Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film, and Comic Art in French Autobiography

1. Beyond Autobiography

Beyond Autobiography Véronique Montémont The 1970s saw the first signs of a new way of thinking about photography in France. This was underpinned by a two-way movement in artistic practice and its theorization, with names like Raymond Depardon, Gilles Mora, Claude Nori, Bernard Plossu, and Denis Roche in the forefront. A unifying thesis for these artists and theorists was the conviction that photography and life are intimately linked, a premise that could form the basis of a new visual language. This is why they appealed for what Cécile Camart calls “autobiographical investment in the photographic act” (375), which resulted in the publication in 1983 of the dazzling Manifestephotobiographique [Manifesto for 29 30 beyond autobiography Photography]. This text, written by Mora and Nori, is resolutely confident in the vitality of the newborn genre and conceptualizes writing and photography as a single act of creation: “And so photography can enable us to live our lives over again. It is essentially a biographical witness. We will give it new impetus by putting it at the heart of our autobiographical project, to the point where we no longer know whether to live for taking photographs or the opposite” (103). Twenty years on, Mora has stated that his wish was not fulfilled, even if the founders of the movement, particularly Roche and Depardon, have produced an extraordinary body of photobiographic work (“Pour en finir” 116). However, despite the fact that photography and autobiography have not become as interwoven as Mora had hoped, it is clear that contemporary French literature has taken a photographic turn, given the increasing recourse to photographic material in autobiography and autofiction. Following on from writers such as Roland Barthes and Georges Perec and from artists such as Sophie Calle and Christian Boltanski, a number of artists, many of them distinguished , have introduced visual material into their texts: Hélène Cixous (Photos de racines, 1994) [Rootprints]; J. M.G. Le Clézio (L’Africain, 2004) [The African]; Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie (L’Usage de la photo, 2005) [The Use of Photography ]; Roger Grenier (Andrélie, 2005); Marie Desplechin (L’Album vert, 2007) [The Green Album]. Others do not actually include photographs but base their narratives on absent or fantasmatic images: François Bon (Mécanique, 2001) [Mechanical ]; Antoinette Dilasser (Les Vraies images, 2007) [The Real Images]; and of course Hervé Guibert, who describes photographs that he has not been able to take but that are etched into his imagination (L’Image fantôme, 1981) [Ghost Image]. These texts form a heterogeneous collection; however, since the presence of photographs (whether real or brought into 31 Véronique Montémont being by description) has a different effect on their relation to biographical reality according to whether they are icons (based on resemblance) or indexes (based on the material trace left by an object) (Peirce 140), there is need to put forward a few possible theoretical frameworks in order to gain a better understanding of the interactions at work between the text and the image in autobiography. Photo-Text Relations Photography and autobiographical discourse meet in a range of different ways. Just as Jean-Marie Schaeffer (68–74) describes photography as a complex system, it could be argued that photobiography is neither a generic category nor the mechanical adding together of two discourses but a composite system that has three aspects: textual, iconic, and the explicit or implicit relations between the two. The latter determine the perspective that the reader chooses to adopt in decoding the work. An initial approach may be a quantitative assessment of the ratio of image to text in an autobiography. At one end of the scale would be texts containing no images but that use “notional” ekphrasis (Hollander 209). This is a procedure that consists of invoking absent objects, in this case one or more photographs, which become the focal point for descriptions, commentaries, reveries, and readings, on the now-famous model of the Winter Garden photograph in Barthes’s La Chambre claire [Camera Lucida] (106–10). Other examples can be found: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Souvenirs pieux [Dear Departed], which lingers over the deathbed portraits of her mother, Fernande; Perec, in W ou le souvenir d’enfance [W or the Memory of Childhood], daydreams about childhood photographs depicting him and his mother; Bon’s Mécanique turns upon the repeated description of a portrait of his father driving an unusual-looking traction...