on The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer
In January, 2003, Annie Ernaux and the photographer/journalist Marc Marie began a love affair. “One morning, I got up after M. had left,” Ernaux writes at the outset of The Use of Photography. “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.” She fetched her camera, and when M. returned, they decided to shoot images of their vacated scenes of rising desire. As the photos began to accumulate, the two of them (they both hated the term “the couple”) devised a ritual for viewing them: “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.” At some point, they decided to write about the images. She says, “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.” After selecting 14 photos, they composed separately, not sharing their work for 10 months until their texts were collected for a book – L’usage de la photo, published by Gallimard in 2005, now translated for Anglophones by Alison L. Strayer.
The year 2003 was a challenging one for Ernaux. The previous October, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer; in January, her infusions began, which coincided with the first of the photographs. By July, the treatments had concluded. But The Use of Photography isn’t an illness memoir – though the brief texts about the photos, even more than the images themselves, are what fascinate her. The writing became for them “a sort of new erotic practice.” I recalled that in Ernaux’s The Young Man, she remarked, “Often I have made love to force myself to write.” The photos provided runways toward something more vital to her:
“I realize that I am fascinated by photos in the same way I’ve been fascinated, since childhood, by blood, semen, and urine stains on sheets, or old mattresses, discarded on sidewalks; by the stains of wine or food embedded in thew wood of sideboards, the stains of coffee or greasy fingers on old letters – the most material and organic kinds of stains. I realize that I expect the same thing from writing. I want words to be like stains you cannot tear yourself away from.”
This may be why the “use” in the book’s title is singular. After Marc quips, “You only got cancer so you could write about it,” she acknowledges that it was “as if writing about the photos authorized me to write about the cancer,” to which, however, she turns her attention only in passing, such as when mentioning that her wig stays on during sex. Even when writing about a particular photo, she says, “I am no longer inside of the reality that gave rise to my emotion and to the photo I took that morning. It’s my imagination that deciphers the photo, not my memory.” It is because the photo represents a “devastated landscape” that it triggers a present moment of comment.
Some of the critics, who had referred to her for years as “Madame Ovary,” weren’t charmed. “People disapproved. Of the photos, first of all. They’re unusual, they’re not what anyone expects,” Ernaux said in an interview. “Things then weren’t the way they are now, with people taking photos everywhere with their phones … They disapproved because it hadn’t been done before. Certainly not by a woman with breast cancer.” But the images aren’t especially transgressive, so there must be a “second of all” – and I’ll assume that Ernaux’s fixation on her psyche, and the open-ended nature of the narrative, are what annoy the boys. If this is the case, then these critics failed to hear the Barthesque nature of her thoughts on photography when she writes, “We want to ‘take’ each other, constantly – at the dinner table, or on waking in the morning. It’s like an accelerating loss. Then proliferation of photos, while intended to ward off the loss, only deepens it.”
Marc Marie’s sections complement and at times echo Ernaux’s notations on love and loss, but his main value here is to provide context and details of their time spent together. He had begun his liaison with Ernaux immediately after a break-up, and his perspective on the new relationship can sound provisional: “Waking up beside each other with no clothes or makeup on, breath sour and eyes full of sleep, can be a point of no return: you either rush into the shower and set your sights on going home as quickly as possible, or you stay for breakfast.”
Towards the end, Ernaux recalls the first time she spent the night “with a boy” at age 17: “There is an expression that perfectly captures the power and the shock of the event, ne pas en revenir – to never come back from it. In the exact sense of the expression, I never did come back, I never rose from that bed.” And this is the liminal aura of The Use of Photography – the moments of pleasure “were fleeting and impossible to represent” – but it is as if their clothes were never retrieved from the floors of those rooms.
[Published by Seven Stories Press on October 1, 2024, 144 pages, $22.95US/$33.95CAN, paperback]
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on A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind by Stephen Budiansky
In 19th century America, “being shot through the neck” was slang for drunkenness. In Oliver Wendell Holmes (2019), Stephen Budiansky writes that after the future Supreme Court Justice suffered such a wound at Antietam on September 17, 1862 during the most lethal day in American military history, Holmes joked with a surgeon that his trauma was “disgraceful for a temperance man.” Holmes turns up again in Budiansky’s A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind, a narrative built upon the lives of nine figures.
Holmes’ Second Corps had suffered 2,200 killed and wounded in just 20 minutes. Some 3,675 Union and Confederate soldiers died on that day. “Holmes, who had gone to war filled with a Boston Brahmin’s conviction in the superiority of class and intellect along with an unquestioned assumption that zeal for the cause and a gentlemanly bearing were sufficient qualifications to lead men in battle, lost those heroic illusions, but gained some practical wisdom,” writes Budiansky. Much of A Day in September reflects on how the urgency to attend to the grave results of the conflict resulted in changes – to military strategy and execution, communications, journalism and photography, transportation, medical procedures, the roles of women, and so forth. Budiansky’s snappy prose not only vivifies the scenes, but aligns itself with the humanism – the desires and follies – drawn from his cast of characters.
He begins with Robert E, Lee, whose arrival at West Point in 1825 coincided with the academy’s emphasis in those years on engineering over military leadership and conducting warfare, deficits embodied in the clash at Antietam. Budiansky borrows materials from other historians to swiftly arrive at Lee’s military psyche — and its contrast with his background, personal habits and values. Although Lee learned a great deal from his exploits in the war with Mexico, Budiansky critiques him for his headlong offensive campaign in Maryland rather than fighting in a more defensive and elusive manner. As noted by others, the Confederacy didn’t have to win the war, it just had not to lose. A stalemate would have prompted settlement. Even if the Union didn’t achieve a decisive victory at Antietam (though its general, George B. McClellan, boasted as much), it was named the winner after the Confederate withdrawal. Here as elsewhere, McClellan is excoriated privately by his own staff for failing to crush Lee’s forces when he had the chances.
In his chapter on General Jacob D. Cox of McClelland’s Ninth Corps, Budiansky limns the mentality of young enlistees: “Northerners imbued with rural and small-town democratic egalitarianism, and Southerners with touchy feelings of personal honor, equally refused to see themselves as cogs in a machine or to recognize the right of officers to order them around. Northern citizen-soldiers, the colonel of an Iowa regiment found, simply refused to be ‘bossed.’” And in “Organizing for Carnage,” a chapter on Jonathan Letterman, MD, we find regimental commanders who insisted that “hospitals, ambulances, medical supplies, and the necessity of detailing men to help with all such things were an intrusion on military affairs, to be jettisoned at the first opportunity.” How Letterman persisted in his benevolent efforts was itself an act of bravery and endurance.
In 1850, one of every three children born in America died before reaching their ninth birthday. In 1853, 12,000 people died during a yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans. Early death was omnipresent – and death on the battlefield was regarded as just how things are. We find these facts in a chapter on photographer Alexander Gardner, 345 of whose photos, hung at Matthew Brady’s gallery, caused a sensation in Washington. In 1860 there were more than 4,000 newspapers in the United States, and war coverage in multiple daily editions became a staple of the culture. The glory began to ebb: “As Ambrose Bierce found, it was probably even less palatable to reveal that war is sordid and meaningless than to reveal that it is bloody and terrifying.”
Budiansky’s subtitle, “the world it left behind,” indicates his focus and interests. Although he draws no new conclusions nor introduces new materials, his cultural emphases are illuminating and his deployment of details is masterly. His descriptions of the battle’s various actions are less cogent. For clear accounts of what happened where and when, go to Richard Slotkin’s The Long Road to Antietam (2012). While reading A Day in September, I turned to my copy of Battlefields of the Civil War (1989) for ample maps and recounting. Nevertheless, Budiansky succeeds in indicating why “Antietam would be an enduring link in the transformation of war from an art to a science, and generalship from the realm of individual inspiration to rigorous study and procedure.”
[Published by W. W. Norton on September 3, 2024, 304 pages, $32.50 hardcover]