Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Macé par by Akane Kawakami (review)

Kawakami, Akane. Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Macé. Oxford: Legenda, 2013. ISBN 978-1-907975-86-8. Pp. 193. £45. French writers have been exploring and exploiting the creative potential of photography ever since the medium emerged onto the cultural scene in the 1830s. The subfield of literary criticism that seeks to understand what happens when literature confronts still images (and vice versa), while a more recent phenomenon, is flourishing. Kawakami’s lively new study of a particular brand of contemporary phototextual practice signals a photographic turn in narratives of the self. As such, it builds upon existing work on the play between “light” and “life” writing by Timothy Dow Adams (2000) and contributes nicely to scholarship published in a recent volume, edited by Natalie Edwards, Amy Hubbell, and Ann Miller, on verbal and visual selves in French autobiography (2011). Kawakami focuses on a trio of authors—Hervé Guibert, Annie Ernaux, and Gérard Macé—who have published numerous personal narratives that think about, and sometimes reproduce, meaningful photographs, many of which these writers (Guibert and Macé especially) have taken themselves. The texts in Kawakami’s corpus consistently deploy photography as a metaphor, and a tool, for seeing the world differently. Throughout, Photobiography engages with some of the most influential theorists of the photographic medium (Benjamin, Bazin, Barthes, Sontag), and touches on a set of terms—like “indexicality, absence/presence, affect, and ethics”(6)—central to the debate about photography’s distinct ontology. Perhaps most importantly, however, Kawakami compellingly considers how Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé use photography to complicate the already ambiguous generic status of their texts, which hover on the border between document and fiction. This is what she means, in part, by the term“photobiography”:“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” (7). In a brief but enlightening introduction, the author traces the historical and theoretical antecedents that inform her understanding of this term. The first chapter serves as a critical prelude to the analyses that follow by proposing fruitfully how Proust’s Recherche, and in particular his thoughts on perception and technology therein, anticipates the photographic selfwriting by the authors at the core of this study. The following three chapters offer a series of smart close readings that tease out what makes each author’s “photobiographical ” approach unique. Guibert, for example, is less interested in questions of referentiality in photography—contra Barthes, Guibert prefers to ponder what photographs do not show—than he is in positing photography as an“act of love”(40). Ernaux’s“(auto)ethnological”process (103) prompts the author to“write photographically ” as a way to render her texts, and the life experience she describes within them, more material, more tangible. And, finally, while Macé makes no attempt to “mimic the qualities of photography” (164) in his more implicitly autobiographic kind of self-writing, his extensive incorporation of images in his texts highlights the power 220 FRENCH REVIEW 89.2 Reviews 221 of photography to transform—often as a mirror that reflects as well as it refracts— the real. University of Virginia Ari J. Blatt Kullberg, Christina. The Poetics of Ethnography in Martinican Narratives: Exploring the Self and the Environment. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2013. ISBN 978-08139 -3513-3. Pp. 217. $27.50. Cette étude passionnante, parue dans la série “New World Studies” dirigée par J. Michael Dash, est dédiée à la place faite à l’ethnographie dans des textes martiniquais. Selon l’auteure, chercheuse attachée au département de langues modernes de l’Université d’Uppsala, les auteurs martiniquais ont mis en place des stratégies spécifiques pour appréhender leur réalité et pour tenter d’articuler une identité martiniquaise compliquée par un désir parfois contradictoire d’enracinement et d’hybridité: “This complicated, if not paradoxical, process of searching for and expressing internal knowledge about the self and the environment is the topic of this book”(2). Kullberg, ayant remarqué que les références à l’ethnographie abondent dans les textes martiniquais au point de constituer un élément caractéristique...