Philippa Conlon reviews The Use of Photography (Fitzcarraldo, 2024) by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie (translated by Alison L. Strayer)
In 2003, when she was diagnosed with cancer, Annie Ernaux found that she could not write. Entries in her notebook l’Atelier Noir (2011) record an elliptical kind of self-rebuke from that year: ‘Breast cancer, haven’t written anything since about the twentieth of January’. Ernaux would later confess to Alison L. Strayer, the translator of The Use of Photography (2024), that she struggled partly because she ‘didn’t know if [she] was going to get better’. In the book itself, she asks ‘How to conceive of my death…my exit from time?’ The woman who writes unflinchingly about all aspects of life is suddenly confronted with its ultimate fact—its end—and falls silent.
Reticence is not normally Ernaux’s style. In her first three novels, she donated details of her own experience to the page with a detached and determined generosity. But sometime during the process of writing A Man’s Place (translated in 1992), an account of her father’s life, she settled more firmly on self-disclosure. To Ernaux, fiction now seemed at best a form of stylistic squeamishness, at worst an imaginative infidelity to her family and to her social class. The ‘I’ of A Man’s Place, then, is simultaneously a daughter desperate to understand her father and a spectator who surveys the scene with a coolly sociological slant. The book was something of a breakthrough, and its mixture of apparent apathy and outrage animates Ernaux’s later work. But in 2022, she admitted to the New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz that this ‘flat writing’ is ‘excruciatingly hard’ to achieve: its style is bracing even brusque but bears an almost invisible load of loss and pain. And it is sustainable only because Ernaux believes in, what she called in a 1993 essay published in Cahiers du RITM, its ‘transpersonal’ potential. The subjectivity of her writing surrenders to something larger than itself; its ‘I’ is ‘impersonal’ and capacious, an interiority flecked with a consciousness of the collective. This handover from writer to reader allows for Ernaux’s honesty. She revels in the risk of self-exposure, happily immune to its consequences. In Simple Passion (translated in 1993), she compares the feeling to ‘lying in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen’ or ‘making love without contraceptives at twenty’.
The Use of Photography aims for this authorial abandon. It is a collaboration between Ernaux and her then-lover, the photographer and journalist, Marc Marie. One morning, at the outset of their affair, Ernaux went downstairs to find clothing, lingerie, and shoes scattered across the tiled floor. Moved by an urge to mark the moment, she photographed these accidental arrangements, the debris of the previous night’s desire. Marie later admitted that he had felt the same instinct. The Use of Photography, made up of fourteen of these photographs and essays by the two, is an intimate and creative communion. But, in her preface to the book, Ernaux asserts that these ‘written photos’ reach for the ‘highest degree of reality’ in the reader’s imagination and memory. She invokes that ‘I’ which in its articulated aftermath becomes a ‘we’. It is the trick of the autofictional writer (though Ernaux herself resists this term precisely for its solipsistic scope): she recoils from the treacly realm of her own emotion and finds creative recourse in the construction of a communal life.
But illness is isolation. Try to describe it and ‘language at once runs dry’, Virginia Woolf warns in her 1926 essay ‘On Being Ill’. Ernaux tells very few people about her cancer for fear of their sympathy, the kind which is really furtively refashioned relief that it is not their suffering. On the page, it emerges as something of an afterthought— that ‘other scene…absent from the photographs’. And there is a series of images we never see. ‘My body was investigated and photographed innumerable times from every angle and with every technique in existence’, Ernaux writes before listing various scans, mammograms, and ultrasounds. This is all consigned to a footnote, neatly cordoned off from the main text. She keeps her pain firmly out of frame. Even Marie who imagines their relationship as a morbid ménage à trois (‘we live together as a threesome, death, A. and me’) at times misses her mental track. The night before Ernaux is to return to the Institut Curie to hear her prognosis, Marie wonders aloud if he has ‘lost interest’ in his ex-girlfriend. Ernaux, sitting on her own in the kitchen in the early hours of the morning, notices that this pain is worse than ‘not yet knowing whether [she] was doomed or not’. Entirely alone, she is suddenly struck by how singular and small the ‘I’ can feel. Ernaux remains haunted by the prospect of her ‘non-existence’ but insists ‘that if only her ‘thoughts could continue elsewhere, dying wouldn’t matter’. Transfiguring her experience in the mind of the reader, and living, altered, in their memory is now not just a matter of style but also of survival. It strikes her as both an imperative and an impossibility.
The Use of Photography, then, is a crisis of Ernaux’s life-writing. When first diagnosed, she turns to narrative, suddenly tempted by its teleology, the lure of its linearity. At a train station, she sees a ‘gypsy woman holding out her hand’ for money. Noticing that she is breastfeeding a child and that her breast is purple, Ernaux retraces her steps and gives her a coin. ‘For the sake of mine’, she admits. Her unusually interventionist impulse is an attempt to impose a cosmic symmetry on her unluckiness, to render reality readable. Later, she adopts a different approach and admires how life escapes all the neat narratives we make for it. When Marie asks if the cancer is in her left breast, Ernaux is surprised, but with a kind of grim glee she remarks that he can ‘probably not imagine’ that the ‘prettier of the two’, tumour-swollen, is a sign of her sickness. Faced with the unruliness of living, how it seeps out of sense and structure, Ernaux concludes that she is ‘looking for a literary form that would contain [her] whole life’ and that it does ‘not yet exist’.
The image becomes a kind of compensation. The visual usurps the verbal in part because it promises a certain precision; it is committed to ‘material traces’, as indisputable as the ‘stains on sheets, or old mattresses’. The Use of Photography is, incidentally, the first of Ernaux’s books to contain actual photographs. She ventures that this ‘something [she] could only do…at this time in [her] life’. Perhaps this is because the camera cannot ‘capture a span of time’ but instead ‘lock[s] you into the moment’. It takes for itself the single second and holds at bay all the deliverance and devastation that can follow. Ernaux pores over these photographs because here is evidence of her life and of Marie’s love, which are both in doubt. And writing would be a surrender of this immediacy, a betrayal of the moment. She even swears one evening that if ‘[she’d] had to choose between making love with M. and preserving [her] pages of notes, it is not them [she] would have chosen’.
Ernaux’s recovery, then, is a rehabilitation to the page. It is also her separation from Marie. Ernaux has always had the peculiar ability both to be consumed by her desire and capable of dissecting it, ardent and analytical in equal measure. In Simple Passion, for example, and even more so in Getting Lost (the diaries from that love affair, translated in 2022), Ernaux is forensic about her own foolishness. The two form a diptych of the ecstatic agony of wanting and being unwanted in return, and of the manic monotony that this stalemate of desire and dejection brings with it. Ernaux does not eat, barely sleeps, writes irregularly, and refuses to hoover in case her lover calls. All of this for a man who is, more or less, unremarkable. ‘And yet what it all comes down to is this:’, she writes, ‘he fucks, he drinks vodka, he talks about Stalin.’ In The Use of Photography, Ernaux is more probing: ‘The difficulty I experience in doing without a man comes less from a purely sexual need than from a desire to know.’ That verb is so invitingly intransitive (know what?), and it is only when the affair collapses that Ernaux can articulate any sort of answer.
Marie and Ernaux break up because their life together threatens to become art. Their last photos are less spontaneous than the first few, weighed down by style and symbolism. Of a photographed black dress coiled like a rose on the floor, Marie writes that it is ‘too beautiful’, and Ernaux compares it to a canvas in a picture gallery. The image enunciates an ending: ‘Here there is no more life or time. Here I am dead’. Marie slowly retreats into being a ‘revelation’ for Ernaux, who suddenly feels as ‘if [they] didn’t know each other’ at all and thinks of other men who she has slept with and of all the times when she didn’t sleep with her husband. Life, in other words, goes on, and these paper trails of pleasure and pain become proof of something else, a renewed acceptance of the singular and subjective moment in time.
The affair is a brief spell of seductive, salvific happiness in a time of Ernaux’s life that otherwise could have been hopeless. But Ernaux ultimately reunites her ‘I’ with the reader, concluding that if ‘the shadow of nothingness, in one form or another, does not hover over writing…it doesn’t really contain anything of use to the living’. Her relationship with Marie fails but the one between life and art, born of the same necessities, oblique compulsions and desire for communion, goes on.
PHILIPPA CONLON gave it a go.
Art by Angelika Woodruff.
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