Photobiographies: pour une écriture de notation de la vie (Roland Barthes, Denis Roche, Annie Ernaux) by Fabien Arribert-Narce (review)

Not only have autobiography and life writing emerged as some of the most innovative fields of literary practice and critical reflection in the past three decades or so, but the relationship between life and writing has itself been thoroughly unsettled by the simultaneous turn to photography as a second means of recording and articulating lived experience. Fabien Arribert-Narce’s book offers one of the most comprehensive explorations to date of the relationship between photography, writing, and life, and the role of the photographic image in shaping contemporary autobiographical practice. Although his principal focus is on three writers (a term whose meaning looks increasingly unstable by the end of his study), his discussion of their work is grounded in a sure and comprehensive overview of broader trends in contemporary life writing and photography studies. He makes a convincing case for the continuities between Barthes, Roche, and Ernaux, rooted fundamentally in a shared concern with the (analogue) photograph’s relationship to the real, its staging of time, and its memorial function. Despite the work of Barthes and Ernaux being dauntingly well-trodden terrain by now, Arribert-Narce succeeds in drawing out several new and illuminating insights into their engagement with photography and its use in their writing about the self. Taking a detour via Deleuze, Guattari, and Levinas, he highlights the importance of the face, and Barthes’s suspicion of photographic portraits, in his thinking about identity, self, and self–other relations. He links these concerns persuasively with Barthes’s interest, shared with Proust, in the semantics and semiotics of proper names. In relation to Ernaux, Arribert-Narce rightly insists on the importance of photographs to her project of auto-socio-analysis through the way they capture gestures and other features of identity that are historically, culturally, and socially specific. Pursuing Ernaux’s concern with ‘photographic’ writing based on the ‘notation’ of life rather than its narration, he considers how it informs her deconstruction of the autobiographical subject by staging the extent to which subjectivity is constituted by and through the external world. His chapter on Roche is particularly valuable as one of the most sustained discussions to date of an often overlooked but nevertheless significant figure of contemporary French literary and visual culture. A writer and photographer, Roche was also a senior editor at Éditions du Seuil, responsible for commissioning Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes as part of its ‘Écrivains de toujours’ series. His work explores the ambivalence of photography as a medium through which we celebrate life at the same time as it presents us with unavoidable evidence of a lost past. Photography becomes a question of saving and treasuring moments of life, a re-valuing of the fragment and fragmentation, which is shown to unite all three of the writers discussed by Arribert-Narce. The book can tend towards a slightly laboured thoroughness in places, probably reflecting its origins in the author’s PhD thesis, but there is no doubting its significant contribution to our understanding of an important trend in recent French culture.