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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
The Use of Photography recounts a passionate love affair between Annie Ernaux and the journalist and author Marc Marie, after the two met in January 2003. Ernaux had been receiving intensive chemo for breast cancer during the prior three months, and had lost all her hair from the treatments. At the end of January she had surgery, followed by radiation therapy. The affair took place in different locations and Ernaux describes how, shortly after it began, she found herself entranced each morning by the sight of clothes strewn about, chairs out of place and the remains of their last meal of the evening still on the table – and how painful it felt to put things back in order afterwards. She went and got her camera, and began to take photographs of the scenes of disarray. When she told Marc Marie what she had done, he said he had felt the same desire. Translated by Alison L. Strayer into English for the first time, The Use of Photography is an extraordinary meditation on eroticism, photography and writing, a major work by the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.
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‘Reading her is like getting to know a friend, the way they tell you about themselves over long conversations that sometimes take years, revealing things slowly, looping back to some parts of their life over and over, hardly mentioning others.’
— Joanna Biggs, London Review of Books
‘Annie Ernaux is one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months.’
— Sheila Heti, author of Alphabetical Diaries
‘Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation.’
— Margaret Drabble, New Statesman
‘Across the ample particularities of over forty years and twenty-one books, almost all short, subject-driven memoirs, Ernaux has fundamentally destabilized and reinvented the genre in French literature.’
— Audrey Wollen, The Nation
‘I find her work extraordinary.’
— Eimear McBride, author of Something Out of Place
Praise for A Woman’s Story
‘Ernaux’s genius, here as elsewhere, is in using her own experiences to bring into consciousness our painful unknown knowns, through a deeply relatable, hyper-personal objectivity.’
— Lucy Sweeney Byrne, Irish Times
‘What emerges is something that verges on the mystical: Ernaux writes as though she is not writing but unearthing something that already exists.’
— Lucy Thynne, The London Magazine
4Praise for The Young Man
‘[Ernaux’s] work is self-revealing, a series of pitiless auto-autopsies…. These are deeply intimate books, but in another way, Ernaux brings a disquieting impersonality to her project.’
— Megan Nolan, The Times
‘The Young Man does offer a taste of what’s so unique and astonishing about her honesty, her intelligence, the deceptive simplicity of her narratives.... [I]t adds invaluable information to what we have already learned about the sources of her energy and courage, about the complex connections between her life and her work, her lived experience and the grace with which she transforms memory into art.’
— Francine Prose, Guardian
‘Ernaux’s works aren’t coy or glancing; they’ve been sharpened to a point. Though she seems like a writer of details, each book is a vital mission, carried out with thrusting force.’
— Tobi Haslett, Harper’s
Praise for Getting Lost
‘All her books have the quality of saving frail human details from oblivion. Together they tell, in fragments, the story of a woman in the twentieth century who has lived fully, sought out pain and happiness equally and then committed her findings truthfully on paper. Her life is our inheritance.’
— Ankita Chakraborty, Guardian
‘Ernaux has once more created a living document of existential terror and hope.’
— Catherine Taylor, Irish Times
5‘The almost primitive directness of her voice is bracing. It’s as if she’s carving each sentence onto the surface of a table with a knife.... Getting Lost is a feverish book. It’s about being impaled by desire, and about the things human beings want, as opposed to the things for which they settle … it’s one of those books about loneliness that, on every page, makes you feel less alone.’
— Dwight Garner, New York Times
Praise for Simple Passion
‘A work of lyrical precision and diamond-hard clarity.’
— New Yorker
‘The triumph of Ernaux’s approach ... is to cherish commonplace emotions while elevating the banal expression of them.... A monument to passions that defy simple explanations.’
— New York Times
‘I devoured – not once, but twice – Fitzcarraldo’s new English edition of Simple Passion, in which the great Annie Ernaux describes the suspended animation of a love affair with a man who is not free. Every paragraph, every word, brought me closer to a state of purest yearning.’
— Rachel Cooke, Observer
‘What mesmerizes here, as elsewhere in Ernaux’s oeuvre, is the interplay between the solipsistic intensity of the material and its documentary, disinterested, almost egoless presentation. Reminiscent of the poet Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow, a study of how grief mangles chronology, Simple Passion is a riveting investigation, in a less tragic key, into what happens to one’s experience of time in the throes of romantic obsession.’
— Lola Seaton, New Statesman6
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THE USE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
ANNIE ERNAUX & MARC MARIE
Translated by ALISON L. STRAYER
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‘Eroticism is the approval of life unto death.’
— Georges Bataille10
CONTENTS
11Often, from the start of our relationship, on getting up in the morning, I would gaze in fascination at the dinner table, which had not been cleared, at the chairs out of place, our tangled clothes that had been thrown all over the floor the night before, while we were making love. It was a different landscape every time. Having to destroy it by separating and picking up each of our belongings made my heart heavy. I felt as if I were removing the only objective trace of our pleasure.
One morning, I got up after M. had left. When I came downstairs and saw the pieces of clothing and lingerie, the shoes, scattered over the tiles of the corridor in the sunlight, I had a sensation of sorrow and beauty. For the first time, I thought that this arrangement born of desire and accident, doomed to disappear, should bephotographed. I went to get my camera. When I told M. what I had done, he confessed to having felt the same desire.
Tacitly, from that time on, as if making love were not enough and we needed to preserve a material representation of the act, we continued to take photos. Some we took immediately after lovemaking, others the next morning. The morning pictures were the most moving. These things cast off by our bodies had spent the whole night in the very place and position in which they’d fallen, the remains of an already distant celebration. To see them again in the light of day was to feel thepassage of time.
Very soon we grew eager, even excited to discover together and to photograph the always new and unpredictable composition, whose elements – jumpers, stockings, shoes – had organized themselves according to unknown laws, movements and gestures that we had forgotten, of which we had been unaware.
12A rule was spontaneously established between us: never to touch the arrangement of the clothing. To move a high-heeled shoe or a T-shirt would have been wrong, as impossible for me as changing the order of the words in my journal. It would have been an attack on the reality of our act of love. And if one of us had, without thinking, picked up a piece of clothing, it was not put back for the photograph.
M. usually took several shots of the scene, framing them differently to capture all the things scattered on the floor. I preferred him to do the shooting. Unlike him, I have little experience of photography, which I’ve only practised in a sporadic, absent-minded way until now. At first he used the heavy black Samsung that belonged to me, then the Minolta that had belonged to his late father, and later the small Olympus that replaced my faulty Samsung. All three were analoguecameras.1
There was a delay of one or several weeks (the time it took to finish the film and bring it to Photo Service for development) between our taking the photos and viewing them for the first time, which was done according to a ritual:
the person who went to collect the prints was not allowed to open the packet;
both of us had to be sitting on the sofa, side by side, with a drink in front of us and a CD playing in the background; and
the photos were to be removed from the envelope one 13at a time and viewed by both of us.
Each time was a surprise. We did not immediately recognize the room in the house where the photo had been taken, or the clothing. It was no longer the scene we had seen and wanted to save, soon to be lost, but a strange painting, with often sumptuous colours and enigmatic shapes. We felt as if the lovemaking of the night or the morning, the date of which we already struggled to recall, had taken on material form and at the same time been transfigured, as if it now existed elsewhere, in a mysterious space.
For a few months, it was enough for us to simply take photos, to view and to accumulate them. The idea of writing about them came up one evening over dinner. I don’t remember who had the idea first, but we knew at once that we shared the same desire to give it substance. It was as if what we’d thought until then would be enough to preserve a trace of our moments of love – the photos – was not enough and we needed something more – writing.
We chose fourteen of the forty-odd photos and agreed that each would write separately, in total freedom, never show the other anything until it was done, or even change a word. The rule was strictly observed until the end.
There was only one exception. When we started to take these photos, I was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. While writing, I very quickly felt the necessity of evoking the other scene playing itself out inside my body, absent from the photographs – the blurred and stupefying (‘Is it really me this is happening to?’) struggle between life and death. I mentioned it to M. Like me, he was unable to ignore this aspect, which had been an essential part of our relationship for months. It was the only 14time we talked about the content of our ‘compositions’, a spontaneous, provisional name we gave to our project, corresponding (in both senses of the word) to what they were to us.
I cannot define the value or the interest of our undertaking. In a way, it belongs to the same frenzy for turning life into images that is increasingly characteristic of our age. Whether through photographs, or writing, we strove each time to give greater reality to moments of pleasure that were fleeting and impossible to represent. To capture the unreality of sex in the reality of what it leaves behind. The highest degree of reality, however, will only be attained if these written photos are transformed into other scenes in the reader’s memory or imagination.
Cergy, 22 October 2004
1 This term, which has appeared in recent years to mark the difference from ‘digital’, just as vinyl marks the difference from CD in music, is a distinction that heralds the programmed disappearance of the former in favour of the latter. It strikes me as incongruous, impossible to apply to what for me will remain forever, simply, a camera.
15In the photo, all we see of M., who is standing, is the part of his body between the bottom of his grey jumper with its wide cable ribs, level with the top of his auburn bush, and the middle of his thighs, over which his underwear – black boxer shorts with ‘Dim’ in big white letters – has been lowered. The sex, seen in profile, is erect. The light from the flash illuminates the veins and makes a drop of sperm glisten at the tip of the glans, like a bead. The shadow of the erect penis is projected onto the books in the bookcase that occupies the entire right part of the photo. The names of the authors and titles can be read in large type: Lévi-Strauss, Martin Walser, Cassandra, The Age of Extremes. A hole can be seen at the bottom of the jumper.
I took this photo on 11 February, after a quick lunch. I remember the bright sunshine in the room and his sex in the light. I had to take the RER into Paris, so we didn’t have time to make love. The photo was the thing we did instead.
I can describe it, but I could not expose it to the eyes of others.
I realize that, in a way, it is the counterpart of Courbet’s painting TheOrigin of the World, which for a long time I’d only ever seen in a photo in a magazine. It also has much in common with a scene I witnessed the summer I was twenty-three, at the Termini station, in Rome, as I was eating a hot dog, leaning against the open window of a train that was about to leave. Right across from me, in the train stopped on the other side of the platform, an erect penis, pulled free of a pair of trousers, was furiously stroked by the hand of a man hidden from the waist up by the blind he had lowered halfway in a first-class compartment.
16I saw M.’s sex for the first time on the night of 22 to 23 January 2003, at my house, in the entrance hall, at the foot of the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. There is something extraordinary about the first appearance of the other’s sex, the unveiling of what was hitherto unknown. So that is what we’re going to live with, live our love with. Or not.
