Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes by Katja Haustein (review)

Katja Haustein’s monograph charts new territory in the expanding study of autobiographical writing in the light of photography. Centred on the themes of affect, selfhood, and otherness, as well as the (Lacanian) gaze, Haustein’s objective is to explore how photography impacts on autobiographical texts by Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes in the context of what she calls (following Hans Belting) a ‘history of looking’ (p. 4). She analyses the ways in which photography helps these writers to undermine the conventional parameters of autobiography (as defined by Philippe Lejeune), only to create new autobiographical forms rooted in ‘textual staging’ of ‘practices of looking’ that can be seen as characteristic of the photographic image (p. 4). In Part I, Haustein considers the metaphorical and actual role of photography within À la recherche du temps perdu and provides a lucid interpretation of the scenes of the grandmother’s death and of the sleeping Albertine, showing how in these moments of expected affection the references to photography are used to create a post-Romantic ‘emotional void’ (p. 57) by describing the loved ones as visual spectacle. The second and most demanding part (both in terms of the material covered and the argument itself) is devoted to Benjamin’s negotiations of photographic metaphors in his continuously evolving autobiographical projects, which move towards an ‘increasing destabilization’ of the self through narratives that perform ‘the self ’s escape from the gaze of the Other’ (p. 105). The final and shortest part examines Barthes’s resistance to Proustian ‘involuntary memory’ and further suggests how, in his late works, Barthes overcomes the egotism of his earlier writings with the aid of photography, introducing an emotion-based subject defined in relation to the Other. Overall, very close readings and sharp textual analyses of passages from the three authors’ works that are frequently commented upon, and others that are less often examined, are key features of Haustein’s study. One would have wished for a similar intellectual rigour in relation to photography itself. To the extent to which the concrete historical practice of photography is addressed, there are some distracting errors in her discussion, including, most prominently, a recurring confusion between daguerreotypes and other mid-nineteenth-century types of photography (see, for example, pp. 1, 29, 97, and 137), this being particularly relevant to Benjamin’s arguments. Such errors tend to weaken the critical impact of Haustein’s commentaries on the few but beautiful photographic reproductions in the book, including an alleged childhood portrait of Proust, with respect to which she argues that ‘moments of analogous, external representation are always eventually an impasse’ when analysing À la recherche (p. 38). One also regrets the lack of more judicious copy-editing in order to avoid spelling mistakes and erroneous references. The book’s back cover contains one rather glaring mistake: Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes is cited as a work from 1977 rather than 1975. Nonetheless, these oversights do not seriously undermine the substance of the argument, and this volume will no doubt be of great benefit to specialists of these three seminal authors, as well as to those working in comparative studies.