L’articulation intersémiotique du souvenir chez Camille Laurens et Rémi Vinet

Abstract

In Cet absent-la, Camille Laurens’ text and Remi Vinet’s photographs are equal forms of representation which illustrate the different shapes and aspects the memory of a beloved person can assume; together these two elements form a coherent whole. At first, this may seem surprising since the people on the pictures do not appear in the text while the characters whose photographs are described in the text – the ex-partner of the first-person narrator and her son Philippe, who died shortly after birth – do not figure on any of the pictures. Thus, both the ex-partner and Philippe, on the one hand, and the people on the pictures, on the other hand, are “cet absent-la”. Laurens and Vinet use this apparent contradiction between presence and absence to foreground their own conception of memory: through their visual and textual representations memory is at once associated with time and space but, at the same time, it also is defined as being beyond temporal and spatial boundaries. In my opinion, it is precisely the new dialectical relationship between text and image which creates the unique character of this novel. The present contribution offers an analysis of the book based on the dichotomy presence-absence specific to Cet absent-la as well as to memory.