The Tones of Memory: Literature and Photography in Annie Ernaux as Markers of the Chronology of the Disappearance of the Self (Autobiographical)

Abstract

This article aims to understand the intricacies of Annie Ernaux's literature (1940) through its engagement with photography. Literature and photography, two central elements in the author's work, are underpinned by memory, which produces the tonal quality of Ernaux's writing, enlivening the tone of her novels through themes that explore the social, political, and psychological issues of her life. Photography in Ernaux's text attests to the veracity of her autobiographical narrative — or auto‑socio‑biographical narrative — which establishes the parameters of memory by retrieving the past and understanding it within the present. With philosophical, sociological, and historical implications, Ernaux's literature is an archival project, supported by photography, which provides clues to the autobiographical self that narrates, recounts, and observes the chronological development of its own existence, reporting it in writing on the basis of the unavoidable events that marked her life. In this context, photography serves as an inventory of the preludes to these events and of their futures.