Men have repeatedly lectured me about Annie Ernaux. “You must read ‘The Years,’” a date once told me, responding to the homage I’d written, staying up all night in a Swiss hotel room, upon learning that this writer whose work I’d admired for decades had been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. (In the piece, I mentioned that “The Years” lay unopened on my bedside table at home.)
Well, I can now report that “The Years,” with its layers of autobiography nestled like Matryoshka dolls within a broader portrait of the French postwar generation, is an anomaly in Ernaux’s oeuvre. In the main, her work consists of slender volumes, knifelike in their intensity and pared-down precision as they focus on the material conditions, unspoken truths and (at times) lacerating emotions of one particular woman’s life.
“The Use of Photography,” Ernaux’s most recent work to make it into English — deftly translated by Alison L. Strayer — is also an anomaly: a photo essay published in France in 2005 and co-authored with the journalist and photographer Marc Marie, who died in 2022.
In the opening pages, Ernaux explains the work’s genesis. She and Marie, acquaintances, had dined together in a Left Bank restaurant on Jan. 22, 2003. He’d recently broken up with his live-in girlfriend. He wasn’t aware, at first, that Ernaux was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, with an operation scheduled for the coming week. She sprung the news of her diagnosis on him suddenly, noting to herself (with a certain satisfaction) that he didn’t flinch at the revelation.
They spent that night together and an affair ensued, as intense as it was unlikely, unfolding primarily in Ernaux’s house in Cergy (a Paris suburb), with brief excursions abroad when she was able to travel. One morning early on in their relationship she came downstairs to find the remains of dinner still on the table and their clothes strewn about the hallway, shed in the urgency of their desire for each other. Moved by this “composition” created by chance and passion, she took a picture, the first of around 40 postcoital still lifes recorded by the couple, “to capture,” she writes, “the unreality of sex in the reality of what it leaves behind.”
“The Use of Photography” includes 14 of these pictures, each accompanied by two essays, one by Ernaux, one by Marie. The photographs attest to the couple’s having made love in an impressive array of domestic locations. Garments and shoes lie scattered across a white-tiled entrance hall or form indistinguishable heaps beneath a kitchen counter lined with unwashed dishes. There is mute comedy in two empty white mules seeming to stride across a living room carpet, and in a pair of men’s jeans, belted around an absent waist and half rising from the floor as if inhabited by a randy ghost.
As images, they are the opposite of pornographic, leaving nearly everything to the imagination. They also have little in common with fashion photographs; in the couple’s rush to nakedness, the garments here are discarded with no regard for their display or preservation. In fact, Marie points out in an essay, these pictures resemble crime scene photographs. They attest to love’s sometimes violent needs, while also suggesting its eventual devastation.
Ernaux’s essays include startlingly precise descriptions of chemotherapy. “For months,” she writes, “my body was a theater of violent operations.” The lovers appear not to have been put off by the leather harness that she wears for five-day stretches at a time, even at night, and which holds a “vial of poison” at her waist. A thin plastic tube runs from the vial up her chest, ending in a needle plugged into a catheter implanted near her armpit. In the intervals between treatments, the catheter remains in place, “a sort of protuberant beer cap, under the skin.”
She loses all her hair. “Because of my totally smooth body he called me his mermaid woman,” she says of Marie. “The catheter like a growth protruding from my chest became a ‘supernumerary bone.’” It’s tempting to offer Marie a posthumous award for gallantry, but I sense that it was not politeness that compelled him to seek shelter in a love affair shadowed by death. “I don’t know what these photos are,” he writes. “I know what they are not: images in frames on a mantelpiece, next to a father, chubby babies and a great-uncle in uniform.”
“The Use of Photography” takes its place, alongside Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida,” as a profound meditation on the paradoxes of this medium that has come increasingly to dominate our lives, even as we struggle to break free of it. It is also a testament to the disruptive force of desire and the power of images to stand guard as sentinels against illness, loss and death.
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