Autobiographical Revisions: Photography in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Claude Cahun’s Disavowals

Abstract

In this article, the author explores the presence of photography in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Claude Cahun’s Disavowals, or Cancelled Confessions. Published almost half a century apart, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and Disavowals foreground the traffic between verbal and visual self-representation in making lives and selves visible. In both texts, photography is central to the authors’ construction of the self: not only through the inclusion of photographic images of the author, but also through a photographic consciousness that pervades their writing. Kim considers how family photographs, both inherited and reconstituted, play a central role in the authors’ quest for autobiographical revisioning.

Notes

1. In the original French publication, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, Barthes states in the list of illustrations at the end of the text: “Sauf mention particulière, les documents appartiennent à l'auteur” (“Unless otherwise stated, the documents [images] belong to the author.” All translations mine.)

2. Indeed, it is a reflection on the oft-discussed scene from Camera Lucida in which Barthes is looking through old family photographs on the occasion of his mother’s death that opens Edwards and Hart’s introduction.

3. “New paragraph” is a translation of the French word alinea, which can also be translated into English as “paragraph mark,” “paragraph sign,” or “pilcrow,” which is the typographical symbol for a new paragraph.

4. Cahun and Moore collaborated on the photomontages that appear in Disavowals, and Moore’s name is clearly signed in some of them. For a detailed analysis of Cahun’s photographic technique and Moore’s central role, see Stevenson.

5. Mary Ann Caws writes: “In 1909 Lucy Schwob [Cahun] returned to school in Nantes, and fell in love with Suzanne Malherbe [Moore]... Their families were friends, and upon the death of Lucy’s mother, her father, Maurice Schwob, married Suzanne’s mother” (127).

6. In chapter one of Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, Michel Beaujour discusses Barthes by Barthes in relation to the speculum, or medieval encyclopedia.