Enduring Images: Mourning and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century French Literature (Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, Hervé Guibert)

Abstract

This dissertation studies the intersection of writing, mourning, and aesthetics in twentieth-century French literature. I examine how the act of beholding aesthetic objects is represented in writing as a way to suspend the demands of modern life and bring the mourner into alternative spaces and temporalities where beauty and pleasure are still possible in the wake of loss. This dissertation intervenes on two paradigmatic questions in the study of mourning in twentieth-century French literature and critical theory. First, what role do photography, physical traces, and material objects play in the work of memory and mourning? Second, what is the role of writing as a consolatory practice for sublimating the pain of loss or, conversely, as a practice of inscribing the impossibility of mourning? I respond to these questions through a series of case studies on Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, and Hervé Guibert. I analyze a variety of genres — essays, novels, journalistic writings, lectures, and diaries —, and I reorient the established genealogy of Proust, Barthes, and Guibert by framing their writings on loss within a historical consideration of aesthetic theory and practice. This approach opens the possibility to reassess psychoanalytic interpretations of the work of mourning in literary criticism. Moving beyond ideas of sublimation and recuperation, I focus instead on how the literary work of mourning is enmeshed with the world as it is: a site of vision and pleasure that will one day pass into ruin. In the first chapter, I begin by developing a concept of “mourning through looking” in a reading of Proust’s early essays on the aesthetics of English art critic John Ruskin. I then look at how the act of visiting works of art and architecture structures the narrative representation of mourning in Proust’s novel A la recherche du temps perdu, specifically the “Séjour à Venise” episode in which the narrator, still mourning the death of his lover and grandmother, painfully anticipates the death of his mother while traveling in Venice. In the second chapter, I turn to Barthes’s work following the death of his mother in 1977. In his private diary of mourning, in his maternal elegy-cum-essay on photography La Chambre claire, and in his lecture course on the preparation of the novel, Barthes uses writing to transform the emptiness of loss into a more aesthetically replete and inhabitable negative space. Proust is a significant point of reference for this late Barthes, but I show how Barthes diverges from the Proustian model in order write and mourn through acts of self-effacement, failure, and silence. In the third chapter, I study a trio of texts by Guibert: Guibert’s own book on photography, L’Image fantôme, written from the perspective of a practicing photographer, his writing as a photography critic for the French daily newspaper Le Monde, and his novella Fou de Vincent, a fictional account of mourning a dead lover. Guibert writes about photography as a physical and corruptible medium similar to the human body in order to reflect on the material transience and future death of his loved ones. Within the context of the HIV-AIDS epidemic, the rhetoric of photography provides a means for Guibert to mourn his own imminent death and to preemptively memorialize queer intimacy and daily life in the 1980s.