Photography and autobiography in Hélène Cixous's Photos de racines and Annie Emaux and Marc Mariées L'Usage de la photo

Abstract

This article compares two autobiographical works that interweave text and photographs. Many writers have incorporated photographs into their autobiographies. These autobiographers, however, use photographs from which they are absent; the images are of something/somebody else. By displacing the autobiographical self in a plurivocal narrative amid photographs of other people, both authors create a fluid, unstable narrative self that they use to escape present trauma: for Cixous, by moving into the past, and for Ernaux into the future. Furthermore, these works push autobiography to its limits, reminding us that this genre is about concealing just as much as revealing the self.