In the middle of Nathalie Léger’s book Exposition, the narrator tells a startling story of the first photograph she remembers of her own face, a photograph taken when she was nine or ten. The context for this picture is important: in it, only her childish face is visible, poking from a hedge between two houses. The first house belongs to her mother, to their family. The other, smaller house is the one her father’s mistress has rented next door.
On this afternoon, the child peers through the hedge and witnesses her father photographing his mistress, who is nicknamed Lautre, the other. The father is transfixed as he clicks the shutter, enveloped through his camera lens. Eventually the tension can’t be sustained any longer — the father lowers his camera and carries his mistress inside. But on the way in, Lautre grabs the camera and photographs something over his shoulder. A few days later, without comment, the narrator finds the photo of her face in the hedge propped on her nightstand. “You can’t photograph a memory,” Léger writes, “but you can photograph a ruin.”
It goes almost without saying that no ordinary autobiography could unleash this kind of insight. In its simplest terms, Léger’s Exposition is the first volume in a triptych that goes on to include Suite for Barbara Loden (which came out to acclaim in 2016), and The White Dress. Each of these books is a portrait of a woman artist, and each is tied to a particular artistic medium, moving from the dawn of photography, through film, to performance. There is an unspoken sense of artistic generations here, in the sense that previous women have been buried, both figuratively and literally, by the violence of the male gaze and by the passing of time. When Suite for Barbara Loden first came out, I was drawn, like many others, to the way Léger characterized her project: “I felt like I was managing a huge building site, from which I was going to excavate a miniature model of modernity, reduced to its simplest, most complex form: a woman telling her story through that of another woman.”
Now that all three books exist in English thanks to Dorothy Project and exceptional translations by Natasha Lehrer and Amanda de Marco, it feels as if the stakes have been tripled. Though each book is a case study of a particular woman’s life, the neat boundaries of these subjects aren’t meant to hold. “On the winding path of femininity,” Léger writes, “the loose stone you stumble over is another woman.” These slippages are part of the danger and excitement of Léger’s work — look long enough at another woman, and you may find yourself looking in a mirror. Is the narrator telling her story through the Countess of Castiglioni who decided, in 1856, to be the most photographed woman in the world? Is she telling it through Barbara Loden and her 1970 film Wanda? Is she telling it through the 2008 story of Pippa Bacca who was raped and killed while hitchhiking in a wedding dress to promote world peace? Or are all these women buffers between the narrator and the story of her own mother’s unhappiness, a story of betrayal that fills a dossier that the narrator desperately doesn’t want to inherit, but which threatens to creep between paragraphs?
Over the course of the triptych, I kept returning to the photograph of the child taken by Lautre, a small face gazing through the narrow hedge between radically different versions of womanhood. Though she has grown up, the narrator of these three books is still caught lingering in the verge between lives, trying to understand how her subjects fight to make themselves seen. In the books, Léger dramatizes the ways her biographical investigations exceed the initial parameters others expect from her, like the cultural attaché who wants a simple exhibition about “ruins” or the editor who wants a short entry on Barbara Loden for a film encyclopedia. These superficial forms can’t hold Léger’s ambition, precisely because she is still aiming to inhabit the boundaries that divide one woman from the next. The narrator’s gaze is like the frame of the triptych, holding all three portraits in relation. Part of that frame is the story of mother and daughter, the story of “banal cruelty” the daughter wants to evade. Even in her evasion, the narrator’s vision is on display, as is the curiosity that makes her attempt to grapple with these women as her subjects. The form of this project often feels less like a triptych than like a triangular prism whose five sides (Countess of Castiglioni, Barbara Loden, Pippa Bacca, the narrator, her mother) are always bending and refracting the light.
As I write this, I’m conscious of how vast a universe is unleashed through the juxtaposition of these three short portraits. None of these books is longer than 150 pages. It’s difficult to convey, in brief quotations, the intense significance Léger extracts from each detail. For example, Léger sets up a quotation from the artist Marina Abramović by describing the end of her performance Rhythm 0, in which she invited the audience use 72 different objects on her, over the course of six hours:
“Abramović got up and walked through the audience, which parted without a word—surprised, she said, to see her alive — look at that, it wasn’t an object after all, it was a woman, that’s what they were thinking, she said. ‘The lesson I drew from this piece was that in a performance you can go very far, but if you let the public do it you risk being killed.’
With her distinctive dashes, Léger makes a gap in the sentence for the artist, dramatizing, at the level of punctuation, how the crowd is forced to shift their perspective. In an interview, translator Natasha Lehrer described Léger’s sentences as suitcases where everything is neatly packed, “It’s all there for you, you just have to open the suitcase and unpack it.” It’s a testament to the power of her translation that the order of the syntax has been preserved in this moment. We get “look at that” right after the dash, so that we feel the gaze of the audience, the violence of its impersonal engagement with the body of the woman artist. Nothing about this syntactic arrangement is casual, but it feels seamless. The next transition, across the narrow white space of a paragraph break, only compounds that violence:
“Pippa Bacca’s dead body was discovered in a thicket between Izmit and Gebze, a few kilometers from Istanbul. During one of her stops along the way a local journalist asked her: ‘Why hitchhike?’ She replied: ‘It’s a way of showing trust toward your fellow human beings. To prove that when you show trust you receive nothing but goodness.’ The reporter did not ask her what relationship there might be between art, trust, and goodness, nor if it was up to art to prove anything. Like everyone else, he found Pippa Bacca’s idea beautiful and a little mad.”
These two paragraphs hinge on the death of the female artist, both examining what it means for a woman to entrust herself to the behavior of her audience. Both ask how long a woman can sustain her humanity as she moves through the public eye.
Pippa Bacca’s story reminded me of “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters,” a classic essay by Vanessa Veselka about women who hitchhike. In the essay, Veselka investigates girls who were killed at rest stops around the same time she was on the road herself, as a teen in the mid-eighties. But no one who was working at the rest stops at the time remembers the killings. It’s as if they’ve been erased from memory. Veselka argues that this lapse is partly because we don’t have the right narrative frame in which to remember the stories of these women — they are seen as victims in a male story rather than protagonists of a female one. Like Pippa Bacca, Veselka was often asked why she was hitchhiking, “But over time, I came to understand that the question was not ‘why,’ but ‘how.’ As in, how could I have left? How bad was it? How could this have come to pass? These are very different questions from ‘why.’ ‘How’ is about events, as in ‘how did it happen?’ Whereas ‘why’ points to individuality and agency.”
There is a sense that, before Léger arrived, these women had become the wrong question, and this lack of a why is part of what makes Léger’s spirit of critical inquiry so welcome. Léger’s why is tenacious and all-consuming. It pulls these women’s lives out of the layers of a tragic archive and into a frame of Léger’s own devising, which is, of course, a deeply feminist project. This work is brilliant, painful, redemptive, dark. Léger doesn’t take any aspect of these women for granted, and even passivity is presented with agency, as a choice. But Léger’s rigor is also humane. She stops short of visiting Pippa Bacca’s mother, because she doesn’t feel useful enough to justify interviewing her about her daughter’s death.
In the end, this refusal to extract the grieving mother’s perspective sends Léger back to her own family story. At last her mother’s dossier, “the chaos of an ordinary existence,” is also brought to light, and the betrayal it contains becomes the culmination of Léger’s investigations. This dossier, the narrator finally admits, is the stuff of her own life, the archive of her family.
“We are made of paper,” Léger writes, and it’s a fitting remark from someone who directs IMEC, an important archive for French writers and publishers. Léger knows how to take archives for what they are: vast reams of rustling ghosts. In the white spaces of these books, the archive is always in the background, threatening to consume both the author and her subject, but these collections of paper are also what allow these women to be rediscovered, heard. As the poet Susan Howe put it, “Font-voices summon a reader into visible earshot.” There’s a sense here that research itself can be a performance if it’s insatiable enough, if it answers the call of that summons.
I can’t think of another project that so radically captures both the font-voices and the self-consciousness of womanhood, the nature of being watched, judged, seen by others however they want to see — the artist losing control of the frame, and then somehow reclaiming it. Seeing these women through Léger’s eyes feels like excavating a wound. “It’s so unjust,” the mother finally says, “It’s justice.”
[Exposition — published September 15, 2020, 160 pages, $16.00 paperback; Suite for Barbara Loden — published October 16, 2016, 128 pages, $16.00 paperback; The White Dress — published September 15, 2020, 160 pages, $16.00 paperback. Both books are published by Dorothy: A Publishing Project and may be acquired by clicking here.]