Writing Photography: The Grandmother in Remembrance of Things Past, the Mother in Camera Lucida, and Especially, the Mother in The Lover

Proust, Barthes, and Duras describe photographs of maternal figures. Such photographs are not reproduced, but witheld or nonexistent. I include the Proustian narrator's imagined photograph of his grandmother; Barthes's unreproduced photo of his mother at five years old standing in the Winter Garden; and, the Durasien narrator's imagined photograph of her mother, Marie Legrand, in virtual photography. I explore the effects, in these instances, of virtual photography of maternal figures. Like actual photography, virtual photography implies that a referent exists for the image; like actual photography, virtual photography immobilizes, objectifies, and kills its referent even as it arrests the dying of that referent. Like actual photography, virtual photography can figure a recurring moment of separation from and mourning for the photographed person. Unlike actual photography, however, virtual photography creates "absolutes"; the actual image is rescued from the use and gaze of the public, who may not love the person imaged. These writers thus control the interpretation of the image, and contain its excesses while protecting writing itself from the threat of the image. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol24/iss2/9 Writing Photography: The Grandmother in Remembrance of Things Past, the Mother in Camera Lucida, and Especially, the Mother in The Lover' Erin C. Mitchell SUNY Plattsburgh In Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, in Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, and, especially, in Marguerite Duras's The Lover, some photographs are imagined and described, but witheld from reproduction as images. Such an imagined photograph engenders the narrative of The Lover; the narrator describes a photograph of herself at fifteen and a half as she stands on a ferry crossing the Mekong, but it is a photograph "never taken" (13). The narrator of The Lover says that "the image doesn't exist. . . . It never was detached or removed from all the rest" (10). Such imagined, or taken but witheld, photos belong to what Madeleine Borgomano calls "virtual photography"; in this study I examine the effects and implications of virtual photography of maternal figures in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Barthes's Camera Lucida, and especially, Duras's The Lover. As with actually reproduced photographs, such virtual photographs as we find in Proust, Barthes, and Duras imply a factual referent. As with actual photographs, virtual photographs transform human referents into mortified objects; both actual and virtual photography "freeze" human beings as static images. Photographs reify the human being as object of the gaze. At the same time as photography "kills" its object, it also resists death by mourning and immortalizing the object, by taking its subjectsas-objects out of history, time, and the processes of decay and death. Virtual photographs of mothers and grandmothers can 1 Mitchell: Writing Photography: The Grandmother in Remembrance of Things Pas Published by New Prairie Press 326 STCL, Volume 24, No.2 (Summer, 2000) be "used" to figure a loss of and separation from the maternal; as with actual photographs, virtual photographs both express and induce recurring grief over the "death" of the maternal other. The process of photography itself interpolates a distance between the photographer and the photographed person/object. By textually ascribing use and meaning to photographs that are not reproduced, however, Proust, Barthes, and Duras contain the use of the photographs, and constrain the readers' interpretations of them in ways that reproducing described photographs could not. This strategy protects the text from the uncontrollable excesses and hermeneutic possibilities of the image qua image; describing the image allows the narrator to position him or herself as a creator of absolutes, as God, while it simultaneously protects words themselves from the potentially ravaging, silencing, subverting power of images. Writing photography, then, privileges the voice and writing above the image, even as it acknowledges the frailty of words, the necessary failures of attempts to represent a human life. Proust, Barthes, and especially Duras create virtual photographs of maternal figures. Proust's narrator describes his photographer's-eye-view of his ill and aging grandmother. Proust's narrator "takes" a photo of her before she knows she is being looked at.' After returning from Doncieres, Proust's narrator, on first seeing his grandmother, reports that "for the first time, and for a moment only, since she vanished very quickly, I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, vacant, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, a dejected old woman whom I did not know" (I: 815). Proust's narrator describes his nightmarish view of his grandmother as a "photograph," and positions himself as "only the witness, the observer ... the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer" (I: 815). Mary Price calls this photograph of the grandmother a "metaphoric photograph" (155). In what Beryl Schlossman calls Barthes's "articulations of the relations between languague and desire," in all his writings, Schlossman contends, "the voice of Proust can be heard" (144). Barthes indeed acknowledges Proust's influence on his meditations about photography throughout Camera Lucida (45, 63, 75, 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 24, Iss. 2 [2000], Art. 9 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol24/iss2/9 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1488