Photographs in Two Works of Life Writing: L'afrique Fantôme by Michel

Photographs in Two Works of Life Writing: L’Afrique fantôme by Michel Leiris and L’Africain by J.-M.G Le Clézio by Matthew Rushton A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Mediations Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario © 2018 Matthew Rushton Abstract: This dissertation looks at the role of photographs in two works of autobiographical, travel-based life writing. Michel Leiris’ 1934 travel diary, L’Afrique fantôme features 31 ethnographic photographs taken during a French ethnographic expedition that crossed sub-Saharan Africa at the beginning of the 1930s. J.-M.G. Le Clézio’s 2004 memoir L’Africain includes 15 photographs taken by his father, a British medical doctor stationed in remote areas of Cameroon and Nigeria in the 1930s and 1940s. What brings these works together in this research has surprisingly little to do with the readily apparent commonalities in subject matter between the two photo sets—peoples and places of the African continent during the high colonial period. Rather, we focus here on text-image relationships, examining how, in each case, the photographs are made to be autobiographical. Taking an intermedial approach to literary studies that raises the photographs up from a subordinate illustrative function, we consider the primarily textual operations that, in plays of meaning and intention, work to appropriate and incorporate into these texts photographs that can be resistant or disruptive to those efforts. Our readings of these works contribute new insight into the use and function of photographs in life writing. ii Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Dr. Aboubakar Sanogo and Dr. Bruno Thibault for such fair and firm evalutation of my research. Your challenges to and support of my work were so very validating a conclusion to this long, persistent, and at times, arduous process. To Dr. Jill Carrick, I want to thank you for your enthusiasm, encouragement and pointed obervations, which I felt in full from our very first encounter, and each and every time that we were fortunate to cross paths. To Dr. Carol Payne, from my arrival into the Cultural Mediations program, you showed consistent and continued support for this project. Without that support and your ever-so-precise suggestions and advice, this work could not have been realized. To the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, Dr. Casteel, Dr. Faulkner, Dr. Frank, Dr. Furstenau, Dr. Hodgins, Dr. Khordoc, Dr. Phillips, Dr. Phillips, Dr. Roy, Dr. Slaney, Dr. Théberge, Dr. Tiampo, and Mrs. Dawn Schmidt, thank you all for enriching these past several years. To my friends and colleagues in Cultural Mediations who have been on this same path, I could not have made it through without you. To my family and my friends, thank you for the years of support. To Mariana, thank you for believing in me. À Dr. Sébastien Côté, après dix ans d’appui, de conseils, et d’énorme influence, dix ans de formation intellectuelle et professionnelle, dix ans de patience et d’encouragement incessants, et tout cela tout au long de deux programmes d’études supérieures, je n’ai pas encore les mots pour vous remercier suffisamment. Ça me prendra du temps à les trouver. Je les trouverai. Humbly and confidently, I now move forward. iii Table of contents: Title page i Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Photography in Autobiographical Life Writing 16 Chapter 2: Michel Leiris’ L’Afrique fantôme. A Critical History 56 Chapter 3: Michel Leiris’ L’Afrique fantôme. The Photographs 106 Chapter 4: J.-M.G. Le Clézio’s L’Africain in words and pictures 180 Conclusion 239 References 247 iv Introduction: This study looks at the role of photographs in two works of autobiographical life writing. Michel Leiris’ 1934 travel diary, L’Afrique fantôme features thirty-one ethnographic photographs taken during a French ethnographic expedition that crossed sub-Saharan Africa at the beginning of the 1930s. J.-M.G. Le Clézio’s 2004 memoir L’Africain includes fifteen photographs taken by his father, a British medical doctor stationed in remote areas of Cameroon and Nigeria in the 1930s and 1940s. The photographs that illustrate Leiris’ L'Afrique fantôme were chosen from among thousands collected by a French ethnographic mission as it traveled from Dakar to Djibouti between 1931 and 1933. Le Clézio’s L'Africain, which revisits that author’s childhood voyage from postwar France to Nigeria to meet his father, a field doctor, for the very first time, is a generation—and several decades—removed from Leiris’ work, and so it offers a more contemporary retrospective of the era. Yet it shares with L’Afrique fantôme a lived experience, and Le Clézio uses his father’s personal photographs to anchor his story to that specific time and place in which the images had been captured. Photographs that appear in non-fiction are generally expected to corroborate or supplement a text (Adams xxi). However, these two works have been selected for how they challenge those expectations, for how the literary use of photographs in each work engages with the book’s textual elements. Taking an intermedial approach to literary studies that raises the photographs up from a subordinate illustrative function, we examine ways that photographs contribute to the literary construction of the self. What we consider are the primarily textual operations that work, in plays of meaning and intention, to appropriate and incorporate photographs that frequently prove themselves to 1 be resistant or disruptive to those efforts. In one respect, this study is about the role they play as illustrator, as a visual medium in collaboration1 with a written text. But the authors employ their photographs in intentional and deliberate ways. It is those intentional actions and their effects that are the primary focus of this study. Le Clézioʼs familial photographs hold a direct connection to the author’s past, yet they also serve to fabulate his memoir, reenacting and elaborating an escapist childhood fantasy as the author renegotiates the troubled relationship he had had with his father. As for Leiris’ image choices, they are strangely and deliberately banal. As ethnographic photographs, they are almost insignificant. The ceremonial masks, mud huts, and sun- baked faces squinting for the camera are all old hat by the time the book was published in 1934. But within the text of L’Afrique fantôme they can prove formally challenging and provocative, regardless of their actual subject. It is such details that begin to disrupt the narrative expectation2 of the visual content of these books. The two works also share a focus on those personal experiences of travel that are often negative, eliciting feelings of detachment or of isolation when they are not merely mundane. Leiris wrote L’Afrique fantôme during the interwar period, when at the age of thirty, he embarked upon a two-year journey across the African continent. The British novelist Graham Greene whose own travelogue, Journey Without Maps—about his reckless decision to walk across Liberia in 1935—, was published only two years after 3 L’Afrique fantôme, writes of this particular generation of writers, that: 1 This project takes what Irina Rajewsky calls a “literary approach” to intermedial studies; it examines "forms and functions of intermedial practices in given media products" ("Intermediality" 49). 2 See De Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology: 178. 3 While Greene, here, speaks of his British compatriots, similar things could be said of French scribes of the era, Leiris included. See Debaene… 2 We were a generation brought up on adventure stories who had missed the dis- illusionment of the First War; so we went looking for adventure […]. (ix) It was a period when ‘young authors’ were inclined to make uncomfortable journeys in search of bizarre material, Peter Fleming to Brazil and Manchuria, Evelyn Waugh to British Guyana and Ethiopia. (ix) In a race to prove themselves, this generation of interwar writer-travellers were nonetheless beset with a certain melancholy. Adventure-seeking was their outward compensation, from a sense of belatedness, a sense of having “missed the authentic experience once offered by a world that was already disappearing” (Behdad, Belated Travelers fourth cover), that had already been discovered. The world did not match the excitement of adventure stories with their “energizing myth[s]” of Imperial glory (M. Green, Dreams of Adventure… xi; qtd in Zilcosky Writing Travel 5). And, besides, those adventures had already been written; many an interwar travel writer would thus go to near extremes to carve out his own place, to show “the radical singularity” of his own voyage. (Debaene, Far Afield 133). With L’Afrique fantôme, the novelty was quite grandiose, if rather institutional. The Dakar-Djibouti Mission that was the catalyst for Leiris’s book had been orchestrated by the French government, and its launch was a grand affair that aimed to profit both from the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition and from the popularity at the time of jazz and black culture, by “riding the crest of the wave of enthusiasm for l’art nègre” (Clifford, Predicament of Culture 136). But the mission, itself, was belated: its mandate involved not the discovery and documentation of new cultural practices or languages, but rather the preservation of cultural effects that were disappearing due to colonial contact and a changing world (cf. “Instructions sommaires” in Cahier Dakar-Djibouti 174). The Dakar- 3 Djibouti mission also came decades after similar expeditions by other colonial powers, and so its leader, Marcel Griaule, prided himself, rather, on this mission’s advanced and state-of-the-art technology, which included equipment for capturing sound, images and moving pictures—Griaule even bragged of a boat that served as a mobile laboratory (Clifford, Predicament of Culture 56).

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