The Disaster Artist: Sophie Calle’s “histoires vraies”

Abstract

A tenant sets himself on fire in Sophie Calle’s childhood bed, which is tossed out and left in her building’s courtyard. A spiteful colleague assaults Calle with a stiletto, bringing her career as a stripteaseuse to an abrupt end. From divorce to self-immolation to strangulation to suicide, Des histoires vraies (2017), Calle’s ongoing compilation of autobiographical vignettes, is steeped in calamity, its photographs and micro-narratives detailing notable episodes in the artist’s life.

I argue that Calle’s emotional and stylistic restraint allows her to compellingly depict disaster’s encroachment on the everyday while figuring a space for its artistic recuperation. Calle’s almost clinical detachment renders these depictions all the more poignant, her tightly-controlled vignettes evoking Roland Barthes’ notion of the photographic punctum. I focus on Histoires vraies punctured and punctuated by violence—texts whose precise, deceptively transparent prose constitutes another form of punctuation, interweaving the flatness of the quotidian and the shock of the tragic. I use these vignettes to comment on the veracity of Calle's autobiographical project, the subtle ways in which she blurs fact and fiction, in order to tease out the feminist implications of her depictions of violence.

Keywords:

• Autofiction
• autobiography
• phototextuality
• contemporary French literature
• French women’s writing
• Sophie Calle

Notes

1 Itself part of the seven-volume Doubles-jeux, which documents Calle’s artistic collaboration with American novelist Paul Auster.

2 The term refers to the layout of many of Calle’s published books, in which a photograph is positioned on one side of a double page, across from a short text. For more on phototextuality in Calle’s work, see Johnnie Gratton, “Sophie Calle: Écriture blanche;” and “Experiment and Experience in the Phototextual Projects of Sophie Calle.” Women’s Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s, edited by Gill Rye and Michael Worton, Manchester UP, 2002, pp. 157–170.

3 See “Autour de Sophie Calle.” Interview by André Labarthe, Jean Narboni, and Alain Veinstein. Accès direct, France Culture, 15 Jan. 1996.

4 Cybelle McFadden, for instance, argues that Calle’s carefully structured works produce the artist “not only as a figure with absolute authority but as the narrative itself” (145).

5 For more on the parallels between Barthes and Calle, see Gratton, “Sophie Calle: Écriture blanche,” pp. 161–166; Martine Delvaux, “Sophie Calle: Follow Me.” Intermédialités, vol. 7, 2006, p. 158.

6 Incidentally, Jean Narboni, the man dressed in “La Garde-robe,” directed Gallimard’s Cahiers du Cinéma, which published Barthes’ La Chambre claire.

7 For Gratton, this phenomenon encompasses Calle’s “vues frontales et intégrales d’objets isolés et étalés sur fond neutre, résultats d’une approche visuelle qui réduit la profondeur du champ et la temporalité de l’image à une sorte de degré zéro. […] comme si […] la photo aspirait toujours à épouser le plat de la page, là où l’écriture […] retrouve aussi son support” (161).

8 Calle is not the only French writer to subvert the protocols of life-writing in this manner. Alain Robbe-Grillet posited the “pièce fausse,” the unidentified falsehood, as a fundamental element of autofiction (120–121). More recently, Anne Garréta mobilized a similar strategy in Pas un jour (2002), whose post-face reveals that at least one of its ostensibly autobiographical narratives is a fabrication.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Carr

Jennifer Carr holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and an MA in Cultural Translation from the American University of Paris. Her research interests include contemporary French and Francophone literature, feminist theory, experimental writing, theories and practices of translation, and the intersection of literature and the visual arts. She currently teaches at the University of Alabama.