UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Between Erasure and Exposure: Intermedial Autobiography Since Roland Barthes A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone Studies by Lauren Elizabeth Van Arsdall 2015 © Copyright by Lauren Elizabeth Van Arsdall 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Between Erasure and Exposure: Intermedial Autobiography Since Roland Barthes by Lauren Elizabeth Van Arsdall Doctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 Professor Malina Stefanovska, Chair In my dissertation, I investigate the trend toward intermedial representations of the self in contemporary French personal writing of an autobiographical type. The theoretical framework of my dissertation is based on notions of referentiality presented in La chambre claire, and in essays contemporaneous to Roland Barthes’s by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jean Baudrillard. As I demonstrate, they are in dialogue with it, all the while exploring the boundaries of self-representation in relation to illness and death. At the outset, an analysis of the discourses of photography in France from the 1980s to the early 2000s informs my discussion of representations of an expected death in works by Alix Cléo Roubaud, Jacques Roubaud, Annie Ernaux, and Hervé Guibert. I argue that the legacy of a Barthesian conceptualization of the photograph obliges writers to rethink their stance towards representing the self. Through gestures of erasure and exposure, they create an intermedial aesthetic coupling writing, photography, and film to explore anew certain taboos concerning self and death. Intermediality opens up the notions of referentiality presented in Roland Barthes’s La chambre ii claire: note sure la photographie— the making of traces through writing, memories, and recording the body. The “intermedial” authors selected are central to a trend (begun in the early 1980s and increasingly practiced over the past thirty years) that takes advantage of visual media and writing to explore not only posing for and viewing photographs but also the taking of these images. They also examine the shifting boundaries between intimate and social spaces of the self. By bringing to light their particular poetics, my work attends to the impact of the intertwined representations of the self, illness, and death in the fields of autobiographical works and of visual studies within the academic domain of French Studies. iii The dissertation of Lauren Elizabeth Van Arsdall is approved. George Thomas Baker Lia N. Brozgal Malina Stefanovska, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2015 iv Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………................1 Lenses and Mirrors Deaths Foretold: Thanatography and Ghosts 1. Mourning and Memory in Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noir and Alix Cléo Roubaud’s Photographic Writing ………………………………………………………23 Revelations from the Dark Room Expanding the Frame: A Portrait of Alix Cléo Roubaud in Film Dying Twice: Photography and Elegy From Ekphrastic Dialogue to Post-mortem Commentary Éros mélancolique: Shadows of Alix Cléo Roubaud 2. Invisible Scenes: Eroticizing Pictures in Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’usage de la photo……………………………………………………………………......75 Photographic Writing Style and the je transpersonnel Exhibiting the Banal No Pink Ribbon: Visualizing Autopathography Text as Jouissance Intermediality as Uncoupling 3. From Erasure to Exposure: Hervé Guibert’s Theory of the Image……………….129 Ghostliness in L’Image fantôme Corpsing: Staging Suicide on Camera Framing Reactions to La pudeur ou l’impudeur Breakdown of Boundaries v Self-Reflexivity and the Camcorder Conclusion……………………………………………………………………....………180 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………....…….190 vi Acknowledgments Many people have supported me throughout the writing of the dissertation. I thank Malina Stefanovska for her guidance and intellect, as well as her indefatigable feedback on drafts. Lia Brozgal was an insightful reader and mentor whose collegiality, in-depth commentary, and eye for detail taught me so much. George Baker has been generous with his time and supported my efforts as an interdisciplinary scholar. I am grateful to Andrea Loselle for helping me lay the groundwork for the project by supervising my qualifying exams. In-put by Michelle Clayton and Stuart Burrows in the early stages of the project was also essential. Thanks are due to Kerry Allen for helping me navigate administrative process, and I am grateful to Diana King at the Arts Library for helping me discover and access photo-literary works I needed to see. I also had the good fortune to be able to test out ideas for this project at a Photo-Literature event at UC Berkeley. Special thanks are due to Suzanne Guerlac and Jean-Pierre Montier for their invitation to speak and to those who asked questions. My work was made possible by a series of fellowships and grants. The Center for European and Eurasian Studies funded two periods of summer research in France. Fellowships from the UCLA Graduate Division facilitated the early stages and the completion of the final manuscript of the dissertation. My gratitude also goes out to the Center for the Study of Women for the opportunity to present my work at the annual Thinking Gender conference. Also at UCLA, I owe an enormous debt to friends and colleagues, who left their mark on this dissertation. Heartfelt thanks to the members of my writing group: Veronica Dean, Carolyn EmBree, Anneka Haddix, Adelaide Kuehn, Annie Mueller, and Kate Schlosser. I want to express appreciation for their enthusiasm, cheerfulness, and encouragement. No acknowledgement section would be complete with mentioning my parents, Robert and Debra Van Arsdall, and my vii sisters, who provided welcome breaks from the dissertation. And lastly, I must thank my partner, Alexander Garcia, for his laughter, lightness, and unfailing support without which this project would not have been possible. viii VITA/BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH LAUREN ELIZABETH VAN ARSDALL EDUCATION University of California, Los Angeles Ph.D. Candidate, French and Francophone Studies, expected spring 2015 University of California, Los Angeles B.A. French and Francophone Literature, 2009 PUBLICATIONS Published or In Press (In Press), “Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Coming of Age’,” Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Ageing. New York: SAGE. (In Press), “Lenses and Mirrors: A Portrait of the Photographer Alix Cléo Roubaud,” Revue photo-littéraire, no. 5. “Book Review: In Looking Back One Learns To See: Marcel Proust and Photography,” The French Review (May 2015). “Cross-Pollinations and Confrontations of Image and Text in Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s Les Malheurs des immortels,” Modern Humanities Research Association Papers: Literature and Art, vol. 9 (Winter 2014). SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS th st 2015. “Is French Literature Really Dead?” 20 and 21 Century International French and Francophone Studies Colloquium, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. 2014. “Rituals of Jouissance in Annie Ernaux’s L’Usage de la photo.” Proceedings from the Thinking Gender Conference. Center for the Study of Women. <http://escholarship.org/uc/csw_thinkinggender.> th st 2013. “Sophie Calle’s Travelogues,” 20 and 21 Century International French and Francophone Studies Colloquium, Emory University, Atlanta. HONORS & AWARDS 2014-2015 Dissertation Year Fellowship Center for European and Eurasian Studies Dissertation Grant ix 2013-2014 Martin Turrell Award for Excellence in Teaching Center for European and Eurasian Studies Pre-doctoral Grant 2012-2013 Graduate Research Mentorship Graduate Summer Research Mentorship 2010-2012 Chancellor’s Prize Summer Research Mentorship 2009-2013 Pauline Yu Humanities Fellowship x INTRODUCTION Remarking on the need to film her mother’s death from terminal breast cancer, conceptual artist Sophie Calle contends, “I didn’t want to miss the last word, her last smile. As I knew I had to shut my eyes to sleep, because the agony was very long, there was a risk I might not be there. I put a camera there, thinking that if she gave a jump or start, a last work, at least I’d have it on film.” 1 Calle’s film Pas pu saisir la mort (2007) is an eleven-minute short based on over one hundred hours of footage from the previous year made using a camera propped by the foot of her mother’s bed. Exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the film plays in a loop, and as the title Pas pu saisir la mort, or “Couldn’t Capture Death” suggests, it is impossible to tell when Calle’s mother takes her last breath. The title also suggests that her death cannot be grasped precisely because of the “uncomfortable relation” that arises from placing us in the position of witnessing a stranger die, which is, by all standards, a private affair that here happens before our very eyes.2 The camera seizes upon her mother’s profile bathed in a soft light emanating from the hospital window, and within the peaceful mise-en-scène of the deathbed, we become both entranced and complicit in studying the video for signs of her passing, unable to tell if she is asleep, awake, or dead. In defense of the mortuary aspect of the film, Calle argues it is not about aggression or intrusion; rather, as she claims, the film pays homage to her mother, a woman who, much like Calle herself, loved being the center of attention.3 1 See Angelique Chrisafis, “Interview: He Loves Me Not.” The Guardian. 15 June 2007. 2 See Anneleen Masschelein, “Capturing the Last Moments: Recording the Dying Body at the Turn of the 21st century.” Image and narrative, vol. 14, no. 3 (2013): 122-40. 3 See also Marcelline Block, “Unburied Mothers: The Death of the Maternal in Simone de Beauvoir’s Une mort très douce and Sophie Calle’s Pas pu saisir la mort.” The Many Ways We Talk About Death in Contemporary Society. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2009, and Rosalind Krauss’s Under Blue Cup. Boston: MIT Press, 2011. 1 Calle’s film is both a commentary on the invisibility of grief and an important part of a long history of thanatography, or works that attempt to represent death; it is also a narrative project about the artist and her subject.