In 2021, published by renowned French author Anne Ernaux ExternalitiesA random selection of journal entries written during his brief residence in Sergi-Pontois, a suburb of Paris. It stands apart from the books that established his reputation as a fearless chronicler of his own life and relationships. Simple passion (1993), going on (2001) and A woman's story (2020) – eschews the intimately intimate and semi-autobiographical approach that helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. Instead, as its name suggests, Externalities Appears detached and external. His aim, he said, was “to describe reality through the eyes of a photographer and to realize the mystery and opacity of the life I encountered”.
Despite its oddly academic-sounding title, Photography application – note the singularity – bears little relation to its predecessor, a return to the intensely personal style for which Ernaux is revered. The difference here is that even as the lens turns back on herself, her reflections – on desire, illness, memory and aggressive death and photography – are those of her ex-lover Marc Marie, a journalist and photographer with him. She had a long and passionate love affair in 2003. Instead of diluting the intensity of her prose, the dialogue between them somehow works.
The arc of their relationship is drawn in a series of 14 snapshots that are, in essence, 14 variations on the same theme: their discarded clothes and shoes lying tangled on the floors of various apartments and hotel rooms. Stumbling, hurrying, and first encountering these scattered remains that predate their romance, Ernaux is overcome with “a sense of beauty and sadness” and immediately goes to find his camera to avoid “this arrangement born of desire and accident”. Simply disappear if not registered.
Certain elements recur throughout: her fashionable mules, his laceless work boots; Her flared stockings, his frayed denim jeans. (Oddly, the photographs are printed throughout in black and white, despite several references in the texts to the color of clothing and objects.) Fortunately, the entire sexual act is outlawed, as both are undoubtedly aware. French philosopher Roland Barthes insists that, in photography, sensuality must be “a kind of subtle beyond,” evoking desire more powerfully by suggesting than by showing.
Interestingly, Ernaux's initial article responded to a photo she took, but chose not to include: a close-up snapshot of her lover's erect penis, in which the camera flash “makes a drop of semen glisten. Hours”. The primary reason for not having visual evidence is privacy rather than privacy – “I can describe it, but I can't expose it to other people's eyes”.
The purpose of the almost mundane images that Ernaux and Marie chose to include – their primary use in the book's schematic title – is in large part in the prose they inspired. They are not so much the attendant-memories as the melancholic traces of a once-intense but now-dissolved desire, which Ernaux retrospectively interrogates in his inimitable way. At one point, Mary likens them to a diary of “love and death,” but it's through her writing about them – depression, insistence, self-questioning – that the dark themes of death and loss fully emerge.
“When we started taking these photos, I was undergoing treatment for breast cancer,” Ernaux tells us in her short introduction. A few pages later, in the formal first essay, her forensic eye reveals the starkly intimate details of their first night, which, like every other aspect of her life at the time, was overshadowed by her illness. “I don't take my wig off in bed. I don't want him to see my bald head. As a result of the chemotherapy, my penis was also bald. I had a sort of protuberant beer cap near my armpit, and under the skin, a catheter was implanted there at the beginning of the treatment.
Their love affair culminated in a visit to the Institut Curie and the book describes visceral descriptions of his physical and psychological state, his punishment treatments and sense of impending doom. Throughout this heightened transition, their intense connections become a kind of opposition. It goes without saying that self-pity is not her style. “I told very few people about my cancer,” she writes at one point. “Whenever the plain fact that I have become something else to others is revealed, I want no part of sympathy that can never be concealed. I could see my future in their eyes.
Against these passages of insight and stark expression, Mary somehow finds herself a collaborator. His writing is connected to the formal aspects of photographs, but also their limitations in terms of what they describe or evoke. Often they evoke fragments of memory from his own childhood. “My clothes are nowhere to be found,” she captioned a picture. “It's like I'm not there, like I'm not in the world like I've been since all those unhappy Christmases.” It was only when I read back at the beginning of the book her one-line author biography, where she is mentioned in the past, that I realized Mary is no longer with us. He died in 2022. (The book was first published in France in 2005.) Ernaux recently told an interviewer: “I was informed of his death by a letter sent to me by his cardiologist.” His absence lends another layer of melancholy to their shared memory.
At the end of the book, Ernaux asks himself an impossible question: “How do I conceive of my death… my absence?” That, in turn, prompts an unimaginably short philosophical meditation. “We have nothing to think about waiting for, but that's the point: no more waiting. or memory.” This “shadow of nothing,” she concludes, suggests Photography application And, indeed, all her work. Without it, he insists, “even a form of writing that is most attuned to the beauty of the world has nothing really useful to the living.”
