Les mythologies individuelles: récit de soi et photographie au 20e siècle par Magali Nachtergael (review)

Reviews 239 Nachtergael, Magali. Les mythologies individuelles: récit de soi et photographie au 20e siècle. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. ISBN 978-90-420-3483-9. Pp. 292. 58 a. At the intersection of literature and the visual arts, this book examines hybrid forms of self-representation that have emerged since the invention of photography. The first chapter, “La révolution photographique,” reinvigorates the familiar story of photography’s transformation of the field of representation by connecting two very different fin-de-siècle works. Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte (1892), a novel illustrated with photographs, and Mallarmé’s experiment with the visual form of the poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897) both exploit the possibilities of technical modernity to construct the space of the page as a fragmented visual theater. They thus set the stage for avant-garde experimentation with modes of textual and visual interaction that displace the poetic subject while foregrounding the poet-artist’s everyday environment (Apollinaire, Cendrars, Cubist collage, Dadaist photomontage). Chapter 2, “L’autobiographie de la modernité,” analyzes Breton’s Nadja (1928) as a new form of autobiography that borrows from the popular genres of illustrated magazines and ciné-romans. By studying Breton’s modifications for the 1963 edition (notably the addition of four photographs), Nachtergael connects Breton’s retrospective self-mythologizing to postwar practices of personal mythography. The book’s third chapter,“Mythologies de l’intime” examines the narrative models of the photoessay and the roman-photo, which appear in the postwar period both as popular, mass-media forms and as a site of literary and artistic experimentation (examples include Robbe-Grillet’s interest in the roman-photo, the photo-textual narratives of Duane Michals, and the photomontages of Richard Hamilton). Chapter 4,“Esthétique de l’instant,” traces Barthes’s trajectory from the cultural critic of Mythologies (1957) to the self-mythographer of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) and La chambre claire (1980), who develops a fragmentary aesthetics of the self based on the biographical detail (biographème). The culminating chapter,“Naissance des mythologies individuelles,”investigates the emergence in the 1960s and 1970s of a new set of mixedmedia autobiographical practices by visual artists such as Christian Boltanski, Jean Le Gac, and Annette Messager. Extended analyses of Boltanski’s combinations of fiction and self-documentation, and of Sophie Calle’s staging and ritualization of life events, are followed by a survey of the contemporary proliferation of mythologizing autobiographies . Nachtergael’s book combines a broad historical sweep with close attention to key figures. Its genealogy is inspired by the paradoxical concept of “mythologies individuelles,” first proposed by the curator Harald Szeemann in the context of the 1972 Documenta exhibition in Kassel (11–12). In artistic practice, individualized ‘petites mythologies’replace collective narratives via complex forms of fragmentation and recomposition.In popular culture,semi-imaginary construction of personal identity occurs first in the family photo album and today in dematerialized online forms of narrative and visual representation. The book’s introduction and conclusion perhaps focus too heavily on demystification, privileging Baudelairean suspicion of the photographic image (or Debord’s critique of the spectacle) over Barthes’s sense of the photograph’s indexical and emotional force. Unfortunately, the book itself does not include photographic reproductions to illustrate the detailed analyses of visual works. Nevertheless, this is an engaging and truly interdisciplinary study that offers compelling insights and thought-provoking connections. University of Chicago Alison James Thompson, C.W. French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. ISBN 978-0-19-923354-0. Pp. 472. £64. At the beginning of his study, Thompson wonders why well-known French authors embraced the Romantic travelogue during the first half of the nineteenth century, while their foreign counterparts in England and Germany did not do so to a similar extent. The author finds a response to his question in the “emergence of a distinctive Romantic travelogue that was born with Chateaubriand and Staël, died soon after Nerval in the 1850s, and is characterized in part by a novelistic impulse”(3). The author restricts his study to finished books in prose that were published by major authors, thereby concentrating...