The Use of Images by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie evaluate – snapshots of intimacy

In 2021, the famend French creator Annie Ernaux printed Exteriors, a random choice of journal entries written whereas she lived for a time within the Parisian suburb of Cergy-Pontoise. It stands aside from the books which have made her fame as a fearless chronicler of her personal life and relationships – the likes of Easy Ardour (1993), Occurring (2001) and A Woman’s Story (2020) – eschewing the unflinchingly intimate and semi-autobiographical method that helped earn her the Nobel prize in literature in 2022. As an alternative, as its identify suggests, Exteriors is indifferent and outward-looking. Her purpose, she mentioned, was to “describe actuality as via the eyes of a photographer and to understand the thriller and opacity of the lives I encountered”.

Regardless of its oddly academic-sounding title, The Use of Images – notice the singular – bears little relation to its predecessor, being a return to the intensely private fashion for which Ernaux is revered. The distinction right here is that, though the lens is as soon as once more turned on herself, her reflections – on want, sickness, reminiscence and encroaching mortality in addition to pictures – are juxtaposed with these of her former lover Marc Marie, a journalist and photographer with whom she had a chronic and passionate love affair in 2003. Reasonably than dilute the depth of her prose, their to-and-fro dialog someway works.

The arc of their relationship is sketched in a sequence of 14 snapshots which are, in essence, 14 variations on a single topic: their discarded garments and sneakers mendacity in a tangled jumble throughout the flooring of assorted flats and lodge rooms. On first encountering these scattered remnants of the fumbled and hurried prelude to their lovemaking, Ernaux was overcome, she writes, by “a sensation of magnificence and sorrow” and instantly went to search out her digicam lest “this association born of want and accident” would merely disappear if not recorded.

Sure components recur all through: her trendy mules, his unlaced work boots; her unfurled stockings, his crumpled denim denims. (Oddly, the images are printed in black and white all through, regardless of there being a number of references within the texts to the color of garments and objects.) Blessedly, the sexual act itself stays out-of-frame all through, each of them little question conscious of French thinker Roland Barthes’s insistence that, in pictures, the erotic ought to be “a type of delicate past”, evoking want most powerfully by what it suggests relatively than what it reveals.

Intriguingly, Ernaux’s preliminary essay is a response to {a photograph} that she took however has chosen to not embody: a closeup snapshot of her lover’s erect penis through which the digicam flash “makes a drop of sperm glisten on the tip of the glans, like a bead”. The first purpose for the absence of visible proof, it seems, is privateness relatively than propriety – “I can describe it, however I couldn’t expose it to the eyes of others”.

The aim of the just about mundane photographs that Ernaux and Marie selected to incorporate – their major use as intimated within the e-book’s definitive title – lies to an ideal diploma within the prose they’ve impressed. They don’t seem to be a lot aide-mémoires as melancholy traces of their as soon as fervent however now dissipated want, which Ernaux retrospectively interrogates in her inimitable manner. At one level, Marie compares them to a diary of “love and demise”, however it’s via the writing about them – melancholy, insistent, self-questioning – that the darker themes of mortality and loss totally emerge.

“Once we began to take these pictures, I used to be present process therapy for breast most cancers,” Ernaux tells us, matter-of-factly, in her quick introduction. A number of pages later, within the first essay correct, her forensic eye reveals the starkly intimate particulars of their first evening collectively, which, like each side of her life at the moment, existed within the shadow of her sickness. “I didn’t take off my wig in mattress. I didn’t need him to see my bald head. Because of chemotherapy, my pubis was bald too. Close to my armpit was a type of protuberant beer cap, beneath the pores and skin, a catheter implanted there at first of therapy.”

Their love affair is punctuated with visits to the Institut Curie and the e-book particulars visceral descriptions of her bodily and psychological situation, her punishing therapies and her acute sense of demise’s imminence. All through this heightened interregnum, their intense couplings turn into a type of defiance of the identical. Self-pity, it goes with out saying, is just not her fashion. “I had informed only a few individuals about my most cancers,” she writes at one level. “I needed no a part of the type of sympathy which might by no means conceal, each time it was expressed, the plain incontrovertible fact that for others I had turn into another person. I might see my future absence of their eyes.”

Towards these passages of perception and stark revelation, Marie someway holds his personal as a collaborator. His writing is attuned to the formal points of the images, but additionally their limits when it comes to what they will describe or evoke. Usually they awaken fragments of reminiscence from his personal childhood. “My garments are nowhere to be seen,” he writes of 1 picture. “It’s as if I weren’t there, as if I have been absent from the world as I used to be from all these joyless Christmases.” It was solely after I retrospectively learn his single line creator biography at first of the e-book, through which he’s referred to prior to now tense, that I realised Marie is not with us. He died in 2022. (The e-book was first printed in France in 2005.) Ernaux not too long ago informed an interviewer: “I used to be notified of his demise by a letter despatched to me by his heart specialist.” His absence lends one other layer of melancholy to their shared remembering.

In the direction of the top of the e-book, Ernaux asks herself the unattainable query: “How do I conceive of my demise… my non existence?” That, in flip, precipitates a brief philosophical meditation on the unimaginable. “None of what awaits us IS thinkable,” she displays, “however that’s simply the purpose: there’ll be no extra ready. Or reminiscence.” It’s this “shadow of nothingness”, she concludes, that informs The Use of Images and, certainly, all her work. With out it, she asserts, “writing, even of a sort most acquiescent to the great thing about the world, doesn’t actually include something of use to the dwelling”.