difference being that Guibert did not actually take the photographs, although one might plausibly argue that he was at least their co-author.57 According to Hans Georg Berger, all of the portraits of Guibert were jointly conceived and designed by the two of them working as equal partners,58 which could justify thinking about the collection as an autofictional work. Even if we do not, however, this book and its preface give us a useful indication of how we should approach Guibert’s AIDS writings, and the photographs that he took of himself during the last stages of his illness.59 The captions are crucial in creating the fictionalized context for each of the photographs in Dialogue d’images. There is one work that illustrates particularly effectively this interplay between truth and fiction, caption and image, called ‘Le moine et Pinocchio’ [The Monk and Pinocchio] (figure 2.2). The structure of the image is quite complex. Guibert stands rigidly against a wall, next to the portrait of a monk hanging on the same wall; the location appears to be a room inside the Villa Medicis. The monk is in white, and his eyes are closed, whereas Guibert is in black, staring out of the photograph. The clothes hang off his emaciated body, and the handsome face, having lost much f lesh off the cheeks, looks indeed as if it might be carved out of wood. These two central figures are so arresting that it is only a little later that the viewer — at least this particular one — notices the other objects in the room: next to Guibert on the right-hand side stands an old-fashioned basin and jug, and beyond that is the window sill with a candle on it; on the left, a crumpled mass of duvet and pillows is visible next to a bedside table, which holds a sheaf of mansucripts secured by an ink bottle, a vase of f lowers, an ashtray, and — closest to the camera, a little out of focus — a Pinocchio doll. The presence of the doll and its famous story offers the viewer an alternative, fictional context in which to read the photograph. Guibert can now be written into a fairy tale, a fairy tale in which a wooden figure is brought to life, and in this fictional context a different explanation can be given to his horribly gaunt form and face: he was made of wood

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Fig. 2.2. Hans-Georg Berger, ‘Le moine et Pinocchio’, Eremo di Santa Caterina, Elba (1990) in Dialogue d’Images, © Hans Georg Berger

until his miraculous transformation. The rigid pose can also be read as the result of the fact that as a former wooden doll, he has not yet learned to relax his limbs. The fairy-tale context thus offers a life-giving reading 60 — the story of a Guibert whose life has just begun — of a situation which seems obvious here if we are looking at the image in a more ‘realist’ context: Guibert is clearly dying.61 In the preface, Guibert argues that photographs of himself taken by others have revealed to him hitherto unsuspected things about himself, because they have captured him in unexpected positions: Longtemps je n’ai supporté et laissé passer de moi qu’une image statique qui ne donnait rien d’autre à voir que son masque [...] Puis j’ai été surpris par des images de moi que m’ont volées des proches, par amusement, et dans le plaisir du viol aimable d’une paralysie si étudiée. Une photo prise par T. [...] Une photo de B. [...] Une autre photo prise par A. [...] Ces photos, non plus statiques mais dynamiques, m’ont toutes les trois, différemment, appris quelque chose: sur moi-même, sur mon corps, sur des possibilités de forces — gymnastiques ou narratives — auxquelles aucun miroir n’aurait pu m’encourager. [For a long time, I could not bear and would not allow to be taken of myself anything but a static image which showed nothing but a mask [...] I was then surprised by images of myself which were stolen from me by my friends, for amusement, and for the pleasure of a friendly violation of my so very selfconscious paralysis. A photo taken by T. [...] a photo by B. [...] Another photo taken by A. [...] These photos, not static any more but dynamic, have, all three of them differently, taught me something: about myself, about my body, about

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The fear of the predatory photographer is still present, in the use of words such as ‘viol’ and ‘des images de moi que m’ont volées des proches’, but precisely because these ‘proches’ are friends — the three initials are reminiscent of the nomenclatura in L’Image fantôme — the photographs are acceptable to him, indeed crucial to an increase in his own self-knowledge. By showing him in positions he has not seen himself in before, the photos offer him autofictional possibilities that self-scrutiny had not revealed to him (‘des possibilités de forces — gymnastiques ou narratives — auxquelles aucun miroir n’aurait pu m’encourager’). The possibility of autofiction — of writing truthfully about himself, but within a fictionalized context — is clearly crucial to the writing of Guibert’s AIDS fictions. There has been much discussion of the status of the genre that is AIDS fiction: Sarkonak coins for Guibert’s version the term ‘AIDS autofiction’, defining it as a work of literary creation in which the author describes, through a fiction, the physical and mental pain of living with AIDS based on direct personal experience; although such a work is fictional, it is nonetheless based on first-person testimony by a witness whose name is identical with that of the author.62

Where issues such as ‘testimony’ or ‘witness’ are involved, it becomes legitimate to ask why any fictionalization of the experience is entered into at all: if the truth value of the experience is its most important characteristic, why not tell it ‘straight’? The answer is perhaps that it is simply not possible, as Marie Darrieussecq writes in her essay on Mes Parents: Ce que nous dit l’autofiction, ‘c’est que le récit de la vie ne peut avoir lieu [...] Guibert fait partie de ces moralistes modernes qui, nous racontant leur vie et leurs mœurs jusque dans les moindres détails, jusque dans l’indicible, nous invitent à ouvrir l’œil et à découvrir, peut-être, sous le couvert de ce que l’on ne doit pas dire, l’ombre de ce que l’on ne peut pas dire.63 [What autofiction tells us is that the narrative of a life cannot take place [...] Guibert is one of those modern moralists who, by telling us about their lives and their morals in the greatest detail, to the point of saying the unsayable, invite us to open our eyes and to discover, perhaps, under the lid of what one should not say, the shadow of what one cannot say.]

Much of À l’Ami does, in fact, read like a ‘true’ account: the facts of his illness, of the procedures he underwent in the hospitals, the names of the various drugs which he takes or considers taking. The fabulation occurs in the structuring of the experiences, as well as through the renaming of the key characters, both of which make the narrative more bearable, perhaps for both reader and writer. Perhaps it is simply not possible that self-revelation to the degree to which Guibert pushes it, to the level of T-cell count, the details of the emotional blackmail and cold-blooded manipulation of friendship in the face of death, can be borne — by him or by us — without a degree of ‘affabulation’: an imagined context, a holiday from everyday life, a slight blurring of the edges to make life tolerable. In the previously discussed

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Dialogue d’Images, the recontextualization, which is also a fictionalization, is achieved, on one simple but effective level, by the choice to take these photographs on holiday: [Les vacances] donnent aux photos et à ses sujets des dispositions bien particulières: un temps pour la contemplation, pour le luxe de petites actions inutiles, un laisser-aller ou une négligence de l’être. [Holidays give photos and their subjects very particular dispositions: time for contemplation, for the luxury of small, pointless actions, a relaxation or a negligence of being.]

In À l’Ami also, escape from Paris is a means of escaping from reality into fiction within the narrative space of the book, as well as from the parameters of the medical authorities’ determined battle against the virus inside his body.64 Another way in which Guibert emphasizes the fictionalized nature of À l’Ami is through his simple choice to rename the characters. Even if the ‘facts’ of Guibert’s illness and its progression, his visits to French and Italian hospitals as an AIDS patient in the 1990s, and the myths circulating around AIDS at the time are ‘true’ and bear witness to a historically valid experience, the recreation of his friends and himself as ‘characters’ — mainly through their renaming — makes this into an autofictional work. This fact is what those who read the book as a ‘roman à clef ’, identifying Muzil as Foucault and thence accusing Guibert of betraying his friend’s sexuality and cause of death to the public, failed to understand: even if one had been told, prior to reading the work, that ‘Muzil’ was based on Foucault and ‘Marine’ on Isabelle Adjani, the use of the different names makes a huge difference to the reading experience and allows Guibert to develop these characters as he wishes, unconstrained by reality. ‘Marine’ is much more of a fictional character than the ‘I.’ in L’Image fantôme, and even the narrator, identified in the text as Hervé and Hervelino, is not exactly the Hervé Guibert who wrote the book: Tout est scrupuleusement exact et je suis parti des vrais personnages, des vrais noms, j’avais besoin des vrais noms pour écrire. Mais, au fur et à mesure que j’écrivais, et bien que je n’aie rien retravaillé [...], j’ai brouillé les pistes... Cela dit, le livre est aussi un roman. Muzil, Marine et les autres sont quand même des personnages, ils ne sont pas tout à fait ce qu’ils sont en réalité. Même celui qui est Hervé Guibert dans le livre est un personnage.65 [Everything is scrupulously correct and I started off from real people, real names, I needed real names to write. But, as I continued to write, and in spite of the fact that I didn’t rework anything [...], I muddied the waters... Having said that, the book is also a novel. Muzil, Marine and the others are characters, after all, they are not exactly what they are in reality. Even the one who is Hervé Guibert in the book is a character.]

On the subject of the fictionalized friends who people À l’Ami, Sarkonak points out that Guibert’s book follows in the long tradition of friendship elegies, in particular the eulogy of Muzil, as well as his portraits of Eugène Savitzkaya, Jules and Berthe and their children, Doctor Chandi, and Yannis. There are also the less f lattering portraits, of Bill in particular, but also of Marine. The ensemble is strongly remi­ niscent of the ‘gallery of friends’ template discussed earlier in this chapter, exem­plified

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photographically in Le seul visage. In L’Image fantôme, Guibert described a mental gallery of such snapshots, which — at the moment of his death — would disappear forever after a final f lash: ‘Chaque mort provoquerait la destruction d’un fonds photographique qui repasserait une dernière fois, dit-on, dans un rayon de conscience ...’ [Every death would set off the destruction of a photographic archive that would be projected one last time, they say, in a ray of consciousness ...] (IF, 144).66 In À l’Ami, Guibert is committing to paper his gallery of friends, faithful and unfaithful, before the images disappear with the destruction of the mind that holds them. The structure of the book is itself related to that of a gallery. The chapters, of which there are exactly 100, are all fairly short: some consist of a single, brief paragraph, whilst others are several pages long. The longer chapters are reminiscent of short films which can offer a telling portrayal of a person: the chapters on Marine fall into this category. The shorter ones work well as snapshots of a mental state, a person or a f leeting moment. A number of them are metanarrative comments on the structure of the book, told in the present tense and thus giving the reader a clear sense of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of both the book and of the events it describes. Indeed the complex chronology of the work, created through the savant use of a kind of journalistic passé simple, the passé composé, and the present tense, plays its part in reinforcing the ‘absent-yet-present’ status of what is described in each chapter, making them function — in that sense — like photographs. So, for instance, a dinner with Bill and his friends, at a time when Guibert’s T-cell count was still high enough for the miracle vaccine to be effective, and when Bill still seemed to be ready to administer it to him, is described in the present tense: Le 18 mars 1988, de retour à Paris, je dîne chez Robin en compagnie de Gustave, la veille de leur départ pour la Thaïlande. Sont également présents, je m’en souviens précisément et jusqu’à leur disposition autout de la table: Paul, Diego et Jean-Jacques, ainsi que Bill rentré le matin même des Etats-Unis. Nous serons donc ce soir-là six hommes témoins de son discours.67 [On March 18, 1988, back in Paris again, I have dinner at Robin’s with Gustave, the evening before their departure for Thailand. Also present (I remember exactly, even to their places around the table) are Paul, Diego and Jean-Jacques, along with Bill, who’d just arrived that morning from the United States. So there will be six of us there to hear what Bill has to say.]68

This effect of simultaneous presence and absence, equally and maddeningly convincing, is a quality attributed by Barthes to photography in La Chambre claire, as we saw in the Introduction: Or, dans la Photographie, ce que je pose n’est pas seulement l’absence de l’objet; c’est aussi d’un même mouvement, à égalité, que cet objet a bien existé et qu’il a été là ou je le vois. C’est ici qu’est la folie; car jusqu’à ce jour, aucune représentation ne pouvait m’assurer du passé de la chose, sinon par des relais; mais avec la Photographie, ma certitude est immédiate: personne au monde ne peut me détromper. La Photographie devient alors pour moi un medium bizarre, une nouvelle forme d’hallucination: fausse au niveau de la perception, vraie au niveau du temps: une hallucination tempérée, en quelque sorte, modeste, partagée (d’un côté ‘ce n’est pas là’, de l’autre ‘mais cela a bien été’): image folle, frottée de réel.69

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[Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it. Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand, ‘it is not there’, on the other ‘but it has indeed been’): a mad image, chafed by reality.] (CL, 115)

The chapters in À l’Ami, although they are not photographs, have a similarly hallucinatory effect: they are like Barthes’s ‘images folles’, indicating at the same time presence and absence, life and death. The portraits of Muzil fall into this category, as do the various stages of hope, despair, elation, and black depression experienced by Guibert during the course of his illness: simultaneously, they are and they are no more. The famously oxymoronic statement with which the book starts, ‘J’ai eu le sida pendant trois mois’ (À l’Ami, 9) [I had AIDS for three months] (Friend, 1), creates exactly the same effect: the passé composé exacerbates the anomalous status of someone who has had AIDS but sounds as if he does not have it any more, and the result is a sense of impossible presence in the face of AIDS-induced absence. This first sentence sets the tone for the rest of the book: the chapters are signs of life, of presence, bringing to life a collection of living, talking, and fighting people — ‘real’ people, because it is an autofiction — within our paradoxical, paratextual knowledge that many of them are now dead. The end of the book is an arresting, letter-like fragment, addressed to ‘l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie’: La mise en abîme de mon livre se referme sur moi. Je suis dans la merde. Jusqu’où souhaites-tu me voir sombrer? Pends-toi Bill! J’ai enfin retrouvé mes jambes et mes bras d’enfant. (À l’Ami, 284) [My book is closing in on me. I’m in deep shit. Just how deep do you want me to sink? Fuck you, Bill! My muscles have melted away. At last my arms and legs are once again as slender as they were when I was a child.] (Friend, 246)

Written in the present tense, the defiant words stand out starkly at the end of the book, simultaneously signalling the presence and absence of their author: the book which he has been writing now collapses into his present (‘la mise en abîme de mon livre se referme sur moi’) like an artefact, a material object resembling a photograph, proving that Guibert was there and wrote this book, but is incontrovertibly absent from the reader’s present. This absent/present effect is pushed slightly towards the ‘present’ end of the spectrum — or rather, towards the ‘fictional’ end — by the autofictional context of the book. That is to say, the autofictional status of the frame in which the ‘real’ facts are enumerated — be they the date of the dinner in the passage quoted earlier, or the narrator’s anger towards Bill — allows the reader to lean slightly towards believing, if only during the space of her reading, in the fictional presence of the scene. In the ‘roman-photo’ that was Suzanne et Louise, the photograph of the ‘dead’ Suzanne was disturbing, but we knew it was not ‘true’ because of the generic frame of the ‘roman-photo’. Autofiction is not as completely fictional as the ‘roman-

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photo’, but it casts doubt on the complete authenticity of everything within its covers, and in the case of À l’Ami, that doubt can come as a relief. We will see how, in the later photographs of Guibert, this autofictional context continues to offer the viewer/reader a similar sort of reassurance. The style of writing in À l’Ami is not the ‘écriture photographique’ discussed in L’Image fantôme: indeed, at first sight it would seem to be diametrically opposed to the snapshot-like, brief style he identified in Kaf ka’s diaries and Goethe’s Voyage en Italie. But the long, comma-ridden sentences might be said to be mimetic of the torture inf licted upon his mental state by the awareness of his illness, his breathless desire to write all the novels he is now condemned to leave unfinished,70 but also of his inordinately active and hypersensitized mind: Jules, à un moment où il ne croyait pas que nous étions infectés, m’avait dit que le sida est une maladie merveilleuse. Et c’est vrai que je découvrais quelque chose de suave et d’ébloui dans son atrocité, c’était certes une maladie inexorable, mais elle n’était pas foudroyante, c’était une maladie à paliers, un très long escalier qui menait assurément à la mort mais dont chaque marche représentait un apprentissage sans pareil, c’était une maladie qui donnait le temps de mourir, et qui donnait à la mort le temps de vivre, le temps de découvrir le temps et de découvrir enfin la vie, c’était en quelque sorte une géniale invention moderne que nos avaient transmis ces singes verts d’Afrique. (À l’Ami, 192) [ Jules had once said to me, at a time when he didn’t believe we were infected, that AIDS was a marvellous disease. And it’s true that I was discovering something sleek and dazzling in its hideousness, for though it was certainly an inexorable illness, it wasn’t immediately catastrophic, it was an illness in stages, a very long f light of steps that led assuredly to death, but whose every step represented a unique apprenticeship. It was a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life, so in a way those green monkeys of Africa had provided us with a brilliant modern invention.] (Friend, 164)

It is in this breathless, relentlessly lucid prose that Guibert’s interactions with his friends, the medical authorities, and other relative strangers is described and recorded in these pages. The effect is both photographic and hallucinatory, as the precisely described images of friends, thoughts, and events arrive and depart at a vertiginous speed through the reader’s consciousness, with only the ubiquitous comma allowing for brief pauses along the way. These passages are punctuated by occasional ‘snapshots’ of the external world, descriptions still bursting with detail but less hectic because they do not incorporate as much movement: J’aimais retrouver le personnel du Spallanzani: l’énorme bonne sœur voilée de blanc propre, avec sa face de bulldog couperosée, un sourire calme dessiné sur les lèvres, glissant sur ses cothurnes blancs, toujours quelque chose à la main, une ordonnance, la nouvelle note intérieure catastrophique ou le panier de bois carré et le bruit de verre de ses tubes pleins de sang qui glissent dans leur encoches; la vieille tireuse maquerelle poudrée et fardée, revenue de tout, râleuse comme pas deux mais le cœur sur la main, le cheveu blond trop fin tout juste déroulé du bigoudi, bien embêtée que tous ses enfants soient malades à la fois; la noiraude frisottée pas vacharde au fond mais catégorique sur le règlement, la meilleure piqueuse ... (À l’Ami, 248–49)

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[I always looked forward to seeing the hospital personnel again: the enormous sister whose immaculate white coif encircled the blotchy red face of a bulldog, who smiled calmly as she glided by on her white clogs, always carrying something in her hand — a prescription, the latest catastrophic medical report, or the square wooden box with its blood-filled test tubes clinking in their compartments; the old nurse, painted and powdered like a madam, whose blonde, too-fine hair still kept the shape of the curlers, someone who’d seen everything, unbelievably bad-tempered but wearing her heart on her sleeve, and really annoyed that all her children had fallen ill at the same time; the dark-skinned woman with the frizzy hair, not really as much of a bitch as she seemed, but a stickler for the rules, who had the best hand with a needle ... (Friend, 214–15)]

When compared with the photographic writing of Annie Ernaux, which we will encounter in the next chapter, or with the examples from Kaf ka and Goethe mentioned earlier, Guibert’s style here does come across as more literary. This is partly because the abundant detail inescapably creates the Barthesian ‘effet de réel’ in the mind of the seasoned novel-reader, for whom this book is clearly destined. The characters who distract Guibert’s preoccupation with his illness in the Spallanzani hospital begin to take on the contours of potential Balzacian characters, the fat kindly nun with the bulldog face, the dark nurse with curly hair who gives the best injections, the heavily made-up nurse with numerous children. The fact that they hail from Rome is not insignificant in granting them a fictional status: Rome, although it is very much part of Guibert’s real world (he spends much of his time writing this book at the Villa Medicis), is still an ‘ailleurs’ [elsewhere], a place in which he is still ill but never as completely despairing as he can be in Paris. Holidays, as we saw from the preface to Dialogue d’images, offer both writers and photographers an alternative context conducive to autofiction, and Rome functions from time to time in À l’Ami as such a context. In other words, this chapter describing the Spallanzani hospital is like one of the photographs of Guibert in Dialogue d’images, showing a definitively ‘real’ Guibert inhabiting a slightly fictionalized, unreal space which allows him to escape from his ‘main’ narrative into a slightly different, happier story, albeit temporarily. As well as the ‘facts’ that make us think of the referents on which it is based, À l’Ami is a narrative which contains both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fictions within the overall, ‘truth-telling’ context of self-writing and testimony. The good fictions are those which allow us to imagine Guibert in another story such as the one just described, on holiday, in a different context or time zone which temporarily releases him and us from the menace of imminent death; the bad fictions are the various lies told to him and his fellow sufferers by irresponsible doctors and Bill, the myths and halftruths concerning the the nature of the disease which — according to Sarkonak — is a true ref lection of the lie-saturated atmosphere in which the sufferers of this particular illness had to survive in the early 1990s. Guibert does not think it is important to see through all the lies that surround the syndrome. [His] solution [...] is to enter the space of the lie — not to get at the truth — but rather to play with the idea of truth in order to illustrate just how problematic such a notion is in the age of AIDS.71

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In other words, autofiction, a form of lying which uses ‘true’ elements, is a way for Guibert both to represent his reality of the time, and to question the possibility of creating a valid representation of that time for those who were not there. I would add that the element of autofiction also affords some relief for the reader and writer, in this otherwise relentless narrative of lies, betrayal, and death. As was the case in Mes parents, and indeed would be the case in real life, conscious moments of escape from ‘real life’ are a crucial and effective means of survival, and momentary relief for the reader also. Cytomégalovirus is subtitled ‘journal d’hospitalisation’: published in January 1992, it was a diary kept by Guibert between 17 September and 8 October 1991. Given what Guibert wrote about diaries, one would imagine this work to be ‘photographic’ in the most straightforward sense, and indeed most of it is: brief notations of external events and his reactions to them are transcribed in the style Guibert described in L’Image fantôme when discussing Kaf ka’s last diary entries, ‘comme des clichés de son état intérieur, un niveau presque radiographique de son angoisse’ [they are like snapshots of his internal state, almost X-ray like, of his anguish] (IF, 77). They are obviously not carefully constructed, certainly not rewritten or worked over. Sarkonak speculates that Guibert, had he lived, might have wanted to rework these notes into an autofiction, but it seems to me that Guibert might have left these as they were: in the autumn and winter of 1991, that is to say the brief period between the end date of Cytomégalovirus and his death, he seems to have had the energy and determination to work on two other works, Le Paradis and L’Homme au chapeau rouge. In other words, he did have the time, and the fact that he nonetheless left the diary in its present form suggests that he wanted it to stay thus, for its style has that characteristic that Guibert attributed to photographic writing — ‘c’est une écriture brute, qui ne supporte pas la retouche’ [it is a raw writing, which cannot be retouched] — which Ernaux values in her diary entries, as we will see. From the very first entry of 17 September, ‘Vision de l’œil droit bousillée; difficile de lire. Écoute de la musique: pas encore sourd’ [vision in the right eye ruined; difficult to read. Listening to music: not deaf yet], the book presents itself as a series of mercilessly accurate ref lections of Guibert’s states of mind.72 ‘Cytomégalovirus’ is the name of a virus which can cause blindness, and is the immediate reason for his hospitalization. Guibert’s fear of losing his sight is captured in various moods in a variety of entries, ranging from raw superstition to detached self-observation. An entry writes his present condition into a longer narrative, dating back to his childhood: ‘cette obsession des yeux, comme une prémonition à l’envers, depuis l’enfance. Et puis le roman écrit en 83 et 84: Des aveugles!’ [my obsession with eyes, like a backwards premonition, since my childhood. And then, the novel I wrote in 83 and 84: The Blind!] (Cyto, 27). Such superstitiousness, if that is what it is, is tempered by curiosity: ‘je ne dirais pas que j’aimerais bien devenir aveugle, [...] mais c’est une situation que je ne connais pas, et j’aime toujours à me glisser, jusque dans l’extrême ou dans le pire, dans des situations inconnues’ [I can’t say that I would like to become blind, but it is a state that I don’t know, and I always like to slip into unknown situations, be they extreme or the worst] (Cyto, 40).

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Several discussions with a sympathetic doctor and exchanges with a tactless nurse later, he is relaxed enough — or perhaps he has become more used to the thought, intolerable as it is — to write the possibility into his future, which of course is already extremely precarious: ‘je me vois assez bien avec une minerve blanche, un bandeau noir sur l’œil s’il est fichu, sous un beau chapeau. Alors, de nouveau, j’accepterais d’être photographié’ [I can quite see myself with a white surgical collar, a black band covering the eye if it’s gone, under a nice hat. Then, once again, I would allow myself to be photographed] (Cyto, 71). Apart from his eyesight, there are various recurring themes and mishaps which are recounted with a certain amount of humour. Guibert records the never-ending quest for a ‘pied’ that works properly: when he finally gets one, he imagines that ‘on a dû le voler à quelqu’un, peut-être. Quelqu’un est mort’ [It must have stolen from someone, maybe. Someone has died] (Cyto, 55). He worries about hygiene, a vital concern for an AIDS patient; he suffers from the incessant chatter of the nurses at night, appreciates their kindnesses, and fights against their unpleasantnesses. And from time to time, we encounter self-ref lexive comments about the writing of the diary. Once or twice, he addresses the reader directly: ‘promis, vous ne saurez pas le menu de ce soir, à moins d’une chose complètement extravagante’ [I promise, I won’t write about tonight’s menu, unless it’s something completely outlandish] (Cyto, 28). Once, he reveals how important writing the diary is to his survival: ‘j’ai cru que je ne pourrais plus du tout écrire dans ce journal, par traumatisme, mais c’est la seule façon d’oublier’ [I thought that I would never be able to write in this diary again, too traumatic, but it’s the only way to forget] (Cyto, 64). In fact the writing is contingent on his stay in the hospital, as we are reminded when he has two opposing reactions to an announcement from his doctor: Mon médecin est passé me voir tout à l’heure. Il m’a annoncé que, si la pose de porte-à-cath se passait bien sous anesthésie locale en bloc opératoire, ils mettraient en route les démarches administratives qui me permettraient d’être hospitalisé à domicile le plus rapidement possible, et plus tôt que prévu (à la fois j’ai pensé: Génial, et: Merde! mon journal ne durera pas quinze jours). (Cyto, 41) [My doctor came to see me just now. He announced to me that, if the application of the catheter-holder goes well under local anaesthetic in the operation block, they would start the administrative proceedings to allow me to go home as soon as possible, and sooner than they had thought (at the same time, I thought, ‘Great!’ and ‘Shit! My diary won’t have lasted two weeks’.)]

These verbal snapshots are the closest, in the whole of his oeuvre, that Guibert comes to executing the ‘écriture photographique’ he described in L’Image fantôme: the diary form of Cytomégalovirus, together with the acknowledged necessity of writing in order to survive, supply him with a unique set of circumstances in which he can put this into practice. It is not the autofiction of À l’ami, but through its use of self-observation as a means of survival, it is still a placing of oneself into another context simply through the act of writing. Or as he says: ‘faire de la torture mentale (la situation dans laquelle je me trouve, par exemple) un sujet d’étude, pour ne pas dire une œuvre, rend la torture un peu plus supportable’ [making mental torture (the situation I find myself in, for example) a subject of study, not to say of a work,

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makes the torture a little more bearable] (Cyto, 54). There is nothing new about this method of surviving a challenge, but it is admirably sustained in this work, so much so that the result is a deeply personalized vision and image of the approach of darkness and death, Guibert as both writing subject and written object. One perfect example of what I mean — a ‘subject-object’ snapshot of a man close to death — is this extremely moving description of a moment of mutual kindness on the part of Guibert and C.: Je demande à C. d’aller me chercher à la machine, au rez-de-chaussée, un café noir 100% arabica sucré, touche ‘corsé’. Mais elle monte dans le hall et me rapporte de la cafétéria un petit expresso qui est de meilleure qualité. Seulement il y a beaucoup moins de quantité de liquide qui brûle la gorge comme je l’aime, mais je ne le lui dirai jamais. (Cyto, 73) [I ask C. to go and get for me, from the machine on the ground f loor, a 100% arabica black coffee with sugar, the ‘corsé’ button. But she goes up to the lobby and brings back a small espresso for me from the cafeteria, which is better quality. Except that there is much less liquid to burn my throat in the way I like it to, but I will never tell her that.]

The briefest of descriptions of an interaction between friends, this passage captures nevertheless a whole array of contrasts and expressions of love. Guibert is constrained, by his illness, to ask C. to get him a coffee. Guibert thus paints his self as an ‘ill’ person: too weak to go downstairs, yet demanding exactly what he, as a subject, wants, a particular type of coffee from the machine, down to the requisite button. C. goes to get it, out of love for him, but makes a decision to obtain a ‘better’ coffee — going ‘up’ instead of ‘down’ — and returns with something different. Guibert is perfectly capable of seeing the situation from C.’s objective (although personal and sympathetic) point of view: the espresso is better quality, and C.’s kindness is evident in her choice. From his point of view, however (was he always thus, or is it since his hospitalization?), he knows that he would have preferred the less good, but more copious cup, quantity rather than quality. Reduced as he is to asking someone else to get him a coffee, he wants to assert his status as subject (‘comme je l’aime’), and does so in his diary: at the same time, as a friend who appreciates his friend’s gesture, he writes that ‘je ne le lui dirai jamais’. Guibert’s vision of himself in these last months of his life is captured photograph­ ically in a number of the photographs published posthumously, and dating from 1988 to 1990. The photographs I am about to discuss are all from Hervé Guibert, photographe, a collection of Guibert’s photos with an introduction by Jean-Baptiste del Amo, and which brings together photographs from 1976 to 1991. Del Amo writes in the introduction that ‘ces images nous offrent autant de vues sur l’état d’esprit du photographe’ [these images offer us a range of views of the photographer’s state of mind];73 this is true, but this ‘état d’esprit’, in the later photographs, is precisely the oxymoronic one that Barthes describes as ‘la folie’, the feeling that something or someone is at the same time there but not there. In Guibert’s photographs of himself or of his surroundings taken in the late 1980s and in 1990, that paradoxical feeling is palpable. He is visibly in the photographs, yet he is almost not there any more:

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Fig. 2.3. Hervé Guibert, ‘Autoportrait, 1988’, in Hervé Guibert, Photographe, © Christine Guibert

very soon he will not be, and the photographs will outlast him. This is the case with all photographs for everyone, as Barthes points out, but for Guibert the attentive reader of La Chambre claire the paradox must have been particularly poignant at around this time, making the act of photography into a veritable ‘nouvelle forme d’hallucination’ [a new form of hallucination].74 Two self-portraits in this collection perfectly capture this strange ‘état d’esprit’ of the photographer. The first is from 1988, a shot of Guibert’s pale face set against an almostly completely dark background: part of a window frame and a white lampshade on a desk in the background, blurred but visible, are the only objects that otherwise alleviate the darkness (Photographe, 195; also cover image) (figure 2.3). Guibert’s face is looking out onto the light source, but it is partially obscured, around the neck and chin, by the shadow cast by his camera, which looks very strikingly like the butt of a pistol or some other kind of firearm. Or is it a more metaphorical shadow, the dark shape projected onto the lower half of his face signifying that the darkness has begun to contaminate his f lesh?75 The overall effect is that of a person being menaced, by a gun or by darkness, and the haunted look of his eyes — bleached slightly by the intensity of the light source — adds to the sense of the precariousness of the model’s existence. The second, dated ‘1988–89’ (Photographe, 202) (figure 2.4), is an even more precarious self-portrait, because it is the photograph of a ref lection. The horizontal photograph is divided into two by a window sill, and the lampshade in the left-hand foreground seems to identify the location as being outside the room in which the previous photograph was taken. Guibert is ref lected in the glass of

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Fig. 2.4. Hervé Guibert, ‘Autoportrait, 1988-89’, in Hervé Guibert, Photographe, © Christine Guibert

the window, in the right-hand half of the photograph. His face is quite small, and its lower half is darkened by a black rectangle which seems to be part of a fireplace inside the room. His hand is lifted, presumably to position the camera, although the machine is not visible. The fact that the image of Guibert is so clearly a ref lection, and one that is, again, invaded by an object on a different plane behind the image, creates again a strong sense that he is almost not there: the temporal and arbitrary nature of his existence is emphasized by the angle and position of the figure. These two self-portraits appear to have been taken in the Villa Medicis. The next photograph but one in the book, dated 1989, also seems to come from the same location. ‘La table de travail’ (Photographe, 203) is a partial shot of Guibert’s desk, on which there is a collection of objects: a sheaf of clean paper, one open and one closed book, a pen, one sheet on which a few words have been written, a wristwatch, and two objects recognizable from other photographs of Guibert’s desk — a knight on horseback, and a framed painting (perhaps a postcard?) of what looks like an unusual mater dolorosa, showing a man supporting a haloed woman in black in a natural setting. The light source is not visible, although one suspects it to be the lamp we have seen in the earlier photographs; it lights up most of the surface area of the desk. The fact that this is a partial shot of the desk has the effect of giving the scene an informal, temporary atmosphere. There is an open book, the light is still on, only a few words have been written on the sheet and the wristwatch would surely have accompanied its owner if he had intended to be away for some time. So it is a photograph which indicates absence, but only temporary absence: indeed

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Guibert’s presence, through the objects which both denote his particularity (the knight, the painting) and his professional tools (the pen, paper, books), is strongly suggested. Alain Buisine writes of Guibert’s photographs that ‘ce sont les traces d’une absence qui sont photographiées: quelqu’un est absent, puisqu’on y voit tant de “restes” de sa présence’ [it is traces of an absence that are photographed: someone is absent, because you can see so many ‘remains’ of his presence].76 This statement can be applied to the numerous photographs taken by Guibert of his desks and working spaces in various countries and cities: they all show a temporary absence, thereby alleviating the ‘mise-à-mort’ effect that photography can have when they show the image of a person. In other words, such a scene is an acceptable version of the Barthesian ‘image folle’, one in which the presence/absence dialectic is justified by a realistic explanation: the person who was there has simply, temporarily, got up and left his desk and is not far away.77 Which is, of course, the truth in this case, for the photographer is indeed not far away, pointing his camera at the desk in question. It may be useful here to contrast such images of ‘temporary absence’ with a similar photograph taken by Hans Georg Berger and included in Dialogue d’Images, entitled ‘le 28 décembre 1991’. It shows Guibert’s desk at home: on it are the objects he took with him to his various ‘temporary’ desks, in the Villa Medicis and elsewhere, although neither of the two described above, the painting and the knight, are to be seen. We assume that this is his ‘home’ desk, because of the many framed photographs on the facing wall, the bookcase next to the desk, and the presence of piles of paper, envelopes, notebooks, and other paraphernalia. But the scene is less temporary-looking than the one described earlier: there is a pencil on the desk directly in front of the chair, but no work in progress; the lamp, with its striking shade featuring a pattern of birds in f light, is not on, there are no open books and no wristwatch in evidence. There is also a certain formality about the angle from which it is taken. Photographs of Guibert’s desk by Guibert are usually taken from a position best described as being behind the chair: some are closeups, others embrace the whole of the desk, but generally speaking they tend to be ‘full-frontal’ shots. Berger’s photograph, by contrast, approaches Guibert’s desk from something like a forty-five degree angle, allowing him to capture almost the whole of what is quite a long desk. In other words, the angle and frame of the shot indicate the photographer’s intention to preserve, for posterity, as complete a record as possible of the state of Guibert’s desk. All this can be deduced from an examination of the photograph on its own, but Berger’s intention is confirmed by the title, which of course is the day after the death of Guibert, which occurred on 27 December 1991. I will end by returning to Guibert’s own photographs, to one of the last in the collection by Del Amo: ‘le panier de fraises’, dated 1990 and taken at Santa Caterina (Photographe, 217). It shows a basket of what look indeed like strawberries, with a sprig of mint tied to the handle, on a table covered with a white tablecloth: next to the table, whose surface occupies most of the photograph, one can see the seat of a deckchair. Also on the table, in the bottom right-hand corner, is Guibert’s straw (panama?) hat: white with a dark ribbon, it is a little larger than the basket

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and dappled in the same sunlight coming through the trees above. It is an idyllic scene, a ‘holiday’ scene of the kind Guibert loved in Berger’s photographs, and here again there is the strong suggestion of a presence only temporarily absent: the hat, of course, but also the chair which looks as if it has been vacated just brief ly, are clearly the ‘restes’ identified by Buisine in the earlier quotation. They are in fact what the eye is most drawn to, in spite of the title which refers us to the basket: the strawberries are not especially evident, just a small pile of mottled darkness at the bottom of the basket. This photograph is an almost parodic instance of the holiday snap, the ‘gone fishing’ genre, given pathos only by the viewer’s knowledge that Guibert died not long after this photograph was taken. But in the autofictional context discussed earlier, which allows the viewer to entertain the possibility that certain apparently ‘real’ facts are false, it is possible to view this photograph in Guibert’s present, a present in which he is still alive: the time that it captures is a lazy time of leisure, the panama hat a symbol of Guibert’s jaunty attire on holiday and a homage to the eternal sunshine of the Italian location. For Guibert, photography was first and foremost an act of love, a way in which the loved other could be written into his self-writing; a whole range of emotional links that can hold between a photographer and his subject, from filial love to exploitation, can be seen in his photographs, especially those of Le seul visage. His view of photography therefore takes full account of the photographer’s intentionality, which he used to effect in creating the ‘roman-photo’, Suzanne et Louise, a work in which affect — in the models, the photographer, and the viewer — plays a central part. The importance of affect in thinking about photography is also evident in the essays of L’image fantôme, in which photographs are vital cards in the games of love and betrayal that are played out between the self and the other in Guibert’s life. It is also in these essays that Guibert develops the notion of photographic writing, a writing practice that is analogical to the photographic process inasmuch as the eye and mind function like parts of a camera in their capturing and recording of an external image; the Proustian analogy is fully developed and technologically updated by his descendant. As a photographer, one who was extremely sensitive to his own needs and desires, Guibert thus thought of the photograph as a space in which thoughts about indexicality and the referent could be exploited by the photographer to play games of hide and seek — or rather, presence and absence — with his viewers. This characteristic of the photograph is central to its usefulness in the context of his autofictional creations — both photographic and literary — and is increasingly employed in both his AIDS fictions and his last photographs. In these works, autofiction and photography come together in Guibert to create a strangely deathdefying genre, where the indexical nature of the photograph is activated in the context of generic ambiguity to offer an ontologically deceptive, but narratologically valid hope for survival.

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Notes to Chapter 2 1. The covers, for instance, of the Folio editions of À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie and Cytomégalovirus. 2. Ralph Sarkonak, Angelic Echoes: Hervé Guibert and Company (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 6. 3. Ibid., p. 13. 4. For an overview of Guibert’s diverse instances of self-writing, see Jean-Pierre Boulé, Voices of the Self (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), pp. 9–12. 5. Hans Georg Berger, L’Image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment? Seize photographies de Hans Georg Berger (Bordeaux: William Blake, 1988). The book is unpaginated. 6. Sontag, p. 4. Alain Buisine describes how, for Guibert, photography is often ‘un exercice de la violence qui s’effectue au plus près de la mort’, ‘Le Photographique plutôt que la photographie’, in Hervé Guibert, ed. by Jean-Pierre Boulé, special issue of Nottingham French Studies, 34.1 (1995), 32–41 (p. 32). 7. L’Image fantôme (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1981), p. 164. Henceforth, all references to this book will occur in the text, preceded by IF. 8. See for instance Sarkonak, ch. 1; Boulé, Voices of the Self, ch. 2; also Frédérique Poinat, L’Œuvre siamoise: Hervé Guibert et l’expérience photographique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008). 9. See Oliver Davis, Age Rage and Going Gently: Stories of the Senescent Subject in Twentieth-Century French Writing (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 172–73. 10. Clive Scott writes: In its popular form, [the ‘roman-photo’]’s parentage is to be found in the cinema (and particularly the ciné-roman, stills ‘narrated’ by extracts from the script) and the bande dessinée. The magazine serial roman-photo had its immediate origins in Italy, in 1947, and was transplanted into France in 1949 by the publishers Aldo and Cino Del Duca. Part of the presse du cœur, it subscribes to the conventions of romantic fiction (the roman rose), but allows excursions into the territory of the roman policier. Scott goes on to refer to the ‘serious’ photo-roman, and cites Suzanne et Louise as one instance. The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, ed. by Peter France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 620. 11. Marie Darrieussecq calls it ‘une autobiographie où peu à peu se met en place l’espace autofictif qui sera radicalement celui de la suite de l’oeuvre’ [an autobiography in which is established, little by little, the autofictional space which radically becomes that of the rest of the work] in Marie Darrieussecq, ‘De l’autobiographie à l’autofiction: Mes Parents, roman?’, Au jour le siècle, 2 (1997), 115–32 (p. 130). Similarly, in their tabular classification of works of autobiography, autofiction, and fiction, Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone place Mes Parents in the ‘autobiographie=récit vrai’ column: see Jacques Lecarme and Éliane Lecarme-Tabone, L’autobiographie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1997), p. 274. But for Boulé, it is a ‘roman faux’ [a false novel] (Boulé, p. 191 ff.). I will say more about Guibert as a writer of autofiction later in this chapter. 12. Davis, p. 180. 13. Ibid., p. 183. 14. Ibid., p. 181. 15. Oliver Davis discusses Guibert’s exploitation of his great-aunts from the perspective of an intergenerational rivalry: see ibid., p. 183. 16. Barthes, La Chambre claire, p. 115. 17. For details concerning the existence (or otherwise) of this photograph, see my Introduction, n. 47. 18. This relationship of ‘outdoing’ is suggested by Sarkonak in Angelic Echoes, p. 46. For a fascinating and detailed account of L’Image fantôme and Guibert’s relationship with La Chambre claire and Barthes, see Sarkonak, pp. 28–65. 19. Maynard, pp. 19–20. 20. Benjamin, ‘Extracts from the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, p. 50.

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21. See Kawakami, ‘When the Unfamiliar Becomes Familiar?’, p. 172. 22. Henceforth I will use the anglicized version of Barthes’s term ‘biographème’, biographeme, to refer to this concept. 23. This episode is retold in Mes parents, but much more simply, with fewer oedipal resonances. See Hervé Guibert, Mes parents (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 105–06. 24. Sarkonak describes the intertextual relationship between Guibert and Barthes with regard to photography and mothers: see Sarkonak, pp. 47–51. 25. Sarkonak, p. 48. Sarkonak analyses the oedipal situation in detail, but does not consider the ageing of Guibert’s mother to be a crucial factor in this essay. See Davis, p. 176, for a brief reference to ageing and photography in this essay. 26. Compare with Barthes, CC, p. 105. 27. Although it is not explicitly discussed here, for the reasons suggested above, the ambivalent subject of youth in photography and its disappearance in reality is much discussed in L’Image fantôme. ‘Exemple de photo de famille’ ends with the tale of an unnamed woman: Sa vieillesse venue, une femme, femme de photographe, déchire toutes les photos de sa jeunesse, annule à la fois toute trace de sa beauté et la pratique obstinée de son mari à vouloir la conserver, jalouse elle détruit sa momie de jeune fille. [When she became old, a woman, a photographer’s wife, tore up all the photographs of her youth, annulling at one stroke all traces of her beauty and of her husband’s obstinate habit of wanting to safeguard it, jealously she destroyed the mummy of her youth.] (IF, p. 30) 28. The staging of Suzanne’s death in Suzanne et Louise, analysed earlier, might be seen as an oblique way in which Guibert attempts to experience a similar, but much less traumatic, ageing and death. 29. See Yacavone, pp. 107–08, on Benjamin’s thoughts on the decline of aura. 30. Decribing his mental gallery of his friends’ faces, Guibert wonders what they are made of: ‘j’essaye de savoir ce qui définit les visages les plus tangibles, quelles touches les ont fixés: s’ils sont des masques, ou des auras’ [I would like to know what it is that defines the most tangible faces, what strokes have captured them: if they are masks, or auras] (IF, 143–44). 31. Here again we encounter a missing photograph that inspires writing (see my Introduction, n. 52). I will discuss ekphrastic self-writing in relation to photography at greater length in the next chapter. 32. The photographs, which were taken between 1977 and 1984, were exhibited at the Agathe Gaillard gallery in Paris in the autumn of 1984, before being published as a book by Les Éditions de Minuit. 33. Hervé Guibert, Le seul visage (Paris: Minuit, 1984), p. 6. Henceforth, all references to this book will occur in the text, preceded by SV. 34. In another essay, Guibert describes a different form of autobiographical endeavour through the collection of portraits: not portraits of his friends but of self-portraits of Rembrandt. See IF, p. 65. 35. This image is reminiscent of that of Guibert circling his mother, prior to taking her photograph, in ‘L’image fantôme’. 36. See Colin Davis, Killing the Other: Ethical Issues in Twentieth-Century French Fiction (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 20–21, for a discussion of Freud’s tale in Totem and Taboo in which a group of sons kill and eat their father. 37. For this reason, I will talk mainly about the portraits of his friends in this chapter, not of the land or cityscapes. 38. ‘Mathieu Lindon est depuis longtemps mon grand lecteur, la seule personne en qui j’ai vraiment confiance’ [Mathieu Lindon has been a great reader of my work for a long time, he is the only person whom I completely trust] ‘Je disparaîtrai et je n’aurai rien caché ...’, interview with François Jonquet, Globe, April 1992, p. 108. 39. Guibert was a close friend of Adjani’s. The story of their friendship reaches one version of a conclusion, an unhappy one, in À L’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie. 40. Barthes had noted, in La Chambre claire, that l’âge de la Photographie correspond précisément à l’irruption du privé dans le public, ou plutôt à la création d’une nouvelle valeur sociale, qui est la publicité du privé: le

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privé est consommé comme tel, publiquement (les incessantes agressions de la Presse contre le privé des vedettes et les embarras croissants de la législation témoignent de ce mouvement). (CC, p. 153) [the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly (the incessant aggressions of the Press against the privacy of stars and the growing difficulties of legislation to govern them testify to this movement)]. (CL, p. 98) 41. ‘Toute photographie est tombale’ (Buisine, p. 33). 42. See my discussion of Guibert’s scruples regarding photographs taken by other photographers, p. 70 (with reference to IF, p. 124). 43. Guibert’s obsession with Adjani is well known, and dated from her first appearances on the Paris stage and the silver screen. François Buot, Hervé Guibert: le jeune homme et la mort (Paris: Grasset, 1999), p. 50. 44. Hervé Guibert, ‘Adjani où la vertu de l’excès’, Le Monde, 28 May 1981, p. 13. 45. In another essay of L’Image fantôme, Guibert tells us how irritating such ‘incarnation’ can be, for instance on book covers (his example is the ubiquitous image of Gérard Philippe, as Julien Sorel, a Dostoevsky hero, and so on). IF, p. 69. 46. Guibert first met her when she came to the offices of Le Monde to pick out some photographs, and in his first interview he is said to have raised the subject of her almost maniacal attitude to photographs of herself (see Buot, p. 51). 47. Mechanical failures are frequent and significant in L’Image fantôme: see Buisine, p. 35. 48. ‘Le regard photographique est une espèce de fétichisme de la vue’ [the photographic look is a kind of fetishism of vision]: IF, p. 110. 49. In his preface to Le seul visage, Guibert describes this form of betrayal: Dans l’écriture je n’ai pas de frein, pas de scrupule, parce qu’il n’y a que moi, pratiquement, qui suis en jeu [ ...], tandis que dans la photo il y a le corps des autres, des parents, des amis, et j’ai toujours une petite appréhension: ne suis-je pas en train de les trahir en les transformant ainsi en objets de vision? [When I am writing there are no brakes, no scruples, because there is only me, practically, at stake [...] whereas in photography there are the bodies of other people, of my parents, my friends, and I am always a little apprehensive: am I not betraying them by transforming them thus into objects to be viewed?] SV, p. 5. 50. Montier, ‘La photographie identitaire fait abstraction de la durée en laquelle pourtant se meut tout sujet’, p. 74. 51. Doubrovsky, ‘Autobiographie/Vérité/Psychanalyse’, p. 69. 52. Voices of the Self, p. 10. 53. Doubrovsky in an interview with Hughes, 1999: see the Introduction, where this is quoted at greater length. The reference is at note 17. 54. Voices of the Self, p. 10. 55. Hans Georg Berger and Hervé Guibert, Dialogue d’Images (Bordeaux: William Blake, 1992). 56. Ibid. These are the last words of the preface, which, like the rest of the book, is unpaginated. 57. See ‘E-mail avec Hans Georg Berger’ in Poinat, pp. 297–303, esp. pp. 298–99. 58. Aucun portrait d’Hervé n’a été fait sans son accord. Aucun! Il y avait toujours [ ...] un accord sur la prise de vue et sur la façon d’être photographié. À partir du moment où il a vécu a Rome à La Villa Medicis, c’était davantage Hervé qui me demandait de faire une photo plutôt que moi qui lui proposais. [None of Hervé’s portraits were taken without his agreement. None! We would always [...] agree on the shot and the way in which he would be photographed. From the time when he moved to La Villa Medicis in Rome, it was more often the case that Hervé would ask me to take a photo than that I would propose to take one of him.] Poinat, p. 301. 59. Over the course of their friendship, Guibert and Hans Georg Berger worked closely together on what seems to have been a long-term joint photographic project and experiment, out of which three books — to date — have been published. The third book, which I have not discussed here, is Lettres d’Égypte, photographies d’Hans Georg Berger (Paris: Actes Sud, 1995).

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60. The anonymous reader of my book suggested an alternative reading of this photograph: Pinocchio is of course a liar, and so the reference to the puppet might also be read as a reference to the narrative work of the artist/author and to unreliable narration in self-writing. 61. ‘Il y a quelques photos d’Hervé malade qui sont vraies, particulièrement justes, comme il s’est éprouvé lui-même, comme il voulait lui-même se montrer’ [There are several photos of the ailing Hervé which are true, particularly ‘right’, as he himself felt, as he himself wanted to show himself ], Poinat, p. 301. 62. Sarkonak, pp. 156–57. 63. Darrieussecq, p. 127. 64. Elizabeth Jones, Spaces of Belonging: Home, Culture and Identity in Twentieth-Century French Autobiography (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 171–72. 65. ‘La vie sida’, interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, Libération, 1 March 1990, p. 19. 66. Ernaux’s Les Années starts with a similar evocation of the complete and immediate disappearance of a series of mental images at the moment of death, as we will see. 67. Hervé Guibert, À l’Ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 184. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by À l’Ami. 68. Hervé Guibert, To the Friend who Did Not Save My Life, trans. by Linda Coverdale (London: Quartet Books, 1991), p. 156. All translations of À l’Ami are taken from this volume, and henceforth, all references to it will occur in the text, preceded by Friend. 69. CC, p. 177. 70. Sarkonak describes this as ‘super-abundance’, an aesthetic which characterizes, according to him, Guibert’s AIDS fictions. Sarkonak, p. 174. 71. Ibid., p. 160. 72. Hervé Guibert, Cytomégalovirus: journal d’hospitalisation (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 7. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by Cyto. 73. Hervé Guibert, Hervé Guibert, photographe, texte de Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), p. 22. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by Photographe. 74. CC, p. 177. 75. An essay entitled ‘L’Image cancéreuse’, in L’Image fantôme (pp. 165–69), seems darkly proleptic in this context. 76. Buisine, p. 40. 77. The photographs in Ernaux’s L’Usage de la photo also achieve this effect of temporary absence, as we will see in the next chapter.

C h ap t e r 3

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Annie Ernaux: Photography and the Real Annie Ernaux is usually thought of as an autobiographical writer, a writer who presents authentic autobiographical material from a personal perspective. Her almost exclusive use of the first-person point of view throughout her career, and her rejection of the ‘roman’ label from La Place (1984) onwards, have marked her out as a writer who has always aimed to portray her ‘real’ self in her work.1 From the beginning, Ernaux has been fully aware of the consequences, for both herself and her readers, of her choices: En écrivant cette chose à la première personne, je m’expose à toutes sortes de remarques [...] La troisième personne, il/elle, c’est toujours l’autre, qui peut bien agir comme il veut. ‘Je’, c’est moi, lecteur, et il est impossible — ou inadmissible — que je lise l’horoscope et me conduise comme une midinette. ‘Je’ fait honte au lecteur.2 [By writing this thing in the first person, I am exposing myself to all sorts of comments [...] The third person, he/she, is always the other, who can do whatever he likes. ‘I’, am me, dear reader, and it is impossible — or inadmissible — that I should read the horoscope and behave like a romantic schoolgirl. ‘I’ make the reader ashamed.]

The question of the genre in which her work should be placed — candidates have included autobiography, autoethnography, autofiction, and autobiographical fiction — is a vexed one that has been discussed by many.3 Ernaux herself has preferred to emphasize the fidelity to reality in her work, characterizing her overall project as ‘éléments d’une ethnographie familiale’ (in La Place) or ‘quelque chose entre la littérature, la sociologie et l’histoire’ (in Une femme). Similarly, her famously ‘f lat’ style (‘L’écriture plate me vient naturellement’) is pitched purposely against the ‘literary’: as she specifies in La Place, she feels when faced with her subjects that ‘je n’ai pas le droit de prendre d’abord le parti de l’art, ni de chercher à faire quelque chose de “passionnant”, ou d’“émouvant” ’. Her writing is designed to describe rather than interpret, to record facts rather than to fashion them into a narrative. The words themselves become indices of a period or culture, functioning as material evidence of a particular existence rather than abstract signs that can be applied to any number of people or events. Given that the pursuit of the real within her own experience has been her goal, at least since La Place, it seems inevitable that Ernaux should have been attracted to

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photography, a medium anchored in the concrete and traditionally linked, however problematically, to the referent. The view of photography as ‘proof ’ seems at times to dominate her attitude towards photography; indeed, her understanding of the nature of photography and the photographic may appear, especially at first sight, to be rather simplistic when compared, for instance, with that of Guibert. I hope to show in this chapter that her relationship to the medium is in fact more complex. Photographs and photography become a key theme in her works from La Place onwards, and self-writing and the photographic are threaded together in her books in a variety of ways before the two media come together, so to speak, in her first photo-text that is L’Usage de la photo. Unlike Guibert or Macé, Ernaux does not consider herself to be a photographer, although she does take photographs herself: but more than either she appears to believe, as we will see in the course of this chapter, that writing can in fact achieve photographic goals. In this chapter I will show how photography enters Ernaux’s autobiographical project: how it fits into her thinking about the transformation of reality into writing, the relationship between the material and mental worlds, and the depiction of the self. My analysis will be roughly chronological. Only Ernaux’s first three works were subtitled ‘romans’. Tellingly, it is from the next work onwards — La Place, which won the Prix Renaudot — that photography begins to assume a greater role in her work. The coincidence of Ernaux’s refusal of fiction with the growth of her interest in the photographic image is reminiscent of Barthes’s obsession, in the 1970s, with the ‘être-là’ quality of certain art forms in relation to the ‘real’: in the case of both writers photography, because of its perceived ‘special relationship’ to the referent, becomes an ideal. But for Ernaux photography, although unlike Barthes she does practise it herself, never becomes a rival to writing: as with Guibert, photography for Ernaux offers a model to which writing can aspire, as well as possibilities for collaboration, but can never replace writing as the primary vehicle for self-writing. There are several different ways in which photography is used by Ernaux in her self-writing, and these correspond to the separate sections of this chapter. The first section examines Ernaux’s ‘journaux extimes’ or external diaries, Journal du dehors (1993) and La Vie extérieure (2000), which are explicitly presented as attempts to ‘photograph’ in words the everyday world of Ernaux’s life in Cergy. I show how these texts, although ostensibly about the outside and the other, nonetheless constitute snapshots of her self, and will relate them to her one of her ‘journaux intimes’ or internal diaries, ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’. As defined in the preceding chapter, a ‘snapshot’ — or ‘cliché’ in French — denotes a photograph which has been taken swiftly and therefore with almost certainly little forethought or planning. Both Ernaux and Guibert use the term ‘cliché’ to designate photos which have been taken in a state close to spontaneity, and therefore more likely to represent an ‘authentic’ (as opposed to a staged) situation. In the second section, I show how the concerns foregrounded in the ‘journaux’, both ‘extimes’ and ‘intimes’, have a sharpening effect on the other, more recognizably confessional works, of which I will discuss in detail La Honte (1997). The third section examines how these tendencies in Ernaux develop logically into the photo-text that is L’Usage

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de la photo, which contains photographs representing the passionate affair she was having at the time. L’autre fille, published in 2011, is another photo-text, and will therefore be considered in the same section. In the final section I show how, in Les Années (2010), Ernaux moves away from the photo-text back towards a more traditional ekphrastic narrative using photographs as inspiration, although this text is radically new in another sense, its adoption of the third-person voice. I end this section and the chapter with a consideration of the two most recent metatextual works, L’Atelier noir and Écrire la vie.4 Photographic Writing: The External Diaries La Place, published in 1984, was the book in which photography first appeared as an important element of Ernaux’s writing. Journal du dehors, although published in 1993, covers a period — 1985–92 — that begins the year after the publication of La Place; and La Vie extérieure (2000) is concerned with the period immediately afterwards, 1993–99. That is to say, these books are more or less contemporaneous with the period that stretches from La Place to L’Événement (2000). They are also the books in which the connections between photography and writing are first articulated, and Ernaux’s desire for a photographic form of writing put into practice. Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure seem, at first sight and judging from the titles, not to be about Ernaux or her family. They are certainly ethnographical in f lavour, being collections of what Ernaux calls ‘snapshots’ — verbal snapshots — of her city, Cergy-Pontoise. They contain scenes from its supermarkets, the streets, from the RER carriages; brief portraits of people who retain her attention in the street, commuters, adolescents, the homeless on the RER platforms: 25 mars Dans le RER matinal, une femme se maquillait les yeux, la glace à hauteur du nez. Une autre se limait les ongles, puis les vernissait. Elles accomplissaient soigneusement et lentement ces gestes au milieu de la foule des voyageurs comme si elles étaient seules dans leur salle de bains. Superbe liberté, ou exhibition, difficile de dire.5 [25 March In the morning RER train, a woman was putting on eye make-up, holding her mirror at the height of her nose. Another was filing her nails, then painting them. They were slowly and carefully accomplishing these gestures in the middle of the crowd of commuters as if they were alone in their bathrooms. Are they splendidly free, or exhibitionists? It’s difficult to say.]

In her 1996 preface to the second edition of Journal du dehors (the first edition had no preface), Ernaux wrote that her aim in the book had been to practice a ‘photo­ graphic’ writing: j’ai cherché à pratiquer une sorte d’écriture photographique du réel, dans laquelle les existences croisées conserveraient leur opacité et leur énigme. (Plus tard, en voyant les photographies que Paul Strand a faites [...] — les êtres sont là, seulement là — , je penserai me trouver devant un idéal, inaccessible, de l’écriture.6

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By ‘photographic writing’, Ernaux seems to mean a writing that is non-interpretive, only describing the surface of objects and people: similar to, but not exactly the same as what Guibert meant by ‘l’écriture photographique’, which was more analogical inasmuch as it tried to incorporate the photographic process into the visual and scriptural methods he deduced from the writings of Goethe or Kaf ka. By contrast, Ernaux’s understanding of photographic writing seems to be more metaphorical: in a broad sense, she means that her descriptions of people, places, and objects in her external diaries will be objective, documentary:7 like Paul Strand’s photographs, they will show people just ‘being there’. In what follows, I analyse how these fragments from the city in both Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure might be said to constitute a ‘photographic’ writing, and how they end up, nonetheless, giving us a portrait of Ernaux, albeit of a very peculiar kind of self. It is important to note that the particular nature of Ernaux’s subject, CergyPontoise, is crucial to her ‘photographic’ project. It is an artificial town, one of the ‘villes nouvelles’ of the 1960s created in an attempt to control the expansion of the biggest French cities: there are five near Paris, one of which is Cergy-Pontoise. It is partly the overwhelming newness of this place that triggers Ernaux’s desire — as she says in the 1996 preface to Journal du dehors — to record its reality through her ‘photographs’: she says her book is une tentative d’atteindre la réalité d’une époque — cette modernité dont une ville nouvelle donne le sentiment aigu sans qu’on puisse la définir — au travers d’une collection d’instantanés de la vie quotidienne collective. ( JD, 8) [An attempt to capture the reality of an era — a new town gives us a poignant sense of this modernity without allowing us to define it — through a collection of snapshots of everyday collective life.]

Her intentions, as stated here, are self-consciously non-interventionist, noninterpretive. She wants to represent the reality of the place and time, but recognizes that this reality is not definable or intelligible, which is why she opts for a collection of ‘snapshots’. Her purpose in creating these verbal snapshots is documentary, as indeed is usually the case in her ethnological work.8 She does not then attempt to impose a meaning onto these snapshots: instead of arranging them by theme, say, or inserting them into an explanatory narrative governed by a theory of urban space, she simply puts them into chronological order (by year in Journal du dehors, more precisely dated in La Vie extérieure). In other words, Ernaux does not want us to ‘read’ the city: unlike Barthes, for instance, who in Mythologies wanted to render legible the artefacts of contemporary Parisian society. What Ernaux does want is to ref lect what she sees, to record as objectively as a camera lens, and the city responds in kind. Instead of meanings, Cergy offers her surfaces without depth:9

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La Ville Nouvelle sous un soleil de mars. Aucune épaisseur, rien que des ombres et de la lumière, parkings plus noirs que jamais, béton éblouissant. Un lieu à une seule dimension. ( JD, 47) [The New Town under a March sun. No thickness, nothing but shadows and light, the parking places as black as ever, the concrete blinding. A onedimensional place.]

Some of her techniques also seem to be modelled on actual photographic practice. The ‘30 novembre’ (1997) entry of La Vie extérieure contains a series of brief descriptions of her son and his girlfriend in her house, structurally reminiscent of a series of sequential shots: Ils se sont levés à une heure de l’après-midi. Ils s’étaient couchés cette nuit à trois heures après avoir regardé X-Files et joué à des jeux d’ordinateur. Ils ont déjeuné vers deux heures et sont allés faire un tour à Art de vivre, le centre commercial ouvert le dimanche. Ils ont passé un long moment dans la librairie du centre, acheté de nouveaux jeux. (VEx, 98–99) [They got up at one in the afternoon. They had gone to bed last night at three a.m. after watching The X-Files and playing computer games. They had something to eat at two p.m. and then went out for a walk around Art de vivre, the shopping centre that’s open on Sunday. They spent a long time in the centre’s bookshop, bought some new games.]

Each of the ‘scenes’ is a sentence long, simply described in an everyday vocabulary devoid of emotion or judgement. In other words, they are snapshots — family snapshots, taken not for or of a special occasion but as simple records of a typical Sunday, more important for their ethnographical value than for the individuals they represent. In a sense, Ernaux here is practising a photographic writing that is in keeping with the times. In 1997, photography had not yet attained the ubiquity and everyday status that would come with digital cameras and the mobile phone; although both had been invented by then, they had not become the commonplace consumer goods that they are today. But even then, taking photographs had certainly become much more of an everyday act, far from being limited to weddings or baptisms. By using such snapshots as a model for her own, scriptural records of the everyday, Ernaux’s ‘photographic’ practice is very much of her era. Similarly, Ernaux uses what might be described as a ‘home video’ technique, a few pages earlier, to document her personal space in the geography of the région parisienne. A little grander than a normal home video, it involves an imaginary f light over Cergy-Pontoise, resulting in a series of aerial, or panoramic, views of the town: Silence absolu, là où je me trouve en ce moment, ma maison, point dans l’espace indéterminé de la ville nouvelle. Expérience: parcourir par la mémoire le territoire qui m’entoure, décrire et délimiter ainsi l’étendue de l’espace réel et imaginaire qui est le mien dans la ville. Je descends jusqu’à l’Oise — voici la maison de Gérard Philippe — , la traverse, survole la base des loisirs de Neuville, reviens sur Port-Cergy, file vers l’Essec [...] je suis dans le complexe Art de vivre — revenant par l’autoroute A15 [...] Je survole Pontoise en tous sens, pousse jusqu’à Auvers-sur-Oise [...] Je suis la ligne du RER et la

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Annie Ernaux chevauchée de pylônes jusqu’à Cergy-Saint-Christophe, la grande horloge de la gare. Je me promène dans la rue qui conduit à la tour Belvédère et aux colonnes de l’esplanade de la Paix, d’où se dévoile un immense horizon, avec, en fond, les ombres de la Défense et de la tour Eiffel. Pour la première fois, j’ai pris possession de l’espace que je parcours pourtant depuis vingt ans. (VEx, 97–98) [Complete silence, here where I am at this moment, my house, a point in the indeterminate space of the New Town. An experiment: to travel all over, using my memory, the territory that surrounds me, to describe and thus delimit the expanse of real and imaginary space in the town that belongs to me. I go down as far as the River Oise — here is Gérard Philippe’s house — , I cross it, f ly over the leisure centre of Neuville, return to Port-Cergy, rush off towards Essec [...] I am in the Art de vivre complex — coming back on the A15 motorway [...] I f ly all over Pontoise, go as far as Auvers-sur-Oise [...] I follow the RER line and the forest of pylons as far as Cergy-Saint-Christophe, the great station clock. I go for a walk in the road that leads to the Belvedere tower and the columns of the Paix esplanade, from where an immense panorama is unveiled, with, in the distance, the shadows of La Défense and the Eiffel tower. For the first time, I have taken possession of the space that I have been travelling all over for the last twenty years.]

Although this too is a sequence of views, unlike those of her son and his girlfriend they incorporate movement, which is why I am likening them to the video rather than the photograph. The movement is created by the combination of the present tense and the first-person point of view (‘je descends, je traverse, survole ...’); whereas the activities of her son and his girlfriend seemed static even when they were describing actions (‘ils se sont levés’) because of the use of the passé composé. The panoramic views of her ‘space’ in this passage are dynamically linked into one long trajectory, which is crucial because the whole sequence has as its goal an act of possession: from the still, silent point that is her home, Ernaux sets off on an imaginary but nonetheless very detailed and verifiable circular journey which encompasses her territory, the space in which she has commuted, walked, and shopped for twenty years. The notion that an aerial, panoramic reimagining of this space confers mastery (‘pour la première fois, j’ai pris possession de l’espace que je parcours pourtant depuis vingt ans’) is of course a cliché, but it is a cliché that is here given contemporary cachet thanks to the leitmotiv of photography, snapshots, and video recordings that underlie all of the descriptions in these external diaries.10 Personal memories are, in the main, kept out of these external diaries. But as she carries on with her experiment in ethnography, Ernaux becomes increasingly more aware that it is impossible to keep herself entirely out of her writing: J’ai évité le plus possible de me mettre en scène et d’exprimer l’émotion qui est à l’origine de chaque texte. Au contraire, j’ai cherché à pratiquer une sorte d’écriture photographique du réel, dans laquelle les existences croisées conserveraient leur opacité et leur énigme. [...] Mais, finalement, j’ai mis de moi-même beaucoup plus que prévu dans ces textes: obsessions, souvenirs, déterminant inconsciemment le choix de la parole, de la scène à fixer. Et je suis sûre maintenant qu’on se découvre soi-même davantage en se projetant dans le monde extérieur que dans l’introspection du journal intime. ( JD, 9–10)

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[I have tried as much as possible to avoid putting myself in the picture and expressing the emotion that is at the starting point of each of the texts. On the contrary, I have tried to put into practice a kind of photographic writing of the real, in which the lives I happened upon would retain their opacity and their mystery. [...] But I have ended up putting much more of myself than I had intended into these texts: unbeknownst to myself, my obsessions and memories have been determining my choice of words, of the scene I wanted to capture. And I am now certain that you can discover more about yourself through projecting yourself onto the external world than through the introspection of a private diary.]

It is certainly the case that her choice of subjects gives us clues as to the kind of person she is: they were primarily chosen, of course, because they are what she wants us to see, but there is also still something of her in them, like the shadow in a photograph cast by the photographer.11 She is obsessed, for instance, with the homeless, and her reactions to them are revealing: 24 décembre Aujourd’hui, veille de Noël, en revenant de la poissonnerie, j’ai donné dix francs à un homme affalé près des sacs-poubelle, dans le haut des marches encrassées qui descendent dan la gare RER. Un visage ravagé par la pauvreté et l’alcool. Il sentait très mauvais. “Bon Noël!” a-t-il crié. J’ai répondu machinalement “vous aussi”. Après je me dégoûte tant que, pour effacer la honte, je voudrais me rouler dans son manteau, embrasser ses mains, sentir son haleine. (VEx, 67–68) [24 December Today, on Christmas Eve, coming back from the fishmongers, I gave ten francs to a man lying on the ground next to the bags of rubbish, at the top of the grimy steps that lead down to the RER station. His face was ravaged by poverty and alcohol. He smelled terrible. ‘Merry Christmas!’ he shouted. I mechanically answered ‘to you too’. Afterwards I was so disgusted with myself that, to rub out my shame, I would have liked to have rolled around in his coat, kissed his hands, smelled his breath.]

Other small but significant characteristics about her that come through are, for instance, that she is very sensitive to, and distressed by, the turn to the right in French politics; she is much more interested in the women in her urban space than in the men, in their clothes, their gestures, and their companions (she is particularly interested in mother–daughter couples); she has a tendency to see sex or sexual connotations in unexpected places, and a habit of shopping for her groceries in the big supermarkets. The self-portrait that emerges dimly from these choices is obviously not like the one which would be presented to us in a bona fide autobiography: as suggested earlier, it is more like the shadow of a photographer in a photograph. As such, it is not so much a representation of the self as a mark, of the kind that she would like her writing to be, an authentic trace of the self left from its attempts to record scenes from the outside.12 I will say more about the nature of this ‘mark’ later, but will start by noting that it denotes a structural position, in the sense that the photographer’s shadow — to continue with the analogy — reveals his position vis-à-vis his material,

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the angle of his camera, his choice of light source, and so on: in narrative terms, the image would correspond roughly to Genette’s description of the narrator, whom he breaks down into point of view and narrative voice.13 Ernaux’s own description of her ‘je’ in an essay matches this view of the narrator as a position rather than a person: ‘le je que j’utilise me semble une forme impersonnelle’ [The ‘I’ that I use seems to me to be an impersonal form].14 But Ernaux is not only the ‘photographer’ of the external diaries. I have argued elsewhere that Genette’s division of the narrator into voice and point of view leads him to neglect the existence of the narrating consciousness, the space of the narrator’s self-awareness.15 It is this space Ernaux is referring to when, in her description of her transpersonal ‘je’, she speaks of ‘un moyen [...] de saisir, dans mon expérience, les signes d’une réalité familiale, sociale ou passionnelle’ [A way of seizing, within my experience, the signs of a familial, social or passional reality].16 In Ernaux’s external diaries, this is the space in which the everyday scenes from her urban life are brought into existence, and across which they are free to trample: her mind is like the photosensitive surface on which the images are recorded. This process is reminiscent of Proust’s image, that of emotional pain leaving visible marks on the writer’s body: ‘notre sourde douleur au cœur peut élever au-dessus d’elle, comme un pavillon, la permanence visible d’une image à chaque nouveau chagrin’.17 As for Proust, for Ernaux the experience is invasive: in Journal du dehors, she writes that ‘je suis traversée par les gens, leur existence, comme une putain’. In La vie extérieure, she describes the experience more precisely: Aujourd’hui, pendant quelques minutes, j’ai essayé de voir tous les gens que je croisais, tous inconnus. Il me semblait que leur existence, par l’observation détaillée de leur personne, me devenait subitement très proche, comme si je les touchais. Si je poursuivais une telle expérience, ma vision du monde et de moi-même s’en trouverait radicalement changée. Peut-être n’aurais-je plus de moi. (VEx, 28–29) [Today, for several minutes, I tried to see all the people that I walked past, all strangers. It seemed to me that their existence, through the detailed observation of their bodies, suddenly became very close to me, as if I were touching them. If I carried on with such an experiment, my vision of the world and of myself would be radically altered as a result. Perhaps I would end up with no ‘me’.]

Ernaux here equates a loss of ‘ma vision du monde et de moi-même’ — the space of her self-awareness — with a loss of her self. Unlike the nineteenth-century Baudelairean f lâneur who observes the streets of Paris but never gives away anything of himself, Ernaux — like the Baudelairean prostitute18 — offers her self as a space in which all these other existences can be played out, at least for a brief space of textual time, and this act at times seems to deplete her own sense of identity. Ernaux’s transpersonal ‘je’ is thus a position, a tool, a perspective: in other words, a structural feature of her text. But the external diaries also offer the reader a slightly more substantial vision of the self, one that is not purely structural. Earlier, we noted that a dim self-portrait, comparable to the photographer’s shadow, emerges from the diary entries, and these are not confined to positional indices such as point of view and choice of light source. Other, more personal features may also be deduced from

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it: his/her height, build, and sex (possibly), as well as his/her prejudices, discernible in the choice of subject and the manner in which s/he has presented it. Such are the characteristics which we can glean from coming to know the speaker of these external diaries, who, given that these are diaries and not fiction, we may assume is Ernaux herself, or at least the ‘Ernaux’ who has undertaken to write these diaries. This self — perhaps we can call it the ‘moi’, to distinguish it from the ‘je’ who is predominantly positional — is an unstable entity which is situated somewhere between the borders of the material bodies that make us distinct from each other, bodies which seem to become porous as we begin to discover aspects of our own lives in existences that should be separate from ours. For this is one of Ernaux’s conclusions: she suggests that we are all unstable, or fragmented, in this way, that we all end up carrying bits of each others’ lives as we go about our business in the same urban space. In Journal du dehors, Ernaux describes how a random woman she notices on the RER reminds her forcefully of her own mother, then comments: C’est donc au-dehors, dans les passagers du métro ou du RER, [...] qu’est déposée mon existence passée [...], dans des individus anonymes qui ne soupçonnent pas qu’ils détiennent une part de mon histoire, dans des visages, des corps, que je ne revois jamais. Sans doute suis-je moi-même, dans la foule des rues et des magasins, porteuse de la vie des autres. ( JD, 106–07) [So it’s outside, in the commuters on the metro or the RER, [...] that my past life is to be found [...], in the anonymous individuals who have no idea that they harbour a part of my history, in the faces, the bodies that I will never see again. There is no doubt that I too, in the crowds on the street and in the shops, am a carrier of other people’s lives.]

The notion that parts of one’s past reside in other bodies is reminiscent of Proust’s famous madeleine passage, in which he cites a belief he ascribes to the Celts: ‘Les âmes de ceux que nous avons perdus sont captives dans quelque être inférieur, dans une bête, un végétal, une chose inanimée’ [The souls of those we have lost are imprisoned in some inferior being, in an animal, a plant, an inanimate object]. Ernaux, too, seems to believe that parts of our loved ones reside and survive — not in trees or cake, as in Proust, but in other people: that material traces of our loved ones, both more and less valid than memories, remain in strangers’ bodies. And these traces, although strongly reminiscent of the loved person, also point pitilessly at what that individual had in common with a complete stranger. Ernaux had already noted this paradox in La Place: C’est dans la manière dont les gens s’assoient et s’ennuient dans les salles d’attente, interpellent leurs enfants, font au revoir sur les quais de gare que j’ai cherché la figure de mon père. J’ai retrouvé dans des êtres anonymes rencontrés n’importe où, porteurs à leur insu des signes de force ou d’humiliation, la réalité oubliée de sa condition.19 [It was in other people that I searched for the figure of my father, in the way they would call their children, sit down and look bored in waiting rooms and wave goodbye on station platforms. Anonymous figures glimpsed on a street corner or a crowded bus — unwittingly bearing the stamp of success or failure — brought back to me the reality of his condition.]20

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The Ernauldian city thus becomes a huge, interconnected collection of Barthesian biographemes, where our identities from various times in our lives are being casually carried around by strangers. What this means for our individual identities is that they were always already collective, that what we might have thought of as private was always part of a public space. Ernaux’s sustained attempt at a photographic writing thus results in a radical diminishing of the self, on two fronts: those of the ‘je’ and the ‘moi’. Her use of a ‘je’ which, whilst originating in her ‘real’ self, functions most effectively as a transpersonal voice — ‘quelquefois même plus une parole de “l’autre” qu’une parole de “moi” ’ — was inspired by her need to write a genre situated ‘entre la littérature, la sociologie et l’histoire’ [between literature, sociology, and history]. This ‘je’ is therefore depersonalized in the sense that its primary function is structural, whose commitment to the story is so fundamental that her narratorial consciousness is offered to her subjects as a recording surface, to be trampled over and marked. The ‘moi’, on the other hand, the self who results from the activities of the ‘je’, is a fragmented entity whose identity is interdependent with that of other selves, both acquaintances and strangers: it is both supported and depleted by its relationship with the other. The overall depletion of both the ‘je’ and the ‘moi’ reaches a kind of culmination in Les Années, although I will be arguing that it is accompanied by a parallel movement — that of the preservation of the self through a continuation of its existence in others — which works in the opposite direction. At the same time, the ‘photographic writing’ of the external diaries, which set out to be documentary, non-interpretive and therefore objective, has been revealed — through the presence, however depleted, of the ‘je’ and the ‘moi’ — to be a personal writing, albeit not one which has a fully developed and individual ‘self ’ behind it. ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ and Une femme To date, Ernaux has also published two books of her ‘journaux intimes’: ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ (1997) and Se perdre (2001). The publication dates are misleading, as they both consist of material that was written much earlier. ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ contains entries that were kept during the final years of her mother’s dementia, dating from December 1983 to April 1985; similarly, Se perdre is made up of entries written between September 1988 and April 1990. Both texts, of course, are about events in Ernaux’s life which have been recounted elsewhere: Une femme (1988) for ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ (1997), and Passion simple (1991) for Se perdre (2001). In both cases, the diary entries were published afterwards. The period covered by these internal diaries — 1983 to 1990 –mostly overlap with that covered by the external diaries, 1985 to 1999. In other words, Ernaux was carrying out her project of ‘photographing’ the external world alongside her daily routine of keeping her more conventional diary, which might also be described, as we will see, as an act of ‘internal’ photography. Diary entries, like letters, have been compared with photography by many: as we saw in the last chapter, Guibert describes Kaf ka’s diaries as being photographic. The entries in Ernaux’s diary, judging from these two instances that have been published to date, can also be described as ‘photographic’

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in various ways. In what follows, I will discuss one of the two pairs of works, ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ and Une femme, then conclude on the internal and external diaries as a single ‘genre’. The entries of ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ are far from being entirely about Ernaux’s ‘internal’ landscape, that is to say an account of Ernaux’s thoughts and feelings: the external world is a large part of them, partly because Ernaux tends to write them daily upon her return from the old people’s home where her mother is staying. The descriptions of her mother’s physical state, of the men and women in the home, of strangers noticed on the journey there and back, are in fact quite similar to those that make up the external journals, snapshots which incorporate very little ‘interpretation’:21 Elle dormait en combinaison. Le réseau de ses veine bleues sur sa poitrine. La peau de l’intérieur de ses bras froissée comme le dessous des champignons.22 [She was sleeping in her underwear. The network of her blue veins on her chest. The skin on the inside of her arms, wrinkled like the underside of mushrooms.]

Indeed, in spite of the fact that this is her diary, Ernaux seems rarely to note or to analyse her own feelings or thoughts. Spontaneous reactions — ‘J’ai envie de tuer la petite vieille de chambre de ma mère’ [I want to kill the little old woman in my mother’s room] ( Je ne suis ..., 49), ‘Je m’aperçois que je suis habituée à sa déchéance, à son nouveau visage’ [I notice that I have become used to her decrepitude, to her new face] ( Je ne suis ..., 64) — are simply recorded and never developed. Scenes from the present sometimes remind her of related scenes in the past, and then the link is noted and described. So too are the rare occasions when her mother has a f lash of lucidity and shows something of her old character: ‘J’ai rêvé de Victor Hugo [...] Il s’est arrêté pour me parler.’ Elle rit en se souve­ nant de son rêve. Choisie par le grand poète, élue, comme c’est bien elle. ( Je ne suis ..., 29) [‘I had a dream about Victor Hugo [...] He stopped to talk to me.’ She laughs, remembering her dream. Chosen by the great poet, elected, it’s so like her.]

As in La Place, favourite expressions or turns of phrase characteristic of her mother are quoted directly, as if to capture — within the quotation marks — the moment of enunciation. These are verbal snapshots, literally, transcriptions of real sound: Aujourd’hui, elle s’imagine qu’il y a des gens dans la chambre: ‘T’occupes pas, ce sont des clients, ils vont partir dans cinq minutes, il y en a la moitié qui ne paie pas.’ Ses paroles d’autrefois, notre vie. ( Je ne suis ..., 51) [Today, she thinks that there are people in the room: ‘Don’t worry about them, they’re customers, they’ll be gone in five minutes, half of them don’t even pay.’ Her phrases from before, from our life.]

The overall impression, stylistically speaking, is one of extreme economy, which of itself conveys to the reader a keen sense of the fact that Ernaux, during these months of watching her mother deteriorate slowly, is — understandably — operating at a very basic level; in other words, she is concentrating on surviving, emotionally and mentally, whilst willing her mother to live on.

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Ernaux is aware of her own curiously unemotional state, as her entries indicate: ‘je ne ressens rien tant que je suis avec elle. À peine la porte de l’ascenseur est-elle refermée que j’ai envie de pleurer’ [I don’t feel anything for as long as I’m with her. As soon as the lift doors close, I want to cry] ( Je ne suis ..., 59); ‘je ne pense à rien’ [I’m not thinking about anything] ( Je ne suis ..., 66); ‘je ne “sens” plus rien en songeant à sa dégradation, je me pose de moins en moins la question “est-ce à cause de moi?” ’ [I don’t ‘feel’ anything any more when I think about her deterioration, I ask myself less and less often, ‘is it my fault?’] ( Je ne suis ..., 73). This lack of feeling, or lack of ability to articulate any feelings, has the effect of making her into a camera-like recorder of her mother’s deterioration, the reactions of those around her, and of her own states of mind. Like the moment in which Proust’s Narrator sees his grandmother photographically, that is to say with a vision devoid of affect, Ernaux’s vision is photographic at this point in time, in the metaphorical sense of the word. All the scenes, be they internal or external, come across as objective records of the time that passes through and around her: so even the rare occurrence of a strong emotion — horror — is presented as a simple fact, like the arrival of a storm or a disease (see for instance Je ne suis ..., 101, 104). The day-to-day nature of the entries, which obviously entails a lack of knowledge about what the future holds, means that it cannot constitute a connected narrative: the impression is of a collection of snapshots and recordings, every entry eternally imprisoned in the present. The preface to the book discusses precisely this aspect of the diary: its presentness, ‘cette inconscience de la suite’ which is what makes Ernaux unable to read it immediately after the death of her mother. Instead, she sets about writing Une femme: À la mort de ma mère j’ai déchiré ce début de récit [a first attempt to write about her mother’s youth], en recommençant un autre qui est paru en 88, Une femme. Durant tout le temps que j’ai écrit ce livre, je n’ai pas relu les pages rédigées pendant la maladie de ma mère. Elles m’étaient comme interdites: j’avais consigné ses derniers mois, ses derniers jours, l’avant-dernier même, sans savoir qu’ils l’étaient. Cette inconscience de la suite — qui caractérise peutêtre toute écriture, la mienne sûrement — avait ici un aspect effrayant. D’une certaine façon, ce journal des visites me conduisait vers la mort de ma mère. ( Je ne suis ..., 11) [When my mother died, I tore up the first pages of the story [a first attempt to write about her mother’s youth], and started another one that was published in ‘88, Une femme. During all the time that I was working on this book, I did not reread the pages I had written during my mother’s illness. It was as if they were taboo: I had recorded her last months, her last days, even the eve of her death, without knowing that that was what they were. This lack of awareness of what was to follow — a characteristic of all writing, perhaps, certainly of mine — were, in this context, frightening. In a way, the record of these visits led me towards the death of my mother.]

I will now explore the contrast between the diary and the récit, the day-to-day account recorded with no knowledge of what the future holds and the récit, the retrospective narrative.23

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Une femme starts with the statement of Ernaux’s mother’s death: ‘ma mère est morte le lundi 7 avril à la maison de retraite de l’hôpital de Pontoise, où je l’avais placée il y a deux ans.’24 [My mother died on Monday 7 April in the old people’s home attached to the hospital at Pontoise, where I had installed her two years previously.]25 It continues with a description of the preparations of the funeral, then the funeral itself, in a factual tone reminiscent of the start of L’étranger; after which there follows a mise en scène of the writing of the book, much like the one which introduces La Place. In each case, the death of her parent is followed by a scrupulous recording of her own reactions to the loss, and of the stages whereby the text begins to be written. Ernaux thus brings the reader into the present of the writing process, and then announces her intentions: Mon premier mouvement, en parlant d’elle, c’est de la fixer dans des images sans notion de temps: ‘elle était violente’, ‘c’était une femme qui brûlait tout’, et d’évoquer en désordre des scènes, où elle apparaît. Je ne retrouve ainsi que la femme de mon imaginaire [...] Je voudrais saisir aussi la femme qui a existé en dehors de moi, la femme réelle, née dans le quartier rural d’une petite ville de Normandie [...] Ce que j’espère écrire de plus juste se situe sans doute à la jointure du familial et du social, du mythe et de l’histoire. Mon projet est de nature littéraire, puisqu’il s’agit de chercher une vérité sur ma mère qui ne peut être atteinte que par des mots. (C’est-à-dire que ni les photos, ni mes souvenirs, ni les témoignages de la famille ne peuvent me donner cette vérité.) (UF, 22) [My first impulse is to ‘freeze’ her in a series of images unrelated to time — ‘she had a violent temper,’ ‘she was intense in everything she did’ — and to recall random scenes in which she was present. This brings back only the fantasy woman [...] I would also like to capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town [...] The more objective aspect of my writing will probably involve a cross between family history and sociology, reality and fiction. This book can be seen as a literary venture as its purpose is to find out the truth about my mother, a truth that can be conveyed only by words. (Neither photographs, nor my own mem­ ories, nor even the reminiscences of my family can bring me this truth.) And yet, in a sense, I would like to remain a cut below literature.] (Woman, 11–12)

A contrast is immediately set up between the personal image and the social reality, ‘le mythe et l’histoire’. Calling the former a myth has the obvious effect of downgrading it in the truth stakes, and indeed Ernaux seems to believe that words will be the key to the truth about her mother: ‘ni les photos, ni mes souvenirs, ni les témoignages de la famille ne peuvent me donner cette vérité’. One might reasonably object that, although photos are clearly not verbal artefacts, her memories and certainly stories from other family members are surely made up of words, but this would be to misunderstand exactly what Ernaux means by ‘mots’. She explains, a little later, that verbal truth resides in their order: Je passe beaucoup de temps à m’interroger sur l’ordre des choses à dire, le choix et l’agencement des mots, comme s’il existait un ordre idéal, seul capable de rendre une vérité concernant ma mère — mais je ne sais pas en quoi elle consiste — et rien d’autre ne compte pour moi, au moment où j’écris, que la découverte de cet ordre-là. (UF, 43–44)

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In her search for an ideal order of words, Ernaux seems to reject any pictorial images of her mother. Nonetheless, photographs have their place in this account. Quite early on in her ‘historical’ account of her mother, starting with her childhood and adolescence, a photograph is described in terms that irresistibly recall Barthes in more ways than one: Sur la photo de mariage, elle a un visage régulier de madone, pâle, avec deux mèches en accroche-cœur [...] Mais ce n’est pas ma mère. J’ai beau fixer la photo longtemps, jusqu’à l’hallucinante impression de croire que les visages bougent, je ne vois qu’une jeune femme lisse [...] Seules, sa main large serrant les gants, une façon de porter haut la tête, me disent que c’est elle. (UF, 37–38) [In the wedding photograph she looks like a madonna, with pale, regular features, a kiss-curl [...] But she is not my mother. Stare as I may at the photograph, until the faces actually seem to move, all I see is an impenetrable young woman [...] Only the broad hand clutching her gloves and the proud upward tilt of her head tell me it is she.] (Woman, 26)

Barthes cannot, of course, be said to have a monopoly on descriptions of maternal photographs, but the characteristic which leads Ernaux to recognize her young mother is very much a punctum in Barthesian mode: ‘sa main large serrant les gants’. There are no other photographs of her mother described in Une femme, but the ‘image’ — as against the truth residing in language — makes a comeback in other ways. The dichotomy between image and word is both sharpened and given a wider significance when Ernaux elaborates on what it means for her to ‘reject’ the images of her mother in her mind: J’essaie de ne pas considérer la violence, les débordements de tendresse, les reproches de ma mère comme seulement des traits personnels de son caractère, mais de les situer aussi dans son histoire et sa condition sociale. Cette façon d’écrire, qui me semble aller dans le sens de la vérité, m’aide à sortir de la solitude et de l’obscurité du souvenir individuel, par la découverte d’une signification plus générale. Mais je sens que quelque chose en moi résiste, voudrait conserver de ma mère des images purement affectives, chaleur ou larmes, sans leur donner de sens. (UF, 52) [When I think of my mother’s violent temper, outbursts of affection, and reproachful attitude, I try not to see them as facets of her personality but to relate them to her own story and social background. This way of writing, which seems to bring me closer to the truth, relieves me of the dark, heavy burden of personal remembrance by establishing a more objective approach. And yet something deep down inside refuses to yield and wants me to remember my mother purely in emotional terms — affection or tears — without searching for an explanation.] (Woman, 39–40)

The desire to map her mother’s life onto a socio-historical continuum is, again,

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reminiscent of her aims in La Place for her father’s life, but here it is specifically linked with truth (‘cette façon d’écrire [...] me semble aller dans le sens de la vérité’) and with meaning, ‘la découverte d’une signification plus générale’. Set against these rather public values is the warmth, immediacy and affective value of the personal images, which a part of Ernaux would like to keep unchanged, ‘sans leur donner de sens’. Both meanings of ‘sens’ are pertinent here, meaning and direction: placing her mother’s idiosyncrasies within a social context gives them a new meaning, and arranging the events of her life into a teleological narrative gives them direction, and therefore a kind of sense that is lacking from the diary. The difference between the two kinds of representation ref lects precisely the difference between two articulations of the same sentence that Ernaux analyses in Une femme: Après, j’ai écrit sur un morceau de papier, ‘maman parle toute seule’. (je suis en train d’écrire ces mêmes mots, mais ce ne sont plus comme alors des mots juste pour moi, pour supporter cela, ce sont des mots pour le faire comprendre.) (UF, 93) [Then I wrote down ‘Mummy’s talking to herself ’ on a piece of paper. (I wrote those words for myself, to make the thought more bearable. Now I am writing the same words, but for other people, so that they can understand.)] (Woman, 78)

Writing them at the time — not in the diary, as it happens, but on a random piece of paper — is a means of survival, ‘pour supporter cela’: diary-writing is indeed sometimes described as a coping mechanism, self-administered therapy.26 Writing the same words later, ‘pour faire comprendre’, is another kind of act which depends on the shared nature of language: language bridges the personal and the public, ‘makes sense’ of the illegible, attributes meaning to the unthinkable. Ernaux’s growing interest in public, shared meaning culminates in Les Années (2010), but we can see how, at this stage in her writing career, she is already keenly aware of the opposing attractions of public narrative and personal image. The photograph, of course, is a form of image that manages to be both public and private: the Barthesian distinction between punctum and studium is one way of indicating the private and public ways of viewing an image. Its double nature is perhaps one reason why Ernaux becomes increasingly fascinated by photography as she pursues a career of transforming her inchoate private experiences into an ordered public narrative. The internal diary that is ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ thus contains, like the external diaries, something that might be described as the raw material for Ernaux’s autobiographical project. This material is not ‘true’ in the sense that the portrait of her mother in Une femme is true: that truth is of the kind which emerges from narrative order. But Ernaux admits that there is a different kind of truth in the diaries: in one instance, ‘quelque chose de cru et de noir, sans salut’.27 This crude, raw truth, whether we call it ‘écriture immédiate’, photographic writing, or verbal snapshots, is the stuff out of which her autoethnographical narratives are subsequently built. As far as Ernaux is concerned, it really is ‘stuff ’, as in material: for her the contents of her diary, although linguistic, have none of the suppleness and changeability that is traditionally associated with language. On the contrary, she had said in various books that, once written down,

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Annie Ernaux les mots qui se sont déposés sur le papier pour saisir des pensées, des sensations à un moment donné ont pour moi un caractère aussi irréversible que le temps: ils sont le temps lui-même.28 [the words that have been deposited on the paper to capture certain thoughts and sensations at a given point in time have for me a quality that is as irreversible as time: they are time itself.]

Like photos, fingerprints or CCTV footage, Ernaux’s diary entries function for her as material evidence, unalterable indices that can be used — in different contexts — to ‘prove’ the existence of past events or people. In Journal du dehors, Ernaux wrote that: il y a deux démarches possibles face aux faits réels. Ou bien les relater avec précision, dans leur brutalité, leur caractère instantané, hors de tout récit, ou les mettre de côté pour les faire (éventuellement) ‘servir’, entrer dans une ensemble (roman par exemple). ( JD, 85) [There are two possible procedures when faced with real facts. Either relate them precisely, in their brutality, their immediate character, outside of all narrative, or put them aside to make ‘use’ of them (eventually), to put them into an ensemble (a novel for instance).]

If the first ‘démarche’ is used in her diaries, then they become a depository for the material she will recast later — following her second ‘démarche’ — for her other, more narrative books, be they novels or otherwise. I have tried to show in this section that the internal and external diaries are extremely similar inasmuch as they contain what I have been calling raw material, ‘écriture immédiate’, photographic writing: the ‘stuff ’ from which her narratives are fashioned. Chronologically listed rather than arranged in a continuous narrative, the diaries constitute fragments which, at times, seem only very loosely connected to each other. They may be called diaries, but it would be difficult to derive a coherent portrait of Ernaux’s ‘self ’ from them: most often they offer the reader a Humean ‘bundle of perceptions’ rather than a Cartesian self built on self-knowledge. Ernaux’s preference for her ‘récits’ — from her diaries she has, to date, only published two books and the text accompanying the photographs in Écrire la vie — would seem to be related to the fact that the ‘récits’ are always attempts to connect disparate elements to each other: her past self to her present one, her bourgeois self to her workingclass origins, the time after her mother’s death to the time when she was alive.29 But by offering the ‘raw material’ alongside the récits, her readers are privileged to see how the snapshots are transformed into the literary portraits, how the ordered narratives are built on f leeting impressions or illegible traumas. It is also possible, having read a diary book alongside its récit version, to think of the pairs as case studies within Ernaux’s long-term autoethnological project. Inasmuch as she does not believe very strongly in an internal reality divorced from the external world, both the internal and external diaries constitute crucial material in Ernaux’s lifelong attempt to construct the self retrospectively and painstakingly, in the context of the historico-material conditions which have surrounded her throughout her life.

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Structural Photographs: La Place and La Honte The fifteen years — 1985–99 — during which Ernaux ‘photographed’ herself through her day-to-day existence in Cergy-Pontoise and recorded in the ‘journaux extimes’ also saw the publication of four other works: Une femme (1989), Passion simple (1991), La Honte (1997), and L’Événement (2000). The first two are the récit versions of her diary books, of which we have discussed Une femme: the second two are works which seem not to have an obvious link to the photographic. In this section I will show how the photograph actually begins to assume a discreetly central role in these apparently non-photographic works, taking La Honte as my primary example. But I will start this section with an examination of the earlier La Place because it is the first text by Ernaux in which a photograph acts as the image that triggers the writing of the text. In La Place this relationship between photograph and text, the fact that it is at the structural base of the text, is not spelled out; in La Honte, the links between images and text are more explicitly articulated. I will be arguing that Ernaux’s interest in the photograph as an ideal form of representation leads her to structure her texts more and more around the scène, a key scene from her memory which has always been ‘indicible’, like a photograph: and her attempts to speak the scene in question result in the texts that we are about to examine here in detail. When I interviewed Annie Ernaux on the role of photography in her work, she said that although she had not been conscious that her rejection of fiction in La place coincided with the introduction of photographs into her books, la décision de ne pas ‘fictionner’ le réel s’accompagne de l’utilisation de la réalité: or, à la mort de mon père, une photo joue un rôle important, celle que je trouve dans son portefeuille avec une coupure de journal.30 [the decision not to ‘fictionalize’ reality goes together with the use of reality: now, when my father died, a photo played an important role, the one that I found in his wallet with a newspaper cutting.]

This photo is the first one described in La place. In an essay written for a book on Bourdieu, Ernaux describes the impact made on her by the double discovery in her father’s wallet of this same photograph, showing her father as a labourer, and of a newspaper cutting, proof of her academic success: Brutalement une réalité que je connaissais, mais de façon abstraite, avec la photo prenait corps au sense littéral du terme: mon père avait été longtemps, la moitié de sa vie en fait, un ouvrier [...] En un éclair j’ai ressenti de tout mon être une vérité qui balayait la vie de mon père et la mienne, une vérité sensible et irréfutable que je n’avais jamais pu ou voulu regarder en face.31 [Brutally, a reality that I knew about, but in an abstract way, became f lesh when I saw the photo, in the literal sense of the word: my father had for a long time, for half his life in fact, been a labourer [...] In a f lash I experienced, with all my being, a truth that swept through my father’s life and mine, a physical and irrefutable truth that I had never been able to, or wanted to, look in the face.]

In her essay, Ernaux goes on to describe this effect as ‘la preuve par corps’: the striking way in which real objects, such as photographs or documents, can prove the

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reality of something which was already known but not in this visceral sense: il ne s’agit pas d’une prise de conscience, comme on peut en avoir en apprenant des choses ignorées [...] mais, sans pouvoir scinder les deux, de reconnaissance et de connaissance. Reconnaissance indubitable de ce qui a été vécu, traduite par une forme de saisissement, de coagulation brutale de toutes les expériences. En même temps, connaissance de lois et de règles qui rendent raison de ce qui jusque-là n’avait pas de raison autre qu’un trait de caractère, le hasard, la chance. C’est une émotion rationnelle, un bouleversement cognitif.32 [It is not a realization, of the kind that you have when you learn of something you didn’t know [...] but a recognition and cognition, both at the same time. An irrefutable recognition of what happened, translated into a kind of shock, a brutal coagulation of all experience. At the same time, cognition of the laws and rules that make sense of what until that point had no reason other than a character trait, or happenstance, or chance. It’s a rational emotion, a cognitive shock.]

The personal and the general, ‘reconnaissance’ and ‘connaissance’, are to be found, intertwined, in the photograph: indeed the two aspects might be said to correspond to the Barthesian punctum and studium, which we have in turn been relating to another duality in Ernaux’s work, the image and the narrative. Although Ernaux seems at times to be aiming much more to write examples of the latter — her desire to transform the material in ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ into Une femme, and that of Se perdre into Passion simple are obvious instances of this — her best work is very much a fusion of both elements, aimed perhaps at creating in the reader the illogical exper­ience described in her essay, ‘une émotion rationnelle, un bouleversement cognitif ’. This visceral knowledge of her father’s reality, triggered by the photograph and the accompanying document (the newspaper cutting), permeates La Place, and its structure relies heavily on photographic material. Each stage of her father’s life begins with the description of a photograph. The section on his married life starts with a photograph of his wedding day: ‘Mon père se tient debout à côté d’elle, une petite moustache et “le col à manger de la tarte”.’ (LP, 47) [My father is standing at her side, with his small moustache and starched white collar.]33 (Pos, 35) At forty, having recently lost his first daughter to diphtheria, a photo shows that he is a man of a certain age and class. Another photograph inaugurates the next section: ‘Alentour de la cinquantaine, encore la force de l’âge, la tête très droite, l’air soucieux, comme s’il craignait que la photo ne soit ratée’ (LP, 55) [Although he is approaching fifty, he is still in his prime, his head held perfectly straight and a worried expression on his face, as if he is afraid the photograph will come out wrong (Pos, 43)]. The sense that he becomes less and less central to her life is ref lected in his diminishing presence in the photographs that follow. The photograph that is described after the one of her father in his fifties is actually a shot of herself at sixteen, in which her father is present, but only as a shadow: ‘Une photo de moi, prise seule, au-dehors [...] J’ai seize ans. Dans le bas, l’ombre portée du buste de mon père qui a pris la photo’ (LP, 78) [a photo of me, alone, outside [...] I’m sixteen. In the foreground one can see the shadow of my father, who took the picture (Pos, 66)]. And from her wedding lunch, Ernaux offers the reader an ‘instantané

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de la mémoire’, a snapshot-like memory: ‘il se tient la tête un peu en arrière, les deux mains sur sa serviette étalée sur les genoux et il sourit légèrement’ (LP, 95) [his head slightly back, his two hands on the napkin spread out on his knees, he is smiling slightly (Pos, 83)]. From ‘official’ wedding photo to ‘instantané de la mémoire’, the photographs structure and punctuate the narrative, linking it to reality and protecting it from being colonized by her own memories: ‘Je ne pouvais pas compter sur la réminiscence, [...] je ne retrouve que moi-même, et mes étés de vacances, à Y ...’ [I couldn’t rely on my memory, [...] I can only remember myself, and my summer holidays, at Y ... (LP, 100)]. As already noted, it is outside her own memory that she finds images of her father, either in photographs or ‘dans des êtres anonymes rencontrés n’importe où, porteurs à leur insu des signes de force ou d’humiliation, la réalité oubliée de sa condition’ (LP, 100–01) [anonymous figures glimpsed on a street corner or a crowded bus — unwittingly bearing the stamp of success or failure — brought back to me the reality of his condition (Pos, 87)]. Photographs impose a discipline on her writing which Ernaux comes to value more and more, a framework which anchors it to something outside of herself. In La Honte, the use of photographs as a framework is very much in evidence. The narrative, which is structured around photographs and scenes throughout, is very obviously framed by two photographs dating from 1952, the year of the event which La Honte will attempt to describe: De cette année-là, il me reste deux photos. L’une me représente en communiante. [...] On voit une fille au visage plein, lisse, des pommettes marquées [...] Impression qu’il n’y a pas de corps sous cet habit de petite bonne sœur parce que je ne peux pas l’imaginer, encore moins le ressentir comme je ressens le mien maintenant. [...] Sur l’autre photo, petite, rectangulaire, je suis avec mon père devant un muret décoré de jarres de f leurs. C’est à Biarritz, fin août.34 [Of that year, I have two photos. The first is of me at my First Communion. It shows a young girl with a full, smooth face, and well-defined cheekbones [...] I get the impression that there is no body under the nun-like dress because I cannot imagine it, even less feel it as I can feel my own now. [...] On the other photo, small, rectangular, I am standing with my father in front of a wall decorated with pots of f lowers. It was taken in Biarritz, end of August.]

These are excellent examples of Ernaux’s ekphrastic writing, about which I will say more in my discussion of Les Années, but more importantly in La Honte, they frame the incident — her father’s attempt to kill her mother — and the narrative that will attempt to explain it: as the incident occurred between the taking of the two photos, the time between them is the space of the narrative to follow. The use of a recognizable photographic genre — the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pair — to structure the narrative is extremely effective: such pairs are usually associated with physical change (diets, makeovers, and so forth), so the reader, together with Ernaux, finds herself searching for differences between the two images. As there is no obvious change (‘elles sont trop différentes par le format, la qualité, pour indiquer un

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changement certain dans ma silhouette et ma figure’ [they are too different in format and quality to show a definite change in my face and figure], LH, 25), our focus, with hers, returns to the narrative of the event. Before the discussion of these photographs, we are introduced to the event itself, which is referred to throughout the first section of the book as a ‘scène’ (LH, 16, 18, 19, 20). After the photographs have been discussed, the event reappears: first as a blurry film (‘un film sur une chaîne de télévision cryptée regardé sans décodeur’ [a film on a scrambled television channel, watched without the decoder], LH, 30), then as an immovable ‘scène’, akin to a photograph: ‘cette scène figée depuis des années, je veux la faire bouger pour lui enlever son caractère sacré d’icône à l’intérieur de moi’ [I want to make this scene move, its been frozen for years, to divest it of the sacred, iconic status it’s acquired inside me] (LH, 30). Ernaux’s aim, in constructing this particular narrative, is similar to what made her write both La place and Une femme: ‘je vise peut-être à dissoudre la scène indicible de mes douze ans dans la généralité des lois et du langage’ [perhaps I am aiming to dissolve the unspeakable scene of my twelve-year-old self in the generality of laws and of language] (LH, 38). The particularity of the personal is to be translated into the general, the comprehensible, the ‘lisible’. In the cases of La place and Une femme, Ernaux lamented what was lost in the translation, the warmth of the image lost to the clarity of the prose, but in the case of the ‘scène’ of 1952, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain through its dissolution into a public language. Ernaux then begins her attempt to bridge the gap between her present self and her self in 1952, by collecting documents, reading contemporary copies of ParisNormandie, remembering the rules and regulations that ordered her world back then. Her aim is to write an ethnology of her adolescent self, as she did for her parents, although this time the ethnology is part of the more important attempt, as mentioned earlier, to ‘make sense’ of the horrific event: Pour atteindre ma réalité d’alors, je n’ai pas d’autre moyen sûr que de rechercher les lois et les rites, les croyances et les valeurs qui définissaient les milieux, l’école, la famille, la province, où j’étais prise [...] Mettre au jour les langages qui me constituaient, les mots de la religion, ceux de mes parents liés aux gestes et aux choses [...] Me servir de ces mots, [...] pour décomposer et remonter, autour de la scène du dimanche de juin, le texte du monde où j’ai eu douze ans et cru devenir folle. Naturellement pas de récit, qui produirait une réalité au lieu de la chercher. Ne pas me contenter non plus de lever et transcrire les images du souvenir mais traiter celles-ci comme des documents qui s’éclaireront en les soumettant à des approches différentes. Être en somme ethnologue de moi-même. (LH, 38) [To reach my reality of back then, I have no other sure way than to look for the laws and the rites, the beliefs and the values that defined my environment, school, the family, the province, where I was trapped [...] To bring to light the languages that constituted me, the words of religion, my parents’ words, connected to gestures and things [...] I will make use of these words, [...] to deconstruct and rebuild, around the scene of that Sunday in June, the text of the world in which I was twelve and thought I would go mad. Of course, no narrative, which would produce a reality rather than look for it. I will not content myself either with picking up and transcribing images from

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my memory but will treat them as if they were documents, whose meaning will become clear when they have been subjected to different investigative approaches. In short, I will conduct an ethnological investigation of myself.]

Ernaux’s methods are, as they always have been since 1983, not autobiographical but (auto-)ethnological: she does not plan to look deeply into her mind and her memories to gather information about herself, but on the contrary will look outwards, for the words and rules that constituted her and her world back in 1952. She starts by describing Y. in the present tense: ‘Topographie d’Y. en 52.’ [topography of Y. in 1952] (LH, 44). This reads like the description of a photograph, a photograph that belongs to the collection of documents that Ernaux has assembled for her project. It is also part of a more general attempt to read material facts: ‘Décrire pour la première fois, sans autre règle que la précision, des rues que je n’ai jamais pensés mais seulement parcourues durant mon enfance, c’est rendre lisible la hiérarchie social qu’elles contenaient’ [To describe for the first time, with no rules other than precision, the streets that I have never thought about, just moved around in during my childhood, is to make readable the social hierarchy that they contained] (LH, 48). The translation of things, objects, and places into language forces them to make sense, because ‘écrire est une chose publique’ [writing is a public thing] (LH, 86). Following the successful narrative reconstruction of her world in 1952, and therefore of the dissolution of the originary scene of shame, several other scenes are evoked. The first involves her mother, and is remarkably reminiscent of the Proustian scene in which the Narrator, coming upon his grandmother unannounced, has a ‘photographic’ vision of her as ‘une vieille femme accablée que je ne connaissais pas’.35 In Ernaux’s case, the ‘photographic’ moment occurs upon her return home, late at night, from a school trip with her teacher and classmates: ma mère est apparue dans la lumière de la porte, hirsute, muette de sommeil, dans une chemise de nuit froissée et tachée (on s’essuyait avec, après avoir uriné). Mlle L. et les élèves, deux ou trois, se sont arrêtées de parler. [...] Je me suis engouffrée dans l’épicerie pour faire cesser la scène. Je venais de voir pour la première fois ma mère avec le regard de l’école privée. (LH, 110) [My mother appeared in the light in the doorway, hairy, dumb with sleep, in a wrinkled and stained nightdress (we wiped ourselves with it after urinating). Miss L. and the students, two or three of them, stopped talking. [...] I plunged into the grocery to end the scene. I had just seen my mother for the first time with the eyes of the private school.]

The mother’s appearance is described in photographic detail, and the moment is frozen, as it would have been in a photograph, by the sudden cessation of the students’ conversation. The absent camera’s ‘objective’ viewpoint is here the ‘regard de l’école privée’, and the image is captured in the eyes of the twelve-year-old Ernaux, who rushes into the house to break the photographic spell, ‘pour faire cesser la scène’. The book ends with three final images, all from the journey she made to Biarritz with her father in the summer of 1952. They depict small instances of shame, of realization that father and daughter belong to an inferior social class. The fact that they are called ‘images’ indicates that these are not explanations or commentaries,

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but more instances of non-verbalized ‘evidence’ for her auto-ethnology: Après chacune des images de cet été, ma tendance naturelle serait d’écrire ‘alors j’ai découvert que’ ou ‘je me suis aperçue de’ mais ces mots supposent une conscience claire des situations vécues. Il y a eu seulement la sensation de honte qui les a fixées hors de toute signification. [...] C’est elle qui unit la fille de 52 à la femme en train d’écrire. (LH, 125–26) [After each of these images of that summer, my natural tendency would be to write ‘and so I discovered that’ or ‘I noticed that’, but such words presuppose a clear consciousness of these lived situations. All that there was the feeling of shame that fixed them outside of all meaning. [...] That is what unites the girl of 1952 to the woman who is writing now.]

These three images have as their fixing agent not light, as for photography, but shame; however, like photographs they are frozen in time, frozen outside of meaning. Thus photography — or photograph-like images such as these — offer throughout La Honte the raw material on which the auto-ethnological project is based. One could argue that these images, as opposed to the photographs, are merely subjective scenes originating in the memory of the writer; but because they are always one-off images or ‘scènes’ described in the terminology of photography, and because they are usually set alongside actual photographs, they succeed in giving the impression of being objective artefacts, ‘things’ discovered by Ernaux in her mind only when she has made the effort to go back to that point in her past. In other words, they do not give the impression of being part of a continuous and authoritative memory of the self which spans the decades. Ernaux’s narratives posit no such ‘self ’: ‘il n’y a pas de vraie mémoire de soi’ is her final word on the subject, and earlier in La Honte she maintains that her self hood resides in transient objects, Humean fragments masquerading as an identity: (À moi [...] dont les souvenirs sont attachés à un tube d’été, une ceinture en vogue, à des choses vouées à la disparition, la mémoire n’apporte aucune preuve de ma permanence ou de mon identité. Elle me fait sentir et me confirme ma fragmentation et mon historicité.) (LH, 96) [To me [...] whose memories are attached to a summer hit song, a fashionable belt, to things destined to disappear, memory brings no proof of my permanence or my identity. It makes me feel, and confirms, my fragmentation and my historical situatedness.]

The self that emerges from La Honte is as fragmented as the one derived from the external and internal diaries. At its very end, however, Ernaux offers a remarkable alternative to memory for creating identity: Je n’ai plus rien de commun avec la fille de la photo, sauf cette scène du dimanche de juin qu’elle porte dans la tête et qui m’a fait écrire ce livre, parce qu’elle ne m’a jamais quittée. C’est elle seulement qui fait de cette petite fille et de moi la même, puisque l’orgasme où je ressens le plus mon identité et la permanence de mon être, je ne l’ai connu que deux ans après. (LH, 133) [I have nothing more in common with the girl in the photo, except for that scene of the Sunday in June that she has in her head and which has made me

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write this book, because it has never left me. That is the only thing that makes me and the little girl the same person, because the experience of orgasm, which is what makes me feel most strongly my identity and the permanence of my being, was something I first had only two years afterwards.]

Orgasm is usually associated with a loss of self, but to Ernaux, it brings a confirmation of her own identity and its permanence. I will be discussing in more detail the centrality of ‘jouissance’ to identity in the section on L’usage de la photo, but will note here that at the end of this dark and difficult narrative of shame, the emotion which both identified her (as an ‘inferior’ species) and negated her (‘cette néantisation’) as an adolescent, Ernaux offers orgasm — completely out of context, as there is no other reference to sex in this book — as a glimmer of hope, a way out of the prison that is so convincingly depicted in La Honte. The Photo-text? L’Usage de la photo and L’autre fille L’Usage de la photo is Ernaux’s first properly ‘photo-textual’ work, comprising a series of interspersed photographs and texts. I have written elsewhere in detail about this book, so will limit myself to pointing out the how the themes that run throughout the texts we have been considering — the materiality of photography and writing, and the continuation of the self through dissolution into language — are pre-eminent in this book also. The former theme in particular is, of course, brought to the fore by the presence of photographs in the text: there are also other kinds of images of the self alluded to in L’usage de la photo, such as medical photographs, mammograms, and X-rays.36 I shall argue that this new status accorded to photography is a direct result of Ernaux’s life-threatening illness, which makes the relationship between her work and reality all-important, to the temporary exclusion of everything and everyone. Elsewhere, she is not so uncompromising, as we have seen: the photograph, for her, has not always had to function as ‘proof ’ of the real, but in L’Usage de la photo this requirement dominates all else. This is why she comes to demand so insistently of both the images and texts that they not so much represent her life as ‘prove’ it, her life both as writer and as lover. L’Usage de la photo records the events of 2003 in Annie Ernaux’s life, in a series of chapters written alternately by Ernaux and by Marc Marie. The texts are inspired by a selection of photographs, taken at the time, of the couple’s clothes lying enmeshed on furniture or on the f loor, exactly as they were found the morning after a night of lovemaking. Having begun to take these photographs, in circumstances which will be analysed in more detail below, the lovers decide to write texts inspired by — or accompanying — a number of them: they agree not to show each other their separate texts until the end of the experiment. Accordingly, each photograph is followed by two texts, the first by Ernaux and the second by Marie, with a brief introduction and conclusion to the whole series written by Ernaux. In the introductory section Ernaux explains the genesis of the photographs: Souvent, depuis le début de notre relation, j’étais restée fascinée en découvrant au réveil [...] nos vêtements emmêlés, jetés par terre n’importe où la veille au soir en faisant l’amour. C’était un paysage à chaque fois différent. Devoir le

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Annie Ernaux détruire en séparant et ramassant chacun nos affaires me serrait le cœur. J’avais l’impression de supprimer la seule trace objective de notre jouissance.37 [Often, since the beginning of our affair, I had been fascinated in the morning [...] by our entangled clothes, thrown onto the f loor, every which way, the night before when we had made love. It was a landscape which was different on each occasion. Having to destroy it by separating and picking up our things made my heart ache. I felt as if I was suppressing the only objective trace of our joy.]

One morning Ernaux decides to photograph one such ‘paysage’, and when her act meets with her lover’s approval, ‘comme si faire l’amour ne suffisait pas, qu’il faille en conserver une représentation matérielle, nous avons continué de prendre des photos’ [as if making love wasn’t enough, as if we had to keep some material representation of it, we carried on taking photographs] (L’Usage, 9). Photography here is being used in its traditionally popular function of proof. The enduring appeal of this characteristic of photography is well known, and has been discussed earlier in this book: it has also often been qualified or refuted.38 But whatever claims have been made or rejected on behalf of photography, writers usually agree that writing, in contrast, fails to function as proof.39 In L’Usage de la photo, however, the apparently banal view of photography as ‘proof ’ comes with a less predictable insistence that writing, too, can provide ‘proof ’ — specifically, ‘proof of life’. Ernaux describes, for instance, the evidentiary status of the ‘disposition des vêtements’ [the arrangement of the clothes]40 — moving the clothes before they are photographed is taboo — as being precisely comparable to that of ‘l’ordre des mots dans mon journal intime’: to change either would constitute ‘une façon d’attenter à la réalité de notre acte amoureux’ [a way of undermining the reality of our act of love] (L’Usage, 10). We know already from Se perdre and other books that the words in her diary, like the couple’s discarded garments, are like artefacts for Ernaux: pieces of reality that have value not as signs but as objects. But in L’usage de la photo, Ernaux explains her ‘materialist’ view of language in more detail. She wants to make writing into a referent:41 Je m’aperçois que je suis fascinée par les photos comme je le suis depuis mon enfance par les taches de sang, de sperme, d’urine [...] Je me rends compte que j’attends la même chose de l’écriture. Je voudrais que les mots soient comme des taches auxquelles on ne parvient pas à s’arracher. (L’Usage, 74) [I notice that I am fascinated by these photos in the same way that I have been fascinated, since childhood, by stains made by blood, sperm, urine [...] I realize that I expect the same thing from writing. I want words to be like stains from which one cannot tear oneself away.]

Of course, in L’Usage de la photo Ernaux does not think of writing purely as proof, as a kind of mark that denotes rather than signifies. Words are sometimes described more as containers of a past reality, as belonging to a system that can evoke the past more precisely than other systems. Describing a photograph taken in her study, in which sheets of paper covered in writing have fallen on the f loor as a result of their lovemaking, Ernaux writes: Je voudrais lire ce qui est écrit. Sur toutes les photos et les cartes postales qui comportent une publicité, une couverture de livre, un journal, n’importe quoi

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d’écrit, j’essaie toujours de déchiffrer. Comme un signe plus réel du temps que le reste. (L’Usage, 64) [I would like to read what it says. Photos and postcards that contain an ad, a book cover, a newspaper, anything with writing on it, I always try to decipher. As a more truthful sign of time than everything else.]

Here, writing is not an opaque object but a legible sign that can conjure up the past.42 The more startling of these two approaches to writing, Ernaux’s view of it as a referent, is further complicated by her disturbingly original attitude to what we may call ‘levels of reality’. In this next quotation we find the sign/referent hierarchy turned on its head: Photo, écriture, à chaque fois il s’est agi pour nous de conférer davantage de réalité à des moments de jouissance irreprésentables et fugitifs. De saisir l’irréalité du sexe dans la réalité des traces. Le plus haut degré de réalité, pourtant, ne sera atteint que si ces photos écrites se changent en d’autres scènes dans la mémoire ou l’imagination des lecteurs.43 [Whether it be a photo, or writing, for us it was all about conferring more reality onto the fugitive and unrepresentable moments of pleasure. Capturing the unreality of sex in the reality of its traces. But the highest degree of reality will not be attained unless these written photos are changed into other scenes in the memories or the imagination of my readers.]

Ernaux seems, first of all, to be saying here that the sexual act, once it has occur­ red, is not as ‘real’ as the photographic and textual traces it leaves.44 More extra­ ordinarily, however, she goes on to claim that if and when these photographs are transformed in the minds of her readers, ‘le plus haut degré de réalité [...] sera atteint’. What exactly does she mean by the highest degree of reality? She appears to be suggesting that certain moments of her life — moments of ecstasy — will be given a further lease of life by being transformed, through the medium of writing and photography, back into ‘reality’ by taking on a new existence in the minds of her readers. A circular movement, then, from Ernaux’s ‘reality’ through a phototextual medium back into a reader’s ‘real’ life: the kind of movement that writing, specifically, is supposed not to be able to achieve. Metamorphosis, the continuation of life in another form, is a possible explanatory model for this thought; especially during this time of her battle with breast cancer, Ernaux may well have been attracted by notions of such alternative, if subordinate, means of survival. There may be a case for suggesting that the process she had been envisaging, of the metamorphosis of her self through writing in the lives of her readers, suddenly acquires an urgency and concreteness because of her illness. In what follows I will show how the photographs of the couple’s discarded clothes in L’Usage de la photo, evoking bodies and thereby ‘proof ’ of both life and death, offer us a variety of ways in which to think about Ernaux’s art and its metamorphic, as opposed to metaphorical or representational, relation to reality. Articles of clothing have long been a rich source of metaphors and metonymies for the human person. To take just one famous instance, from Ovid: in the final scene of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, in which the two lovers arrange to meet secretly in

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the woods, Pyramus arrives to see Thisbe’s veil on the ground, torn and bloodied by a lion; thinking she must be dead, he kills himself. The object is so completely representative of Thisbe that its destruction is clear proof, in her lover’s eyes, of her death. In L’Usage de la photo Ernaux singles out shoes as a particularly ‘human’ object of this kind: De toutes les choses abandonnées sur le sol après l’amour, les chaussures sont les plus émouvantes. [...] À la différence des autres pièces d’habillement devenues formes abstraites, les chaussures sont le seul élément de la photo qui conserve la forme d’une partie du corps. Qui réalise plus la présence à ce moment-là. C’est l’accessoire le plus humain. (L’Usage, 46) [Out of all the things abandoned on the f loor after our lovemaking, shoes are the most moving objects. [...] Unlike other articles of clothing which become abstract forms, shoes are the only element of the photo which retains the form of a part of the body. Which realizes presence the most, at that moment. It is the most human of accessories.]

Like Thisbe’s veil, Marc Marie’s shoes are proof of presence and absence: they are irrefutable signs of an absent person. And again like the veil, the shoes offer the reader misleading signs. From the condition of the veil, Pyramus wrongly deduces that Thisbe must be dead; similarly, Marie’s ‘bottes’ are semiotically deceptive. For instance, they are a recognizably ‘macho’ choice of footwear, but were in fact chosen, according to their wearer, to help boost his height next to the tall Ernaux. Further­ more, connotative of virility, they have the opposite effect on their love­making, the undoing of the intricate laces forcing, at times, a crucial delay (L’Usage, 50). It is immediately after this section that Ernaux goes on to tell us how she has always been fascinated by traces, signs of physical presence that are indisputable (L’Usage, 74). Elsewhere, describing another photograph of their clothes, Marie is more dismissive of the effect of ‘traces’ on the objective viewer: ‘Pour l’œil extérieur, ce ne sont que des traces’ [for an outsider’s eye, they are nothing but traces] (L’Usage, 95). But Ernaux has always found the language of objects more compelling than that of the emotions: ‘Je ne connaîs que la langue des choses, des traces matérielles, visibles’ [I only know the language of things, of material, visible traces] (L’Usage, 121). It is in such traces, be they texts, photos, or articles of clothing, that Ernaux seems, finally, to put the greatest faith; signs that continually offer ‘proof of life’ in a never-ending attempt at a f lawed (because partial), but faithful, portrayal of it. In about the last sixth of the book, as Ernaux’s cancer treatment draws to a close, she executes a gradual but efficient rejection of the whole project and of its particular ‘usage de la photo’. I shall attempt here to trace and analyse this trajectory. Earlier in the book Ernaux describes how, soon after they had started writing texts to accompany the photographs, both she and Marie had been seized by an ‘avidité photographique’ [a photographic greediness] that made them want to take photographs of each other all the time (L’Usage, 91). Although she never makes the link explicit, this frenzied desire to accumulate photographs mirrors uncannily the proliferation of images made of her ailing body during the active treatment of her cancer: ‘pendant des mois, mon corps a été investigué et photographié des quantités de fois’ [for months, my body was investigated and photographed loads of times]

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Fig. 3.1. Annie Ernaux, ‘Chambre, matin de Noël’, L’Usage de la photo, © Annie Ernaux

(L’Usage, 149). Accordingly, as the period of her illness nears its end, so too does the urge to photograph. The first of the quieter, almost abstract photographs (L’Usage, 108), which in Ernaux’s text triggers a meditation on death, loss, and emptiness, is dated ‘fin mai début juin’ [end May, start of June] and is linked by Marie to a specific date, the day on which Ernaux’s chemotherapy ended: ‘le 24 mai, on a enlevé à A. sa dernière poche de chimio. C’est un chapitre qui meurt, et avec lui le temps des premières photos’ [24 May, A.’s last chemo bag is removed. It is the end of a chapter, and with it, of the period of the first photos] (L’Usage, 113). The seachange in photographic mood, heralding the end of the project, is noted by both Ernaux and Marie in the texts they write separately about this image. The images themselves continue to become more abstract, less and less obvious in their evidence of ‘life’. The next picture taken in Cergy (L’Usage, 128) (figure 3.1), and Ernaux’s matching text, effect an extraordinary exorcizing of Marie — and of men in general — from the book and from her bedroom, the scene of the photo­g raph: Une sorte de paix se dégage de la scène, semblable à celle des publicités de catalogues pour le blanc. Entre le lit et la porte-fenêtre, presque indiscernables, les pattes arrière blanches de la chatte Kyo. Rien n’appartient à M. sur cette photo. (L’Usage, 129) [A kind of peace emanates from the scene, which reminds you of those ads in catalogues for bed linen. Between the bed and the French window, you can just make out the back paws of the cat, Kyo. Nothing in this photo belongs to M.]

Peace and purity reign in this exclusively feminine space (even the cat is female) from which M. has been expunged completely. Even her ironic remark about catalogue images is a reference to an obsession generally accepted as being almost exclusively female. Ernaux then reminisces about a series of rooms in her past, in

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all of which she had been alone and man-free (L’Usage, 129–30). Reminiscences of how her expensive marital bed was purchased lead to another meditation on stains, but this time the emphasis is on how the reading of them is generally considered to be a female skill (L’Usage, 131). Ernaux concludes her text by noting that the only limits to the couple’s photographic activity are ‘celles du désir’, the implication being, surely, that she can sense these limits on the horizon. After this ‘man-free’ photograph there are two even more abstract images: the couple’s clothes are still there, but captured in positions that make it extremely difficult to identify each article and to separate it from the others. And the accom­ panying texts become, in Ernaux’s case at least, notably distressed. Her distress stems from non-recognition: that is, when she looks at the photograph, no connection is made with the lived experience that it supposedly ‘proves’. The penultimate photograph leaves her completely cold: ‘Je n’éprouve rien devant cette photo’ [I don’t feel anything when I look at this photo] (L’Usage, 138). And the next, and last, photograph, far from proving her ‘life’, negates it: Impression que M. a photographié une toile abstraite dans une galerie de pein­ ture. [...] Tout est transfiguré et désincarné. Paradoxe de cette photo destinée à donner plus de réalité à notre amour et qui le déréalise. Elle n’éveille rien en moi. Il n’y a plus ici ni la vie ni le temps. Ici je suis morte. (L’Usage, 145–46) [I feel as if M. has photographed an abstract painting in a gallery. [...] Everything is transfigured and disembodied. It’s a paradox that this photo, which was destined to give more reality to our love, should de-realize it. It awakens nothing in me. There is no more life or time here. Here, I am dead.]

These photographs are the antithesis of ‘proof of life’. If the supposed subject of the photographs cannot establish a link between the image and a memory in her consciousness, the ‘proof ’ has failed and the logical conclusion, unf linchingly stated by Ernaux, is that she must be dead (‘Ici je suis morte’). The photographs, taken in order to prove that she is alive, have come to ‘prove’ the opposite. Faced with the same photographs, Marie has a similar reaction: he says of the last one that it is indicative of a new, purely aesthetic concern (L’Usage, 147). But his subsequent response is completely different from that of Ernaux: he chooses then to describe what lies beyond the image before our eyes, the life that is still extant outside the frame of the photograph. In other words, he refuses to accept that the photograph is the only, and final, ‘proof ’ of their relationship. He points out, for instance, that the ‘man-free’ image of Ernaux’s bedroom was in fact taken on Christmas Day, and that it fails to show that ‘au rez-de-chaussée et au même moment est exposé dans le salon un sapin décoré, et sous lui nos deux paires de chaussures’ [on the ground f loor, at the same moment, there is a Christmas tree in the living room, and under it our two pairs of shoes] (L’Usage, 134). And the next photograph, he tells us, was taken on the same day, almost at the same time: le cliché précédent [the man-free snapshot], qui incarne pour moi la solitude, est contredit par celui-ci [the penultimate photograph], pris dans la même chambre, au même instant. La lingerie d’A. jouxte mon boxer au pied d’un grand coussin orange. Il y a ici l’incarnation la plus brute de notre amour physique. (L’Usage, 140)

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[the preceding photo, which embodies solitude for me, is contradicted by this one, taken in the same room, at the same time. A.’s lingerie lies next to my boxer shorts at the bottom of a big orange cushion. Here, I see the most raw incarnation of our physical love.]

This is the lingerie that Ernaux disowns in her text (L’Usage, 138). I would suggest that the difference between Marie’s and Ernaux’s attitudes towards these photo­ graphs comes from Ernaux’s experience of recovery after a life-threatening illness. Marie attempts to give us a more complete vision of the relationship, supplying the photographs with a context, whereas Ernaux, greedy for life after her brush with death, wishes only to see ‘proof of life’ in the photographs. When she does not find it there, she rejects them outright (‘ce n’est pas moi’) in a brutal, almost amoral movement towards the essential: life. In her conclusion to the whole sequence of photographs and texts, however, Ernaux seeks, I believe, to redress the balance, to restore Marie to the place from which he was ejected in her rude grasping for ‘life’. The last paragraph of the conclusion describes an untaken, imaginary photograph. Readers acquainted with other such ‘unshown’ photographs, in La Chambre claire or L’Image fantôme for instance, will immediately note the significance of this strange ontological status.45 It is an image of bodies, not clothes, and in it Ernaux pictures herself in a position that is both sexual and maternal: Je nous revois un dimanche de février, quinze jours après mon opération, à Trouville. [...] J’étais accroupie sur M., sa tête entre mes cuisses, comme s’il sortait de mon ventre. J’ai pensé à ce moment-là qu’il aurait fallu une photo. J’avais le titre, Naissance. (L’Usage, 151) [I see us on a Sunday in February, two weeks after my operation, at Trouville. [...] I was crouched over M., his head was between my thighs, as if he was coming out of my belly. I thought at that moment that we should have had a photo taken. I had a title for it: Birth.]

I think that this image, the most important one in the book, is a corrective to the trajectory I have been analysing, the trajectory described by the elementary desire for life that seemed to result in her rejection of her relationships, both with Marie and with photography. Now in remission, Ernaux can look back at the time of her illness and acknowledge how both of these — the man and the activity — sustained her. Marie is allowed to return to her bed in this photograph, although in it he still assumes a subordinate position. Ernaux remains the dominant partner: through taking on the roles of both lover and mother, she seems to be reminding us that she has, in a sense, given birth to him, to Marie the newly published writer and to the ‘M.’ that we have come to know through her texts.46 Martine Delvaux writes of this ‘photograph’ that ‘dans le mauve du soir naît l’amant/enfant, comme un signe ultime de survie par rapport au cancer’ [in the mauve evening the lover/ child is born, like the ultimate sign of survival in relation to the cancer].47 This is true, but Marie is also, importantly, the father: by telling us of the circumstances of the scene (‘quinze jours après mon opération’), Ernaux here acknowledges her reliance on Marie during her illness, and his major role in the birth of both the book and her post-cancerous self. He it was who noticed, before she did, that her

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hair had begun to grow back again: ‘ses cheveux tout neufs d’après la chimio, j’aime les caresser, c’est un duvet très doux, une deuxième naissance’ [I love to stroke her completely new hair after the chemo, it is a very soft down, a second birth] (L’Usage, 41, my emphasis). In a complicated but fertile nexus of relationships, Ernaux and Marie become both parents and children in this imagined image of renewal and rebirth. If we look back now at Ernaux’s greatest hope for her ‘photos écrites’ as articulated in the introduction — that they be changed into ‘d’autres scènes dans la mémoire ou l’imagination des lecteurs’ (L’Usage, 13) — it is possible to see how the metaphorical model she has in mind for the passing on of her reality to others through her texts is perhaps not so much metamorphosis as the process of procreation.48 For the moments of her life she wants to pass on are those of sexual ecstasy — ‘de jouissance irreprésentables et fugitifs’ — the moments in which she is most alive and potentially creating life.49 Procreation is, of course, the most obvious way in which human beings can be said to ‘pass on’ life, a miracle of both transformation and continuation. And it is also a process that is inescapably organic and material, leaving ‘traces’ of the kind that Ernaux wishes her writing to resemble. Indeed, maternity is another way in which a woman is made undeniably ‘material’: it foregrounds the physicality of her being, and she brings a material person into the world.50 (Her cancer, of course, also had this effect: as numerous narratives of illness have shown, illness leads almost inevitably to the body being objectified.51) On the level of both structure and content, L’Usage de la photo is a provocative and insistent ‘rendering material’ of the self. Conceived first and foremost as a ‘proof of life’ at a time when that life was in danger, L’Usage de la photo is a mise-en-scène of the survival of Ernaux’s self: the images of jouissance and giving birth, appearing at the start and end of her project, constitute the dual metaphorical model for an understanding of the book’s conception and publication. In many parts of L’Usage de la photo, however, metamorphosis is still the main topos for what happens to Ernaux through her writing. At times Ernaux seems engaged in a process of almost constant metamorphosis of self into text, or, as she puts it, ‘Je me demande, si, comme je le fais, ne pas séparer sa vie de l’écriture ne consiste pas à transformer spontanément l’expérience en description’ [I wonder if not separating one’s life from one’s writing — which is what I do — doesn’t consist of transforming, spontaneously, experience into description] (L’Usage, 84). Ultimately, it might indeed be argued that the couple’s clothes metamorphose into their owners for the reader. Photographs always evoke presence and absence, but whereas photographs of Ernaux and Marie themselves, taken at the time, would simply have evoked their past presence and present absence, the photographs of their clothes, together with the accompanying text, are different in that they evoke first and foremost the absence of their bodies at that time: that is, the photographs and commentary strongly suggest that the wearers are elsewhere in that time frame, naked and alive. Put differently, these photographs of their clothes can transport the reader back into 2003 and communicate the certainty that Marie and Ernaux are alive and well in the next room, so to speak, in a way that no photograph of a face or a body can. This is the sense in which we might say that Marie and Ernaux have,

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in L’Usage de la photo, metamorphosed into their clothes; the sense in which we can say that, through metamorphosis, they have created a new life. L’Usage de la photo was published in 2005. Ernaux’s next book, Les Années, came out in 2008, and has been followed by three 2011 publications: L’autre fille, L’Atelier noir, and Écrire la vie. Although L’autre fille is later than Les Années, I want to discuss it here, immediately after L’Usage, both because it is something of a photo-text and because, as a photo-text, it can be described as the mirror image of L’Usage de la photo. L’autre fille (2011) was commissioned and published by NiL éditions, in a collection called ‘Les affranchis’ specializing in ‘unsent letters’. Ernaux’s ‘letter’ is addressed to her sister, her parents’ first daughter who died of diphtheria before Ernaux was born. The series editor may have commissioned this work, but to any faithful Ernaux reader it comes as no surprise to find her writing about her sister at this stage. The family ethnology which started with La place appears to have led logically to this final member of the family. Where the use of photography is concerned, L’autre fille represents a slim but significant ‘opposite’ to L’Usage de la photo. There are just two photographs in L’autre fille: one of her parents’ house in Yvetot, when it was still an épicerie-café, and the other of the house in which she was born, in Lillebonne, but after its transformation into a residential building. By contrast, there are a fair number of photographs described in the text, mostly of the sister she never knew she had, until the day she overheard her mother telling a sympathetic stranger about the loss of her first girl. In her memory, the scene is as still as a photograph: Pas plus qu’une photo, la scène du récit n’a bougé. Je vois la place exacte des deux femmes dans la rue, l’une par rapport à l’autre. Ma mère en blouse blanche s’essuyant les yeux de temps en temps avec son mouchoir.52 [The scene of the tale has not moved, no more than a photo would. I see the exact placement of the two women in the road, their positions with respect to one another. My mother, in a white blouse, wiping her eyes from time to time with her handkerchief.]

The scene is located on the Rue de l’École, the road running behind the family home, and on the next page is the first photograph, a photo of the house in Yvetot which shows the road in question: it is just possible to make out the street name on a plaque attached to the back wall of the house itself. It is a perfect instance of writing as proof, as a sign proving the existence of this road, and thence adding reality — for the reader — to the scene that has just been described. Ernaux herself experiences a visceral confirmation of the reality of her memory: Plus que tout, la réalité de la scène m’est attestée par une sorte d’hallucination corporelle, je me sens courir en cercles [...] je vois les silex de la rue de l’Ecole ... (AF, 18) [More than anything, the reality of the scene is proven to me by a sort of bodily hallucination, I can feel myself running around in circles [...] I see the f lint stones on the rue de l’École ...]

As mentioned above, the photographs described verbally in the book are mostly of

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her sister. Interestingly, what we are told about them here seems to contradict the little we have come across earlier in her oeuvre concerning the same photographs: Sur ces photos, excepté celle de toi bébé, tu dois avoir entre quatre et six ans. [...] Presque toujours, tu baisses la tête en grimaçant ou tu te protèges les yeux de ton bras, comme si la lumière te faisait mal, que tu ne puisses pas la supporter. Dans une lettre récente, ma cousine G., qui l’a constaté aussi, en déduit: ‘elle n’a pas l’air de s’aimer.’ (AF, 36) [In these photos, except for the one of you as a baby, you must be between four and six years old. [...] In most of them, you are looking down with a grimace or shielding your eyes with your arm, as if the light was hurting you, as if you couldn’t bear it. In a recent letter, my cousin G, who also noticed this, drew the following conclusion: ‘she doesn’t seem to like herself very much’.]

Earlier, in Une femme, a description of what seems to be the same or a similar photograph reads thus: Leur petite fille était nerveuse et gaie. Sur une photo, elle apparaît grande pour son âge [...] Elle rit, une main au-dessus du front, pour ne pas avoir le soleil dans les yeux. (UF, 42) [Their little girl had a gay, excitable nature. In one photograph she looks tall for her age [...] She is laughing, one hand raised to her forehead to keep the sun out of her eyes.] (Woman, 30)

The crucial element of interpretation involved in viewing a photograph, an aspect of the medium usually ignored by Ernaux, emerges from this intertextual comparison.53 In Une femme the little girl is of course a peripheral character, whereas in L’autre fille, Ernaux is attempting to describe the full impact of her sister’s life on the family. Hence, perhaps, the other difference between the two accounts of her sister: in Une femme it is simply noted that ‘en 1938 elle est morte de la diphtérie trois jours avant Pâques’ (UF, 42) [she died in 1938, three days before Easter] (Woman, 30), whereas in L’autre fille much is made of the fact that the day was in fact Holy Thursday, and that she died ‘comme une petite sainte’ [like a little saint] (AF, 16). L’autre fille is an attempt by Ernaux to create an image of her unknown sister, but she finds that she cannot fulfil this task: ‘tu n’as d’existence qu’au travers de ton empreinte sur la mienne. [...] Tu es une forme vide impossible à remplir d’écriture’ [you have no existence, except for what you get from your imprint on mine. [...] You are an empty form, impossible to fill with writing] (AF, 54). She is like a negative image, transcribed onto the photosensitive surface that is, again, Ernaux herself: the emotional residue from the scene of the unexpected discovery made on the rue de l’École, perhaps, that only Ernaux can see. Even her photographs cannot confer existence on her, denote life. Perhaps this is simply because Ernaux, because she never met her sister in the f lesh, is not capable of recognizing the girl in the photo, cannot match the image to a memory inside her own mind. These photographs cannot function as ‘proof of life’, unlike the ones in L’Usage de la photo: they belong to the category which Barthes exemplifies, in La chambre claire, with the photograph of Lewis Payne before his execution (‘il est mort et il va mourir’ [he is dead and he is going to die]).54 It is in fact exactly the same situation, as the one fact about which

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Ernaux is certain, where her sister is concerned, is the fact that she died; so every photograph of her is a proof of death, of pastness. The second actual photograph in the book — of the house in Lillebonne, but as it looks in 2009 — is, again, proof of pastness, of absence. The house we see does not look like the one Ernaux knew, so this photograph consigns the first to being a historical record, a photo of something that is no more. A photograph of the transformed house is a more complete denial of the first house than, say, a photograph of the old house as a wreck: the newer version replaces, or rather displaces, the old one. But when Ernaux gains, with difficulty, access into the house in April 2010, she discovers that although much of the inside too has been transformed, the first f loor is structurally unchanged: ‘tout correspondait, en plus petit, à mon souvenir.’ [everything matched my memory, it was just smaller] (AF, 75). Enough of the house is still the same for recognition to take place, although much of it has changed completely; the experience is comparable to that of the narrator of La Honte looking back at her twelve-year-old self. L’autre fille also contains some revealing thoughts about Ernaux’s sense of self. We discover that she has always thought of herself as a replacement, a ‘bad’ substitute for her ‘good’ sister, as someone who was born only because her sister died (because her parents only ever wanted one child). She reveals that she used to think of herself as a fictional being: Je retrouve ceci, écrit dans mon journal en août 1992: «Enfant — est-ce l’origine de l’écriture? — je croyais toujours être le double d’une autre vivant dans un autre endroit. Que je ne vivais pas non plus pour de vrai, que cette vie était ‘l’écriture’, la fiction d’une autre. Ceci est à creuser, cette absence d’être ou cet être fictif.» C’est peut-être l’objet de cette fausse lettre — il n’y en a de vraies qu’adressées aux vivants. (AF, 45–46) [I find this, in my diary from August 1992: ‘Is the child the origin of writing? I always believed myself to be the double of another, living somewhere else. That I wasn’t really alive, that my life was “writing”, someone else’s fiction. This is something I must look into, this absence of being or this fictitious self.’ This person is perhaps the recipient of this false letter — real letters are only addressed to the living.]

Fantasizing that one is a character in a novel is not an uncommon activity: the epigraph to Se perdre, ‘voglio vivere una favola’, is an anonymous graffito she saw in Florence. But what Ernaux says here is perhaps a little stronger than a fantasy or a wish. It is a belief — ‘je croyais toujours [...] que cette vie était “l’écriture”, la fiction d’une autre’ — not so much that she is a fictional character in a novel as that she is a fake: ‘le double d’une autre vivant dans un autre endroit’. A doppelgänger, a replacement, a fictitious being: these are all negative others, not a joyous fictional creation but an object of suspicion, an entity who should perhaps not exist. If Ernaux is a fictitious presence of this kind, her sister is a fictitious absence, somebody whose real, if past, existence is concealed by a fiction of absence, maintained by the fact that the family never admit that she existed: ‘nous avons maintenu la fiction au-delà de toute vraisemblance’ (AF, 47). Ernaux does not

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often use the word fiction or its derivatives: it is interesting that she does so in this quotation, to mean, more or less, a ‘lie’. In her quest for reality through the ideal of photography, which she maintains throughout her work since La place, lying — and fiction — have no place. It is important to her to feel that, each time she sets off on one of her writing journeys, she does not know exactly what she will find because she is not creating an alternative, fictional reality, but searching for a true reality. This is why her discoveries are always something of a surprise: si je n’avais pas eu envie d’écrire au plus près de la réalité dans ce livre-là, La Place, serais-tu remontée de la nuit intérieure où je t’ai tenue pendant des années? Est-ce que c’est d’écrire que tu es re-née, de cette descente, à chaque livre, dans ce que je ne connais pas d’avance, comme ici, où j’ai l’impression d’écarter des voilages qui se multiplient sans arrêt dans un corridor sans fin? (AF, 61) [if I had not wanted to get as close as possible to reality in that book, La Place, would you have emerged from the internal darkness where I had kept you for all those years? Is it from my writing that you were reborn, from my descent, in each book, into what I didn’t know in advance, exactly as I am doing now, where I feel as if I am forever opening net curtains that keep multiplying in an endless corridor?]

In the final pages of the book, Ernaux writes that it is she, Ernaux, who is ‘l’autre fille’ — ‘celle qui s’est enfuie loin d’eux, ailleurs’. In saying that she is the ‘other’ one, Ernaux presumably means, first and foremost, that she is the black sheep, the one who does not belong with her parents, and will not be buried with them in Yvetot, as she has just made clear. But perhaps she is also suggesting that she who has written so much about herself has ended up creating a written self who is the doppelgänger, ‘le double d’une autre vivant dans un autre endroit’ that she believed herself to be as a child. In this sinister fictionalization of the self, as in the other aspects mentioned above, L’autre fille is a negative version — perhaps even in the photographic sense — of L’Usage de la photo. Les Années, L’Atelier Noir, Écrire la vie Les Années, at 242 pages, is noticeably longer than the average Ernaux book: it is also, for the first time in her career, a book written in the third person, although the ‘elle’ is clearly Ernaux herself, at least as clearly as her ‘je’s have ever been. With no chapter divisions, it is a f luid narrative recounting the events, objects, and people who have been part of her life, from her childhood in post-war France to the present day. Political events and major items of news from this period of sixtyodd years are interspersed with details of everyday life, from novelty foods and consumer objects to fashion trends, popular TV programmes, and developments in communication technology (so we get anecdotal accounts of Ernaux’s generation getting to grips with email, iPods, and mobile phones). The overall effect is that of the representation of ‘lived history’ during this period for the average French person: the only ‘personal’ details come from the descriptions of photographs of Ernaux herself, at various stages of her life, which punctuate with injections of the individual the otherwise seamless narrative of collective history.

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One might plausibly argue that the work is an apotheosis of the tendencies I have been charting in this chapter. The dissolution of the ‘je’, for instance, is finally completed, through its replacement by an unidentified third-person ‘elle’ and through the collectiveness of the experiences described, although it is made clear at the outset that the memories have as their source a single consciousness. The first sentence of Les Années is ‘toutes les images disparaîtront’ [all the images will disappear].55 This, it turns out, is a reference to the images inside one’s head, specifically, Ernaux’s: the statement is a prelude to her attempt to record them verbally, before their and her disappearance, in the book to follow. This ‘record’ follows the structure we have already encountered in La Place and La Honte: each section starts with the description of a real photograph, which is then followed by the ‘images’ — visual memories, listed in sentences without verbs, reminiscent of the ‘clichés’ of the journaux extimes — which belong to each period characterized by the initial photograph. The use of ekphrasis — rather than the insertion of actual photographs — is an interesting choice, especially coming after L’Usage de la photo: it would seem to indicate that Ernaux returned to ekphrasis in Les Années because she was not entirely happy with her intermedial experiment. We know now that she went back to using actual photographs in L’autre fille, but given that her aim in Les Années is the dissolution of the ‘je’ and the rendering collective of the years she has lived through, ekphrasis can be seen as the ideal choice inasmuch as it is the least intrusive way of introducing photographs into a narrative. Had she included the actual photographs she describes, they would have dominated the text, drawing attention to themselves and therefore to the individuality of her person rather than to the collective experience of the years they represent. But with the verbal descriptions, readers are free to visualize the photograph themselves, or to insert their own photos from each particular period as they read;56 indeed Ernaux has said that some readers have written to her saying that that is precisely what they did as they read her text.57 Photographs of course are an integral part of this material history, especially in its latter stages. With the advent of the digital era, there is a frenetic proliferation of the ‘traces’ which Ernaux has always found so precious: On n’arrêtait pas de vouloir le [le présent] ‘sauvegarder’ en une frénésie de photos et de films visibles sur-le-champ. […] Avec le numérique on épuisait la réalité. (LA, 223) [We kept on wanting to ‘safeguard’ it [the present], in a frenzy of immediately available photos and films [...] With the digital camera, reality was exhausted.]

From being rare, significant images, photographs become everyday, anticlimactic, contemporaneous with the present because of the immediacy of the digital image: ‘la multiplication de nos traces abolissait la sensation du temps qui passe’ [the multiplication of our traces abolished the feeling of passing time] (LA, 224). This is a cliché of our age, which is why it is so resonant: it is in fact an excellent example of the ‘truths’ that make up Les Années, ‘truths’ that are both banal and significant, because both personal and collective. About two thirds of the way through her book, Ernaux describes the difficulty of her task:

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Annie Ernaux Elle voudrait réunir ces multiples images d’elle, séparées, désaccordées, par le fil d’un récit, celui de son existence, depuis sa naissance pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale jusqu’à aujourd’hui. [...] comment représenter à la fois le passage du temps historique, le changement des choses, des idées, des mœurs et l’intime de cette femme, faire coïncider la fresque de quarante-cinq années et la recherche d’un moi hors de l’Histoire [...] Son souci principal est le choix entre ‘je’ et ‘elle’. Il y a dans le ‘je’ trop de permanence, quelque chose de rétréci et d’étouffant, dans le ‘elle’ trop d’extériorité, d’éloignement. (LA, 179) [She would like to bring together these multiple images of herself, separated, out of sync, in a narrative thread, the narrative of her life, from her birth during the Second World War until today. [...] But how to represent, at the same time, the passing of historical time, the changes in things, ideas, manners and the personal life of this woman, how to put together the fresco of forty-five years and the search of a self outside History [...] Her main concern is the choice between ‘I’ and ‘she’. In ‘I’ there is too much permanence, something shrunken and suffocating, in ‘she’ there is too much exteriority, distance.]

This passage harks back to a number of tendencies we have been charting through the course of this chapter. The desire to ‘réunir ces multiples images d’elle [...] par le fil d’un récit’ is reminiscent of the tensions between her internal and external diaries, containing ‘raw material’ in the form of unanalysed scenes and snapshots, and the récits which strive to organize such images into a truth-telling narrative. And ‘la recherche d’un moi hors de l’Histoire’ confirms Ernaux’s wish, in spite of her self-effacing attempts to tell other lives at the expense of her own, to secure nonetheless a ‘self ’ which will not be swept away with the multitude, a self who will be outside Time. For surely History here means Time, and reminds the reader irresistibly of Proust’s search for an extratemporal self? Ernaux’s self — as discussed in the section on the diaries — is a fragmented, unstable entity, hardly akin to Proust’s, but she nonetheless wishes for this self to be free enough from the relentless march of time to be capable of writing about it. As for as the choice between ‘je’ and ‘elle’, by the time of our reading, the choice has been made: she has opted for the distanced, exterior perspective. But although the ‘je’ has been rejected, the ‘nous’ is everywhere present, almost as ubiquitous as the ‘elle’. The viewpoint of Les Années is one which she attains by immersing her subjectivity into the collective: Et c’est dans une autre sensation qu’elle a puisé l’intuition de ce que sera la forme de son livre, celle qui la submerge lorsque à partir d’une image fixe du souvenir [...] il lui semble se fondre dans une totalité indistincte, dont elle parvient à arracher par un effort de la conscience critique, un à un, les éléments qui la composent, coutumes, gestes, paroles, etc. Le minuscule moment du passé s’agrandit [...] Elle retrouve alors, dans une satisfaction profonde, quasi éblouissante — que ne lui donne pas l’image, seule, du souvenir personnel — , une sorte de vaste sensation collective, dans laquelle sa conscience, tout son être est pris. De la même façon que, en voiture sur l’autoroute, seule, elle se sent prise dans la totalité indéfinissable du monde présent. (LA, 238) [And it is another sensation that she has plumbed for the intuition that has given her the form of her book, the sensation that engulfs her when, from a fixed image in her memory [...] she feels as if she is melting into an indistinct totality, from which she manages to tear away with an effort of the critical

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consciousness, bit by bit, the elements of which she is composed, habits, gestures, words, and so on. The tiny moment of the past grows larger [...] she then finds, with a deep, almost overpowering satisfaction — that the image of her personal memory cannot give her — , a sort of vast, collective sensation, in which her consciousness, all her being is caught. In the same way that, driving on the motorway, alone, she feels caught in the indefinable totality of the present world.]

What this means in terms of narrative technique, apart from the move to ‘elle’ from ‘je’, is that her ‘self ’ becomes the material onto which these images are printed, projected. It is a logical consequence of what she was doing in the external diaries: as analysed in the earlier sections of this chapter, the external diaries offer Ernaux’s self to the external world as a photosensitive surface on which the various images are to be printed. This happens again in Les Années: Ce que ce monde a imprimé en elle et ses contemporains, elle s’en servira pour reconstituer un temps commun [...] pour, en retrouvant la mémoire de la mémoire collective dans une mémoire individuelle, rendre la dimension vécue de l’Histoire. (LA, 238) [She will make use of what the world has printed onto her and her contem­ poraries, in order to reconstruct a shared time [...] to create the lived dimension of History by finding the memory of collective memory in an individual memory.]

We could analyse this development as an extreme ‘othering’ of her self, a way of putting herself into ‘objective’ time: in other words, by offering us her personal version of collective time, her subjectivity collapses into the very stuff onto which collective experience is inscribed. The same trajectory is followed by her ‘je’: from the ‘je fictif ’ of the early works which evolved into the fragmented ‘je’ ‘traversé par les gens’ of Journal du dehors, it has now disappeared completely — ‘aucun “je” dans ce qu’elle voit comme une sorte d’autobiographie impersonnelle — mais “on” et “nous” — comme si, à son tour, elle faisait le récit des jours d’avant’ — to become a viewpoint without a person behind it. In several of her books, Ernaux evokes a painting by Dorothea Tanning, called Anniversaire: ‘on voit une femme aux seins nus et derrière elle des portes ouvertes à l’infini’ (LA, 204) [it shows a woman with bare breasts and behind her an infinite series of open doors]. At various points in her life, this painting has meant different things to her: at this stage, it would seem to be a structural model for Les Années, in its evocation of the many Annies that she has passed through on her way to her present self. In Journal du dehors, the people who traversed her became part of her: by the same token, if time has ‘traversed’ her (‘ce temps qui l’a traversée’), she will have become, in a very literal sense, that time. The last few pages of Les Années describe how the narrating ‘elle’ has come to decide on the form of her book: Ce ne sera pas un travail de remémoration, tel qu’on l’entend généralement, visant à la mise en récit d’une vie, à une explication de soi. [....] Ce sera un récit glissant, dans un imparfait continu, absolu, dévorant le présent au fur et à

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Annie Ernaux mesure jusqu’à la dernière image d’une vie. Une coulée suspendue, cependant, à intervalles réguliers par des photos et des séquences de films qui saisiront les formes corporelles et les positions sociales successives de son être [...] à cette ‘sans cesse autre’ des photos correspondra, en miroir, le ‘elle’ de l’écriture. (LA, 242) [It will not be a work of remembering, in the general sense of the word, aimed at narrativizing a life, explaining the self. [...] It will be a slippery narrative, written in a continuous, absolute imperfect tense, which will devour the present little by little until the last image of a life. A f low that is suspended, however, at regular intervals by the photos and the film clips that will capture the successive corporeal forms and social positions of her being [...] to this ‘ceaselessly other’ of the photos will correspond, as a mirror image, the ‘she’ of the writing.]

This double vision of the self does not correspond precisely to the ‘personal’ and ‘general’ dichotomy of the earlier works. These are ‘mirror images’ of the photo­ graphed ‘other’ set against the narrating ‘elle’, the ‘elle’ who is nothing more than the surface on which collective, historical images are described. So on the one hand we have the surface, covered in (written) images from the collective consciousness, and on the other, the individual being who is ‘embodied’ from time to time in descriptions of photographs and home videos. In this dual vision of the self, the photographs (and videos) contain all that is personal or individual: the ‘public’ images are presented as simply residing in her consciousness, whence they will disappear on her death (unlike the photographs, which can technically outlive her), which is why she wants to record them. Death is very much in the air towards the end of Les Années, structurally as well as thematically. Indeed the final pages of the book are clearly related, it seems to me, to the last pages of À la recherche du temps perdu, in which the narrator tells the readers how he is planning to write the book that we now hold in our hands: in both Proust and Ernaux, the end of the narrative comes round in a wide circle back to its beginning. Yet there are technical differences between the two endings. They are both concerned with how they will go about their task. Proust’s famous ending is as follows: Aussi, si elle m’était laissé assez longtemps pour accomplir mon œuvre, ne manquerais-je pas d’abord d’y décrire les hommes, cela dût-il les faire ressembler à des êtres monstrueux, comme occupant une place si considérable, à côté de celle si restreinte qui leur est réservée dans l’espace, une place au contraire prolongée sans mesure puisqu’ils touchent simultanément, comme des géants plongés dans les années à des époques, vécues par eux si distantes, entre lesquelles tant de jours sont venus se placer — dans le Temps.58 [So, if I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the effect were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men as occupying so considerable a place, compared with the restricted place which is reserved for them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure, for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves — in Time.] (vi, 451)

The image of the end of time approaching, in both cases, is a frightening and

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sobering one: Ernaux’s imperfect tense, representing her past, will catch up with her present in ‘la dernière image d’une vie’ when it ends, whereas Proust’s narrator leaves open the possibility that there will not be enough time for him to ‘accomplir mon oeuvre’. In both cases, of course, the work is completed and the writer survives: but the interesting difference is to be found in the narrators’ positions when evoking the future project. Ernaux writes in the third person, as we have seen, and uses the future tense: ‘Ce ne sera pas un travail de remémoration [...] Ce sera un récit glissant’. Proust, by contrast, occupies the first person, and uses the conditional mood: ‘si elle m’était laissé assez longtemps pour accomplir mon œuvre, ne manquerais-je pas...’ Many characteristics attach to these tenses and persons which do not operate in every case, but I would argue that here, the combination of third-person and future tense in Ernaux creates a more impersonal, and thereby less fictional, space for the birth of the work in question, whereas Proust’s combination of the firstperson and conditional tense conjures up a definitively novelistic space from which his work will emerge. That the works have come into being is not in question, but the moods of their engendering are different. For Proust, the fictional nature of a work does not detract from the value of its content: for him the very act of creation, whether of time or of narrative, is by definition fictional and therefore not to be feared. But Ernaux, whose commitment to truth-telling has developed alongside her attachment to photography and who has always been suspicious of ‘literature’, is defiantly anti-fictional at the end of Les Années, setting up her writing against the ‘otherness’ of her photographs as if to dare her readers to doubt her absolute commitment to the ‘truth’. L’atelier noir and Écrire la vie were both published in 2011, and are — in different ways — metatexts for everything Ernaux had published up to that point: as such they cast additional light on my readings of the previous works. I will not give an exhaustive reading of either, especially not of L’atelier noir, which offers a wealth of material to all Ernaux scholars studying her works from 1982 onwards, but will focus on what they bring to our discussions regarding the place of photography in Ernaux’s autobiographical project. L’atelier noir is a transcribed sample of Ernaux’s thoughts about her writing projects, a diary she has kept since 1982. It cannot be called a writing diary, as it does not contain her drafts or plans, ‘rien de ce qui constitue les matériaux du livre en cours. [...] C’est un journal d’avant-écriture, un journal de fouilles’ [nothing that constitutes material for the work in progress. [...] It’s a pre-writing diary, a diary of searches].59 A third diary, then, if we count it alongside her journaux intimes and extimes, this ‘texte autonome’ was written between 1982 and 2007, although there are long periods missing, and even the most detailed year — 1989 — only takes up twenty-three pages.60 A fascinatingly large number of the entries, covering as they do a period of twenty-seven years, are about the work which would eventually be published in 2008 as Les Années: Ernaux was already thinking about it in 1982, and pondering about the relative merits of the ‘je’ and the ‘elle’, individual versus collective memory (AN, 103), and the use of photographs (AN, 127, 188, 190) over the course of all the years in between.

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Thoughts about the place of photographs in her books, in Les Années or otherwise, occur regularly in L’atelier noir, and confirm the various tendencies I have been charting in this chapter. Thus in an entry from February 1993, Ernaux makes the distinction between private images and public writing, crucial to the writing of Une femme when discussing a private image-memory (AN, 103). In November of the same year, she points out that the two kinds of memory cannot coexist: ‘Les deux ne coïncident pas (sauf dans le récit? ex. Une femme)’ [the two can’t coincide (except in narrative? e.g. A Woman’s Story)] (AN, 106). In 1995, she expresses a desire for what we have been calling photographic writing: ‘ma hantise, mon désir: qu’il y ait la distance la plus infime entre le souvenir, la représentation de la réalité et la transcription’ [my dread, my desire: that there should be the most infinitesimal distance between memory, the representation of reality and its transcription] (AN, 123). At the time, of course, she is writing La vie extérieure, using herself as the photosensitive surface upon which life has transcribed itself, and this in turn is a process that she will use in Les Années, ‘cette vie écrite, inscrite quelque part, rien qu’en vivant’ [this written life, inscribed somewhere, just by living], a process she describes in 1997 as ‘l’idée la plus forte jusqu’à présent’ [the best idea to date] (AN, 139) for that book. Ernaux wrote to me in a letter that the photographs in Les Années with which each section starts were not triggers for the writing of what was to follow: Il faut la considérer [the photo] comme une ‘inclusion’ de l’individuel, du singulier (femme, trajectoire sociale, pensées, sentiments) dans le collectif: c’est ainsi que j’ai travaillé, je n’ai pas commencé par la description d’une photo dans le manuscrit d’origine ... [The photo must be considered as an ‘inclusion’ of the individual, of the singular (woman, social trajectory, thoughts, feelings) in the collective: that is the way I worked, I didn’t start with the description of a photograph in the original manuscript ...]

Notwithstanding this statement, at several points in L’atelier noir Ernaux records that she wants to ‘partir d’une photo’ in order to write Les Années: ‘L’autobiographie vide, complètement extérieure, à la limite sans personne, comme Journal du dehors, au travers de photos, non montrées. À partir d’elles, anecdotes (peu), gestes, époque, chansons, émissions de radio’ [an empty autobiography, completely external, to the point where there is nobody there, like Journal du dehors, through photographs, which aren’t shown. From them, anecdotes (a few), gestures, epoch, songs, radio programmes] (AN, 127; see also 140, 190). The two thoughts are not incompatible, of course, and are occurring at different points in time. The main reason for the photos described in Les Années is, as Ernaux says, to insert a space for the individual into the text: but this does not mean that, prior to starting the manuscript, Ernaux could not have used the photographs as a way of broaching the historical, collective account which follows. What the notes in L’atelier noir show is how crucial her personal archive of photographs is for her writing: even if they are not physically included in Les Années, they represent the ‘personal’ for her, the ‘je’ which in the end was excluded completely from the text. In a 1989 entry of L’atelier noir, Ernaux wonders brief ly about interpolating — in

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Les Années — actual photographs from her archive with extracts from her diary (AN, 53). This is in fact what happens in Écrire la vie, the quarto edition published by Gallimard of a large number of Ernaux’s books and essays, which contains a prefatory section made up, according to its back cover, of ‘100 pages de photos personnelles accompagnées d’extraits du Journal intime inédit’. There is a preface to this prefatory section, in which Ernaux explains that ‘j’ai sélectionné les extraits du journal en fonction des photos choisies [...] surtout des années où elles ont été prises’ [I have chosen extracts from my diary to match the chosen photographs [...] from the years when they were taken].61 In actual fact, this pattern is not strictly adhered to. Of course it would not have been possible for the photos of a threeyear-old Ernaux to be accompanied by diary entries from when she was three, but a number of the later photographs — most noticeably those of her wedding, the years soon after it, and some dated in the early 1990s — are placed alongside retrospective rather than contemporary entries. Where the entries and photographs are contemporaneous, as for instance is the case for some shots of a 23-year-old Ernaux alongside diary entries from 1963 noting that she has had her first novel rejected by Seuil, or a publicity shoot for the Prix Renaudot next to her thoughts on winning the prize in 1984, the effect is intriguing: one feels somehow obliged to try to ‘match up’ the thoughts and the image of the woman who has written them down, to imagine them coming from that particular person. In a 1979 entry, Ernaux herself points out that it is not in old photographs that she finds her past selves: ‘J’ai regardé des photos et ça ne m’apprend rien, c’est par la mémoire et l’écriture que je retrouve, les photos disent à quoi je ressemblais, non ce que je pensais, sentais, elle disent ce que j’étais pour les autres, rien de plus’ (EV, 37) [I look at photos and learn nothing from them, it is through memory and writing that I can reclaim the past, photos tell me what I looked like, not what I was thinking, feeling, they tell me what I was for other people, nothing else]. Rather, it is in moments of what sound like a specialized form of involuntary memory, when she finds herself returning to a particular age, that she rediscovers various past selves: Tout l’après-midi je relis Le Deuxième sexe. Progressivement, je me suis ressentie redevenir l’être de 1959, lisant à Ernemont cet incroyable livre, entourée de sa vérité pour moi accablante. (2007) (EV, 44)62 [All afternoon I have been reading The Second Sex. Little by little, I felt myself becoming the being I was in 1959, reading this incredible book at Ernemont, surrounded by its truth which was devastating for me.]

Sometimes, this ‘return’ is a more specifically visual experience, for instance in the text placed alongside a photograph of herself as a four- or five-year-old: Mercredi, dans le RER, [...] je me suis vue — réellement vue — avec le regard de mes huit-douze ans: une femme mûre, élégante, très ‘instruite’, allant parler en public dans un cinéma de Paris, ce lieu inconnu ... (1998 entry) (EV, 20) [On Wednesday, in the RER, [...] I saw myself — really saw myself — with my eyes when I was between eight and twelve years old: a mature woman, elegant, very ‘educated’, going to give a public lecture in a cinema in Paris, this unknown place ...]

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Fig. 3.2. Ernaux and her father in Biarritz (almost certainly one of the ‘framing’ photographs of La Honte), in Écrire la vie, © Annie Ernaux

Writing is, as we have discovered during the course of this chapter, the main medium through which Ernaux has attempted to discover the past, including her past selves: photographs, whenever they have appeared in her writing, have usually been a tool, used by the writer in her attempt to ressucitate a past truth. Some of those photographs are reproduced in this collection, which is a source of pleasure for the seasoned Ernaux reader (a photograph of father and daughter in Biarritz, for instance, as described in La Honte, on page 29 (figure 3.2); the ‘dernière photo de jeune fille’ [last photo as a girl] evoked at the start of L’Événement, almost certainly, on page 56). Also interesting from this textual point of view are the photographs of various key places in Ernaux’s life that we have come to know through her books: Lillebonne, Yvetot, Rouen, rue Cardinet, and of course her house in Cergy. Looking at these photographs and the accompanying diary entries may produce a faint echo of the experience I described in the chapter on Proust, the experience of being asked to ‘match’ Nadar’s photographs of the real-life models for Proust’s characters to a reading of La Recherche. But it is only a faint echo, because in the case of Ernaux we know that this is not what we are being asked to do. Ernaux explains in the preface that the combination of photos and diary entries, which she dubs a ‘photojournal’, ne constitue pas une ‘illustration’ de mes livres. [...] Il n’est pas non plus l’expli­ cation d’une écriture mais il en montre l’émergence. [...] Il faut, je crois, le considérer comme un autre texte, troué, sans clôture, porteur d’une autre vérité que ceux qui suivent. (EV, 9)

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[does not constitute an ‘illustration’ of my books. [...] Neither is it the explanation of my writing, but it shows its origins [...] I think it should be considered as another text, full of holes, without closure, but containing another kind of truth from those that follow it.]

The other fact to remember here is that Ernaux’s writing is not billed as fiction, unlike La Recherche, and that it is therefore acceptable to read them as coming ‘from her’, broadly speaking. What that ‘her’ consists of is what we have been discussing at length in this chapter, of course. In the preface to Écrire la vie she offers us, once more, her thoughts regarding the identity of the ‘je’ in her books: J’ai toujours écrit à la fois de moi et hors de moi, le ‘je’ qui circule de livre en livre n’est pas assignable à une identité fixe et sa voix est traversée par les autres voix, parentales, sociales, qui nous habitent. (EV, 7) [I have always written of myself and outside of myself at the same time, the ‘I’ that circulates from book to book cannot be assigned to a fixed identity and its voice is crossed over by other voices, parental, social, which live inside us.]

Perhaps more interesting than the relationship between the ‘photojournal’ and the novels is the one which holds within the ‘photojournal’ itself, between ‘photo’ and ‘journal’. Ernaux says that ‘l’alliance de deux documents personnels, l’album photo et le journal intime’, has been Une façon d’ouvrir un espace autobiographique différent, en associant ainsi la réalité matérielle, irréfutable des photos, dont la succession ‘fait histoire’, dessine une trajectoire sociale, et la réalité subjective du journal avec les rêves, les obsessions, l’expression brute des affects, la réévaluation constante du vécu. (EV, 8) [a way of opening up a different autobiographical space, thus associating with the material, irrefutable reality of the photos, whose sequence ‘creates a story’, sketches a social trajectory, the subjective reality of the diary which contains dreams, obsessions, the raw expression of emotions, the constant reevaluation of what is being lived through.]

Starting with the obvious but important distinction between the subjective and objective ‘views’ of reality, the internal ‘photographs’ collected in her diaries as against the photographs taken of her external person, Ernaux goes on to break down the ‘subjective’ category into several different types. The diary entries are ‘snapshots’ of different kinds of internal reality: ‘les rêves, les obsessions, l’expression brute des affects, la réévaluation constante du vécu’. Dreams are a kind of reality, subjective but meaningful for the dreamer; obsessions are similar in that they can affect the obsessive’s reality although they may not, in fact, correspond to it; ‘l’expression brute des affects’ are internal states which have not yet been interpreted, of the type we saw in our discussion of her external diaries; and ‘la réévaluation constante du vécu’ is of course the work of the self-conscious mind. The photos, by contrast, make history/a story, just by being put in order: historical artefacts by virtue of their materiality, and thus functioning as indices of the external self ’s social trajectory through showing us the clothes, the houses, all the trappings of the everyday life of this individual. Structurally speaking, these photographs are very much like

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the photographs decribed in Les Années, except that they work in the opposite direction. Whereas the photographs in Les Années were ‘comme une “inclusion” de l’individuel, du singulier (femme, trajectoire sociale, pensées, sentiments) dans le collectif ’, in Écrire la vie they are ‘inclusions’ of the external self — although still ‘singulier’, and denoting ‘femme, trajectoire sociale, pensées, sentiments’ — in the subjective (not collective) f low of her history. Finally, for Ernaux’s readers, these photographs are not simply photographs: we know about many of them from her books, and even those we do not recognize from textual descriptions acquire a certain status in our eyes, because we know that they belong to her personal archive. We know that she has pored over them to write her ethnotexts: we know that they constitute part of the ‘stuff ’ upon which she draws for her creation of her ‘récits’. There is also a slight sense of transgression, perhaps even of disappointment, at seeing these photographs: the mythical status of the ‘unshown photograph’, discussed earlier, is brutally destroyed. The effect here is therefore not so much illustration as demystification, or a shattering of the illusory link created between text and image in her ekphrastic texts: being shown what seem to be the ‘framing’ photographs of La Honte, for instance, is equivalent to being reminded of the singularity of photographs, and thence of the ‘other’ that is Ernaux in relation to the reader. In her writing, Ernaux often aspires to create the opposite effect: as we have seen, the reader is allowed to take over Ernaux’s space, to ‘vampirize’ her, to write him/herself into Ernaux’s writing. The photographic images remind us that this is a colonizing act on the part of the reader, and that it can only occur in a textual, not a photographic, context. As Ernaux wrote, ‘ “je” fait honte au lecteur’ [‘I’ make the reader ashamed] ( JD, 19), but only when the reader is reading, not when s/he is looking at the author’s photographs. In this chapter, I hope to have shown that Ernaux’s use of photographs and the photographic in her self-writing is multiple and nuanced, ranging from the ethnological to the personal, the illustrative to the narrative, from ekphrasis in La Honte and Les Années through the ‘photographic writing’ of the diaries to the photo-texts of L’Usage de la photo and L’autre fille. Her apparent faith in the ability of photography to authenticate the real in some of her works is countered by her understanding of the uneasy links between text, image, and reality in others; her idealization of photography as a medium is tempered by her preference, throughout her career, for a writerly approach to the photographic. In her two most recent publications, which are a kind of metatext for the whole of her oeuvre to date, Ernaux seems to be enacting a mise en question of her creative strategies, both writerly and photographic, by giving us samples of the ‘raw material’ she employs — both verbal and photographic — and presenting them to her readers in all their strangeness and singularity. One effect of this display is that we as readers are made conscious of the way in which we take over Ernaux’s life when we read her selfwriting, how we colonize her experiences as our own. In the next chapter, we will see how Macé, a very different writer from Ernaux in many respects, develops the reader’s colonizing tendencies as part of his own methods for self-writing photographically.

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Notes to Chapter 3 1. Her readers have responded generously to this offer, as Lyn Thomas has shown: indeed the relationship between Ernaux and her readership has always been extremely intense and personal. See Lyn Thomas, Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and her Audience (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999). 2. Annie Ernaux, Journal du dehors (1985–1992) (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 19. 3. See for instance Thomas, ch. 1; Siobhan McIlvenny, Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), pp. 3–7; Shirley Jordan, ‘Improper Exposure: L’Usage de la Photo by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’, Journal of Romance Studies, 7 (2007), 123–41. 4. My proposed grouping of L’autre fille (2011) with L’Usage de la photo (2005), which will be analysed before Les Années (2008), may give the impression of a smoother relationship and trajectory than the actual sequence of events, which is as follows. After the publication of the photo-textual L’Usage, Ernaux seemed to have abandoned the intermedial form in her ‘return’ to the ekphrastic Les Années, before coming back to the photo-text in L’autre fille. On the other hand, as we will see, Les Années was so long in its writing and indeed conceiving that its publication in 2008 is arguably not indicative of a return to ekphrasis. 5. Annie Ernaux, La Vie extérieure: 1993–1999 (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), p. 103. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by VEx. 6. Ernaux, Journal du dehors, p. 9. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by JD. 7. See n. 8 regarding the notion of ‘documentary’ photographs. 8. Of course, photographs presented as having a documentary function nevertheless contain the potential to create a reality rather than illustrate it. Ernaux does not explicitly question the possibility that her ‘snapshots’ may be creations rather than ‘evidence’, but her later aknowledgement that there is much more of her self in them than she had originally thought can be seen as an implicit admission of the very biased status of her ‘photographic’ evidence. For a discussion of the documentary versus illustrative functions of the photograph (and their shortcomings), see Johnnie Gratton, ‘Illustration Revisited: Phototextual Exchange and Resistance in Sophie Calle’s Suite vénitienne’, in Textual and Visual Selves, ed. by Edwards, Hubbell, and Miller, pp. 139–66. 9. One of the few ‘snapshots’ taken in Paris, not Cergy, immediately adds a dimension from the literary past to the present scene: for the space of a paragraph Ernaux retraces the steps of Nadja, ‘cherchant le numéro 106, l’Hôtel de Suède, autrefois le Sphinx Hôtel’ ( JD, 79–80). Bréton’s Nadja is of course a photo-text, an autobiographical one at that, and its appearance in JD is extremely tantalizing: however, Ernaux does not explain her sortie into Paris, or indeed ever refer to the earlier text again in either of her external diaries. She does mention it in passing in our interview: see Appendix 1, pp. 180–81. 10. Indeed the belief that our ways of seeing are heavily inf luenced by advances in technology is one that Ernaux clearly shares with Proust; her camera-like vision even has a retrospective inf luence on the hue of her memories: souvenirs en noir et blanc de l’enfance, de toutes les années, jusqu’en 1968. Souvenirs en couleurs, ensuite. Est-ce que la mémoire n’a pas suivi le passage du cinéma et de la télévision du noir et blanc à la couleur? [My childhood memories are in black and white, for all the years until 1968. Memories in colour, thereafter. Has my memory followed the movement of film and television from black and white to colour?] (VEx, 105) 11. An image which occurs in La Place, as we will see. 12. The belief that a real trace can be left on the image by the referent harks back to our discussions in the Introduction concerning La Chambre claire about the indexical connection between the image and the referent, but there are two important differences between those arguments and this one. First, in Ernaux’s case, the mark is left by the photographer-writer, who is nevertheless

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attempting to capture the image of something else; this is also often the case in Macé’s photo­ graphs and writings, as we will see in Chapter 4. Second, Ernaux’s ‘mark’ here is left not on a real photograph, but on the analogically photographic surface of her writing, which allows me to continue my argument at a structurally analogous level to photography, rather than at the concrete level at which the Barthesian discussion took place. 13. Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 203–24. 14. Annie Ernaux, ‘Vers un je transpersonnel’, in Autofictions et Cie, ed. by Serge Doubrovsky, Jacques Lecarme, and Philippe Lejeune (Paris: Université Paris X, RITM, 1993), pp. 219–21 (p. 221). 15. ‘The narrator’s world is the fictional world that the narrator inhabits, as distinct from the world of the story that he/she creates: it may or may not overlap with the “story”, but is crucial to the organisation of the narrative.’ (Kawakami, A Self-Conscious Art, p. 9). In the case of Ernaux’s journaux extimes, the two worlds do overlap most of the time — except when she reminisces about the past — because it is non-fiction. 16. ‘Vers un je transpersonnel’, ibid. (my emphasis). 17. Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, À la recherche du temps perdu, iv, 485. But it is completely different from Guibert’s conception of the medium: for Guibert, the photosensitive surface, when analogically applied to the photographer, is much more cerebral, being either the memory or the retina. See my discussion of ‘l’écriture photographique’, pp. 50–51. 18. Clive Scott discusses the generosity of the prostitute figure in Baudelaire’s versification: see Clive Scott, A Question of Syllables: Essays in Nineteenth-Century French Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 4. 19. Annie Ernaux, La Place (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 100–01. 20. Annie Ernaux, Positions, trans. by Tanya Leslie (London: Quartet Books, 1991), p. 87. Henceforth, all translations of La Place will be taken from this volume, and page references to it will occur in the text, preceded by Pos. 21. Michael Sheringham notes that each of these fragments involves a ‘playing back’ of the scene witnessed on the day, and that ‘the subjective component in the event’ can only be inferred. See Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 321–22. 22. Annie Ernaux, ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 29. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by Je ne suis . . . 23. For another account of the diary versus the récit forms, see Elise Hugueny-Léger, ‘Du dedans au dehors: Trajectories of the Self in Diaries by Annie Ernaux’, in Parcours de femmes: Twenty Years of Women in French, ed. by M. Allison and A. Kershaw (Amsterdam and New York: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 167–79. See also Sonia Wilson, ‘Life, Disrupted: Annie Ernaux’s Journal du dehors and “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit”’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 49 (2012), 250–66, for an excellent comparative analysis of these two works which I unfortunately read too late to incorporate properly into my own chapter. 24. Annie Ernaux, Une femme (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p. 11. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by UF. 25. Annie Ernaux, A Woman’s Story, trans. by Tanya Leslie (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1991), p. 1. All translations of Une femme are taken from this volume, and henceforth, all references to it will occur in the text, preceded by Woman. 26. See Wilson, p. 258. 27. Annie Ernaux, Se perdre (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 14. 28. Ibid., preface. 29. ‘J’ai perdu le dernier lien avec le monde dont je suis issue’ [I have lost my last link with the world from which I came] (UF, 106). 30. See Appendix 1, p. 177. 31. Annie Ernaux, ‘La preuve par corps’, in Bourdieu et la littérature, ed. by Jean-Pierre Martin (Nantes: éditions Cécile Defaut, 2010), pp. 23–27 (23–24). 32. Ibid., pp. 24–25. 33. Ernaux, La Place, p. 37. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by LP.

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34. Annie Ernaux, La Honte (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 52. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by LH. 35. Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes, À la recherche du temps perdu, ii, 438; for a detailed discussion of this scene, see Chapter 1, pp. 19–21. 36. For a discussion of medical images of Ernaux’s self in L’Usage de la photo, see Jordan, pp. 135–57. 37. Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, L’Usage de la photo (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 9. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by L’Usage. 38. See for instance the section on ‘La retoucheuse’ in Chapter 1. 39. In an article on the place of photography in Guibert, Proust, and Barthes, I have explored further the issue of writing’s failure to prove existence, which is the starting point for these authors’ meditations on photography; see Akane Kawakami, ‘Un coup de foudre photographique: Autobiography and Photography in Hervé Guibert’, Romance Studies, 25 (2007), 211–25. 40. Such an interest in the position of clothes is naturally evocative of the discourse of crime, as Marie humorously notes: ‘Ce pourrait être les photos d’une service de criminologie [ ...] On se met dans la peau de l’enquêteur. Ont-ils abandonné leurs vêtements? Si oui, pour quelle raison? Les a-t-on forcés?’ (p. 93) [They could be photos from the criminology department [...] Imagine looking at them from the investigator’s point of view. Did they leave their clothes behind? If so, why? Were they forced to do so?]. 41. On Ernaux’s desire to write referentially, placed in the context of the autobiographical genre, see Nora Cottille-Foley, ‘L’Usage de la photographie chez Annie Ernaux’, French Studies, 62 (2008), 442–54 (p. 443). Cottille-Foley also lists more examples in L’Usage of writing as illegible marks (p. 453). 42. Elsewhere in her oeuvre Ernaux has searched for words that will recreate her past for her: ce qui m’importe, c’est de retrouver les mots avec lesquels je me pensais et pensais le monde autour. [ ...] Me servir de ces mots, dont certains exercent encore sur moi leur pesanteur, pour décomposer et remonter, autour de la scène du dimanche de juin, le texte du monde où j’ai eu douze ans. (La Honte, 37, 38) [What is important to me is to locate the words with which I thought, and thought about the world around me, back then. [...] I will use these words, some of which still weigh heavily on me, to deconstruct and reconstruct, around the scene of that Sunday in June, the text of the world in which I was twelve years old]. 43. Ernaux, L’Usage, p. 13. It is significant that the syntax of this sentence is itself descriptive of the fact that Ernaux does not see photographs as a ‘better’ or superior medium, but as just another art that can help this metamorphosis occur in the reader’s imagination (it is simply juxtaposed with writing — ‘Photo, écriture’). 44. At this point in her life Ernaux had already attempted to retain on paper ‘traces’ of one of her sexual liaisons: with an ex-lover, Philippe Vilain, she had created a series of images composed of his sperm and her menstrual blood. See Jordan, p. 134; and Philippe Vilain, Défense de Narcisse (Paris: Grasset, 2005), pp. 56–57. Ernaux describes the activity thus: ‘C’était devenu un supplément de plaisir. L’impression aussi que tout n’était pas fini avec la jouissance, qu’il resterait une trace — la date et l’heure figuraient sur la feuille — quelque chose de pareil à une œuvre d’art’; Annie Ernaux, ‘Fragments autour de Philippe V.’, L’Infini, 56 (1996), 25–26 (p. 25). 45. That this is a recurring trope in French self-writings has been noted in previous chapters. I will go on to discuss the nature of ekphrastic self-writing in the section on Les Années. 46. This is not the first time that Ernaux has ‘given birth’, symbolically speaking, to a writer/ lover. Philippe Vilain acknowledges her parental status vis-à-vis himself as a writer, as well as the mother–child relationship that exists, in his view, between his first novel and her Passion simple: en donnant une suite à Passion simple, en empruntant le style à celle dont je partageais la vie, il est très probable que je souhaitais à la fois m’inscrire dans un généalogie littéraire et inventer, par le jeu hypertextuel, une manière d’écriture jalouse et incestueuse, d’Œdipe d’écriture. (Défense de Narcisse, p. 60). 47. Martine Delvaux, ‘Des images malgré tout. Annie Ernaux/Marc Marie: L’usage de la photo’, French Forum, 31.3 (2006), 137–55 (p. 152).

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48. In an analysis of Ernaux’s image of ‘une série de chambres en abyme’ (L’Usage, p. 130), Delvaux comments that Ernaux is proposing ‘l’image de la naissance elle-même comme une structure en abyme’ (‘Des images malgré tout’, p. 152). Her view here, therefore, comes close to my own, although it is not quite the same and is arrived at via a different route. 49. And in which she is most certain of her identity, as we saw in La Honte. Moments of ‘jouissance’ are extremely important for Ernaux’s self hood, as Nancy K. Miller notes in ‘Memory Stains: Annie Ernaux’s Shame’, in Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, ed. by Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 197–212 (p. 206). 50. In Une Femme, Ernaux gives birth metaphorically — through her text — to her own mother, thus inverting the mother–child relationship following the former’s death: ‘Il me semble maintenant que j’écris sur ma mère pour, à mon tour, la mettre au monde’ (p. 43) [I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.] (p. 31 of Leslie’s translation). 51. One excellent example of this, which makes full use of photography, is the classic book by Jo Spence, Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography (London: Camden 1986), which, amongst other things, charts the author’s battle with breast cancer. 52. Annie Ernaux, L’autre fille (Paris: NiL Éditions, 2011), p. 16. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, prefaced by AF. 53. Ernaux herself, after reading my chapter, offered another, simpler explanation for this difference: ‘entre l’écriture d’Une femme et celle de L’autre fille, la photo a été égarée ...’. The difference, in that case, would be the one that holds between the actual viewing of a photograph and the memory of such a viewing. 54. La Chambre claire, p. 149. See also p. 150: ‘la photographie me dit la mort au futur. [ ...] Devant la photo de ma mère enfant, je me dis: elle va mourir: je frémis, tel le psychotique de Winnicott, d’une catastrophe qui a déjà eu lieu’ [Barthes’ italics]. 55. Annie Ernaux, Les Années (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), p. 11. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, prefaced by LA. 56. This is what Véronique Montémont suggests in her pages on the use of ekphrasis in photo­ biography, with particular reference to Ernaux: see ‘Beyond Autobiography’, in Textual and Visual Selves, pp. 29–49 (31–32). 57. See ‘Entretien avec Marie-Laure Delorme’, Mediapart, 2 April 2008. 58. Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, p. 353. 59. Annie Ernaux, L’Atelier noir (Paris: Éditions des Busclats, 2011), p. 9. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, prefaced by AN. 60. In the preface to the book, Ernaux tells us very precisely what she has cut out of the diary: ‘j’ai retranché de la période 1993–2001 — la plus répétitive — une dizaine de pages. Ne figurent pas non plus celles écrites aprrès 2007’ (AN, 14) [I have cut out from the period between 1993 and 2001 — the most repetitive part of the diary — a dozen or so pages. I have also removed everything I have written after 2007]. The implication is that everything else is there, absolutely as in the original. 61. Annie Ernaux, Écrire la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), p. 9. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, prefaced by EV. 62. See also EV, 48.

C h ap t e r 4

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Gérard Macé: Photography and Self-Creation The opening lines of Un monde qui ressemble au monde, which contains a selection of Macé’s photographs of the gardens of Kyoto, describe the miniature ‘jardin japonais’ [ Japanese garden] which belonged to his mother when he was a little boy: Comme cet objet était posé sur la table à ouvrage, il est lié à jamais à l’univers troublant de la fémininité, au point que les pelotes de laine, les aiguilles à tricoter, les coussins piqués d’épingles se superposent à l’image des chevelures noires et compliquées des femmes japonaises telles qu’on les voit dans les grav­ures d’Utamaro, et quelquefois encore, les soirs de fête, dans les rues de Kyôto.1 [As this object was on her work table, for me it is forever linked to the troub­ ling universe of femininity, to such an extent that the balls of wool, the knitting needles, the pincushions are superimposed onto the image of the dark, complicated hairdos of the Japanese women one sees in Utamaro’s engravings, and still, sometimes, on feast day evenings, in the streets of Kyoto.]

Travelogue? Autobiography? Or a ‘rêverie’ introducing the reader to the gardens of Kyoto through an intensely personal vision? Macé’s writing is difficult to classify: it defies generic borderlines, moving seamlessly from scholarly analysis to autobiographical confidence, from translation to explication, from Surrealistic prose poetry to the purest of French récits. ‘Lancée sur ses propres chemins, à l’écart des genres et des modes, elle [l’oeuvre de Gérard Macé] paraît inclassable’ [having set off on its own paths, set apart from known genres and fashions, Macé’s work appears uncategorizable].2 This heterogeneity may be one reason why Macé, in spite of an impressive oeuvre of over twenty books and ten translations, and a clutch of prestigious prizes including the 2009 Grand Prix de la Poésie de l’Académie française, will never be a ‘popular’ writer, a household name, in France or elsewhere. But after a quietly successful career spanning over thirty years as an individual artist, Macé is also coming to be recognized as one of a group of writers responsible for recharting the territory of contemporary French literature through a combination of innovation and historical awareness: ‘qui s’intéresse de près aux évolutions de la littérature française, constate assez vite à quelle point elle [son oeuvre] contribue de façon essentielle à ses renouvellements les plus décisifs’ [whoever takes a close interest in the evolution of French literature will soon notice how Macé’s work makes a crucial contribution to its most decisive innovations].3

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Although bewilderingly various from a generic point of view, Macé’s books have an inner coherence of theme and style that can be traced back directly to the author’s idiosyncratic vision. Whatever the story he has chosen to tell, be it a history of the Japanese garden (Un monde qui ressemble au monde), a tale that links Proust, narration, and unveiling (Le Manteau de Fortuny), or the adventure of learning Chinese (Leçon de chinois), it is played out in Macé’s distinctive, personal space. The stories are often biographies, but these other lives are relived by Macé through a combination of factual research and dreamlike imaginings, through his method of ‘rêver le geste de l’autre’ [dreaming/imagining the other’s gesture].4 This method, which allows Macé to ‘remember’ things that he could not have experienced himself, is both apparently colonizing — he is, after all, taking over someone else’s memories — and oddly self-effacing, in that what is involved in this ‘takeover’ is that Macé offers his narrating consciousness as a space in which another’s long-forgotten memories can unfold.5 Macé’s photographs, too, with their frequent use of ref lective surfaces or angles that betray the photographer’s existence, seem to be designed to retain a shadow of the creator, and of the act of creation, within the finished product. Karine Gros characterizes the ensemble of his oeuvre as ‘une autobiographie éclatée [...] L’autobiographie devient une vie imaginée: une vie en images’ [a dispersed auto­ biography [...] Autobiography becomes an imagined life: a life in images].6 In other words, each of Macé’s works might be said to ref lect a part of his identity, real or imagined: ‘une vie imaginée’ is a phrase that strongly suggests autofiction, at least Colonna’s ‘wider’ definition of it as self-fabulation.7 Macé’s authorial voice is always writing itself; it is an implicitly autofictional voice that slowly describes a self-portrait during the course of the oeuvre. Macé’s first book was published in 1974. His photographic career is much shorter: if we are to believe the opening lines of La photographie sans appareil, it was the gift of a camera on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday that led to his extraordinarily successful transformation into a prolific photographer. But the same text tells us that, although taking photographs was new to him, seeing the world photographically was something he had been doing for decades: ‘depuis toujours ou presque, je pratiquais la photographie sans appareil [...] cette curieuse façon, maniaque mais esthétique, de découper le réel sans laisser de traces’ [from the very beginning or almost, I have been taking photographs without a camera [...] this strange habit, maniacal but aesthetic, of cutting out the real without leaving any marks].8 This lifelong interest in photography has yielded several kinds of text in his oeuvre which have a relationship with the visual medium: books in which Macé writes about photography; books which contain photographs and text, both by Macé; and books of photographs by Macé, with a commentary by someone else. All of these subgenres will be considered in this chapter, in conjunction with a number of the earlier writings, in the context of what we may call, borrowing Gros’s formulation, Macé’s ‘autobiographie éclatée’. Macé’s self-writing is very different from that of an Ernaux or a Guibert, although there are pertinent comparisons to be made. Macé’s self is almost never explicitly present in his works. It is as a point of view, a narrative voice, that his ‘self ’ resides

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in the text;9 or, in the case of his photographs, as the choice of an angle, lighting, or subject. The author/photographer is both extremely self-effacing — he is never centre-stage — and completely crucial, because his main presence in the work is as part of the structure (although at times he does also form part of the subject matter). I therefore propose to characterize Macé’s texts as implicit — or structural — self-writings: writings in which his self forms part of the structure, rather than the style or content, of the account. And to anticipate, I will be arguing in the course of this chapter that this kind of self-writing captures a particular type of self, the self as artist: through situating the self in the very fabric of the work, Macé’s texts and photographs show us the self in the act of creation. In order to elucidate my theory, I will start this chapter with a consideration of what ‘autobiographical’ means for Macé, and subsequently go on to examine his writings, photo-texts, and photographs with a view to showing how he combines these media to create a particular form of self-portrait. Essay or Meditation? I wrote above that ‘Macé offers his narrating consciousness as a space in which another’s long-forgotten memories can unfold’. It might be argued that a less cumbersome description might be simply to put Macé’s writing in the category of the essay.10 Macé himself has claimed Montaigne as a kindred spirit, writing that: ‘Les Essais sont mon modèle; ces tentatives, cette grande catégorie de la littérature, protéiforme. Ce terme-là, les essais, me conviendrait, avec tout ce qu’il comporte d’aventure’ [The Essays are a model for me; these attempts, this great, protean literary category. The term ‘essay’ suits me very well, with everything within it that speaks of adventure].11 The relationship between Macé’s voice and his subject is certainly comparable to the one that holds between an essayist and his chosen theme. The space in which the essayist operates is not autobiographical in the sense of writing about his life, but in that he chooses to speak in his own, distinct voice and to bring the cardinal points of his personal vision to bear on his subject. Similarly, the erudite yet engaging, distinctly literary yet clearly non-fictional voice in Macé’s works invites us consider his chosen theme or subject in the language of his personal universe, where memory, language, the image, and forgotten truths constitute the keys to understanding. Karine Gros considers the term ‘essai’ in relation to Macé, but ultimately rejects it for its didactic and pragmatic connotations: in her view, Macé’s work is too poetic and fictional to be classed as essays.12 Of course the essay itself is not a uniform genre, and Montaigne’s version, for instance, with which Macé identifies his own efforts, is not known for its didacticism. Indeed it is as a ‘catégorie [...] protéiforme’ that Macé appreciates the essay, one whose most important quality is that of ‘aventure’. Macé’s short prose pieces therefore fall into a similar category of selfwriting as the essay,13 from a structural point of view, but at times their content is more imaginative than what might be expected in an essay: the result is a strangely intimate text which is as informative as it is confessional.14 One sense in which any writing might be said to be a form of self-writing is defined by Proust, writing about the idiosyncracy of style:

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Gérard Macé Le style pour l’écrivain, aussi bien que la couleur pour le peintre, est une question non de technique mais de vision. Il est la révélation, qui serait impossible par des moyens directs et conscients, de la différence qualitative qu’il y a dans la façon dont nous apparaît le monde, différence qui, s’il n’y avait pas d’art, resterait le secret éternel de chacun. (iv, 474) [for style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, if there were not art, would remain for ever the secret of every individual.] (vi, 254)

A writer’s style, according to Proust, depicts the way in which s/he sees, thereby revealing to the readers his/her personal view of the world, or indeed his/her world. As such any kind of writing can be described as writing the self. What I call ‘structural self-writing’ is situated above this most basic level, as it is a more personalized structure consisting of what I have called the cardinal points of an author’s vision: in Macé’s case, key notions such as memory, the image, language, and forgotten truths. These are the larger structures which constitute a writer’s signature, so to speak, which would be noted by the novice reader of Macé, and form part of the horizon of expectations for his regular readers. And the use of the first person to govern the whole narrative, be it a biography of a nineteenth-century ethnographer or the story of an object discovered in an archaeological dig, attaches the reader’s experience securely to the writer’s: the complex, but organic, structure of Macé’s texts has its roots firmly embedded in his particular person.15 On top of the self-revealing style and structures detailed above, Macé’s works also contain a certain amount of actual autobiographical material: references to his family members, the language of his childhood, memorable places of his past, and so on. These ‘biographèmes’, to borrow Barthes’s term, are interspersed throughout the oeuvre. Although some of the works do contain more autobiographical facts than others, it seems to me that what is particularly interesting about Macé’s autobiographical material — even the specifically autobiographical, such as a particular fact about his maternal grandfather — is that they become intricately linked with seemingly objective narratives or scenes belonging to other peoples’ lives, which means that autobiographical material is latent in all of his works, even those which seem most focused on the external world. In this section I have attempted to distinguish between several levels of writing the self — the stylistic, as defined by Proust; the structural, on which aspects of the writing such as point of view, key themes and positional indices clearly belong to the writer; and the actual, which involves the revelation of autobiographical material as content — which are present in Macé’s works. I will now go on to show how the self emerges at all of these levels, in his essay-like writings, the writings about photography, the photo-texts, and his photographs.

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My Family and Other Egyptians: Les trois coffrets (1985), Le dernier des Égyptiens (1988), and La mémoire aime chasser dans le noir (1993) Macé quotes Plato in the epigraph to Mirages et solitudes: ‘j’appelle images en premier lieu les ombres, ensuite les ref lets dans l’eaux, ainsi que les ref lets sur des corps opaques, lisses et brillants’ [First, I call images shadows, then ref lections in water, as well as ref lections on opaque, smooth and shiny objects].16 For Macé, photography is descended from such ref lections, rather than from painting, ‘à quoi on la compare trop facilement’ [to which it is too readily compared].17 From a long time before the publication of La mémoire aime chasser dans le noir, in which he first wrote explicitly about photography, Macé’s attitude towards the image has been ‘photographic’ in the above sense: images are ref lections or impressions of reality, which will be more or less distorted in accordance with the fidelity of the receiving surface. This is precisely in accordance with Maynard’s definition of the photographic, and throughout Macé’s oeuvre, we see how the images he creates using mirrors, shadows, poetic writing, and dreams are photographic in this way. And when the subject of these images is the self, the result is a narrative which tells the self using such photographic images. In this section I will show this process at work in Les trois coffrets and Le dernier des Égyptiens at the different levels of self-writing distinguished in the previous section, and end by discussing how the equivalences created between photography and dream-vision are foregrounded in La mémoire aime chasser dans le noir. Les trois coffrets is a narrative that links various lives, cities, and ages: starting with the story of Crepereia Tryphaena, the name of a second-century woman and her doll discovered by archaeologists on the banks of the Tiber, it moves from Rome to Egypt and Paris via the lives of Crepereia, Champollion, the narrator, and his ancestors.18 This evocation of other lives, eras, and places all takes place within the consciousness of the narrating ‘je’, who lets us know at an early stage in the narrative that it will lead to a truth about himself, ‘au secret de la filiation’ [to the secret of my filiation].19 But the result is not a teleological narrative, or indeed a narrative of detection that leads to a triumphant revelation: for instance, the secret of the narrator’s father does not come as a climactic ending, but is mentioned, albeit cryptically, around half-way through the book (TC, 35), then repeated about ten pages later. Indeed repetition — repetition with a slight difference each time — is the dominant structuring pattern of Les trois coffrets, and applies as much to the visual as to the verbal tropes. For instance, a series of images of women, the first of which is that of the second-century woman called Crepereia Tryphaena, recur throughout the text: indeed, given the photographic nature of the images, it would be better to describe this recurrence as superimpositions which result in something resembling a composite photograph. As discussed in chapter 1, composite photographs consisted of photographs of family members, whose resemblance became accentuated when superimposed upon each other. The process is reversed in Macé’s text, as women who apparently have nothing to do with each other acquire a strange ‘parenté’ [family relationship]20 through the process of superimposition. Crepereia, because

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of the ‘plante aquatique’ [aquatic plant] which gives her a full head of f loating hair, makes the narrator think of his maternal grandmother, who used to loosen her long grey hair ‘au-dessus d’un seau d’eau qui lui servait de miroir’ [above a bucket of water which she used as a mirror]: hair, water, and mirrors link the two women, whereas her doll, also called Crepereia, reminds him of his mysterious companion in the present, who once dreamt of becoming a mannequin in a shop window (TC, 18). The narrator’s mother, through a series of complicated steps involving King Lear, is also linked to Crepereia: like Cordelia she was one of three girls, immortalized in a photograph that the narrator remembers seeing in his grandfather’s bedroom, ‘celle de trois filles dont la plus pâle était ma mère’ [the one with three girls, of whom the palest was my mother] (TC, 68). This photographic image of his pale and thoughtful mother then sends the narrator back, in this paragraph, to Crepereia’s world, because ‘c’est auprès d’elle [his mother] que j’ai découvert l’univers féminin de coffrets vaguement interdits’ [my emphasis] [it was with my mother that I discovered the feminine universe of vaguely prohibited boxes] (TC, 68). The composite photograph, made up of all of these women and denoting the alluring but forbidden universe of femininity, thus forms an autobiographical image: an image of the history of his encounters with the opposite sex. Another composite image created by the narrative is of the narrator himself, but in this one the faces superimposed onto his belong to his father and Jean-François Champollion. Here again the starting point is Crepereia, although it is not her image but her name — certain components of which denote the status of a freed slave, signalling dubious origins — which reminds him of a dream.21 In the dream he is confronted by his father as an adolescent, whose image he remembers (in real life) from a photograph, who asks him to decipher some words written on a stone. The narrator is unable to do this, but is also aware that he has nothing to fear from his father, because he knows that ‘il me suffit de lui demander son nom pour l’assassiner’ [to kill him, all I would have to do is to ask him his name] (TC, 36). His name is his weakness, then, and soon afterwards we are told that his father only received his surname ‘à l’âge où la voix mue’ [at the age when his voice changed]: that is, he was born an illegitimate child. The dream offers further material which needs to be elucidated. One presumes that the stone in question is modelled on the Rosetta stone, deciphered by Champollion, who famously taught himself, as a child, to read. At this point in the narrative, however, the narrator reveals the less well-known fact that when he first met with his tutor, Champollion was said to have spelled certain words phonetically (‘Je vous priée dégluser mon petit esprit qui est un peu volage ... ’, TC, 57). We are then introduced to another dream which offers fruitful links between illiteracy and illegitimacy: le manuscrit du copiste était un palimpseste: sous la lettre enluminée je voyais une correction à l’encre rouge [...] une faute d’orthographe ancienne et jamais oubliée, à cause de l’humiliation ressentie. J’avais écrit ‘l’année dernière’ en trois mots (la née dernière) [...] ils avaient cessé d’être un tourment, parce que dans leur inscription le motif était enfin lisible. En effet, j’étais entré à l’école au moment où ma sœur était née [...] les mots sous les mots redisaient l’événement, en laissant entendre la séparation d’avec les miens que fut l’apprentissage de

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la lecture et de l’écriture. [...] ma grand-mère maternelle, entre autres, était vraiment illettrée. (TC, 61) [The copyist’s manuscript was a palimpsest: beneath the illuminated letter I saw a correction in red ink [...] of a spelling mistake from years ago and never forgotten, because of the humiliation I had felt. I had written ‘l’année dernière’ [last year] in three words (la née dernière [the last born]) [...] the words had ceased to torment me, because in their inscription the meaning was legible at last. In fact, I had started school exactly when my sister was born [...] the words under the words told the story again, allowing me to understand the separation from my family that learning to read and write was for me. [...] my maternal grandmother, amongst others, was completely illiterate.]

The Freudian misspelling indicates how the young boy saw both his sister and literacy as separating him from his family. But the word ‘faute’ [mistake] is then reclaimed as a family word, moving from the maternal line of the illiterate grandmother to the paternal grandmother who had ‘fauté’ [made a mistake]. As a result of her ‘faute’, her son — the narrator’s father — was born illegitimate: and when he was adopted legally, his name, when it was transcribed into his new ‘état civil’ was apparently misspelled, another ‘faute d’orthographe’. The writer’s autobiography, therefore, is shown to originate in images of illiteracy from his mother’s side and images of illegitimacy from his father’s: his face emerges dimly from a composite ‘photograph’ of such images. The illiterate maternal grandmother is a key biographeme which underlies the opening image in another of Macé’s works, Le dernier des Égyptiens. This work is much less obviously autobiographical than Les trois coffrets, with no ‘je’ to possess the narrative and studded with footnotes called ‘scholies’, which refer us to scholarly and historical works on the life of Champollion. It starts with a striking sentence, ‘Champollion ne savait pas lire’ [Champollion could not read],22 and an equally striking image of the great Egyptologist and decipherer of the Rosetta stone: felled by a bad bout of gout, Champollion is sitting on a sofa with his painful leg stretched out, while someone reads Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans out loud to him. When I interviewed Macé on the subject of this image, he responded with a remarkable revelation: GM: Si je n’avais pas eu une grand-mère illettrée, je n’aurais jamais écrit sur Champollion. D’abord, parce que la fascination pour les signes vient de là, mais cette scène-là, précisément, c’est encore autre chose. C’est qu’on faisait la lecture à voix haute à ma grand-mère: le courrier, le journal, quand elle voulait savoir un peu les nouvelles. Donc mon grand-père lui faisait la lecture à voix haute, premier point: c’est à elle qu’on faisait la lecture à voix haute, pas à moi. AK: Mais tu étais là... GM: Oui. Deuxièmement, elle avait une jambe raide, qu’elle ne pouvait plus plier, à la suite d’un accident, [...] et elle avait toujours un tabouret pour l’allonger. Quand on lui faisait la lecture, elle avait cette jambe, comme ça ... Et pour moi, aussi le corps de cette grand-mère a été très érotisé. Au fond, la tentation incestueuse, je l’avais peut-être plus avec cette grandmère qu’avec ma mère. C’est l’histoire de tous les garçons ... Et donc elle avait cette jambe qui était exhibée comme un phallus. [...]

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AK: GM:

AK: GM:

Donc, il y avait tout ce qui se jouait autour du corps fantasmé et beaucoup par la présence physique de ma grand-mère. Et on lui faisait la lecture et elle avait la jambe allongée. Et à un moment, longtemps après la parution du livre, vraiment longtemps, tout à coup je pense ... ... que c’était Champollion. Voilà. Il y a deux scènes réelles qui en fait sont comme une scène fantasmatique ... et aux antipodes, apparemment, parce qu’on a un grand savant et une illettrée, un homme et une femme ... tu vois, tout est opposé, et tout se superpose en même temps. C’est une image qui donne vraiment à penser. En plus, quand j’étais chez ma grand-mère, j’allais toute la journée en forêt, comme les Indiens de Fenimore Cooper, parce que mon grandpère était bûcheron: je l’accompagnais en forêt. Donc ce livre est à tout point de vue un livre de mémoire personnelle, mais transposé complètement.23

[GM: If I had not had an illiterate grandmother, I would never have written about Champollion. Firstly, because my fascination for signs comes from there, but that precise scene is something else again. My grandmother used to have people read to her: letters, the newspaper, when she wanted to catch up a little with the news. So my grandfather used to read out loud to her. So, the first point to note is that it was my grandmother who was read to, not me. AK: But you were there ... GM: Yes. Second point, she had a stiff leg, which she could not bend any more following an accident, [...] and she always had a stool to stretch it out on. When she was being read to, she had this leg out, so ... and for me, my grandmother’s body was highly eroticized. Deep inside, I was probably more tempted to commit incest with my grandmother than with my mother. All little boys have the same story to tell ... she used to have this leg on display like a phallus. [...] So you have here everything that was at stake around this fantasized body, and the physical presence of my grandmother. And she was being read to, and her leg was stretched out. And one day, a long time after the book had been published, really a very long time, suddenly I thought ... AK: ... that it was Champollion. GM: That’s right. There are two real scenes that together become something like a fantasmic scene ... and at polar opposites from each other, seemingly, because one is a great scholar and one an illiterate woman, one is a man and the other a woman ... you see, opposites, but it’s all superimposed at the same time. AK: It’s an image that really gives you food for thought. GM: Moreover, when I stayed with my grandmother, I used to spend the whole day in the forest, like Fenimore Cooper’s Indians, because my grandfather was a woodcutter: I used to go with him into the forest. So this book is a book of my personal memories from various perspectives, just completely transposed.]

There are several points to be noted here. First, Le dernier des Égyptiens itself does not contain any reference to Macé’s grandparents: unlike Les trois coffrets, there is nothing of what I called actual autobiographical material — or biographemes, to use the Barthesian term — in this work. But the autobiographical images clearly

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function as templates upon which the narrative’s images are situated, and the result is another composite photograph. So the great scholar Champollion is superimposed — it is Macé who uses the words ‘se superpose’ — onto the illiterate grandmother, albeit unconsciously at the time of writing: and Fenimore Cooper’s Indians, making tracks through the North American forests, are superimposed onto the young Macé and his woodcutter grandfather. The superimpositions works in a way comparable to what happens in Les trois coffrets, except that it occurs at a different diegetic level: in Les trois coffrets all the images concerned are intradiegetic, whereas in Le dernier des Égyptiens, some of them are extradiegetic. It is clear from reading these works that Macé’s vision was photographic from an early stage. I will now discuss the work in which his views of photography are explicitly articulated for the first time. La mémoire aime chasser dans le noir24 is made up of three sections. The first section contains brief thoughts about photography, the second about dreams, and the third contains prose poems which bring the two together. As we saw in Les trois coffrets, dream-vision is photographic in the Maynardian sense if one argues that they ref lect images from reality, produce images on the sensitized surface that is the mind. Whether or not one agrees with this view of dreaming (and this may depend on individual experiences), La mémoire certainly suggests that dream and photography are on an equal footing in Macé’s world. The writings on photography in the first section of La mémoire might be said to make explicit many of the thoughts that underlie the ways of seeing practised in Les trois coffrets and Le dernier des Égyptiens. Macé starts by giving photography a new genealogy, relating it not so much to painting as to more mechanically ref lective, if at times less faithful, processes within our everyday lives: Les miroirs déformants, la boule de cristal, [...] annonçaient à leur façon la photographie. Et l’image poétique avec son déclic et ses éclairs, qui conjuguent la netteté du détail et le f lou de l’infini, plus encore que la peinture à quoi on la compare trop facilement. (Mémoire, 21) [Deforming mirrors, crystal balls, [...] heralded, in their ways, photography. And poetic images with their clicks and their f lashes, which bring together the clarity of detail and the vagueness of the infinite, even more than painting to which it is too readily compared.]

The connection between photography and mirrors, which becomes a major theme in Macé’s actual photographs, is articulated here. The predictive power of the ‘boule de cristal’ is humorously displaced from its centre to its surface: that is, instead of foretelling the future through images to be found inside the sphere, it has been announcing the advent of photography, unnoticed for centuries, simply through ref lecting images on its polished surface. And the poetic image, ‘avec son déclic et ses éclairs’, can also function as a precursor of photography. Here Macé’s image is related to the link made by Barthes between photography and a specific type of poetry, haiku: Le sens n’y est [dans le haiku] qu’un f lash, une griffure de lumière: [...] mais le f lash du haiku n’éclaire, ne révèle rien; il est celui d’une photographie que l’on prendrait [...] mais en ayant omis de charger l’appareil de sa pellicule.25

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Photography and this kind of poetic image have in common the ability to light up (‘un f lash’ in Barthes, ‘ses éclairs’ in Macé) the world, to reveal something which has hitherto been hidden in plain sight. Photography and mirrors are linked throughout La mémoire, functioning both as ref lections of reality and openings into dream worlds, much like windows.26 At times they open into the world of death and forgetfulness: ‘à cause de l’effet de miroir des tirages argentiques, tous les visages sont celui de Narcisse noyé dans une f laque d’eau; et tous les f leuves aux ref lets de mercure, de la Seine à l’Amazone ont l’aspect silencieux du Léthé’ [because of the effect of silver-plated mirrors, all the faces are of Narcissus drowned in a puddle of water; and all the rivers with their ref lections of mercury, from the Seine to the Amazon, have the silent look of Lethe] (Mémoire, 44). Other thoughts about photography are offered as fragments, one after another, in this first section. The dead can remain with us in the form of photographs (‘Quand nous portons sur nous les photographies des morts [...] nous sommes accompagnés comme les Anciens par des ombres convives’ [When we carry around on our persons photographs of the dead [...] we are accompanied, like the Ancients, by shadowy guests] (Mémoire, 27)), a rich image given what Macé will do with photographs of shadows in his later work. Shadows, shades, and death are brought together again in the following passage which claims that photographs give us a taste of death before the real event: Mais l’ombre a remplacé la proie, et la photographie que nous croyons réaliste nous propose une mort sans pourriture, l’éternité comme un leurre à portée de la main. Au point que devant nos propres dépouilles, nos mues transparentes sur du papier glacé, nous sommes étonnés qu’elle ne nous dispense pas de mourir. (Mémoire, 47) [But the shadow has replaced the prey, and the photograph that we thought was realist offers us a death without decomposition, eternity like an illusion within our reach. To the extent that, faced with our own remains, our shed skins transparent on the glossy paper, we are surprised that it does not dispense us from dying.]

In other fragments, Macé sees photography as being ‘cut out’ from the fabric of reality, another thought which pre-empts his practice when he starts to take photographs, as we will see in later sections of this chapter: ‘une photographie qui vient d’être prise est découpée dans la chair du monde, et quand elle n’est pas en noir et blanc, elle a les couleurs criardes des tatouages’ [a photograph that has just been taken has been cut out from the f lesh of the world, and when it isn’t black and white, it has the loud colours of tattoos] (Mémoire, 48). Elsewhere, with what seems to be an intertextual nod to Le dernier des Égyptiens, the photographer is compared with the Indian, scanning the clouds, reading the skies for the perfect light: ‘dans nos villes aussi grandes que des forêts, le photographe opère avec l’instinct du chasseur [...] comme le braconnier ou l’Indien silencieux’ [in our cities which are as big as forests, the photographer operates with the hunter’s instinct [...] like the

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poacher or the silent Indian] (Mémoire, 47). In the earlier work, the Indians were superimposed onto Champollion himself: Dans la nature la difficulté commence avec le relevé des indices, et l’Indien resemble alors au déchiffreur. On cherche une empreinte comme on cherche une pierre écrite ou un fragment de tablette [...] en passant la forêt au peigne fin, en soulevant chaque feuille et chaque branchage comme Œil de Faucon et les Mohicans.27 [In nature the difficulty begins with the noting down of indications, and the Indian then comes to resemble the decipherer. You look for tracks in the same way that you look for writing on stone or a fragment of a tablet [...] going through the forest with a fine tooth comb, turning over each leaf and every pile of branches like Falcon Eye and the Mohicans.]

Thus Champollion is now linked, via the Indians of Fenimore Cooper, to the modern-day photographer: another composite photograph, of hunters of clues in an ever-changing environment. But the most important mode with which photography is associated in La Mémoire is dream, or dreaming. Like Proust, Macé points out that photographs ‘précise trop certains traits que nous voudrions ignorer’ [make too clear certain features that we would like to ignore] (Mémoire, 39). This clarity of vision that photo­g raphy can offer — again, as we saw in Proust — is linked in Macé to the way in which we see in dreams: he tells us that photography ‘nous permet de nous voir comme nous voyons les autres en rêve, à la fois semblables et différents: à vrai dire d’une incroyable ressemblance’ [allows us to see ourselves as we see others in dreams, sim­ilar and different at the same time: to tell the truth, unbelievably similar] (Mémoire, 41). Unbelievable in the sense of unexpected is what is intended here, the impression described by Barthes as ‘mais je n’ai jamais ressemblé à ça!’; both photography and dreams offer us something we may not want to see, at least at first encounter, a richer version of reality than the one to which we are accustomed.28 ‘Rêver’ is shorthand, in Macé’s work, for a state of heightened consciousness which allows us to perceive the world around us more creatively. Dreams can be pernicious, especially those experienced whilst asleep: by contrast, the state of heightened awareness described above, and referred to by him as ‘le rêve éveillé’, is always a positive one, and can at times even be attained through an act of will in order to ‘agrandir le réel’.29 According to Gros, this state is at the heart of Macé’s surreal vision of the world, whether he is writing or photographing, whether he is focusing on other lives, objects, or countries.30 The surreal reality of images in dreams and photographs is given a new twist in the following thought from La mémoire: L’aspect improbable et tremblé des photographies prises en milieu aquatique, où l’on voit des nageuses aux contours f lous comme si l’on assistait au début d’une métamorphose, est peut-être ce qu’il y a de plus proche de l’image de rêve. Qui se forme à l’instant où le dormeur, quittant les profondeurs du sommeil où il était plongé dans la nuit noire, se trouve lui-même entre deux eaux. [The improbable and trembling aspect of photographs taken underwater, in which you see swimmers with blurred edges as if you were witnessing the start

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This passage is irresistibly reminiscent of — and, given that Macé is a serious reader of Proust, almost certainly a partial allusion to — the description of the high society ladies in Le Côté de Guermantes, glimpsed in their boxes by the narrator at the Opéra: Cependant, au fur et à mesure que le spectacle s’avançait, leurs formes vaguement humaines se détachaient mollement l’une après l’autre des profondeurs de la nuit [...] leurs brillants visages apparaissaient derrière le déferlement rieur, écumeux et léger de leurs éventails de plumes, sous leurs chevelures de pourpre emmêlées de perles que semblait avoir courbées l’ondulation du f lux; après commençaient les fauteuils d’orchestre, le séjour des mortels à jamais séparé du sombre et transparent royaume auquel ça et là servaient de frontière, dans leur surface liquide et plane, les yeux limpides et réf léchissants des déesses des eaux. (i, 33–34) [Gradually, however, as the performance went on, their vaguely human forms detached themselves languidly one after the other from the depths of the night [...] their gleaming faces appeared behind the playful, frothy undulations of their ostrich-feather fans, beneath their hyacinthine, pearl-studded headdresses which seemed to bend with the motion of the waves. Beyond began the orchestra stalls, abode of mortals forever separated from the sombre and transparent realm to which here and there, in their smooth liquid surface, the limpid, ref lecting eyes of the water-goddesses served as frontier.] (iii, 37–38)

Both passages evoke the existence of an alternative world, enticingly visible but not entirely clearly so, because of the aquatic element involved. Proust describes the opera boxes as another world, a ‘sombre et transparent royaume’, whose inhabitants — the ‘déesses des eaux’ — cannot be seen clearly (‘formes vaguement humaines’) but whose limpid eyes serve both as mirrors and as the frontier between the two worlds. The ‘other’, watery world is dark (the sea goddesses surface slowly ‘des profondeurs de la nuit’), and is a space of metamorphosis (the goddesses being, in fact, high society ladies). Macé’s passage is not as elaborate, of course, but contains similarly dimly visible female figures (‘des nageuses aux contours f lous’) starting to metamorphose, glimpsed as the sleeper is about to surface from the depths of sleep (‘la nuit noire’) and preparing to move from one kind of water to another (‘se trouve lui-même entre deux eaux’). What the two passages have in common is that they both evoke visions of an alternative world — be it that of dreams or an inaccessible social class — using the image of aquatic vision, and that in both cases the alternative world is dark and metamorphic, related to sleep, dream, or the deep sea. In other words, photography in Macé is a transformative way of seeing, not a purely ref lective one, like Proust’s eyes transforming the occupants of the high society boxes at the Opéra. The viscosity of water, the conducting medium, impedes a straightforward ref lection from occurring, blurring the contours and thus altering the aspect of the originals. This transformative power is what attracts Macé in all of these media, dreams,

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photography, and writing: their ability to ref lect is an important given, but would be nothing without their subsequent tendency to deform, transform, and create new creatures. The prose poems which form the third section of this book are examples of this power of transformation through verbal imagery. There is no space here for a detailed or comprehensive analysis of these poems,31 but I will cite an example here to show how dream and photography, in their respective worlds of night time and death, are agents of metamorphosis: La nuit qui retouche les portraits (qui change les vers en prose et le rêve en fait divers), la nuit à l’œil louche a glissé sous ma porte la photo agrandie des morts: des oiseaux aveuglés par le jour, des épouvantails en costumes de dimanche, et derrière un comptoir en bois des îles un Baudelaire à la beauté créole, à la chevelure crantée comme sur une photo de Carjat. [...] Dans la chambre noir où la mariée devient veuve, et les garçons d’honneur de drôles de fantômes au bras d’éphémères demoiselles, j’ai vu des têtes préparées pour la mort au milieu de chemises blanches [...] Sans meute ni rabatteur, la mémoire aime chasser dans le noir et rapporter des proies vivantes, des massacres ornant les murs de nos chambres et le dessus de nos buffets. [Night, which retouches portraits (which changes verse into prose and dreams into minor news items), night with its squinting eye slipped under my door the enlarged photograph of the dead: birds blinded by the daylight, scarecrows in their Sunday best, and behind a wooden counter of the islands a Baudelaire got up as a Creole beauty, with curly hair like in a Carjat photo. [...] In the darkroom where the bride turns into a widow, and the best men into strange ghosts linking their arms with ephemeral young ladies, I saw heads prepared for death in the middle of white shirts [...] With neither hounds nor beaters, memory likes to hunt in the dark and bring back live prey, massacres adorn the walls of our rooms and the surface of our dressers.]

Photography and dreams reign in the space created by night and death where memory, or perhaps the imagination, chases ‘live’ prey. Night transforms the Caucasian male Baudelaire into a dark beauty with curly hair, and the darkroom is a magical place where white can become black (surely the most obvious explanation for ‘la mariée devient veuve’) and young men in dark suits become ‘des têtes préparées pour la mort au milieu de chemises blanches’. This last image is another possible reference to Proust’s ‘bal de têtes’, but even without the allusion we can see how photography can be an even more powerful agent for ageing than time, transforming the young into the very old in an instant. We will now see how Macé harnesses the transformative power of photography when he picks up the camera himself, in particular when the subject of his gaze is his own self. The Photo-Texts: La photographie sans appareil and Un monde qui ressemble au monde As mentioned earlier, Macé only took up the camera in 1996, but since then he has been extraordinarily active with it. His most recent bibliographer lists ten books containing his photographs, to which a 2011 publication, La Couleur est un trompe-l’œil, must now be added. Many of these are short books containing two

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to six photographs, luxury editions with an extremely small circulation, and both the photographs and the texts usually reappear elsewhere.32 In this chapter I will therefore only discuss the five main books of photographs, which are La photographie sans appareil, Un monde qui ressemble au monde, Mirages et solitudes, Éthiopie, le livre et l’ombrelle, and La Couleur est un trompe-l’œil. The first two intersperse photographs and text, and will be analysed in this section: the latter three, arranged in a more classical fashion with photographs and texts set out separately from each other, will be discussed in the following section. La photographie sans appareil starts with a brief introduction, followed by a series of photographs interspersed with a text which is not descriptive of the photographs, but about the medium of photography: it also situates the photographing self in relation to the photographs themselves. In this sense the work might be said to be both self-ref lexive and structurally autobiographical. In the introduction, Macé tells us that Depuis toujours ou presque, je pratiquais la photographie sans appareil. [...] cette curieuse façon, maniaque mais esthétique, de découper le réel sans laisser de traces; [...] d’encadrer un paysage en disposant partout des fenêtres et des miroirs, ou de leur équivalent mental; de cerner le réel comme le ferait un vitrail, mais en effaçant les couleurs pour mieux mettre en relief l’éphémère construction des lumières et des ombres. Bref, les mille et une façons d’échapper au chaos des impressions visuelles, ce qui revient à faire du temps une succession d’images impossibles à fixer.33 [From the very beginning or almost, I have been taking photographs without a camera [...] this strange habit, maniacal but aesthetic, of cutting out the real without leaving any marks; of framing a landscape by putting windows and mirrors everywhere, or their mental equivalent; of surrounding the real as a stained-glass window might, but removing the colours to bring out better the ephemeral construction of light and shadow. In short, the thousand and one ways of escaping from the chaos of visual impressions, which is the same thing as making of time a succession of images that are impossible to freeze.]

This explanation of what ‘taking photographs without a camera’ means for Macé translates directly into an accurate description of the kinds of photographs that are contained in this book: many feature ref lections and shadows, although there are no actual mirrors (of which there are many more in Mirages et solitudes).34 It is also an intriguing account of what photographic vision is for Macé, particularly useful because he concentrates on the act of seeing photographically, without a camera. For Macé, taking photographs without a camera is to frame reality (‘découper le réel’, ‘cerner le réel’) and to reproduce it in black and white in order to bring out ‘l’éphémère construction des lumières et des ombres’, the ultimate result being to tame the ‘chaos des impressions visuelles’ that constitutes our day-to-day experience. Such a framing, taming exercise must, by definition, be completely personal, and the photographs and text which follow all testify to an individual vision which is revealing of Macé’s self at a structural level. The photographs are also autobiographical at another level in that many of them are obviously from his travels: they are not exactly holiday snaps, but the fact that the captions, listed at the back of the book, are all place names proves that their locations are an important

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Fig. 4.1. Gérard Macé, untitled (cover image) in La photographie sans appareil, © Gérard Macé

element of their identity. Like his texts, these photographs transport the viewer to distant places, indeed to the same distant places, for instance to the Egypt so familiar to us from and through his writings on Champollion. One of the first thoughts on photography to follow the introduction takes us back to the characteristic which photography shares with dreaming, its power to transform reality: Témoignage ou miracle, [...] la photographie emprunte à la réalité ou la révèle, la restitue plus ou moins fidèlement ou la fait exister pour la première fois. (PhSA, 20) [A witness account or a miracle, [...] photography borrows from reality or reveals it, restores it more or less faithfully or makes it exist for the first time.]

The photograph on the front cover (figure 4.1) — the shadow of half of a reclining figure, projected onto a wooden fence — is a case in point. The top of the fence ends just before the top of the figure’s head, but the figure is saved from having the top of her head sliced off by the fortuitous presence of a roof behind the fence: although it is on a different plane, quite a few metres behind the fence, on the f lat

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surface of the photograph it appears directly above the head and gives it a crownlike pate. Clearly this arrangement of reality must have existed for the photograph to have been taken, but it is also an image that only became possible because the photographer was standing at exactly the right place for the shadow’s head to match the width of the roof, his camera poised at precisely the correct angle and height: a few centimetres in the wrong direction would have unmade the image instantly. This is a photograph, in other words, which borrows its elements from reality but also transforms them into something new, captures and reveals an image that was only precariously there: indeed, it might be said to have created it, made it ‘exister pour la première fois’ as an image. The vision of the photographer, in other words, is paramount, and the self taking the photograph is crucial to its existence. The same can be said of the two ‘torso’ photographs on pages 16 and 17, showing the torsos of a crucified Christ and of a person holding a bunch of radishes and some f lowers. Both clearly have their models in reality, but as images they only exist because of the photographer’s idiosyncratic vision: the framing of the crucified figure from his chest down to his feet, with several trees and a house on different planes in the foggy riverside background, and of the human figure attired incongruously in a thin cotton garment reminiscent of a nightdress or smock against the background of a cold-looking river sparsely lined with trees, are inseparable from the photographer’s particular vision, his ‘spotting’ of an image latent in reality as Michelangelo is said to have spotted the statue latent in a block of marble. The framing which is so crucial to the structure of each of these images, however, is teasingly undermined by their placement on facing pages at exactly the same height. The two photographs being the same shape and size, the tree in the background of the photograph on the right seems to extend its branches into the top right-hand corner of the photograph on the left, thus effectively eliminating the frames (and the spine of the book) that separate the two images. Similarly, the rivers blend into one, the fog obscuring the background in the photograph on the left is echoed by the deliberately blurred focus of the photograph on the right. Thus the two images are framed a second time as the photographer, now turned editor, repositions them to create a single image across the two pages.35 The commentary running alongside the photographs of this volume also empha­ sizes the presence of the photographer behind the photographs. ‘L’instant décisif n’est pas l’effet du hasard’ [the decisive moment is not the result of chance] (PhSA, 39), he writes, attributing agency to the moment of creation famously described by Cartier-Bresson, and reminds us how ‘choisir est la première opération du style, et dans le plaisir de cadrer il y a le plaisir d’organiser ce qui est informe, d’arrêter ce qui fuit dans tous les sens. En un mot de donner une ossature à la réalité’ [to choose is the first operation of style, and in the pleasure of framing there is the pleasure of organizing what is formless, of stopping that which f lees in all directions. In a word, to give bone structure to reality] (PhSA, 40). Macé’s frames do organize and give structure (‘une ossature’) to reality, but they do not, crucially, imprison their subjects. I have written elsewhere about Macé’s framing style in Un monde qui ressemble au monde, and some of what I see in that book applies here also: in the photographs immediately following the above quotation, for instance, where

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repetitive subjects are photographed. The tranquil image of a forest whose trees extend beyond the frame (PhSA, 43), the view of the baskets piled up vertically next to an open door (PhSA, 41), the f lock of sheep pushing outwards towards a slightly curved horizon (PhSA, 45): all of these images, whilst being striking shots in themselves, suggest a beyondness, the hors-champ,36 which works directly against the panoramic, dominating vision of the typical landscape photographer. The trees in the forest extend not only to the left and right of the frame; they are also ref lected in the water in the foreground, so stretch out downwards: their foliage is cut off near the top of the picture, which encourages the eye to follow them upwards into an imagined space. In the second photograph, the same vertical effect is achieved by the bundles of long, stalk-like vegetation f lanking the doorway; and the baskets, because they are all the same, create an effect of repetition which also entices the viewer’s eye upwards. Moreover, the door is open, and although the space revealed within is far from infinite — it opens onto a wall — the extra depth nonetheless gives a further dimension to the space. As for the sheep in the third photograph, the movement of the f lock creates a gentle curve which replaces the f lat horizon, inducing a slight dizziness and sense of momentum which, again, goes against any sense of enclosure or domination. Macé’s frames do function to delimit the space of the photograph, but they also manage to avoid being too obviously dominant. In one of his comments, Macé suggests that it is not only the structure of the photographs that reveal his self, but their ‘light’: la photographie [...] enregistre les variations de la lumière, qui correspondent presque toujours à un climat mental. (PhSA, 31) [photography [...] registers the variations of light, which almost always correspond to a mental climate.]

This would seem to be an instance of Macé finding in the external world something that was already inside him, ‘reconnaître et de saisir au vol les images qu’on portait en soi’ [to recognize and seize as they f ly past images that were already in me] (PhSA, 11). There is even more of the photographer, this time as a subject, to be seen in the final photograph of the volume, which shows the shadow of the photographer between the taller shadows of two trees on either side of him: his left arm is raised and curved in towards his face, presumably supporting the camera as the right hand presses the button. It is a self-conscious choice of final photograph, and functions as a sort of signature, a good-bye f lourish which contradicts, humorously, the final words of the text: On n’a pas besoin de photographier depuis longtemps pour éprouver, devant certaines images qu’on a prises et qui sont autant de preuves en main, l’étonnement d’avoir été là. Photographier, c’est s’entraîner à l’absence, mais en laissant des traces. (PhSA, 48) [There is no need to have been photographing for a long time to feel, when faced with certain pictures that you have taken and which are like concrete proof, astonished to have been there. To photograph is to prepare yourself for absence, but by leaving traces.]

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All photographs denote both presence and absence, but the photographer, as the creator of the photograph, experiences this from the slightly different perspective. If I look at a holiday snapshot of myself in an exotic location, I see proof of my presence in that place, but am also reminded of my current absence from that place. We saw how Guibert used this effect to suggest both his survival and his death in his last photographs: as discussed in chapter 1, the presence/absence dialectic applies as much to the Operator as to the subject of the photograph.37 The photographer does not (necessarily) see himself in the photograph, but remembers having ‘been there’ in the moment of its creation; the photograph is the ‘trace’ of his passage, ‘autant de preuves en main’. The notion of proof is reminiscent of Ernaux’s desire for photography to authenticate presence; or, if proof at that level is not forthcoming, the photograph can at least be, for both Ernaux and Macé, a trace of their passage as creators of the photograph.38 In the case of Macé, it also shows him the time and distance that separate him from that place. To do this repeatedly must indeed have a sort of training effect: ‘photographier, c’est s’entraîner à l’absence, mais en laissant des traces’. The final photograph is then something of a double ‘trace’ of the photographer to conclude the series: it captures the moment of creation, the actual taking of the photograph, but the creating self is represented by nothing more concrete than its own shadow.39 Un monde qui ressemble au monde is another photo-text based on Macé’s travels, this time to Japan, where he tours the temple gardens of Kyoto.40 I have written in some detail about this text elsewhere, so will limit myself here to focusing on how the photographer-writer’s self is revealed through both the text and photographs of this fascinating travelogue through space and time.41 Un monde qui ressemble au monde conducts its reader through various famous temple gardens in Kyoto, describing their origins and the fortunes of those who designed them and retired to them, usually after distinguished careers as warriors or bonzes. The text of this work is very different from that of La photographie sans appareil: it is manifestly about the gardens and their histories, a voyage through time and space, rather than about photography or the photographer. Indeed Macé himself, in the form of the ‘je’, only appears at the start and end of the book, although the framing of the photographs certainly betrays his non-dominating but nevertheless structuring presence throughout.42 These two appearances, however, are crucial: they structure both the book and his voyage, from his mother’s work table all the way to Japan and back to his childhood garden, and thence to the very beginnings of his existence on earth. The link between the gardens and Macé’s childhood is first made at the start of the text, through the evocation of a miniature object that contains a large space, the ‘jardin japonais’ of his mother:43 C’est grâce à cet objet [le jardin japonais], en apparence insignifiant, que le Japon associé aux jardins est entré dans mon imaginaire. [...] C’est encore cet objet qui m’a donné à mon insu la conviction qu’un espace immense peut tenir dans le creux de la main: bien avant d’avoir [...] lu que ‘dans le monde, tout ressemble au monde’, selon la formule laconique et vertigineuse de Marcel Granet. (Un monde, 7, 9)

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[It is thanks to this object (the Japanese garden), apparently insignificant, that Japan associated with gardens entered into my imagination. [...] It is also this object that gave me, without my knowing it, the conviction that an immense space can be held in the hollow of a hand: a long time before reading that ‘in the world, everything looks like the world’, according to the laconic and vertigoinducing words of Marcel Granet.]

Like Proust’s madeleine, the miniature ‘jardin japonais’ contains the whole of Macé’s early childhood, which in turn contains the source of his interest in Japan, which is of course the starting point for his travels to the gardens of Kyoto. Indeed Macé’s whole trip to Kyoto is, narratively speaking, embedded in this original space, the maternal space evoked by Macé’s memory of his mother’s working table. Furthermore, the maternal space from which Macé sets off towards Japan is also his final destination: in travelling so far away, from France to Kyoto, he is in fact travelling homewards from the very beginning. The only other reference to the mother in this text occurs in its final pages when the narrator is returning to France: but his return journey takes him not only through space, but also through time. For the final paragraph of the text leads us not just back to Europe, but to childhood and beyond, to the womb: Puis je songerai peut-être au jardin potager d’un village en Île-de-France, qu’on arrosait le soir venu en le rejoignant par une sente étroite; presque aussi étroite que le chemin dont nous n’avons aucun souvenir, mais que nous avons dû emprunter pour venir au monde. (Un monde, 61) [I will then, perhaps, think about the vegetable garden in a village of the Îlede-France, which we went to water every evening, down a narrow path; almost as narrow as the path which we have completely forgotten, but which we must have taken to come into this world.]

Macé was born in Paris, but often visited his maternal grandparents, who lived in a little village in the Île-de-France, and the garden is clearly that of their home. As for the reference to ‘le chemin dont nous n’avons aucun souvenir’, it seems to be a reference to the very beginnings of his existence on earth. It appears clear from this that Macé’s travels in Japan as described in Un monde qui ressemble au monde have been a long journey home, back to the place of his origin, of which he has no memory: in other words, the pilgrimage to these ‘lieux de mémoire’ [places of memory] that are the gardens of Kyoto have led him back to a place beyond memory, a place he cannot take control of with his conscious mind. The writer’s preoccupation with that which is just beyond the edge of the consciousness is reminiscent of the photographer’s preoccupation with suggesting that which is just beyond the frame of his photograph: a preoccupation which resulted in a non-dominating, noncolonizing view of the Japanese gardens. In a similar way, it is possible to see how Macé here gestures towards the pre-conscious, but remains reticent on the subject precisely in order to avoid the invasion of this as yet uncharted territory by the conscious stream of thought and words. He does, however, make delicate suggestions — literary allusions — regarding the similarities between his journey through space, to Japan, and his journey through time, back into his childhood. For instance, the travels of a child returning home

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are strongly suggested by an image used at least twice by Macé when referring to his journey, both to and from Japan. This image is that of the ‘cailloux’, or pebbles: Avais-je suivi l’un de ces conseils que l’on recueille avant de partir en voyage, comme autant de cailloux blancs que l’on sème par avance sur l’itinéraire que l’on essaie de tracer? (Un monde, 12) [Had I listened to the advice that is given before you set off on your travels, like the white pebbles that you scatter in advance on the route that you are trying to trace?]

The white pebbles are of course one component of the ‘jardins secs’ that Macé will encounter in Kyoto, but here, in the context of something which is ‘semé par avance sur l’itinéraire’, they clearly constitute a reference to the story of ‘le petit poucet’, one of Charles Perrault’s most famous fairy tales. ‘Le petit poucet’ and his numerous brothers are taken away into a forest during a period of famine by their loving but poverty-stricken parents to reduce the number of mouths they have to feed, and left there to die. But the first time that this happens, the small but intelligent boy ‘avait laissé tomber le long du chemin les petits cailloux blancs qu’il avait dans ses poches’, in order to be able to find his way home: and indeed the white pebbles, shining in the moonlight, guide him and his brothers back to their house.44 In other words, the child drops the pebbles as they go forward, so that he will be able to find his way back. In a similar fashion, Macé ‘sème par avance [de cailloux blancs] sur l’itinéraire que l’on essaie de tracer’: the reference to the pebbles gives the reader an early hint that this route, wherever it is to take the traveller, will eventually turn out to be a route back to his origins. The final pages of the text contain an especially interesting textual use of a Japanese garden technique which was discussed earlier, and shown in one of the photographs. This technique is explained by Macé with reference to a particular temple and its garden: Entsu-ji est l’exemple parfait (unique assure-t-on sur place) de ce que les Japonais résument par la notion de shakkei, autrement dit le jeu entre le proche et le lointain, grâce à une vue choisie sur la nature environnante, qui semble être née pour produire un effet de l’art. Et de fait, au-dessus d’une haie tout en longueur se détache la silhouette du mont le plus proche, verdâtre ou bleutée suivant l’heure. (Un monde, 42) [Entsu-ji is the perfect example (unique, they tell you there) of what the Japanese understand by the notion of shakkei, in other words the play between the near and the far, thanks to a view chosen from the surrounding nature, which seems to have been tailor-made to produce an artistic effect. And in fact, above the full length of a hedge the silhouette of the nearest mountain is clearly to be seen.]

Shakkei literally means ‘borrowed view’; a view, in this case of the mountain, around which the garden is constructed so that it will lend itself to becoming part of the garden. In reality, of course, the mountain is much bigger than the garden, so the fact is that while it might seem to be a ‘perfect fit’, the viewer is looking at something that goes far beyond the frame of the garden. A shakkei, in other words, invites the viewer to look and think beyond the view before him, an effect which

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is frequently used in Macé’s photographs. The photograph on the front cover of La photographie sans appareil might be described, humorously, as making use of a shakkei effect. It is of course the perfect technique for a photographer, whose act reduces three-dimensional spaces to two-dimensional ones. At the end of the book, we find Macé the writer borrowing the technique of shakkei — or the photographic version of it — from Macé the photographer, by superimposing a number of kami into a composite photograph: ‘le kami de la montagne du premier plan, de la montagne du second plan, de la montagne de l’arrière-plan; le kami de la montagne boisée, celui du pied de la montagne’ [the kami of the mountain in the foreground, those of the mountain in the middle distance, and those of the mountain in the background; the kami of the wooded mountain, and those of the foot of the mountain]. Kami are the gods of Shintoism, perhaps closer to spirits than to gods in the Western sense, spirits dwelling in natural phenomena (such as fire, rocks, thunder, and so on) as part of a pantheist universe. It is therefore fitting that they should be ascribed to mountains, but the mountains on multiple planes make us think, naturally, of the example of the shakkei garden of Entsuji. The multiplication of ‘plans’, in narrative form, also has the effect of transforming space into time, for it is here that the white pebbles reappear, transformed into kami, and he will be following them back to France: Sur la route du retour ou plutôt dans le chemin des airs, ce seront les kami mes cailloux blancs, puisqu’on trouve un peu partout ces dieux qui se moquent de la profusion comme des lacunes: le kami du feu pour commencer, puis le kami tranchant de la roche et celui qui tranche la racine; le kami du tonnerre et celui des siff lements; [...] le kami du long chemin et celui du laps de temps; [...] Ce seront les kami mes cailloux blancs, et les noms des temples que je réciterai pour m’en souvenir comme autant de formules magiques, ouvrant sur des espaces qu’on croit avoir rêvés autant qu’on les a vus: Shisendô, Entsû-ji, Ryôan-ji. (Un monde, 57, 61) [On the way back, or rather on the airborne route, my white pebbles will be the kami, since these gods, who are as scornful of profusion as they are of lacunae, are to be found more or less everywhere: the kami of fire to start off with, then the rock-splitting kami and the root-splitting one; the kami of thunder and those of whistling; [...] the kami of the long route and the kami of lapses in time; [...] the kami will be my white pebbles, and the names of the temples that I will recite in order to remember them like so many magic words, opening onto spaces that you feel you have dreamed as much as that you have seen them; Shisendô, Entsû-ji, Ryôan-ji.]

Both pebbles and gods are benevolent entities who will guide Macé back home, together with the reader, for given that there are kami at every stage — ‘le kami de la montagne du premier plan, de la montagne du second plan, de la montagne de l’arrière-plan’ — the reader follows them from plane to plane, travelling further and further back into time and into the picture composed of photographic images superimposed on one another, which taken as a whole forms an image of Macé’s self over time.

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Mirages et solitudes, Éthiopie, le livre et l’ombrelle, and La Couleur est un trompe-l’œil In this section I group together those of Macé’s books in which text and photographs are kept separate from each other, as opposed to those more integrated photo-texts such as La photographie sans appareil and Un monde qui ressemble au monde. Here too I will discuss one unpublished photograph belonging to Macé’s collection which I have been privileged to see, and which supports my arguments concerning Macé’s self-positioning through the media of photography and text. Mirages et solitudes45 contains thirty-three photographs, mostly of non-human subjects, followed by fifteen pages of ‘légendes’: some of these consist simply of place names followed by a date, and others stretch to several paragraphs or even pages. The epigraphs, both from Plato, describe perfectly the kind of photographs which make up the bulk of the collection: ‘J’appelle images en premier lieu les ombres, ensuite les ref lets dans l’eau, ainsi que les ref lets sur des corps opaques, lisses et brillants.’ Platon, La République [‘I shall call images, first of all, shadows, then ref lections in water, as well as ref lections on opaque bodies, smooth and shiny.’ Plato, The Republic] ‘Par images, nous comprenons évidemment les images des eaux et des miroirs, les images peintes ou gravées, et toutes les autres de la même espèce.’ Platon, Le Sophiste [‘I take to mean by images, evidently, images on water and in mirrors, painted or engraved images, and all others of the same kind’. Plato, The Sophist]

These photographs are precisely of the kind that Plato calls images: ref lections of the street on shop windows, mirrors, still puddles doubling a cityscape, pictures, and paintings. Here we see the one type of photograph which, although described in La photographie sans appareil, was not exemplified in that volume, created by framing ‘un paysage en disposant partout des fenêtres et des miroirs, ou de leur équivalent mental’. There were no such photographs in the earlier collection, but Mirages et solitudes contains a large number of shots of ref lective surfaces of various kinds. These photographs also practise shakkei as described in Un monde qui ressemble au monde, although in a manner adapted for the camera. The first part of the collection contains a series of photographs in which, using mirrors and ref lective shop windows, images from the other side of the road are ‘borrowed’ and embedded into the original image to form a layered, trompe-l’oeil effect (photos 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11); in other cases, a semi-transparent window allows a drawing on the window to be superimposed onto the scene inside (photo 6). The result is a series of images that seem to be full of different angles, ref lections, and originals needing to be distinguished and deciphered. It is as if the kami from Un monde qui ressemble au monde, ‘qui se moquent de la profusion comme des lacunes’, have elected to side with profusion. And of course, as with the photograph on the front cover of La photographie sans appareil in which a shadow projected onto a fence appears to be crowned by a roof, these photographs are clearly creations of the photographer’s vision: they are consciously constructed images, their angles, frames and lighting chosen expressly to obtain the desired effect.

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The aesthetic of profusion can perhaps be explained by returning to the equivalence between photography and dream for Macé, elaborated as early as La Mémoire aime chasser dans le noir. Macé, who has both written and said that ‘je rêve réveillé’ [I dream whilst awake],46 holds that dreams are an integral part of reality. He believes reality is much richer and more fantastical than we normally give it credit for. One way to suggest this in an image would be to add hitherto unsuspected dimensions and unusual angles to reality using mirrors and ref lections, as Macé writes in the caption to photograph 26: Le monde des apparences étant propice aux paradoxes, il nous semble que la réalité existerait un peu moins si nous n’étions capables de la retourner pour voir son envers et ses doubles, dans les miroirs, les images de rêve et les f laques d’eau: autant de phénomènes passagers, d’apparitions éphémères qui fixent l’attention en déplaçant son objet, exactement comme la métaphore allume des ref lets dans le langage, provoquant une vibration autour des choses qui leur donne une aura. [The world of appearances being propitious to paradox, it seems to me that reality would exist a little less if we were not capable of turning it over to see its other side, its doubles, in mirrors, dreams, and puddles: so many passing phenomena, ephemeral apparitions that catch your attention by displacing its object, exactly as metaphor lights up ref lections in language, provoking a vibration around things and giving them an aura.]

Macé is not Plato: he is committed to the world of phenomena, of illusion, as the only one to which we have direct access and the one for which we appear to have been designed, given the panoply of our senses. In these photographs he is keen to introduce us to the joys of illusion, to remind us to revel in multiple viewpoints of reality ‘pour voir son envers et ses doubles, dans les miroirs, les images de rêve et les f laques d’eau’. It is in the individual’s power to view the world — and, as we will see, to read the world — creatively and idiosyncratically. These photographs are the products of Macé’s personal attempts to capture proliferating moments in reality. Mirrors and ref lective glass surfaces are not the only way in which other worlds are added to the immediate present in these photographs, and this is suggested by the order in which they appear in the volume. The first sequence of photographs discussed earlier, which are mainly structured around ref lective glass surfaces, is followed by another sequence, this time of mannequins and humanoid figures (photos 15–22). The sequence begins with photograph 15, showing a pair of headless, partially clothed mannequins incongruously left standing on a pavement in Barcelona. Photo 16 is of the ‘salle des pendus’ in the old mining area of SaintÉtienne, where we see several sets of miners’ clothes hanging from the ceiling; photo 17 shows a street in Yemen where a line of six burkas, hanging out to dry, hovers above the figure of a woman in an identical burka returning home from her shopping. Photo 18 is a strange, anthropomorphic figure draped in a paintbespattered white cloth. Photo 19 shows another hooded figure, from a completely different context and continent: a man sitting reading his newspaper in a Kyoto café, his profile completely obscured by a towel he is wearing under his straw hat to protect himself from the sun. And photo 20, bringing us back to Barcelona, shows a

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man lying on the pavement, wrapped up in a white curtain; it is not possible to tell from the photograph whether he is asleep or dead, although the caption informs us that he was — at least at the time the photograph was taken — alive. Real or simulacrum, dead or alive? This sequence of hooded or partially obscured figures allows the viewer to share the photographer’s ambivalent gaze, to delight in the multiple possibilities offered by both the shots and their sequence. The photograph of the man on the Barcelona pavement is followed by two more photographs of some life-size mannequins in the same city. Macé has always been attracted to dolls and mannequins,47 and here he takes various shots of a pile of unfortunate humanoid figures left out on the pavement in Barcelona: they seem to be related to the mannequins of photograph 15, but these later ones are scattered across the pavement in painful-looking poses (photos 21 and 22). The similarity between the living man who looks dead and the lifeless but lifelike mannequins, at the end of this series of figures whose humanity is obscured or ambiguous, foregrounds one of photography’s magical powers: its distancing, f lattening effect which confuses the distinction between the quick and the dead, which is ‘ce qui nous fascine dans la photographie’ [what fascinates us in photography]. The next two photographs, 24 and 25, are a pair of seascapes. The first is actually a desert scene from Yemen, in which the curves traced in the sand by the wind resemble uncannily the surface of the sea, and the second is a shot of a woman standing in front of a seascape painted on a wall: the illusory effect of the waves threatening to engulf the woman is demystified by the outline of a door, clearly visible on the left-hand side of the seascape. In other words, the desert suggesting the sea is a real scene suggestive of a completely opposite identity, and the second is a simulacrum: Macé’s photographs, being copies of both, are three times removed, to paraphrase Plato, from the originals. Plato would no doubt have disapproved of photography, says Macé, but it might have offered him one consolation: Si Platon avait connu la photographie, il n’y aurait sans doute vu que des images sans consistance, [...] mais peut-être aussi le moyen de réconcilier, en une fraction de seconde, l’imitation de l’apparence et l’imitation de la réalité qu’il oppose dans La République: l’art de fabriquer un simulacre et l’art de fabriquer une copie, qu’il oppose dans Le Sophiste. Car le vrai privilège de la photographie, c’est de faire les deux à la fois. [If Plato had known of photography, he would no doubt have seen nothing but images with no consistency, [...] but perhaps also a way of reconciling, in the fraction of a second, the imitation of appearance and the imitation of reality that he sets against each other in The Republic: the art of creating a simulacrum and the art of creating a copy, that he sets against each other in The Sophist. For photography’s real privilege is to do both at the same time.]

The seascapes, the one an illusion and the other a simulacrum, are followed by four more mirror shots: a whole street ref lected on the mirror surface of a building in Barcelona; restaurant tables clad in immaculate tablecloths which seem to f loat on a Paris pavement; two urban ref lections in puddles, one of which does not include the original; and a shop window containing mirrors and glass objects.

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Fig. 4.2. Gérard Macé, untitled (photo 23) in Mirages et solitudes, © Gérard Macé

The final photograph in the book features shadows, and as such will be discussed in conjunction with the photograph which comes immediately before the seascapes, a real masterpiece of planes, shadows and self-writing (or viewing). Taken in Tunisia, photo 23 (figure 4.2) shows a white wall on which we see the shadows of half a tree, the railing of a terrace, and a man standing against the railing who appears to be holding a machine gun. The wall ends half-way up the picture, which is why we only see half of the tree’s shadow: above and beyond the wall is the roof of the building of which the white wall is a part, and further back on another plane is a grey wall. The f latness of the photographic medium makes this play of different planes and angles resemble an abstract painting, especially in the top half of the picture. The bottom half is more emotionally involving. It is difficult to tell the direction of the gunman’s gaze; the angle of his head seems to indicate that he is looking outwards from the terrace. But where then is the photographer? On close examination, one can see the shadow of a roundish object right at the bottom of the photograph: it might be the shadow of a head, and if it is, its owner looks to be standing several metres behind — judging from its size — the man with the gun. Has the gunman noticed him? Might he, in fact, be looking at him at the moment the photograph is being taken, rather than being preoccupied with whatever lies beyond the terrace? The interplay of shadows sets off an unsettling train of thoughts, a narrative which continues even as we refer back to the caption. The caption to this photograph, typically, has nothing to do directly with the subject of the image:

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As we imagine the young woman tracing the shadow of her beloved, we realize that we have been engaged in a comparable activity, attempting to read the play of the shadows whilst worrying for the safety of the photographer. When I interviewed Macé in 2009, he described ‘images’ as being, amongst other things, ‘quelque chose qui provoque la pensée, [...] quelque chose sur quoi on peut revenir, qu’on n’a jamais fini d’interpréter’ [something that provokes thought, [...] something that you can think about again and again, that you never stop interpreting].48 This photograph does exactly that to the viewer, on a very practical level (is the photographer safe?), as well as at the more structural level of sorting out the ‘real’ from what seems abstract in the image as a whole. The final photograph of the volume (figure 4.3) is reminiscent of the final photo of La photographie sans appareil in that it consists of shadows, one of whom is the photographer. This time there are several figures, four of whom are in the fore­ ground, standing on the edge of a cliff: their shadows are projected onto the rough terrain below. The two smaller, clearer shadows — that is to say, the ones belonging to the people standing closest to the edge — are also the most centrally positioned and interesting. One of them has f lung out his arm in a dramatic gesture, pointing it at the other, whose pose — arms bunched up and holding something close to his face — singles him out clearly as the photographer. Like the final photograph in La photographie sans appareil, this shot offers a slightly tongue-in-cheek ending to Mirages et solitudes. One shadow presents the photographer’s shadow to us with a f lourish, and we are left facing the shadow — at the end of a volume which has told us that photography originated from shadows — of the originator of the photograph we are looking at, and who has inscribed himself onto its surface. Mirages et solitudes shares the same aesthetic as Macé’s only collection of colour photographs to date, La couleur est un trompe-l’œil (2011). For this reason, I will discuss these photographs before proceeding to Éthiopie, le livre et l’ombrelle, although this black-and-white collection was published earlier, in 2006. Éthiopie is also a collection which is mostly comprised of photographs of people, unlike the other collections we have considered thus far, which is another reason to treat it separately. La couleur est un trompe-l’œil49 is a collection of colour photographs taken by Macé over the course of several years, 2007–10. The photographs on the front and back covers, and on the pages de garde, were also shown in Paris, at the Galérie Médiane, in 2009. They show a series of buildings on the boulevard du Nord at Erevan,

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Fig. 4.3. Gérard Macé, untitled (photo 33) in Mirages et solitudes, © Gérard Macé

partially covered by huge tarpaulins, on which are painted life-size images of what the buildings will look like when they have been renovated. These photographs set the tone for the rest of the collection; they are all images in which there is some level of optical illusion at work. There are photographs of paintings, usually of street art, which allows for some interference from the animate world to break the frame: a chicken walking in front of a painting on a wall in Cameroon; a street painting with a real tree growing next to it in New York; and on the facing page, the painting of a tree on a wall in Valenciennes against which real bushes are f lowering. There are photographs which experiment with scale, making cracks in the pavement into huge gullies, or the mossy surface of a Scottish tombstone into a Klee painting: ‘j’ai joué avec les changements d’échelle et la couleur’ (La Couleur, 11) [I played around with changes in scale and colour]. There are also a number of photographs taken through viscous media, such as water, rain-bespattered glass, steamed up or dirty window panes, as well as ref lections on water or irregular mirroring surfaces. Georges Monti’s preface emphasizes Macé’s predilection for these illusory effects, but maintains that he delights in them as a ‘trompé’ [someone who is tricked], not a ‘trompeur’ [a trickster] (La Couleur, 5). A willing participant in these tricks offered to the eye by reality, the photographer — according to Monti — is ‘comme le rêveur saisi au réveil par une sensation d’évidence, avant le retour à l’ordinaire des jours’ [like the dreamer, seized upon awaking by a feeling of proof, just before the return to the everday] (La Couleur, 7). Monti writes that colour has not changed Macé’s method, but enhanced it: colour itself functions as a ‘trompe-l’oeil’ effect, as the title suggests. It is certainly the case that Macé’s aesthetic of profusion described

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earlier, which leads him to capture several realities in one image, comes into its own in many of these photographs: the shots of Erevan, where the tarpaulin paintings offer the viewer a trompe-l’œil in both time and space, are a perfect illustration of the thickness of real surfaces. In his own preface to the collection, Macé emphasizes the fact that these images are real: J’ai réellement vu les images que je propose ici. Elles étaient toutes prêtes, il suffisait de les cueillir. Je veux dire par là qu’elles ne sont jamais le résultat de collages, de superpositions, encore moins d’un travail à l’ordinateur. On s’en passe d’ailleurs fort bien, car la réalité est généreuse, et se prête souvent à la transformation d’une vue en image, pourvu que l’esprit soit préparé. (La Couleur, 11) [I really saw the images that I offer here. They were all ready, all I had to do was to pick them up. By that, I mean that they are never the result of collage, of superimpositions, even less of work on the computer. There is no need for that anyway, for reality is generous, and often lends herself to the transformation of a view into an image, provided that the mind is ready.]

In this description of his method, Macé downplays his agency, but we must not forget that as with his earlier, black-and-white photographs, what reality offers is still framed and rearranged by his personal vision. His description of what he, the photographer, does is to perceive the existence of what he calls an image in the raw material, to see where reality generously ‘se prête [...] à la transformation d’une vue en image’. For Macé, une image est plus complexe et plus subtile que ce qu’on voit, parce que l’appareil enregistre la vie de l’esprit en même temps que le réel, et parce qu’une image digne de ce nom continue de se développer mentalement. C’est ainsi que le boulevard du Nord aujourd’hui n’est plus situé seulement à Erevan, et qu’il évoque pour moi la ville en loques dont rêvait Michaux, autant que les ruines circulaires dont parle Borges. (La Couleur, 75) [an image is more complex and more subtle than what one sees, because the camera records the life of the spirit at the same time as reality, and because an image deserving of its name continues to develop in your mind. That is the reason why the boulevard du Nord, today, is no longer situated just at Erevan, but evokes for me the city in ruins that Michaux dreamed of, as much as the circular ruins of which Borges speaks.]

Macé’s view of what constitutes an image here is exactly the same as his definition of it in our interview of 2009: ‘c’est quelque chose qui est construit ... quelque chose qui est de l’ordre du blason, quelque chose qui est réf léchi, qui va donner à réf léchir’ [It is something constructed ... something of the order of heraldry, something thought through, which gives one food for thought].50 The images of La Couleur est un trompe-l’œil, skilfully constructed, beguilingly surreal and provocative as they are, certainly make one think. And these thoughts tend to be meta-representational, about the relationship between reality and its particular representations of it, about the nature of the phenomenal world in which we live: it is no coincidence that Borges is invoked in Macé’s text above. Like a

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Borges tale, these photographs, taken all over the world, trigger thoughts about the nature of reality and our perception of it, through the versions of it offered to us by the photographer. Éthiopie, le livre et l’ombrelle51 is a collection of photographs Macé took in Ethiopia in 2003. Like the two books discussed previously, the photographs and texts are set out separately. The introduction, in five sections, is a personal description of his voyage in Ethiopia: this is followed by the photographs which are grouped into ‘Éthiopie sacrée’ [sacred Ethiopia] (twenty-four photographs, including the inset on the title page) and ‘Éthiopie profane’ [secular Ethiopia] (twenty-eight photographs, including the inset on the title page). There is then a section of ‘Annexes’, which comprises a map, an extremely brief chronological account of Ethiopia’s history, and a section on language, consisting mainly of photographs of some pages from a nineteenth-century French textbook of Ge’ez, one of the languages of Ethiopia. The photographs are all in black and white and are of the landscape, sites of cultural interest and cultural artefacts, but also of the people Macé encounters en route. This subject matter necessarily brings with it the issues of exoticism and exploitation, and of photographing the other, especially the cultural other. Rich white photographers have been photographing poor black Africans ever since the late nineteenth century: the earliest photographic representations of non-European peoples were produced by anthropologists soon after the invention of the daguerreotype.52 Such representations have been a crucial factor in the construction of the Western self as against the African other, and there has been much discussion of them in studies of both colonial and postcolonial discourse.53 A variety of types of photographer, such as anthropologists, professional journalists, photographers working for magazines and tourists, have brought back images of Africa for the West to consume, all of which have contributed collectively to the creation of a stereotyped image of Africa in the Western imaginary.54 There is also a more recent genre of African portrait which results directly from the explosive expansion of charitable activity in the 1980s: the photographs of African children from throughout the continent offered to us by charities and news programmes on a regular basis. Some of them are the unhappily familiar images of the consequences of disease and malnutrition, but there are also — perhaps more worryingly, ideologically speaking — the photos of smiling children presented to us by organizations such as the Red Cross, UNICEF, Save the Children, and the like.55 Such charity work and any photographic side effects it may have, however, is part of the growing globalization which is the wider context for our self–other relationships today, very different even from that which was the case only thirty or so years ago. André Rouillé, whose monumental La Photographie: entre document et art contemporain was published in 2005, discusses how photography has changed, particularly during the last decade of the twentieth century, in the context of the changing political and social circumstances of the post-communist ‘New World Order’. In that new context, as well as that of a broadly anti-representational view of the photograph — according to Rouillé, ontologically realist or at least straightforwardly representational views of photography, dating from the 1960s and 1970s, are now viewed with suspicion — the photographer is now not so much a

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hunter who ‘captures’ the image as a human subject who enters into a dialogue with his subject, another human being. In complete contrast with Guibert’s images of the photographic act as a ‘viol’ or of photographs as ‘images [...] volées’,56 Rouillé offers the possibility of a relationship of ‘l’échange, le dialogue’57 between the photographer and his subject; the position of the photographer is that of ‘l’ouverture à l’Autre’.58 Although Macé has often characterized the photographer as a hunter (most memorably in La Mémoire aime chasser dans le noir), it has always been when the prey is non-human. When faced with human, and culturally ‘other’ subjects as he is in Ethiopia, his attitude becomes noticeably more dialogic. He has spoken and written previously about the difficulties of writing about — and photographing — Africa; he has been fascinated by Africa for some time, and travels there frequently with his wife, especially to the francophone regions. In a conversation at his home in 2009, Macé told me: Je ne suis pas sûr que la photographie en Afrique, ce soit ce qu’il y a de plus intéressant. [...]. Parce que je suis attiré par l’invisible, le rapport à l’invisible, et ça ne se photographie pas... j’aime beaucoup faire parler les gens en Afrique. [I am not certain that photographing in Africa is the most interesting thing to do there. [...] I am attracted by the invisible, the relationship to that which cannot be seen, and that can’t be photographed... I like to get people talking, in Africa.]

How then should we look at these photographs from Ethiopia? After reading the introduction, for one thing: in it Macé discusses the invisible aspect of life in Ethiopia, for instance, as well as the relationship between the photographer and his models. A viewing of the photographs in the ‘Éthiopie sacrée’ section, for instance, is enriched by a knowledge of the Ethiopian belief in the ‘zars’, said to be the descendants of fifteen of Eve’s thirty children. These ‘zars’ are invisible members of the community for whom religion, and day-to-day life, must nevertheless enact special rites and make a space: La cérémonie du café elle-même, qui pourrait passer aux yeux d’un touriste distrait pour un simple réconfort, ou une curiosité locale, fait partie de ces rites propitiatoires. [...] Les grains [du café] sont alors mis dans l’eau bouillante, et la même décoction sera servie trois fois, mais on prend soin d’éclabousser le sol en faisant déborder les tasses, afin de calmer les esprits à défaut de les faire fuir. (Éthiopie, 18) [The coffee ceremony itself, which might appear to the eyes of the unsuspecting tourist as a simple comfort, or a local curiosity, is part of these propitiatory rites. [...] The coffee beans are put into boiling water, and the same brew will be served three times, but care is taken to spill the coffee onto the ground by pouring too much of it into the cups, to chase away the spirits or, failing that, to calm them.]

To be thus reminded of the existence of the invisible is a useful corrective to the dominance of the faculty of vision, in our society and of course in any photographic context. If one of Macé’s aims in his career as a photographer is to alert us to the richness of reality, with its suggestions of what lies beyond the frame, the

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unexpected possibilities afforded by trompe-l’oeil effects and the resulting thickness of an apparently two-dimensional surface, the existence of the invisible can be seen as yet another, particularly ambitious layer to add to the photographic experience. Although elsewhere in the introduction Macé tells us that he himself, not speaking any of the local languages, ‘n’a que le regard pour comprendre et pour admirer’ [can only look in order to understand and admire], here he offers his readers another level of knowledge, thus quietly distinguishing himself, too, from ‘un touriste distrait’ who might skim the surface of the ceremony as ‘un simple réconfort, ou une curiosité locale’. In another section of his introduction, Macé talks about the brief but significant relationship that is set up between the photographer and his models in Ethiopia: Et sur les routes, les regards qu’on croise, si clairs, si francs, qui illuminent les visages et créent sur l’instant une émouvante relation avec l’hôte de passage. Non qu’on lui prête les pouvoirs d’un guérisseur, même si l’on attend de lui une aumône ou des médicaments; mais on a l’habitude ici, depuis des lustres, de se regarder dans l’œil de l’autre, peut-être pour obtenir une image renouvelée de soi-même, différente ou plus fidèle. Et c’est bien ce qui se passe, quand l’autre est photographe et qu’il vous offre, avec une facilité bien proche de la magie, de fixer la rencontre d’un instant, puis d’emporter avec lui ce portrait qu’il promet de vous envoyer, pendant que vous rêvez de vous voir, revenue d’un monde si lointain, comme jamais vous ne vous étiez vue. (Éthiopie, 19–20) [And on the roads, the eyes that one meets, so clear, so frank, that light up the faces and create for an instant a moving relationship with the travelling guest. It is not that they see him as a healer, even if they expect some small change or medicines from him; but here they have an age-old custom of looking each other in the eye, perhaps in order to obtain a renewed image of oneself, different or closer to the real one. And that is exactly what happens, when the other is a photographer and he offers, with an ease that seems close to magic, to fix the meeting of an instant, then to take away with him this portrait that he promises to send you, while you dream of seeing yourself, returned from such a distant world, as you have never seen yourself before.]

This is a skilfully negotiated passage of a difficult area, which leaves the viewer reassured with regard to the intentions of the photographer, at least, although the thoughts he attributes to his models — even prefaced with the ‘peut-être’ — are more questionable: if, for instance, the Ethiopians have a tradition of looking each other directly in the eyes, why would it be because they want, more than any other race that is, to ‘obtenir une image renouvelée de soi-même, différente ou plus fidèle’? Is it not more likely to be — as indeed Macé suggests — simply because his models want some small change or medicine in exchange for being photographed? But even such a rudimentary relationship is, to quote Rouillé, one of ‘l’échange, le dialogue’, a negotiation between one human being and another, and if indeed Macé ‘aime beaucoup faire parler les gens en Afrique’, it suggests that his photographs are the result of a dialogue between the photographer and the photographed. Looking at the images in ‘Éthiopie profane’ confirms that such dialogues seem indeed to have taken place. There are a number of photographs of young men,

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several women, older men and children which have clearly been taken with permission, and often, it would seem, with pleasure on both sides; the photographs have not been captured, or stolen, by the photographer from his subject. For instance, the photographs of two women on facing pages, ‘marchande au Mercato d’Addis-Abeba’ [shopkeeper at the Addis-Ababa Market] (Éthiopie, 72) and the ‘marchande d’herbes, avec ombrelle et baluchon’ [herb seller, with umbrella and bundle] (Éthiopie, 73) show two women who have offered themselves as models with confidence and self-awareness: as a result, the shots are successful portraits of the people themselves, rather than of ‘sample Ethiopians’. The men seem similarly happy to be photographed: the raucous-looking ones in ‘groupe de jeunes hommes qui se rendent à un mariage’ [group of young men on their way to a wedding] (Éthiopie, 88) and the three moody men leaning against a bridge in ‘parapet à décor chinois, dont les éléments préfabriqués furent livrés par la Chine à l’Éthiopie, sous la dictature de Mengistu’ [Chinese-style parapet, whose prefabricated parts were delivered to Ethiopia from China, under the dictatorship of Mengistu] (Éthiopie, 91) are clearly not new to being photographed and certainly do not look as if they want anything in return. Even when the subject is not looking at the photographer, ‘ “feed-back” — ‘the photographer’s version of the anthropologist’s “loop”, whereby the image is agreed with its human subject’59 — is in evidence. These shots are comparable to Guibert’s photographs of his friends: there is a visible relationship of trust between the photographer and the photographed, and as such the photographs witness to the humanity of both parties involved. The photographs of the children are also, overall, reassuring from this perspective. The three teenage girls (Éthiopie, 69) who have stopped to oblige the photographer are clearly full of mischief and enjoying their experience: the boys in ‘boutique d’un tailleur, aux environs de Hausien’ [a tailor’s shop, near Hausien] are staring directly and smilingly into the objective, with no fear, embarrassment, or coyness.60 The ‘jeune pâtre’ [the young shepherd] (Éthiopie, 77) is unsmiling, but he again stares directly at the camera, his confidence perhaps stemming from his possession of a stick, a symbol both of his profession and his masculinity.61 The only photograph I personally find a little difficult to look at without wondering about power relationships is that of a young girl standing under a ‘faux bananier’ [false banana tree] (Éthiopie, 87). Her features and expression seem rather adult for her size: is she twelve? Thirteen? There is a little half-smile on her face as she looks directly into the camera: there are f lies around her beautiful dark eyes, and small holes in her well-worn T-shirt. Perhaps it is these signs of poverty and lack of hygiene that make this portrait more unsettling than the others, because they make the viewer think — involuntarily — of the countless similar images of poor African children that exist in the Western imaginary. (The conjuring up of this context — which is no more than the recognition of a resemblance, in a sense — is perhaps why the publisher has chosen this image as one of the few which also feature on bookmarks produced as part of their marketing strategies.) Perhaps it is also because the girl is not doing anything in particular, unlike the models in some of the photographs described above: she is simply posing for the photographer, which puts her into a position of passivity. The unease of the viewer may also be a direct result of the unease of

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the photographer: from his awareness of the huge chasm between his world and hers, his comparative wealth and her relative indigence, which forms part of the presence of his ‘self ’ in the photograph. If he is uneasy, the caption would seem to offer proof of it: ‘près de Wondo Genet, au sud d’Addis-Abeba. L’arbre est un faux bananier (l’ensète), dont on fait une pâte consommée sous forme de pain, de bouillie et de galette. Avec les fibres, torsadées et tisses, on fabrique des nattes’ [near Wondo Genet, south of Addis-Ababa. The tree is a false banana (enset), from which a paste is made and eaten in the form of bread, gruel, and biscuit. The fibres are twisted and woven, to make mats]. Why does it make no reference to the model? It is as if the vulnerability of the young girl — and, correspondingly, of the photographer — has been captured in this particular photograph: she is quintessentially vulnerable to exploitation, whether or not she is being exploited, and he, vulnerable to accusations of exploitation. The offer of this ethical uneasiness, without apology or theorized solution, is what I find most valuable about this photograph, as well as its bold conjuring up of other contexts in which an attenuated form of exploitation — of the kind that occurs in charity posters, for instance — might be said to be taking place.62 I shall end with the description of an unpublished photograph that I have been privileged to see, taken by Macé in 2009 in North Cameroon and one of his favourites (figure 4.4). It shows, in black and white, an extraordinary scene of drying python skins: hung out vertically on washing lines, like wide ribbons they curl gently, as if to put on display both their patterned fronts and white backs. From between two skins, a boy of about seven or eight has suddenly emerged: he is smiling or perhaps saying something, happy to have been brought unexpectedly into the photographer’s space. Macé told me that the appearance of the boy was a complete surprise. He has been preparing to take a photograph of the drying skins, and the boy had suddenly surfaced from between them. It was the offer of a perfect moment, and Macé seized it: the result is a brilliant shot, the curves of the boy’s body echoed by the curling skins, the incongruousness of the situation captured with complete naturalness thanks to the unstaged expression of the boy. Because of its spontaneity, it is a completely different kind of photograph from the ones in La couleur est un trompe-l’œil: it is obviously more like the images in Éthiopie, but particularly notable for the way in which it has captured an chance encounter. Some of Macé’s best photographs are the ones which look most like snapshots, which contain the shared awareness of a special moment, ‘le moment décisif ’ for the photographer but also for the model: a moment of playfulness, a gratuitous gift from the gods, for the two human beings involved. This sense of equality that holds between the two agents — albeit for a moment — is what makes this a sublime photograph, an ‘image’: Car l’image est plus élaborée que le réel. Au lieu que la photographie de quelque chose qui semble joli donnera éventuellement une reproduction plate. Donc une image c’est d’une autre nature ... Il y a une sublimation du réel, comme dans tout l’art, et j’y tiens beaucoup.63 [For the image is more elaborate than the real. Instead of which a photograph of something which seems pretty will later end up as a f lat reproduction. The image is of a different nature ... It is a sublimation of reality, as with all art, and that is what I want.]

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Fig. 4.4. Gérard Macé, untitled, unpublished photo, © Gérard Macé

Neither Cartier-Bresson’s ‘mise-à-mort’ nor Guibert’s ‘coup de foudre photo­ graphique’, Macé’s photograph of the boy with the python skins seems to capture the joy and wonder of an encounter of pure chance, the delight of an unscripted moment which both photographer and photographed can enjoy; a moment of exchange between two human beings, in which the real, within the photographic frame, is sublimated into art. Conclusion: Le Goût de l’homme How, in the final analysis, should we characterize Macé’s self-writing? It is not the ‘écriture photographique’ of Guibert or Ernaux, as the writing itself does not attempt to mimic the qualities of photography. Rather, his is a writing which includes photographs — literally, in his photo-texts, or through the use of ‘photo­ graphic’ modes such as dream-vision or superimpositions — to present the reader with a version of his ‘self ’. The modes of writing he favours, such as dreaming (‘le rêve réveillé’ [dreaming awake]), reading and metaphor, are all chosen because of their ‘ref lective’ processes. And his notion of the image, central to his work, is analogically photographic in the sense that it is always a ref lection of reality onto a

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sensitive surface, be it a shadow, a dream, or the superimposition of one ref lection onto another. Indeed, all kinds of interaction between reality and the self are envisaged on this photographic model in Macé, whether or not actual photographs are involved. In this chapter I hope to have shown how Macé’s work, his writings, phototexts, and photographs are all structurally autobiographical in their different ways: in all of the media he uses, his style and favourite themes create an ambience, a mental hue which belongs to his universe and which is reinforced by the presence of biographemes. Within this space, others’ lives and other places are evoked, and the result is a delicately balanced coexistence of the self and the other, the other in the self, witnessed by the reader.64 Another way to describe this experience, for Macé’s readers, might be to say that they find themselves in the presence of the self as writer and as reader. ‘On lit comme on rêve’ [one reads as one dreams] is one of Macé’s favourite phrases: when we enter the Macéan space of dream, imagination, and reading, we witness, from the inside so to speak, the activity of his reading self. In other words, we witness the writer in the act of creation, which for Macé is a double act of reading and writing. To read what Macé has written is to experience his reading process. A very brief look at Le Goût de l’homme65 will serve as both an illustration of this argument and a conclusion to my chapter, because it is one of his most self-ref lexive works. The book describes the lives and work of three early twentieth-century ethnologists, Georges Dumézil, Pierre Clastres, and Marcel Griaule. But Macé presents them all, particularly Dumézil, from the completely personal perspective of his reading, down to the very rhythm of his progress: J’aime trop les détours et les raccourcis, j’aime trop f lâner dans les livres et rêver en route pour affronter l’Olympe de face. Mais j’ai besoin qu’un éclair de loin en loin m’en montre le volume et les contours, afin de trouver [...] la respiration adaptée à mon pas. (Le Goût, p. 17) [I am too fond of detours and short cuts, I am too fond of meandering inside books and dreaming on my way to confront Olympus upfront. But I need a f lash of lightning from afar to show me its mass and its shape, in order to find [...] the correct breathing rhythm for my pace.]

In other words, his experience as a reader will structure his writing, and therefore our reading. A page later, he tells us that Dumézil’s work ‘avait la vertu de parler pour nous tous’ [has the virtue of speaking for all of us] (Le Goût, p. 18), and indeed his reading of Dumézil’s complete works is liberally punctuated with Macé’s own biographemes, creating the unmistakeable impression that he is reading Dumézil for himself. Gros describes this experience as ‘le moment où le lecteur défictionnalise une oeuvre en l’intégrant à son univers selon ses souvenirs réels, ou ses souvenirs de lecture, ses fantasmes, désirs ou angoisses’ [the moment in which the reader defictionalizes a work by integrating it into his own universe through his own real memories, or memories of his reading, his fantasies, desires or fears].66 Macé mentions how his son happens to ask him about his relationship with his father at a time when he was reading Dumézil, and describes how he reads Le Roman des jumeaux whilst superimposing upon it the image of himself as a child walking with

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his own father: ‘c’était donc lui l’un des jumeaux’ [so he was one of the twins]. Whilst continuing, in his supple style, to describe Dumézil’s discoveries and theories, he never disguises the fact that what he is presenting to us comes completely from his personal reading of the work, and that the Dumézil who emerges from his account is, to a certain extent, his own creation: ‘je n’ai pas connu Georges Dumézil, c’est pourquoi je peux en faire un héros de notre temps, à mi-chemin entre le mort illustre et le personnage imaginaire’ [I never knew Georges Dumézil, which is why I can make him into a hero for our times, half-way between the famous dead man and the imaginary character] (Le Goût, p. 23). Thus Macé reads the lives of these ethnologists through his own experiences, and within the space of his narratorial consciousness his own autobiographical — or autoethnological — discoveries are juxtaposed with those of the ethnologists. Indeed there is a certain amount of explicitly autobiographical material in the section on Dumézil, and the facts of his father’s illegitimacy are spelled out here for the first time in his oeuvre.67 The section on Clastres is less obviously read through Macé’s own life, but it starts with an autobiographical admission: ‘Si je n’avais pas eu un grand-père bûcheron, je n’aurais peut-être jamais lu la Chronique des Indiens Guayakis’ [if I had not had a woodcutter for a grandfather, I might never have read the Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians]. The hours that he spent in the forest with his grandfather, which come back to him vividly even now ‘quand je rêve éveillé’, have prepared him for his later excursions into forests of books: Un peu plus tard, quand j’ai cherché mon chemin dans les livres avec le même sens de l’orientation qu’en forêt, un sens qui n’empêche pas de se perdre mais permet de se retrouver grâce à des itinéraires imprévus, dont on devine la destination malgré les détours, j’ai retrouvé cette forêt réelle, transposé par la distance et le style, dans des forêts d’emblèmes et de palmes, la forêt obscure de Dante et la jungle endormie du Douanier Rousseau, la forêt des livres illustrés et les sentiers embrouillés que suivent les Indiens. (Le Goût, p. 51) [A little later, when I sought my way in books with the same sense of direction as I used to in the forest, a sense that doesn’t stop you from getting lost but allows you to find your way again thanks to unforeseen routes, whose destinations you can guess despite the detours, I found this real forest, transposed by distance and style, in the forests of emblems and palms, the dark forest of Dante and the sleeping jungle of Douanier Rousseau, the forest of illustrated books and the tangled paths followed by the Indians.]

There are clearly more intertextual echoes here, and the composite photograph that has been thickening slowly ever since Le dernier des Égyptiens acquires several more layers: the images of the Indian tribes of Paraguay, the Guayakis and the Guaranis, both studied by Clastres, are superimposed onto the earlier images of his maternal grandfather, Champollion, the Mohicans, and of course Macé himself. The image of the forest is also composite, made up of the various real and literary forests named above, and functions as a trope for the type of reading in which Macé indulges when he begins to find his way through Clastres’s work: using ‘un sens qui n’empêche pas de se perdre mais permet de se retrouver grâce à des itinéraires imprévus’, he finds both Clastres and himself in the new, transposed forest — ‘transposé par la distance et le style’ — which is also the one that he remembers from his childhood.

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The section on Griaule is mainly focused on the problems of narrative voice experienced by ethnologists attempting to write an account of their findings. Griaule himself makes use of a strangely personal third-person voice in Les Flambeurs d’hommes, which Macé describes as that of a ‘romancier qui n’assume pas tout à fait son rôle, chroniqueur qui parle de lui à la troisième personne’ [a novelist who does not fully take up his role, a historian who speaks of himself in the third person] (Le Goût, p. 83). Griaule, who clearly struggled between the third- and firstperson viewpoints and voices, was allegedly extremely angry when a member of his team, Michel Leiris, made use of the first-person voice to write the now celebrated L’Afrique fantôme. Macé points out that Leiris’s account of the ethnological mission, although full of accurate facts and dates, focuses mainly on ‘les états d’âme de Michel Leiris: ses fatigues, son écoeurement devant certaines pratiques, son ennui et son découragement’ [Michel Leiris’s states of mind: his fatigue, his disgust when faced with certain practices, his boredom and his discouragement] (Le Goût, p. 93). Clearly these issues of narration and the place of the self in a narrative about an other are relevant to Macé’s own work, especially in the context of the thought that a reader always, to a certain extent, finds himself in any work that he decides to read. Both Proust and Ernaux, to name two authors we have read in this study, have said so, and Macé certainly thinks that reading entails a confusion of the self with the text: ‘on lit comme on rêve, on maquille ses souvenirs, la vue se trouble et les pensées se mêlent comme les couleurs du tatouage’ [we read as we dream, we paint our memories, our vision becomes blurred and thoughts mingle like the colours of tattoos] (DE, 61–62). The difference in Macé is that much of his work shows this process taking place: the reader is introduced into Macé’s reading mind, whether he is reading an ethnological study or the clouds in order to take a photograph. It is thus that we are able to see him in the act of creation, in his (self )-readings of other lives and of reality. In some of the works this self is a strangely depersonalized self, for instance in Le Dernier des Égyptiens or Éthiopie, le livre et l’ombrelle; in other works, for instance in Le Goût de l’homme or Mirages et solitudes, it is more f leshed out through the use of biographemes. A photographic metaphor for this relationship between the reader, the writer/photographer, and his creation might be as follows: if we think of each of Macé’s works as a photograph, Macé the reader could be seen as the shadow cast by the photographer. Some of his features — representing his autobiographical material — are visible, and alongside it we are offered the subject which is the focus of the photograph, although from the point of view of Macé the writer/photographer. Reading is always a deeply personal process, and the presence of Macé’s self in his works is there to prove it. As for his actual photographs and their presence in his photo-texts, we have seen how Macé makes use of methods as diverse as shakkei, framing, and editorial layout to direct the viewer’s eye, at times to confound it, and to enjoy the plurality of the visions offered by reality, which is ‘généreuse’ (La Couleur, 11). Macé’s understanding of photography is deeply intentionalist, as befits a photographer who is so interested in phenomena such as shadows, ref lections, and superimpositions, but he is also always conscious of his reliance on what reality offers him to photograph, and his response to it can be spontaneous and instinctive. This position

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of readiness, or openness to the world, shows how Macé is always a willing participant in the photographic act, and how he also thus becomes an active part of the realized photograph: as a shadow cast on the ground (in various shots included in La photographie sans appareil and Mirages et Solitudes), or a structural identity of perspectives and choices (in Mirages et Solitudes, and La Couleur est un trompe-l’oeil), or as one half of a chance human encounter (L’Éthiopie). And when a number of such photographs is put into a sequence, and made into a photo-text in conjunction with his writing, the result is an itinerary of the self ’s journey towards itself (Un monde qui ressemble au Monde is perhaps the best example of this); in other words, a photobiography. Notes to Chapter 4 1. Gérard Macé, Un monde qui ressemble au monde (Paris: Marval, 2000), pp. 7, 9. 2. Gérard Macé, la ‘pensée littéraire’, ed. by Dominique Viart, écritures contemporaines 9 (Caen: lettres modernes minard, 2008), p. 5. 3. Gérard Macé, la ‘pensée littéraire’, p. 5. Laurent Demanze groups Macé in this context with writers who all started by being published in Gallimard’s ‘Le chemin’ collection, directed by Georges Lambrichs: ‘en compagnie d’André Pieyre de Mandiargues et Jean Starobinski, de Jacques Réda et Michel Chaillou, il s’agissait d’explorer des territoires méconnus de la langue et de s’y frayer une voie singulière, en redécouvrant des formes abandonnées et des genres délaissés, pour y réinventer un héritage’ (Laurent Demanze, Gérard Macé, l’invention de la mémoire (Paris: José Corti, 2009), p. 24). 4. See Akane Kawakami, ‘Interview with Gérard Macé’, Romance Studies, 29 (2011), 81–92 (p. 86). 5. This technique is remarkably similar to one employed by an author who is otherwise very different from Macé: Patrick Modiano, a popular novelist whose novels are often explorations into the period of the Occupation, uses first-person narrators who are mysteriously able to ‘remember’ things that happened, long before they were born, to completely different people (see Kawakami, A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 7–24). 6. Karine Gros, ‘L’œuvre de Gérard Macé, une oltracuidanza poetica’, in Gérard Macé, ed. by Marc Blanchet and Jean-Yves Masson, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 297 (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Septentrion, 2010), pp. 127–33 (p. 130). 7. For further details, see Introduction, p. 4. 8. La Photographie sans appareil (Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 2000), pp. 9–10. 9. As we will see, this status of the author is comparable to (although still very different from) Ernaux’s presence in her ‘journaux extimes’. 10. As Demanze, for instance, has done: see Demanze, p. 20. Other critics also link Macé to the essay, but qualify the appellation in some way. For instance, Florence Delay claims Macé has invented the genre of ‘essai merveilleux’: see Florence Delay, ‘L’âme enfin déchiffrée de Champollion,’ in Images et signes: lectures de Gérard Macé, ed. by S. Boucheron, J.-L. Lampel, and N. Ragonneau (Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 2001), pp. 33–35 (p. 34). 11. Quoted in Karine Gros, L’Œuvre de Gérard Macé, une oltracuidanza poetica (Québec: Éditions Nota Bene, 2008), p. 32. 12. Ibid., pp. 33–34. 13. ‘The inscription of the self into the essay is a trademark of the essayistic panoply’; Stafford, Phototexts, p. 100. For further discussion of the modern French essay genre, see The Modern French Essay: Movement, Instability, Performance, ed. by Charles Forsdick and Andy Stafford (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005). 14. Gros ultimately arrives at the term ‘méditations’: see Gros, L’Œuvre de Gérard Macé, pp. 42–43. 15. Or, as Gros puts it, ‘l’articulation entre la vie, la rêverie et l’oeuvre se fonde sur la revendication d’un vécu à l’origine de la création et sur le refus d’une (auto-)biographie canonique’. Ibid., p. 43. 16. Plato, La République, quoted as an epigraph in Mirages et solitudes.

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17. Gérard Macé, La mémoire aime chasser dans le noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 21. Henceforth, all page references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by Mémoire. 18. An essay which analyses this book alongside Macé’s Vie antérieures in a context relevant to my own discussion is David Houston Jones’s ‘ “Traduire, interpréter, rêver sa vie”: image et récit de vie chez Gérard Macé’, in Gérard Macé, la ‘pensée littéraire’, ed. by Viart, pp. 115–30. 19. Gérard Macé, Les Trois Coffrets (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 16. Henceforth, all page references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by TC. 20. Gros, L’Œuvre de Gérard Macé, p. 133. 21. Dreams are always important in Macé’s work, and have a strong link to photography, as we will see in the discussion of La Mémoire aime chasser dans le noir. 22. Gérard Macé, Le Dernier des Égyptiens (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p. 9. 23. Kawakami, ‘Interview with Gérard Macé’, p. 90. 24. Henceforth abbreviated to La mémoire; all page references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by La mémoire. 25. Roland Barthes, L’Empire des signes (Geneva: Skira, 1970), p. 113. 26. As we will see in both the writings and photographs of La Photographie sans appareil. 27. Macé, Le Dernier des Égyptiens, p. 61. 28. Gros, L’Œuvre de Gérard Macé, see esp. pp. 218–22. 29. Ibid., p. 220. 30. Ibid., pp. 220–21. Gros tends to stress the importance of dreams in Macé as literary metaphors (ibid., p. 110), but I believe it is important to look at them for themselves. 31. For a detailed discussion of one of the prose poems, ‘la chambre interdite’, which also analyses its relationship to photography, see Wolfram Nitsch, ‘La chambre interdite: photographie et poésie chez Gérard Macé’, in Gérard Macé, ed. by Blanchet and Masson, pp. 135–50. 32. See Appendix 2 for a detailed description of the make-up and alternative locations of the photographs and texts contained in these volumes. 33. La Photographie sans appareil, pp. 9–10. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, prefaced by PhSA. 34. The slightly odd act (at least to the mind of this reader) of framing ‘un paysage en disposant partout des fenêtres et des miroirs, ou de leur équivalent mental’ in order to isolate a piece of reality is echoed by the Proustian image, cited above, of ‘les yeux limpides et réf léchissants des déesses des eaux’, which offer mirror-like surfaces that ‘servaient de frontière’ between the world of mere mortals and their own. 35. La Photographie sans appareil, pp. 16–17. Macé is always wholly involved in the layout of the photographs in all of his books. 36. ‘L’espace photographique [...] [est] un espace à prendre, un prélèvement dans le monde, une soustraction qui opère en bloc’ which, by implication, excludes the rest of the world, referred to as ‘le hors-champ, le hors cadre’. Philippe Dubois, L’Acte photographique et autres essais (Paris: Nathan, 1990), p. 169. 37. See Chapter 2, pp. 74–78. 38. See Chapter 3, pp. 112–13. For a discussion of indexicality, see pp. 4–5, 9–10. 39. Macé has much to say about shadows in relation to photography, as we will see, for instance, in Mirages et solitudes. 40. Macé, Un monde qui ressemble au monde. All references to this work will occur henceforth in the text, preceded by Un Monde. This edition is now out of print, but a new edition, containing the same text and just one extra photograph, came out in 2011, issued by the publishing house which has brought out several other volumes of Macé’s photographs, Le temps qu’il fait. 41. See Kawakami, Travellers’ Visions, ch. 4, section on Macé. 42. Ibid., pp. 157–61. 43. This object was also evoked, of course, in Les Trois Coffrets: see TC, p. 68. 44. La Belle au Bois dormant, le chat botté et le petit poucet par Charles Perrault, ed. by Albert G. Latham (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 25. 45. Gérard Macé, Mirages et solitudes (Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 2003). The work is unpaginated, but the photographs are numbered, with corresponding captions. 46. See for instance Le Goût de l’homme (Paris: Le Promeneur, 2002), p. 50; Kawakami, ‘Interview with Gérard Macé’, p. 86.

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47. See Agnès Castiglione, ‘Fenêtres sur chambres: les “Belles Endormies” de Gérard Macé’, in Traces photographiques, traces autobiographiques, ed. by Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vray (Saint-Étienne: publications de l’Université Saint-Étienne, 2004), pp. 215–28. 48. Kawakami, ‘Interview with Gérard Macé’, p. 88. 49. La Couleur est un trompe-l’œil (Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 2011). Henceforth, all references to this text will occur in the text, preceded by La Couleur. 50. Kawakami, ‘Interview with Gérard Macé’, p. 88. 51. Gérard Macé, Éthiopie, le livre et l’ombrelle (Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 2006). Henceforth, all references to this text will occur in the text, preceded by Éthiopie. 52. Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ People and the Making of European Identities (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999), p. 58. 53. See for instance the essays in Postcolonial Violence, Culture and Identity in Francophone Africa and the Antilles, ed. by Lorna Milne (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2007); for a study focused on French representations in writing and images of North Africa, see Mary B. Vogl, Picturing the Maghreb: Literature, Photography, (Re)Presentation (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 54. A fascinating study of the photographs of non-European peoples published in the National Geographic over a number of decades charts the development of the images of the other offered to American readers in this inf luential publication: Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 55. To my mind, such images can be seen as payment for our charity: of course our generosity is well-intentioned, but to receive such images — guarantees, in a sense, that our contribution has made these children ‘happy’ — brings our act perilously closer, at least structurally, to a kind of exploitative transaction. 56. Hans Georg Berger and Hervé Guibert, Dialogue d’Images, preface. 57. André Rouillé, La Photographie: Entre document et art contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 231. 58. See Stafford, Photo-texts, pp. 10–13 for a helpful and more detailed account of Rouillé’s theories. 59. I have borrowed this definition from ibid., p. 104. 60. There is an interesting discussion about the photographed subject’s gaze, when it is directly confronting the camera, in Reading National Geographic (pp. 197–201); it claims, citing statistics from the magazine, that the weaker and more vulnerable the model is, the more likely she is to be staring at the camera. Such a tendency pre-dates, apparently, the photograph: in portraits painted in earlier centuries, it has been noted that the more ‘civilised’ subjects tend to look away from the viewer, whereas the opposite applies for the ‘rougher’ classes: ‘to look out at the viewer, then, would appear to represent not a confrontation between the West and the rest, but the accessibility of the other’ (p. 200). I agree that the frontal view denotes accessibility: the pertinent question, in the case of both Guibert and Macé, is how that access is obtained (in Guibert’s oeuvre, the case of Adjani is a striking example). There is a huge difference between the presence of a National Geographic photographer working in the 1970s, for instance, and that of a lone French photographer travelling with his wife in the 2000s: in the latter case, access has to be obtained through trust and complicity, through a transaction between two self-aware and participating agents. Even then, the existence of stereotypes and prior contexts which have nothing to do with the situation in question can upset the balance between the two ‘agents’, as we will see later in this chapter. 61. Macé writes in the introduction that sticks are only carried by men in Ethiopia, although everyone has an umbrella. 62. Macé has written to me since reading my discussion of this photograph that, on this particular occasion, it was the girl who came to him and asked to be photographed. Of course, such an offer/request also takes place within the context of the power relations, the history of exploitative photographs as well as that of the frontal view discussed in n. 60. 63. Kawakami, ‘Interview with Gérard Macé’, p. 88. 64. See Gros, L’Œuvre de Gérard Macé, p. 123. 65. Henceforth, all references to this work will occur in the text, preceded by Le Goût. 66. Gros, L’Œuvre de Gérard Macé, p. 186. 67. Ibid., pp. 130–31.

Conclusion v This book has explored the work of three photobiographers over a period of roughly thirty years. During this time, photography has evolved: from black and white to colour, from ‘special occasion’ portraits to everyday snapshots, from analogue to digital. And photobiography has responded to these developments. In this conclusion, I want to evaluate each of my writers’ perspectives on photography in the relevant historical context, and to review brief ly how those perspectives come through in their photobiographic writings. I shall then describe the various kinds of self that have emerged from my readings of their work, and show how they constitute imaginative responses to technological developments and consequent changes in our modes of perception. I will end on some thoughts about how the photobiographic self might evolve in the future, in the context of the ‘digital revolution’ and its consequences. Guibert’s theoretical writings and photographic practice show that he, unlike Barthes (against whom he might be said to have written L’Image fantôme), was never very concerned with questions concerning photography’s relationship with the referent and reality. He took it that the photograph was an indexical sign, and he experimented with that characteristic of it, especially in his later work. But as a gifted photographer who held an essentially intentionalist view of photography, thinking about photography as a direct analogy for his creative processes came to him very naturally. His approaches to photography and writing as media are very like each other; in the latter he freely used elements of his own life and his friends’ in order to create his autofictions, and he was similarly uninhibited when taking his photographs, although he did occasionally, as we saw in Chapter 2, express reservations about the ethics of using photographic material involving his friends and family. But because he sees photography as a fundamentally creative medium, he does make use of them in his autofictions, in which — as his life nears its end — photography’s qualities are employed more and more as a challenge to death. Ernaux, by contrast, often seems to betray what seems to be a simplistic attitude towards photography, a belief that photography shows us ‘the real’, that it is an objective medium. Yet in her attempts to mimic photography in her writing, we clearly see that she is aware of the creative aspects of the photographic act, and of the personal involvement of the photographer. The role played by the photographs she includes in her texts has been different from text to text. Unlike Guibert, she has lived through the shift from analogue to digital photography, and what she says about photography in Les Années, for instance, shows that she is consciously a member of the digital generation. Her feelings about analogue photographs — the photographs of her past, which have informed her writing ever since the early 1980s, as we have seen — may well be undergoing a change as a result of her newly

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digital perspective; her bold publication of her hitherto unshown photos in Écrire la vie is possibly a result of her changing views, although it is not clear exactly what the import of these changes will be. Macé (born in 1945) hails from the same generation as Ernaux (born in 1940), but his attitude towards photography is more professional, and his vision in general seems to have been more ‘photographic’ from well before he began to take photographs. Because of his particular interest in photography’s capacity to create illusions, through ref lections, collage-effects, and careful framing, his view of photography is intentionalist — like Guibert — but unlike Guibert, perhaps because of his wider interest in non-human subjects (Guibert clearly preferred, in the main, to photograph people), Macé is also fully aware of the intractability of the reality which supplies him with his subjects. As a photographer dealing always with the contingencies of reality, and as a writer who is interested in the lives of others, he sees himself as a participant in the act of creation, inevitably ref lected in both his writing and his photographs. Although most of his published photographs to date have been taken with an analogue camera, partly because of his preference for black and white, he has told me in conversation that he does use a digital camera, although it is reserved for note-taking, a replacement for his erstwhile notebook. Perhaps this distinction will erode or become more complex as he continues to explore colour photography. This study has shown that photography has inf luenced the ways in which these photobiographers perceive themselves, and thence the ways in which they write their selves. Ever since its invention the camera has been likened to the eye, but as photography and our knowledge of its processes has developed, our use of it as both analogy and metaphor has become more complicated and detailed. So from Proust’s description of ‘photographic vision’, discussed in chapter 2, there is an evolution in line with advances in technology and know-how in the work of Guibert, a professional photographer, who develops his gaze to be more precisely analogous to the photographic process, from ‘moment décisif ’ through the darkroom to actual image. Ernaux, for her part, attempts to mimic photography in her writing style: her aim is to arrive at the effect achieved by real photographs in her snapshot-like textual fragments. However, when she is thinking about how she is to achieve this, she uses analogies from the photographic process, describing herself as the sensitive surface on which impressions from the outside world are recorded. And for Macé, all images — even those made prior to the invention of photography — are modelled on the photograph; the blurred images of his self we encountered in his writings are like composite photographs, made up of layers of semi-transparent shots of different individuals, and the position of the writer with respect to his subject seems always to be based on that of the photographer with his camera. The consequences of this photographic vision for the ways in which these writers think of the self have also been illuminating. These selves are all fragmented, and often ref lected off the images of other people or objects, at times only partially: in other words, these selves can be doubly ‘photographic’ and fractured. Guibert’s self, created through the images of his relatives and friends in Le seul visage or L’image fantôme, or ref lected on window panes in his late photographs; Ernaux as the almost

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invisible but crucial presence in her external diaries, or as the temporary absentee in the photographs of discarded clothes in L’usage de la photo; Macé’s ‘structural’ self in his biographical writings on Fortuny, Crepereia, or Champollion, his composite self dimly visible in the superimposed images of relatives and kindred spirits, or the shadow cast by his photographing self to be seen in his photographs. Although the results differ widely, they do have in common a view of the self as a shadow or ref lection, or else as the photosensitive surface, the empty page onto which the world is inscribed. And they are all markedly passive versions of the self: the receptive nature of the latter, the self as the material on which writing occurs, is obvious, whilst the former reduces the active agency of the artist almost to the emptiness of the creative gesture. The shadow of the photographer in the photograph s/he has just taken is precisely that, a sign of the gesture which has given rise to the work; so too is the structural self of an ‘external’ diary. And all of these shadowy ‘selves’, seemingly at one remove from more traditional positions of the self, have been formed by these writers’ attempts to imagine themselves photographically. These writers’ adoption of photography as a model for both process and result has thus given rise to a ref lective, ghostlike, impersonal self. The effect of photography on Ernaux’s work, given that its presence in her oeuvre can be precisely dated, proves this thesis: as photography becomes increasingly important in her oeuvre, her ‘je’ becomes more and more diminished, until it disappears completely (albeit not forever) in Les Années. Guibert, whose writing career was more or less as long as his career as a photographer, had from the start a more literally ref lective sense of the self: the young man who had an X-ray image of his torso pinned above his desk describes his autobiographical récit in L’Image fantôme as ‘un négatif de la photographie’.1 Throughout his oeuvre it is in objects and other people, as well as on photosensitive surfaces, that his self is to be found. In Macé’s oeuvre, the self has never been particularly substantial, as his writings and photographs have rarely been explicitly about himself. But this is partly because his vision has always been photographic. And the self practising the photographic vision, with or without a camera, has always been a crucial but mainly structural presence, as much in his photographs as in his writings. Using photography as a model aesthetic affects both the seeing self and the self seen: the former becomes ‘objective’, camera-like, and therefore structural rather than personal; the latter resembles (and at times is) a photograph or something like it, two-dimensional, a copy albeit a perfect one. This is a self implicated in the whole of the writing process re-envisaged photographically, that is to say a self taking on the roles of the camera, the photosensitive surface, and the end result. What it gains in structural ubiquity within the artistic process, it loses in substance; what it loses in sheer reality, it gains in its recording of the process of creation. And once it has become ‘photographic’, be it the shining sci-fi fragments of Proust’s image, Guibert’s ghostly negative of his writing, the trampled-over surface of Ernaux’s photosensitive body, or the shadow cast by Macé’s photographer, one might argue that the metamorphosis results in the photobiographic self acquiring another of photography’s characteristics, pointed out by Benjamin: its

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reproducibility. There is a sense in which the photobiographic self is less singular because potentially multiple, or even simply because it is less substantial. The view of the self as fragmented and fractured — and/or multiple — which has been much discussed as a feature of postmodern autobiographical writing,2 is here given added support, technical support so to speak, from photographic notions of the self. It is a supporting notion that may become even stronger with the widespread and evergrowing use of digital photography and media. The ‘digital revolution’ is now itself not new, since digital cameras first came onto the market in the early 1990s; however, the ubiquity of the digital camera thanks to the camera phone, and the presence everywhere, from the cinema to the classroom, of digitized images, is perhaps still a fairly recent phenomenon. Photography theorists as well as sociologists have written extensively about the differences between digital and analogue photography, referring especially to the ontological differences between the analogue and digital photograph.3 As is well known, whereas an analogue photo is a transcription, of light via silver salts onto a photosensitive surface, a digital photo is a conversion; that is, the physical properties of the subject are converted into numerical information, symbolized by an arbitrary numerical code. It might therefore be possible to argue that, on the level of process, digital photographs are closer to being symbolic, not indexical, signs; however, inasmuch as the photosensitive cells of a digital camera still react to the thing or person being photographed, that is to say there is still a causal link between original and representation, in the Peircian system of signs it is still, like the analogue photo, an indexical sign. Perhaps more importantly, the reception of digital images in society does not differ greatly from the erstwhile reception of analogue images. It has been pointed out, for instance, that throughout the analogue period, photographs used in advertising were never taken as representations of ‘reality’; they always signified something else (an object of desire, or simply the desire itself ), rather than functioned as indexical signs.4 In our digital age, correspondingly, digital photographs in a documentary context have been accepted without question as representations of ‘what really happened’; the first fifty images to reach the mainstream media of the 7/7 attacks in London, for instance, came from the camera-phones of commuter witnesses, and were published with no question mark over their validity.5 Consumers of tech­ nology quickly become sensitive to the context and function of new products on the market, but the move from analogue to digital has been — as far as social use is concerned — a more or less undisrupted transition. Digital photographers want us to regard their images ‘as part of the tradition of photography’,6 as images func­ tioning in similar, recognizable ways to the analogue image. This is true not only of digitized photographs but also of computer-generated elements, which tend to be created to resemble photographs: again, the point is for the viewers to see them as ‘photo­g raphs’ in various contexts. ‘When we see any of these images we see, pheno­meno­logically, a photograph; an image that has all the marks of a photograph and calls us to read it as a photograph’.7 The digital/analogue difference, in other words, has not made a huge difference to the reception and practice of photographs in Western society.8

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If the difference in nature between these two photographic modes (and the con­ comitant variations, such as computer-generated simulations of digital photo­g raphs) has not affected their reception and use, the only practical differences that the digital revolution has made to our thinking about photography — to date — are perhaps the sheer volume of images to which it gives rise (because of the facility with which such images can be made) and their quasi-instantaneous production. The latter also leads to almost immediate circulation, via the mobile phone and/ or the internet. This exponential multiplication of images of selves throughout the world may be the next technical innovation to which photobiographers will respond. In Les Années, Ernaux noted that ‘avec le numérique, on épuisait la réalité’9 [with the digital camera, reality was exhausted]. How can writers respond to this exhaustion, when the reality at issue is the self? As an answer to this question, I will offer an image relating to con­tem­porary photobiography. The back cover of Ernaux’s L’autre fille shows not one but three photographs of the author: this is relatively surprising in itself, as none of her works published to date in France have shown an image of the author on the cover, but the three photographs themselves are striking. They are similar shots taken from the same angle, of the size and content of an identity photo (that is, containing her face and her upper torso), and placed vertically on top of one another. The top and bottom photos are almost identical. The middle image, which looks very like the photo at the bottom, has been stretched out diagonally, duplicated and then rearranged, so that roughly a third of the image — Ernaux’s left shoulder and the left side of her hair — can be seen on the left of the photograph, next to an image of her face, slightly closer-up but probably part of the same shot with her left shoulder cut off, on the right. This series of images therefore features both digital manipulation, whether of an originally analogue or digital shot, and multiplication; as an instance of the ‘photo-of-the-author’ genre, it is markedly unusual. Is it trying to offer a ‘moving image’ of Ernaux, given that the three photos might be read in sequence? Is it an attempt to suggest that Ernaux and her sister are like multiple identities of the same daughter-figure, given that one was a replacement of the other? Or is it simply an image that came of the fact that it was possible, that what technology allows should be effected? Ernaux herself was laconic about this series of photographs when I asked her about them in my interview: ‘les photos de ce “style”, démultipliées, ne m’enthousiasment pas, je ne vois pas ce qu’elles ajoutent à une photo plus classique, je préfère la photo tout en bas’10 [Photos of this style, multiplied, leave me cold, I don’t see what they add to the classic photo, I prefer the bottom image]. But her own works, like the works of Macé and Guibert, offer far less ‘classic’ images of the self. Perhaps in the not so distant future, photobiographers will continue to follow — when possible and aesthetically fruitful — where technology leads, to show us photobiographic selves invested with the powers (and the weaknesses) of digital photography and computer-generated images.

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Notes to the Conclusion 1. Hervé Guibert, L’Image fantôme (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1981), p. 123. 2. For a discussion of this kind of autobiographical writing, see the Conclusion of Boyle, Consuming Autobiographies. 3. There are many good discussions of this subject, but see for instance W. J. T. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye (1992); A.-M. Willis, ‘Digitisation and the Living Death of Photography’, in Culture, Technology and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. by P. Hayward (London: John Libbey and Co. Ltd., 1990), pp. 197–208; Martin Lister, ‘Photography in the Age of Electronic Imaging’, in Photography: A Critical Introduction, ed. by Liz Wells (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 295–336. 4. Lister, p. 328. 5. Ibid., p. 338. 6. J. D. Bolter and R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), p. 105. 7. Lister, p. 329. 8. ‘Whether the image is mechanically or digitally produced is irrelevant’ (Sarah Kember, Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 11). 9. Ernaux, Les Années, p. 223. 10. Appendix 1, p. 181.

Appendix 1 v

Interview with Annie Ernaux [conducted via letters, June–July 2011]

Akané Kawakami: Il me semble que, dans la trajectoire dessinée par vos œuvres, l’introduction de la photographie dans vos textes coïncide avec ce qu’on pourrait appeler le refus de la fiction: c’est dans La Place, votre premier livre sans le sous-titre de ‘roman’, que vous avez commencé à décrire des photos. Est-ce que vous étiez consciente de cette coïncidence, si c’en est une? Annie Ernaux: Non, je n’ai pas été consciente de cette coïncidence. Mais la décision de ne pas ‘fictionner’ le réel s’accompagne de l’utilisation de la réalité: or, à la mort de mon père, une photo joue un rôle important, celle que je trouve dans son portefeuille avec une coupure de journal, sorte de raccourci sémantique: lui, ouvrier photographié au milieu d’autres ouvriers/moi, figurant dans le journal comme ‘passée’ dans un autre monde, ayant ‘réussi’. J’ai récemment évoqué ce rôle de la photo trouvée dans le portefeuille de mon père en un article paru dans Bourdieu et la littérature (Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2010). AK: J’aime beaucoup les descriptions des photographies dans vos textes, surtout parce qu’elles restent des photographies: c’est-à-dire qu’elles ne commencent jamais à ‘bouger’, à faire du cinéma. Il me semble que vous appréciez aussi, vousmême, cette fixité de la photographie ... en contraste, peut-être, avec la f luidité de l’écriture? En fait je me demande si vous voyez la relation entre la photographie et l’écriture (la fixité et le mouvement) comme étant analogue, en quelque sorte, à la relation entre le récit et le journal intime, entre Une femme et ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’? AE: Non, je ne conçois pas la relation photo/écriture comme analogue à la relation journal intime/récit, laquelle reste d’ordre scripturaire, même si la comparaison est tentante: la photo saisit l’instant comme le fait le journal, dans beaucoup de cas. Je ne me ‘sers’ pas de la photo dans mes textes, par ailleurs, comme du journal (par exemple, dans Les Années, je cite le journal et je décris les photos, les interroge, etc.). Cela dit, la photo est pour moi une pause, un moment figé d’une grande force, dont l’écriture est généralement au présent, dans le tissu du récit. AK: Vous commencez souvent vos récits en décrivant une scène (photographique ou non). Pour vous, qu’est-ce c’est, exactement, qu’une scène? Est-ce une partie ‘matérielle’, non lisible, de votre mémoire? Quand il ne s’agit pas d’une photographie, est-ce qu’une scène possède quand

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même des qualités photographiques? Je m’intéresse, ici aussi, à la ‘fixité’ des scènes, comme dans vos photographies (dans La Honte, vous avez décrit quelques scènes comme étant ‘fixées hors de toute signification’ par ‘la sensation de honte’ ...). AE: Peut-être devrais-je considérer ‘la scène’ comme mon unité psychique fondamentale? Elle est aussi pour moi un ‘indice matériel irréfutable’ et — ce n’est pas le moindre aspect — le fondement de ma méthode d’écriture: les retrouver, me les ‘projeter’, en analyser, quand c’est possible, toutes les implications — comme s’il s’agissait d’une photo — et écrire à partir d’elles. Non pas forcément les décrire — telle la scène inaugurale de La Honte ou, plus loin, celle du retour de la fête de la Jeunesse — mais en nourrir le récit. Ainsi, les parties impersonnelles des Années sont nourries d’images personnelles. Mais est-ce que ce n’est pas ainsi qu’écrivent tous les écrivains? AK: Est-ce la fixité de la photo — ou de la scène, dans votre mémoire — qui fait qu’elle soit un ‘indice matériel irréfutable’? AE: Je différencie la scène remémorée et la photo. Pour l’image intérieure d’une scène, c’est bien son caractère fixe — comme une photo — qui est un ‘indice irréfutable’, quoique immatériel. La photo a cette valeur en fonction de sa matérialité pure, le film — que j’utilise dans Les Années — la possède aussi. AK: Dans L’Usage de la photo, vous avez écrit: Photo, écriture, à chaque fois il s’est agi pour nous de conférer davantage de réalité à des moments de jouissance irreprésentables et fugitifs. De saisir l’irréalité du sexe dans la réalité des traces. Le plus haut degré de réalité, pourtant, ne sera atteint que si ces photos écrites se changent en d’autres scènes dans la mémoire ou l’imagination des lecteurs.

Il me semble qu’ici vous dessinez un mouvement circulaire: certains moments réels de votre vie vont ‘survivre’ en se re-transformant, à travers l’art (de L’Usage de la photo), en des expériences ‘réelles’ dans l’esprit de vos lecteurs. Si j’ai bien compris (mais peut-être que non!) il s’agit d’une sorte de métamorphose, lorsque la réalité vécue d’un individu continue, dans une autre forme, dans la vie d’une autre. Le vampirisme, aussi, pourrait être un modèle pour cette sorte de ‘continuation’ ... (il y a dix ans, Loraine Day, dans un entretien, vous avait demandé: ‘avez-vous l’impression d’être “vampirisée” par vos lecteurs?’). Je voudrais connaître vos pensées autour de ces possibilités de ‘continuation’, matérielle en quelque sorte, à travers l’écriture, la photographie, les lecteurs ... AE: Mais oui, il s’agit d’une métamorphose — ou, dans un langage religieux, de transsubstantiation, quoique ce soit un mécanisme autre. D’où, la photo personnelle changée en écriture se métamorphose en souvenir du lecteur — ou en fantasme. Si l’‘opération’ ne réussit pas, c’est l’échec du livre ... et il faut avouer que ce fut en partie le cas de ce livre! Je ne me sens pas vampirisée pas les lecteurs, le terme est trop violent, suppose une passivité, une action contre mon gré. J’ai conscience, au contraire, d’écrire

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d’une manière ‘ouverte’ au lecteur, de lui permettre d’être ce ‘je’ ou ce ‘moi’ du texte, d’occuper à sa guise tout ou partie du texte.1 A bien réf léchir, je tends le piège où tombe le lecteur! Cela dit, pour certains de mes livres qui ont connu un grand retentissement — La Place — Passion simple — Les Années — j’ai éprouvé, juste après leur parution, une sensation de dépossession, dépouillement, de quelque chose qui m’appartenait toujours en écrivant, qui avait disparu. En même temps, cette dépossession a quelque chose de magnifique, c’est le don absolu, immatériel. AK: Je suis fascinée par l’image, dans Journal du dehors et La Vie extérieure, de votre ‘moi’ comme une sorte de matière base, la page blanche, pour la représentation d’autrui (‘Je suis traversée par les gens, leur existence, comme une putain’, Journal du dehors; ‘aujourd’hui, pendant quelques minutes, j’ai essayé de voir tous les gens que je croisais, tous inconnus. Il me semblait que leur existence, par l’observation détaillée de leur personne, me devenait subitement très proche’, La Vie extérieure). Et dans Les Années, vous vous offrez, encore une fois, comme la matière sur laquelle le temps, le monde, a le droit de s’imprimer: ‘ce qui compte pour elle, c’est au contraire de saisir cette durée qui constitue son passage sur la terre à une époque donnée, ce temps qui l’a traversée, ce monde qu’elle a enregistré rien qu’en vivant. [ ...] Ce que ce monde a imprimé en elle et ses contemporains’. Est-ce votre intention? L’image de la prostituée (‘traversée’ par les gens) me rappelle, évidemment, la femme baudelairienne dans les rues de Paris ... mais j’aime beaucoup mieux une image que vous avez décrit dans Acteurs du siècle, de ‘la première colleuse d’affiches en 1908’, qui parcourt la ville ‘non comme un lieu de passage, [...] mais un espace d’intervention’. J’ai peut-être un sens d’humour un peu bizarre, mais je vous vois plus en colleuse d’affiches (active, interventionniste) qu’en prostituée métaphorique (généreuse, mais passive). Surtout si les affiches montrent, peut-être, des photographies ... qu’en pensez-vous? Intervenez-vous par voie de l’écriture dans l’espace et le temps des autres? AE: Les phrases que vous citez correspondent en effet à: (1) ma perception d’une absence d’identité, de biographie et d’autobiographie possibles. Ce qu’on appelle ‘moi’ est une somme de croyances, idées, venues du monde, des lectures, etc. (2) ma perception de l’écriture: écrire, c’est en un sens saisir en soi la trace du monde, de l’époque, des autres. L’image de la putain m’est très consubstantielle, elle doit apparaître dans plusieurs textes, je crois. Cela dit, la colleuse d’affiches, que vous préférez, me plaît beaucoup. Bien sûr, je conçois l’écriture comme une possibilité d’intervenir dans les représentations de soi, de la vie, du monde, des lecteurs. Leurs donner des désirs, des pensées, des sensations, de la consolation. De la même façon que des livres et des écrivains ont donné des ‘formes’, des noms, à ce que je vivais. Rien ne me décourage plus que l’idée ‘d’écrire pour écrire’, ou pour ‘distraire’. AK: J’ai beaucoup, beaucoup aimé Les Années: le livre m’a fait penser à la notion du temps dans votre œuvre, et à Proust (surtout les dernières pages, qui ressemblent à la dernière page du Temps retrouvé). Voici donc une question sur le temps. Dans

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La vie extérieure, vous avez écrit: ‘la sensation du temps qui passe n’est pas en nous. Elle vient du dehors, des enfants qui grandissent, des voisins qui partent’. Dans La Honte, vous parlez de Proust qui situe notre passé dans les phénomènes extérieurs, comme vous le faites vous-même. Voyez-vous un lien entre la mémoire involontaire proustienne — dans laquelle le passé nous attend dans une madeleine — et ce que vous dites à propos du passé qui réside dans des objets (‘À moi [...] dont les souvenirs sont attachés à un tube d’été, une ceinture en vogue’, La Honte) ou des personnes inconnues? Dans Les Années, vous devenez, petit à petit, le temps passé: est-ce que les années sont les ‘Annies’ d’autrefois? Dans un entretien avec Elise Hugueny-Léger, vous avez dit qu’ ‘on fait toujours époque, avec d’autres gens ...’. AE: Il est intéressant que vous posiez cette question des différences ou similitudes avec Proust. Dans La Honte, je pointe une différence importante à mes yeux: c’est que ma mémoire, si elle est en effet hors de moi, comme chez Proust, s’attache à des signes du temps ‘historiques’, fugaces, objets, chansons, qui disparaissent, tandis que la mémoire proustienne se rattache à la Nature, à des sensations fournies par ‘un souff le pluvieux du temps’ par exemple, à ce qui est pérenne. Mais il peut s’agir de mémoire involontaire aussi en entendant un tube d’été. Ce serait tentant de jouer sur les années/annies d’autrefois! dans la mesure où les photos et films décrits sont des archives personnelles, qu’ils saisissent à chaque fois une fille, femme différente, autres, le pluriel va de soi. Mais ces ‘elles’ multiples sont contenues dans le ‘nous’ du récit collectif, ou même le ‘on’, de façon f luctuante. Il faut bien comprendre que la perspective des Années est inverse d’une autobiographie ‘classique’, dans laquelle le ‘je’/moi est central, et l’Histoire autour. Ici les deux sont étroitement liés. AK: J’étais émerveillée par l’écriture ‘photographique’ du Journal du dehors et La vie extérieure: les clichés, les panoramas, les prises ‘en séquence’ ... avez-vous l’intention de continuer dans cette voie? Vous avez fait deux ‘photo-textes’ (L’usage de la photo et L’autre fille): quel sera votre relation avec la photographie dans l’avenir? Je n’avais pas encore acheté L’autre fille quand une collègue m’a parlé des photographies qui se trouvaient dedans: elle m’a dit qu’elles étaient de votre sœur. J’étais sûre qu’elle se trompait, et en effet quand j’ai reçu mon exemplaire du livre, j’étais heureuse d’avoir eu raison (!): je ne m’attendais pas à des photos de personnes dans vos œuvres, et je n’étais pas deçue. Mais pouvez-vous me dire la raison pour laquelle vous préférez ne pas montrer de telles photos? Il y a trois photos de vous sur la quatrième de couverture de L’autre fille. Est-ce la première fois qu’on a mis votre image sur une de vos œuvres? ( Je sais que le livre de Lyn Thomas, par exemple, vous montre sur la couverture, mais c’est un livre sur votre œuvre, non pas une œuvre de vous.) Que pensez-vous de ces photos, surtout de celle au milieu, un peu f loue, qu’on a allongé dans une direction diagonale? AE: L’usage de la photo mérite le nom de ‘photo-texte’, L’autre fille, j’en doute, mais ce texte a en commun avec L’usage de ne montrer que des lieux. La photo ‘exposée’ d’une personne bloque l’imaginaire, elle est une occasion de profond trouble, souvent, pour le lecteur, d’une sensation mélancolique. Je pense à Nadja de Breton,

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qui ne comporte aucune photo de la jeune femme, hormis celle de ses yeux. On est libre de l’imaginer. Je ne sais pas si j’insérerai des photos dans un texte ultérieur. Pour le moment, il n’en est pas question. C’est la première fois effectivement en France (beaucoup de traductions ont fait figurer une photo). Les photos de ce ‘style’, démultipliées, ne m’enthousiasment pas, je ne vois pas ce qu’elles ajoutent à une photo plus classique, je préfère la photo tout en bas. AK: Quelles sont, maintenant, vos pensées à propos de la relation entre texte et photo dans vos œuvres? AE: Dans le ‘quarto’ qui sort en octobre et qui rassemble la majeure partie de mes textes, j’ai préféré à une classique (et factuelle) biographie à l’entrée, une sorte de photojournal constitué de deux archives personnelles, des photos et des fragments de mon journal intime, sur la même page, pas une illustration mais une mise en rapport de deux réalités, l’une objective (photo), l’autre subjective (journal), et, à mon avis, cela donne un texte (environ 30 pages), à placer près des autres. Cela dit, je ne peux pas théoriser la relation qui existe entre texte et photo, en général, dans mes livres, beaucoup de chercheurs l’ont fait très bien! Pour tout dire, j’agis à l’instinct, au moment où j’écris, pour introduire ou non des photos. Note 1. Notamment par le ‘je’ transpersonnel, et la désubjectification totale dans Les Années.

Appendix 2 v

Macé’s Photo-Texts [I have described here the make-up and alternative locations of the photographs and texts contained in the volumes listed below, as Macé’s bibliographers, to date, have not done so in detail, and it is difficult to obtain them.] La scène des morts (La Pionnière, 1998) contains a text by Patrick Mauriès, the director of Gallimard’s ‘Le Promeneur’ collection. It is reprinted in Images et signes, and was inspired by photographs taken by Macé in the English cemetery in Rome, some of which are reproduced in La Photographie sans appareil. À l’oiseau (Fata Morgana, 2002) contains a text by Pierre Michon, also reprinted in Images et signes, and two photographs by Macé, one of which is reproduced alongside the text in Images et signes. The text can also be found in Michon’s book Corps du roi (Verdier, 2002). Sirènes et mannequins (Presses de Serendip, 2002) contains a text by Macé reprinted in Illusions sur mesure, and the mannequin photographs reproduced in Mirages et solitudes. L’Âge de fer (La Pionnière, 2003) contains a text on the mines of Saint-Etienne reprinted in Illusions sur mesure, and photographs reproduced in Mirages et solitudes. Labyrinthe avec chambres (La Pionnière, 2005) contains photographs taken in Pigalle by Macé. Both they and the corresponding text are to be found in Mirages et solitudes. La Fabrique des doubles (La Pierre d’Alun, 2006) contains a text by Jérôme Prieur, inspired by sixteen of Macé’s photographs, of which just five have been published elsewhere (in La Photographie sans appareil and Mirages et solitudes). Pierres de rêve (La Pionnière, 2007) contains photographs of four ‘pierres de rêve’ taken by Macé, accompanied by a text that is also to be found in Promesse, tour et prestige. Emblèmes et enseignes (La Pionnière, 2008) contains photographs taken by Macé in Benin of some frescoes, with an accompanying text.

Select Bibliography v Primary Material Annie Ernaux Les armoires vides (Paris: Gallimard, 1974) Ce qu’ils disent ou rien (Paris: Gallimard, 1977) La Femme gelée (Paris: Gallimard, 1981) La Place (Paris: Gallimard, 1984) Une femme (Paris: Gallimard, 1987) Passion simple (Paris: Gallimard, 1991) Positions, trans. by Tanya Leslie (London: Quartet Books, 1991) A Woman’s Story, trans. by Tanya Leslie (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1991) Journal du dehors (1985–1992) (Paris: Gallimard, 1993) ‘Vers un je transpersonnel’, in Autofictions et Cie, ed. by Serge Doubrovsky, Jacques Lecarme, and Philippe Lejeune (Paris: Université Paris X, RITM, 1993), pp. 219–21 ‘Fragments autour de Philippe V.’, L’Infini, 56 (1996), 25–26 ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) La Honte (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) La Vie extérieure: 1993–1999 (Paris: Gallimard, 2000) ‘Parmi les rares photos de famille’, Acteurs du siècle, ed. by Bernard Thibault (Paris: Le cercle d’art, 2000), 43–53 —— Se perdre (Paris: Gallimard, 2001) —— L’Occupation (Paris: Gallimard, 2002) L’Écriture comme un couteau. Entretien avec Frédéric-Yves Jeannet (Paris: Stock, 2002) L’Usage de la photo (with Marc Marie) (Paris: Gallimard, 2005) Les Années (Paris: Gallimard, 2008) ‘Entretien avec Marie-Laure Delorme’, Mediapart, 2 April 2008 L’autre fille (Paris: NiL Éditions, 2009) ‘La Preuve par corps’, in Bourdieu et la littérature, ed. by Jean-Pierre Martin (Nantes: éditions Cécile Defaut, 2010), pp. 23–27 L’Atelier noir (Paris: Éditions des Busclats, 2011) Écrire la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2011)

Hervé Guibert Suzanne et Louise (Paris: Éditions Libres Hallier, 1980). repr. 2005 (Paris: Gallimard) ‘Adjani où la vertu de l’excès,’ Le Monde, 28 May 1981, p. 13 L’Image fantôme (Paris: Minuit, 1981) Les Aventures singulières (Paris: Minuit, 1982) Les Lubies d’Arthur (Paris: Minuit, 1983) Le Seul Visage (Paris: Minuit, 1984) Des aveugles: roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1985) Mauve le vierge: nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1988) Les Gangsters (Paris: Minuit, 1988)

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L’Image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment? Seize photographies de Hans Georg Berger (Bordeaux: William Blake, 1988) L’Incognito (Paris: Gallimard, 1989) Fou de Vincent (Paris: Minuit, 1989) ‘La vie sida’, interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, Libération, 1 March 1990, p. 19 À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1990) Mon valet et moi: roman cocasse (Paris: Seuil, 1991) La Mort propagande, et autres textes de jeunesse (Paris: R. Deforges, 1991) Vice (Paris: J. Bertoin, 1991) Le Protocole compassionnel: roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1991) To the Friend who Did Not Save My Life, trans. by Linda Coverdale (London: Quartet Books, 1991) L’homme au chapeau rouge: roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1992) Le Paradis (Paris: Gallimard, 1992) Interview with François Jonquet, Globe, April 1992, p. 108 Cytomégalovirus: journal d’hospitalisation (Paris: Seuil, 1992) [with Hans Georg Berger] Dialogue d’Images (Bordeaux: William Blake, 1992) ‘Je disparaîtrai et je n’aurai rien caché ...’, interview with François Jonquet, Globe, April 1992 Mes parents (Paris: Gallimard, 1986) Photographies (Paris: Gallimard, 1993) Lettres d’Égypte, photographies d’Hans Georg Berger (Paris: Actes Sud, 1995) La Piqûre d’amour et autres textes, suivi de La chair fraîche (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) Hervé Guibert, photographe, texte de Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (Paris: Gallimard, 2011)

Gérard Macé Leçon de chinois (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1981) Bois dormant (Paris: Gallimard, 1983) Les Trois Coffrets (Paris: Gallimard, 1985) Le Manteau de Fortuny (Paris: Gallimard, 1987) Le Dernier des Égyptiens (Paris: Gallimard, 1989) La Mémoire aime chasser dans le noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1993) L’Art sans paroles (Paris: Le Promeneur, 1999) Un monde qui ressemble au monde (Paris: Marval, 2000) La Photographie sans appareil (Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 2000) Images et signes: Lectures de Gérard Macé (Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 2001) Un détour par l’orient (Paris: Le Promeneur, 2001) Le Goût de l’homme (Paris: Le Promeneur, 2002) Mirages et Solitudes (Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 2003) Éthiopie, le livre et l’ombrelle (Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 2006) La Couleur est un trompe-l’œil (Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 2011)

Marcel Proust Textes retrouvés de Marcel Proust, ed. by Philip Kolb and Larkin B. Price (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1968) Correspondance, ed. by Philip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris: Plon, 1970–93) À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1987–89) In Search of Lost Time, trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. by D. J. Enright, 6 vols (London: Vintage, 2000)

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Secondary Material Adams, William Howard, A Proust Souvenir: Period Photographs by Paul Nadar (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984) Albaret, Céleste, Monsieur Proust: souvenirs recueillis par Georges Belmont (Paris: Roger Laffont, 1973) Arribert-Narce, Fabien, ‘A Human Periplum: Denis Roche’s Photobiographic Archives’, Comparative Critical Studies, 8 (2011), 259–75 —— Photobiographies: pour une écriture de notation de la vie (Roland Barthes, Denis Roche, Annie Ernaux) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013) Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957) —— L’Empire des signes (Geneva: Skira, 1970) —— Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Seuil, 1971) —— Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1974) —— Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977) —— Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. by Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) —— La Chambre claire (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1980) —— Camera Lucida, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) —— Le Grain de la voix: entretiens 1962–1980 (Paris: Seuil, 1981) —— La Préparation du roman I et II: cours et séminaires au Collège de France 1978–9, 1979–80, texte établi, annoté et présenté par Nathalie Léger (Paris: Seuil/IMEC, 2003) Bazin, André, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (trans. by Hugh Gray), Film Quarterly, 13.4 (1960), 4–9 Beaujour, Michel, Miroirs d’encre, rhétorique de l’autoportrait (Paris: Seuil, 1980) Benjamin, Walter, ‘Extracts from the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 42–53 Berger, Hans Georg, L’Image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment? Seize photographies de Hans Georg Berger (Bordeaux: William Blake, 1988) Bernard, Anne-Marie and Agnès Blondel, eds, Le Monde de Proust, photographies de Paul Nadar (Paris: CNMHS, 1991) Blanchet, M. and J.-Y. Masson, eds, Gérard Macé, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 297 (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Septentrion, 2010) Bolter, J. D. and R. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999) Boucheron, S., J.-L. Lampel, and N. Ragonneau, eds, Images et signes: lectures de Gérard Macé (Cognac: Le temps qu’il fait, 2001) Boulé, Jean-Pierre, Hervé Guibert: Voices of the Self (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999) Bowie, Malcolm, Proust among the Stars (London: Harper Collins Publishers/Fontana Press, 1998) Boyle, Claire, Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self in Post-war France (Oxford: Legenda, 2007) Brassaï, Marcel Proust sous l’emprise de la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997) Buisine, Alain, ‘Le Photographique plutôt que la photographie’, in Hervé Guibert, ed. by J.-P. Boulé, special issue of Nottingham French Studies, 34.1 (1995), 32–41 Buot, François, Hervé Guibert: le jeune homme et la mort (Paris: Grasset, 1999) Carter, William, The Proustian Quest (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992) —— Marcel Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000)

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INDEX ❖ absence 12, 68, 77, 115, 147, 148, 179 absence/presence 5, 6, 13, 40, 68, 69, 77, 78, 108, 112, 148 temporary 76, 77, 82 n. 77 Adams, William Howard 27 Adjani, Isabelle 57–61, 67, 80 n. 39, 81 n. 43, 170 n. 60 affect/affective 6, 12, 21, 28, 40, 78, 94, 97 Africa/African 6, 70, 159, 160, 162, 170 n. 53 AIDS 39, 61, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73 AIDS writer/writing 39, 61, 63, 64 AIDS fiction 61–62, 66, 78, 82 n. 70 Albaret, Celeste 19, 31–35 Arribert-Narce, Fabien 13 nn. 2 & 3, 14 n. 31 aura 21, 54, 55, 63, 80 n. 30, 153 autobiographie/autobiography 2–4, 21, 28, 30, 34, 36, 43, 44, 79 n. 11, 83, 89, 122, 131, 132, 137 autofiction/autofictional 4, 29, 30, 40, 62–64, 66–67, 69–73, 78, 79 n. 11, 83, 132, 171 Barthes, Roland 5, 6–13, 23, 27–30, 32, 34, 36, 41, 47–48, 55, 68, 69, 71, 74, 75, 77, 84, 86, 91, 96, 97, 100, 114, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 171 La chambre claire 8, 9, 12–13, 15 n. 43, 16 n. 55, 28, 47, 48, 68, 75, 111, 114, 185 ‘The Death of the Author’ 8 La préparation du roman 27–29 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes 1, 6, 8–10 Bazin, André 5 Beaujour, Michel 3 Benjamin, Walter 1, 7, 49, 173 Berger, Hans-Georg 40, 55, 63–65, 77, 78 biographeme 28, 29, 52, 92, 134, 137, 138, 165, 167 biography 9, 27, 28, 52, 63, 64, 134 body 8–11, 23, 24, 25, 26, 46, 50, 58, 60, 64, 65, 67, 90, 101, 108, 112, 115, 138, 164, 173 Boulé, Jean-Pierre 62 Brassaï 17 camera 1, 2, 6, 17, 20, 21, 25, 32, 36, 43, 49, 50, 54, 58, 59, 64, 75, 76, 77, 78, 86, 132, 140, 143, 144, 146, 147, 152, 158, 162, 172, 173 cancer 107, 108, 111–12, 130 n. 51 Cartier-Bresson 51, 55, 56, 164 Cergy/Cergy-Pontoise 84–88, 99, 109, 124 cliché 19, 51, 56, 72, 84, 88, 110, 117, 180 colonizing 126, 132, 149 Colonna, Vincent 4, 62, 63, 132

Damisch, Hubert 5 Darrieussecq, Marie 4, 66 Davis, Oliver 44, 45 Del Amo, Jean-Baptiste 39, 74, 77 diary/diaries 50, 51, 72, 73, 74, 89, 90, 92–94, 97–99, 106, 115, 121–25, 173 digital 10, 171, 172, 174, 175 age/era 5, 117 camera 2, 5, 87, 117, 172, 174, 175 photograph 174, 175 Doubvrovsky, Serge 4, 62 écriture immédiate 25, 97, 98 écriture photographique 7, 50–51, 52, 62, 70, 73–74, 85–86, 88, 164 ekphrasis/ekphrastic 31, 35, 85, 101, 117, 126 Ernaux, Annie 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 17, 25, 51, 71, 72, 83–130, 132, 148, 164, 167, 171–75, 177–81 Les Années 82 n. 66, 85, 92, 97, 101, 113, 116–21, 122, 126, 171, 173, 175, 177, 178, 179–81 L’atelier noir 85, 113, 116, 121–22 L’autre fille 85, 105, 113–16, 117, 126, 175, 180 Écrire la vie 85, 98, 113, 117, 121, 123–26, 172 Une femme 83, 92, 93, 94–97, 99, 100, 102, 114, 122, 177 ‘Fragments autour de Philippe V.’ 129 La honte 84, 99, 101–05, 115, 117, 124, 126, 178 ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ 84, 92, 93–97, 100, 177 Journal du dehors (1985–1992): 84, 85–90, 91, 98, 119, 122, 179, 180 Passion simple 92, 99, 100, 179 La place 83, 84, 85, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99–101, 102, 103, 116, 117, 177, 179 ‘La preuve par corps’ 99 Se perdre 92, 100, 106, 115 L’usage de la photo 82 n. 77, 84, 105–13, 114, 116, 117, 126, 173, 178, 180 La vie extérieure: 1993–1999: 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 122, 179, 180 ethical/ethics 6, 56, 163, 171 fairy-tale 53, 65 Forest, Philippe 4 frame/framing 40, 42, 54, 69, 75, 76, 77, 101, 110, 144, 146, 147, 149, 152, 157, 158, 160, 164 friendship 18, 43, 56, 57, 60, 62, 63, 66, 67 Gabara, Rachel 3, 35, 37

192

Index

Genette, Gérard 4, 30, 90 ghost(s) 52, 53, 54, 143, 173 Goethe 50, 59, 70, 71, 86 Gros, Karine 132, 133, 141, 165 Guibert, Hervé 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 17, 21, 22, 25, 39–82, 84, 86, 92, 132, 148, 160, 162, 164, 171, 172, 173, 175 ‘Adjani où la vertu de l’excès’ 58 À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie 51, 61, 62, 66–72, 73 Cytomégalovirus: journal d’hospitalisation 51, 61, 62, 72–74 Des aveugles 72 Dialogue d’Images 63, 65, 67, 71, 77 L’homme au chapeau rouge 61, 72 L’Image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment? 63 L’image fantôme 13, 40, 47–55, 60–61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 78, 111, 171, 172, 173 Mes parents 42–43, 44, 52, 66, 72 La mort propagande 47, 62 Le paradis 61, 72 Le protocole compassionnel 61 Le seul visage 39, 41, 52, 55–61, 68, 78, 172 Suzanne et Louise 39, 40, 41–47, 52, 69, 78 Haustein, Katja 5, 6 holidays 57, 67, 71, 101 identity 4, 8, 10, 11, 24, 31, 32, 36, 48, 56, 58, 60, 61, 90, 92, 104, 105, 125, 132, 145, 154, 168, 175 indexicality 4–6, 9–10, 78 Kafka, Franz 51, 52, 70, 71, 72, 86, 92 Larkin, Àine 17, 23 Lejeune, Philippe 3, 30, 62 Lindon, Mathieu 57, 80 n. 38 Macé, Gérard 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 17, 24, 25, 50, 84, 126, 131–70, 172, 173, 175, 182 La couleur est un trompe-l’œil 143, 144, 156–59, 163, 168 Le dernier des Egyptiens 135, 137–39, 140, 166, 167 Éthiopie, le livre et l’ombrelle 144, 152, 156, 159–64, 167, 168 Le goût de l’homme 164–67 Leçon de chinois 132 Le manteau de Fortuny 132 La mémoire aime chasser dans le noir 135, 139–43, 153, 160 Mirages et Solitudes 135, 144, 152–56, 157, 167, 168, 182 Un monde qui ressemble au monde 131, 132, 143, 144, 146, 148–51, 152, 168 La photographie sans appareil 50, 132, 143–48, 151, 152, 156, 168, 182 Les trois coffrets 135–37, 138, 139 madness 12, 69

Maynard, Patrick 49, 135, 139 memory 13, 23, 49, 50, 55, 88, 99, 101, 103, 104, 110, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 133, 134, 143, 149, 156 metamorphosis 107, 112, 113, 142, 143, 173 Le Monde de Proust 26, 27, 30 Mora, Gilles and Nori, Claude, Manifeste photobiographique 1 Nadar, Paul 26, 27, 28–30, 36, 124 perception 7, 49, 50, 68, 69, 98, 159, 171, 179 photobiographie/photobiography 1–2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 13 n. 3, 36, 168, 171, 175 photograph(s): black and white 27, 127 n. 10, 140, 144, 156, 158, 159, 163, 171, 172 colour 127 n. 10, 140, 144, 156, 157, 167, 171, 172 composite 19, 21, 23–24, 29, 38 n. 29, 135–36, 139, 141, 151, 166, 172 mechanically failed/unshown 12, 48, 53–55, 60, 111, 126 ontological status of 5, 10, 29, 47, 78, 111, 159, 174 photographic: analogical(ly) 6, 7, 17, 19, 21, 25, 26, 35, 36, 50, 78, 86, 128 nn. 12 & 17, 164 literal(ly) 6, 26, 35, 62, 93, 164, 173 metaphorical(ly) 6, 7, 17, 25, 35, 36, 51, 62, 75, 86, 94, 112 practice 32, 87, 171 vision 19- 21, 24, 26, 29, 49, 55, 103, 144, 172, 173 writing 6, 40, 41, 50, 51, 71, 72, 78, 85–92, 97, 98, 122, 126 see also écriture immédiate, écriture photographique photography: as proof 10, 18, 47, 54, 55, 56, 84, 105, 106–07, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 147–48 as writing see photographic writing theories of: aesthetic constructivism 5 anti-intentionalist 45 formalism 5 intentionalist 167, 171, 172 ontological realism/realist 5, 159 photo-roman/roman-photo 39, 40, 41, 45, 46, 47, 69, 78, 79 n. 10 photosensitive 2, 34, 50, 90, 114, 119, 122, 173, 174 photo-text(e)/photo-textual 1, 2, 6, 7, 26–27, 36, 39, 40, 84–85, 105, 107, 113, 126, 133, 143–51, 164, 165, 167, 168, 180, 182 Proust, Marcel 1, 2, 7, 13, 17–38, 49, 50, 55, 78, 90, 91, 94, 103, 118, 120, 121, 124, 132, 133–34, 141, 142–43, 149, 167, 172, 173, 179–80 referent/referential 2–5, 9–11, 48, 62, 71, 78, 84, 106–07, 171

Index retina 50 Rouillé, André 159, 160, 161 Sarkonak, Ralph 66, 67, 71, 72 self (je): dissolution of 105, 117 fragment(ation) of 9, 24–25, 52, 86, 91–92, 98, 104, 118, 119, 172–74 multiplication of 117, 175 self-portrait 7, 18, 34, 39, 52, 62, 75, 76, 89, 90, 132, 133 self-writing 1–4, 7, 17, 19, 25, 26, 36, 40, 48, 52, 55, 62, 71, 78, 84, 126, 132, 133, 134, 135, 155, 164

193

shakkei 150, 151, 152, 167 Sontag, Susan 5, 40 squirrel 32 superimpose/superimposition 20, 23, 24, 46, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139, 151, 152, 158, 164, 165, 166, 167, 173 Thélot, Jérôme 35 transpersonal (‘je’) 90, 92 X-ray 17, 19, 21–22, 23, 29, 51, 52, 72, 105, 173 Yacavone, Kathrin 15 n. 48, 16 n. 57