Abstract
As a genetic critic interested in word and image relationships in the illustrated manuscripts of various writers and artists, I find myself confronted regularly with the theoretical ramifications of the theories of illustrations, intermediality, photography, ekphrasis and adaptation in my quest to analyze the complexities of my literary corpus of unpublished and published autobiographical narratives punctuated with images. My attention is focused on Annie Ernaux’s autobiographic/photographic production. I reference the hand-written manuscripts of her memoir (Les Années/The Years) her “Photographic Diary” (Écrire la vie) illustrated with numerous family photos, and the intermedial theatrical adaptation of The Years, to trace the metamorphosis of Ernaux’s photographic ekphrasis from one text to another and from one medium to another. I argue that ekphrasis adapts images into words, and is a form of intermedial reference that can have illustrative functions and engages the “dynamics common to all modes of adaptation” (Newell, Adaptation and Illustration: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. In the Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 477–493. Oxford University Press, 2017).
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Notes
- 1.
Claus Clüver also suggests a relationship between ekphrasis and adaptation: “[the] materials [of ekphrasis] are purely verbal. Adaptation […] is the concept covering […] the transposition to the verbal of configurations, usually narrative, in other media” (Clüver 474).
- 2.
In his definition of intermediality, Lars Elleström highlights media differences and media similarities and their “constitutive role for meaning-making within communication.” Within this framework, adaptation is perceived as a form of transmediation, that is “a medium represents again, but in a different way, some characteristics that have already been represented by another kind of medium” (Elleström 512–13).
- 3.
Annie Ernaux, Les années (Gallimard, 2008). The Years (transl. by Alison L. Strayer, Seven Stories Press, 2017).
- 4.
Écrire la vie (Gallimard, 2011) is a sort of anthology where Annie Ernaux’s many previously published autobiographical narratives have been assembled. Her “Photojournal” (which unlike Les années has not been translated) is placed at the very beginning as a form of introduction to this series of texts she chose to include in Écrire la vie.
- 5.
The first theatrical adaptation of The Years was produced in Cergy-Pontoise in 2016: Production Théâtre Écoute; Text Annie Ernaux; staging Jeanne Champagne; scenography Gérard Didier; soundtrack Bernard Valléry; images Benoît Simon.
- 6.
Ernaux clearly discloses her interest in photographic ekphrasis: “This absence-presence. Also, the photograph is mute. These features make me want to write from and with what I feel in front of a photograph” (my translation; Le vrai lieu 23).
- 7.
Studies dedicated to photographic ekphrasis are not very numerous but I would like to mention Justin Coombes’s doctoral thesis Ekphrasis (PhD, Royal College of Art, August 2012).
- 8.
Many theorists have studied the relationship between family photographs, memory and identity: Adam, Rugg, Hirsch, Méaux, Montier, etc. As Sontag suggests: “As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family’s photographic album is generally about the extended family—and often, is all that remains of it” (Sontag 7).
- 9.
It is pertinent to reference Rugg who also considers the familial gaze, the looks exchanged with family pictures in her study of what she calls “unconscious optics”: “The photos are records, documents of the looks and gazes which order and organize familial relations, of the often unconscious and seemingly invisible patterns structuring familial interactions, of the screens through which we define ourselves responding to and resisting the familial gaze” (40).
- 10.
We are not offered an image of Ernaux in 1998, as the “Photodiary” respects chronology, but near the end of her illustrated narrative Ernaux has introduced a photograph of herself with her sons Eric and David in 1999.
- 11.
In her study of theatre and intermedial transpositions, Claudia Georgi suggests that this concept refers to the “transformation of content or formal aspects of a source medium into another medium” (533).
- 12.
Quoting Linda Hutcheon’s often cited definition of “adaptation,” I will argue that Champagne’s play is truly an “extended, deliberate, revisitation of a particular work of art” (170).
- 13.
Genetic criticism is interested in the text in its making: “the new impact of genetic criticism in comparison to traditional philology [...] is that it explores the text as it comes into being […] it analyses the dynamic processes involved in the literary creation” (Schmid 9).
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LeBlanc, J. (2024). Ekphrasis, Illustration, and Adaptation: Annie Ernaux’s Intermedial Autobiographic and Photographic Production. In: Wells-Lassagne, S., Aymes, S. (eds) Adaptation and Illustration. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_8
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