Every Abyss Is a Matter of Time

Alina Stefanescu reviews “The Use of Photography” by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, newly translated into English by Alison L. Strayer.

By Alina StefanescuOctober 19, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Gender & Sexuality

• Memoir & Essay

A. informs him of her breast cancer over appetizers, so the illness is part of their reality from the start. *
—A line and an asterisk from my notebook, dated August 23, 2024

AMERICANS FAVOR big burgers and strong narrative arcs. To her credit, French author Annie Ernaux couldn’t care less. Her books refuse to culminate in orgasmic endings. There is no rising action, no climax, no plot-generated momentum. They are remarkably unsatisfying—which is central to her appeal. One reads Ernaux for the lure of her labyrinths.

Each book by Ernaux elucidates the rules and then plays these out on paper. The writer follows the game and its chosen constraints to their conclusion. Lest we mistake one version of the game for fate, she publishes another book about the same subject, applying different constraints. Different games played on the same terrain result in different experiences. Ernaux wants us to know this. In her first book, Les Armoires vides (Cleaned Out, 1974), a young female protagonist gets an illegal abortion and reexamines her life. Ernaux returned to this experience 26 years later with Happening (2000), in which she adopts the young female protagonist’s narrative voice, relating her coming-of-age as a first-person speaker. And where the titular verb of her debut, Cleaned, imagines itself in the past tense, that of Happening refutes any sense of moving on. The event is not finished: the curettage continues.

Through systematic self-ablations, Ernaux deconstructs the textual self and the conditions of speech. Employing literature as a means of thinking, a tool for studying the conditions of speech, the narrators report ordinary events without vocal intonation. Their tone remains affectless; in lieu of eloquent rhetoric, we find scapular syntax that spins outward centrifugally, lining the margins with images and scraps, assembling piecemeal collages from disjointed fragments. The logic is likewise associative, scattered, prone to recollection. Time recoils. Narration inspects its own unreliability. Ernaux’s books aren’t beautiful, suspenseful, or psychedelic. Their pleasure is cerebral, self-reflexive—and grossly invested in watching a mind tear itself apart, only to survey its pieces from an emotionless distance.

Co-authored by Ernaux and the late French photojournalist Marc Marie, The Use of Photography comes to the English-speaking world in Alison L. Strayer’s new translation. The book’s publication coincides with the 20-year anniversary of Ernaux’s introductory note for the French original, L’usage de la photo, published by Gallimard in 2005. Dated October 22, 2004, the note explains how this particular game will be played. The authors—Ernaux, Marie—will become the speakers, A. and M., coreligionists in an eight-month love affair. The game will advance by way of two activities: taking photographs and writing about the photographs.

The taking of photographs begins spontaneously, with a postcoital snapshot of A. and M.’s clothes on the floor, and then develops into an erotic ritual with rules of its own, the first being their agreement never to touch or alter the “arrangement of the clothing” before taking the photo. For Ernaux, these photos evoke an erotic imaginary whose only limitations are “those of desire.” That is the condition of their composition. Each photo memorializes the moment undone by the sex that followed.

The second activity, writing, abandons spontaneity for the cerebral. The lovers agree to commit their thoughts to text; they do this while looking at the photos apart from each other, without interference or involvement from the other.

“To open up your writing space is more violent than to open up your sex,” A. muses, fondling the intellectual frisson of writing with a collaborator. Even so, the reader is conscripted into the co-creation of the book’s erotic imaginary. Like a communicant at Mass, the reader receives the bread. It is then upon us to do the work of imagining the flesh. In Ernaux’s words, “the highest degree of reality […] will only be attained if those written photos are transformed into other scenes in the reader’s memory or imagination.”

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The book’s presiding spirit is that of Georges Bataille, whose words are carved into its threshold in an epigraph from Erotism (1957): “Eroticism is the approval of life unto death.” The staging draws energy from the conceptual tension between the words (unseen) and the photos (the seen/scene). The scene is where the unseen happens. Knowability is the trapdoor that opens when we think we have gotten the picture. Desire is the hand we don’t see coming.

Although each of 14 color photographs evokes eros and death in the same breath, the first one is breathless in its ghostedness. Ernaux and Marie begin with an absence reminiscent of Camera Lucida (1980), the book Roland Barthes wrote when grieving the loss of his mother. Projected around “the Winter Garden Photograph,” a photo depicting his mother in her “being,” Barthes sought to convey the image without actually displaying it. Readers are encouraged to imagine the visual that is withheld.

Like Barthes, A. depicts this first, unreproduced photo as text. M. stands in a gray sweater flush against “his auburn bush,” sperm glistens at the tip of his “erect penis,” its shadow projecting across her bookshelves. The withholding of the material image aligns with Bataille’s theorizing on how sacred objects lose their power when revealed or reproduced. (A golden crucifix worn around the throat is powerless without the violent imaginary of a man being nailed to a wooden cross in order to release humankind from its relationship to incarnation; every reproduction of the crucifix draws upon the sacredness of the imagined original.)

Ernaux’s long-standing phallophilia implicates the reader in what Adora Svitak has so brilliantly essayed as “love of cock.” We learn that A. first set eyes upon M.’s erector on the evening of January 22, 2003, as she stood at the foot of the stairs after their first dinner together. M.’s ghostly phallus made me think of another image of phallic absence, this one from La Place (A Man’s Place, 1983), a chronicle of her father’s life that was prompted by his death. As her father’s corpse was being dressed for its funeral, Ernaux glimpsed his penis for the first and final time. Visualizing his dead manhood, it seems appropriate to note that no desire could reerect it.

Studying the phallus of the father is forbidden. What secular lingo designates as a boundary violation, religion consigns to sin or some variant of violence against the gods’ ordering of the cosmos. Yet paradoxically, prohibitions mystify what they forbid: the obstacle develops an aura of intrigue that turns into a temptation. While the ordinary (well-ordered) world stigmatizes disorder, Eden’s fruit invites us to partake in the boundless and infinite.

At one point in The Uses of Photography, A. recalls strolling through Montparnasse Cemetery with M., seeking his grandparents’ graves among the epitaphs and names obscured by the frozen snow. Although the snow would be easily cleared by peeing on the tombstones, she keeps this thought to herself, since pissing on graves violates one of the myriad taboos against liquids that emerge from the human body.

Bataille wrote about how religious institutions maintain social power by policing the boundary between purity and profanation. Members of a religious body gain access to the sacred by participating in liturgical practices, following dietary rules, and performing acts of atonement, whether confessional, sacramental, or seasonal.

Taboo: The sight of a father’s tears. Taboo too: The filthiness of stains; the trace of human fluids that threaten bourgeois civility; the visceral seepage of dirt, blood, semen. Yet A. has been drawn to these monstrosities since childhood. This fascination with the unclean doesn’t register a distinction between the polluted and the clean on paper; her tone doesn’t modulate or change registers. Stains are texts that she “learned to read” in disordered beds. Transgression is the object of study as well as the mode. Ultimately, what she wants from writing is for “words to be like stains you cannot tear yourself away from.”

¤

The first visible photo depicts their clothing strewn across the floor of an entryway. What they later call “the hallway composition,” taken by A., intensifies in M.’s telling. Photographing the deshabille “seemed to me a way of restoring dignity to these things that we keep so close—an attempt, in a way, to make them our sacred ornaments,” he writes, adding that “the crime lay not in what we’d done, but in the action of undoing it.”

Geoff Dyer once quipped that hotel rooms are inherently horny because they beg to be defiled. In the blank of the nondescript, the self is disinhibited. Two of the book’s 14 photos are taken in hotel rooms; perversions dance across the spotless mirrors. In this case, one of the two hotels is familiar to A. and M. from prior experience. The text stalks the memory of this small hotel in Brussels as a seminal site in the lovers’ cosmology.

Ostensibly, A. and M.’s relationship began on a rainy night at Hotel Amigo, where M. first lost his mind completely enough to begin imagining her. After his mother’s death, he checked into Amigo with a friend and went on a bender. At some point, utterly soused, he sat at the hotel desk and wrote a long, intoxicated letter to a writer with whom he’d been corresponding for two years. This writer, Annie Ernaux, was so moved by a man spilling his guts to an acquaintance that she responded immediately, adding that she had lost her own mother soon after staying in the same hotel. In the Hotel Amigo past, M. had just left his partner and A. was leaving her spouse. An imaginary bond is formed in that hovel of dead mothers and dying relationships.

A few months after their correspondence, Room 223 at Hotel Amigo becomes the setting for a photograph of roses, tousled sheets, half-eaten pastries, coffee, and other traces of intimacy. A. and M. resemble religious pilgrims revisiting the spaces that love marked sacred. Hotels position open into not-saying, providing spaces where limitlessness is transacted. Lovers retrace their steps across the map of their own making. Looking back at the hotel room, A. observes “such a vast expanse of [her] mother’s absence behind [her].”

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Another story that begins with an absence is the one that begins with a woman in a tomb and an empty white funeral shroud. As A. recounts:

It is said in the Gospel according to John that Mary Magdalene, when she came to see Christ after his death, found the tomb empty. All that remained were the cloths in which the body had been wrapped, lying on the ground, and the shroud which had been placed over the head of Jesus non cum linteaminibus positum, sed separatim involutum in unum locum, “not put with the cloths but folded separately and put in another place.”

If the canonical Virgin sanctifies the dutiful self-sacrifice of a woman’s body for the continuance of an unplanned pregnancy, Mary Magdalene figurates the unattached, childless woman, the unencumbered sexual agent, the impure. Paradoxically, the status of Jesus of Nazareth as godhead depends on the reliability of Magdalene’s word, on her bearing of witness to Christ’s resurrected body in that tomb. It was Magdalene who found the empty shroud lying on the floor, testifying to its inhabitant’s absence.

For all the holiness evoked by Ernaux’s staging, there is nothing sublime about the 12 photos of various objects captured across the rooms of A.’s home. They are flattened by deadpan: her empty kitten heels, his unbuttoned shirts, her maroon slip, his big black leather boots with the tongue hanging out and laces loose, and the cavalcade of rumpled hotel sheets shared between them. “It’s my imagination that deciphers the photo, not my memory,” A. writes.

Eyeing an inside-out trouser leg, M. admires “the power of the act and of the moment […] sex and violence—the east and west of the spectrum of passions.” Apocalyptic violence trolls the stage of the aubade, but the interim is lined with emptied outfits: “this arrangement born of desire and accident,” sculptures “doomed to disappear” unless preserved by a photo. A. knows her ploy will fail; it is “impossible to represent […] the unreality of sex in the reality of what it leaves behind.” The problem of representation plagues both photo and text. No one can prove Jesus’s material resurrection from the presence of an empty shroud. Still, they testify.

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Midway through the book, there is a photo of checkerboard tiles in a kitchen, the lovers’ clothes gathered like small piles of leaves, contingent, worthless, revealing their inherent lack of value. A. describes the chemo port implanted in her chest, the drainage tubes, the alienation from her hairless, naked body. This is the clinical part, the documentary lens. But the book isn’t a breast cancer chronicle. Flesh is the site where the violence of chemotherapy and cancer treatment is transacted.

A.’s more voluminous breast, the one with the tumor, is removed. We can only imagine it. Her sexual affair with M. continues. The death of other women is “every bit as certain as my own,” A. says, of the urgency following her diagnosis. Writing about the photos taken in the weeks following her breast surgery, M. wonders: “Is it possible to feel nostalgic about a moment entirely conditioned by the possibility of death?”

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A. cites an article from Le Monde reporting that scientists have confirmed a “womb retains an imprint of all the children, whether born or aborted, that have developed there.” Abortions, too, are co-signed by sex and death. As the photos draw us through the rooms of her house, A. similarly claims that houses preserve the memories of all that happens inside them. The grainy snapshot of her ravished writing desk: Pens and papers strewn across the garish green carpet. The lovers savor the desecration it represents. M. revisits the satisfaction of “the sacking of the sanctuary”; A. lingers over the pleasure of surrendering to desire at the cost of her writing. Reason may be the Enlightenment’s magic bullet, but reasonability doesn’t protect us from desiring the unthinkable. Clarity, legibility, insight, erudition—our capacities for discerning and theorizing the limits between good and bad behavior, man and beast—do not prevent us from craving the monstrous, the human.

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Much as I wanted the photos to arouse me, it was the text that did the touching. Of the 400 odd photos taken during that eight-month period, 14 color photos were selected for publication. This selection process hides behind the frame: neither speaker explains why these particular photos and writings were selected. What was sheared from their margins?

The absent figures are not identical to the absented ones. Marc Marie’s long-term relationship ended in the weeks before he and Ernaux shared a meal at the restaurant, before they embarked on their own eight-month affair. The woman in M.’s wake winds quietly through this book like the ghost of a ghosted story. She remains unnarrated. I imagine her face when fantasizing the sexual tryst these photos enjoin me to co-create.

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“I still don’t know what revelation M. was supposed to offer me,” A. concedes.

To make a religion of ecstasy requires this belief in a supernal revealing, a thing that can only be seen when lost. For Bataille, the loss loomed as he outlined his final book, terrified that worsening health would prevent him from completing it. Published shortly before his death, The Tears of Eros (1961) intended to fill what Bataille perceived as a failure in Erotism, namely the absence of images. The result is a visual chronology of artistic depictions of the agony of eros across human history. Bataille uses images to link the captions and text, curating an archaeology of sacrificial violence, joining the “contraries” that illuminate the instant “where the religious horror disclosed in sacrifice becomes linked to the abyss of eroticism, to the last shuddering tears that eroticism alone can illuminate.”

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I pan in on Bataille’s “shuddering.” Beneath a sky bleeding light as if in a Frederick Turner painting, the bodies of fallen soldiers twitch as death reclaims them; their eyes agape, wide open. In a hotel room rudded by streetlights, a man hews his eyes to those of his partner as they lose control of their limbs. Despite their efforts to sustain this shared gaze, the couple can’t hold their eyes open. The instant of ecstasy removes them from their wills. The strange, uncontrolled twitching of sexual orgasm resembles the body of the animal at death, lacking control of its limbs, moving without reason, possessed by something we can neither know nor describe. “[W]hat imprisoned me in anguish—but which at the same time delivered me from it—was the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror,” Bataille explained.

The reader is forced to confront the dissonance between the image and the erotic imaginary (or the photo and the text) in this cemetery of libidinal snapshots curated by the lovers. There is no respite in the aesthetics of ethereality: no hygienic distance provided by perspective, no transcendence in the lighting. “For months, we live together as a threesome, death, A., and me,” M. admits, as he begins to romanticize the experience of desire. It is easier to narrate a romance than to concede the ravenousness poised at the intersection of death and sex. Duly, M. reasserts “the old myth of love’s victory over death.” On this reading, death cannot destroy what existed. Memory leaves its footprints in the duration.

And perhaps it is true that every intense sexual relationship leaves us with art that alters our reading of the world. While the poet in me accepts this, the critic reproaches desire for its predictable dissipation, the disenchantment recognizable when M. critiques how A. alphabetizes her shelves rather than arranging them by affinity. As “the pain that drove us to make a record of the scene” diminishes, the lovers begin taking photos solely for the purpose of writing about them. The taking gets folded into the making of the “writing process.” The book, or the writing, supersedes the con fuoco of mutual provocation. Only when the clerics take over the temple in the name of exegesis does the spirit’s authority vacate the premises.

In literary parlance, the realist plot comes to a head, or a climax, followed by the release, or denouement. The orgasm is constitutive to how we consider resolution in life as well as literature. We expect our payout. We demand our “happy ending.” We feel ripped off by inconclusiveness. But eros thrives on destruction and irresolution. In their Bataillean tribute to an affair, Ernaux and Marie come closest to the abyss when overcome by self-shattering. Ultimately, what the orgasm wants is irredeemable.

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This review should end here. But an afternoon at the swimming pool with my own M., a poet-friend, leads to revision. Underwater, the sound of my breath is nonexistent. Holding the air in my lungs, an absence asserts itself. After coming back up to the surface, I return to the notebook and its asterisk. What follows is taken almost verbatim from my notebook. In this case, it is the critic who unfolds the filth of selfhood in a text never intended for publication:

*A. informs him of her breast cancer over appetizers, so the illness is part of their reality from the start. For weeks, we lived together as a threesome: the book, my mother’s ghost, and me.

After my mother died unexpectedly, all I wanted was sex. I wanted to be screwed beyond language and sense. Trapped between the extensive posthumous bureaucracy of American death and the planned obsolescence of late capitalism, I craved disappearance—to vanish from any space or place in which I was known by others, to be removed from the conditions of normal life and the compromises it demanded. The only respite from this was ecstasy.

“Obliterate me,” I said to him, our children’s voices pressing through the wall to our left. Omnipresent: The brutality of people being alive and utterly dead, zombified into banality, the droning absurdity of not feeling it. In this world without floor or ceiling, time barreled forward through small talk about home decor and futures. Not living—not putting one’s foot on the gas to see how much this machine can bear.

“Obliterate me,” I said again and again, desperate to throttle life, to feel it trembling at the edge of possibility. Although my partner tried to hide his concern, he admitted that it felt wrong to meet me in my desire for nonexistence. Not existing wasn’t compatible with life. As he tells it, I was unmoored, and his reluctance came from concern about being part of something that could later be interpreted as harmful. The worry wasn’t the sex but the limitlessness being sought from it. “I feel like it isn’t about me,” he said, “not about me or with me. I could be anyone.”

And he was right. He was absolutely right.

We joked about nymphomania as these pages accumulated Anyones. The conditions were simple: I would take any human body, past or future, half-imagined or fabulated, that allowed me to be somebody else, namely, a self who didn’t know she was going to die. Death’s proximity was palpable. “For time I have left …” was my mantra, punctuated by an ellipsis dangling her head over the impossible. My mother was healthy, unstoppable, then dead in a hotel room in Amsterdam.

Ernaux shoves me into the night of my mind, the sight of the blood staining the prim hotel sheet, marking my mother’s death from an embolus. Grief, hotels, dead mothers, ecstasy, sex … all return in the act of reviewing. I am reminded that this begins with an absence, and the ghost of a phallus. And there is that unremarkable photo towards the end, an image of A.’s dark high heels, alone in a room, M.’s clothing and discard absented from it.

What interests me is him, the man, the M., who writes of sensing his own immateriality to the scene. What the man couldn’t read in the moment, he recognizes in the “now” of the photo. Every abyss is a matter of time. It is unspeakable to know this.