Telling pictures: The traffic of images in contemporary French fiction

This dissertation seeks to identify the space that literature occupies in a society overrun with commodified visual forms. From the mass-produced objects of optical consumption that abound in Claude Simon\u27s Triptyque (1973), to a spectacular series of forged paintings in Georges Perec\u27s Un Cabinet d\u27amateur (1979) and the appropriation of Joseph Mankiewicz\u27s film Sleuth in Tanguy Viel\u27s Cinéma (1999), a number of recent French novels wrap pictures into the fabric of fiction and collectively enact narrative\u27s coming to terms with the claim that contemporary culture is a “culture of the image.” I suggest that these texts incorporate images as part of a typically postmodern strategy that resonates with work by many of the period\u27s most prominent visual artists and their critics, and brings to bear on a set of issues crucial to much cultural production today: namely, the reaction against the hegemonic tenets of Modernism; the celebration of the false in the debate surrounding the “end of art”; the critique of the artwork as commodity; and the crisis of originality in an age where the recycling of culture has become the norm. In spite of their dynamic engagement with the visual arts, however, these texts ultimately remain weary of the status of images in everyday life and constitute a specifically literary corollary to what intellectual historian Martin Jay has termed a “denigration of vision” in contemporary French thought. Mapping the paradoxical position of the visual sign in postmodern culture, they therefore propose that, despite its undeniable ubiquity, the image is generally not to be trusted. In an age in which the practice of reading literature has been eclipsed by the unbridled consumption of popular visual culture, I argue that those novels that tell pictures “write back” in an act of self-preservation and revalorization since, no matter how much they engage the image, they ultimately, and quite simply, do things with words