Ways of Seeing / Self (and) Otherness

Résumé Fr En

Cet article discute de la pratique photographique de deux écrivains de la fin de siècle : Arthur Rimbaud et Émile Zola. Chacun a quitté sa France natale pour vivre un exil soit politique soit voulu, à Harare en Abyssinie (Rimbaud) et à Londres en Angleterre (Zola). Chacun s’est mis à la photographie, et a capté des images de l’espace étranger qui l’a accueilli. Leurs trajectoires, tout en signalant leur diversité, laisse pourtant ouverte la possibilité d’un champ de rencontre où elles témoignent d’une même expérience, d’un même enjeu. La représentation visuelle d’un ailleurs, formé par des sentiments d’accueil ou d’exclusion, mène à une réinterprétation de l’idée de l’identité nationale, de la “francité”, de la subjectivité même à cette époque.

This article considers the photographic adventures of two expatriate writers at the fin de siècle: poet Arthur Rimbaud and novelist Émile Zola. Rimbaud’s experiment with photography occupied two years of the decade he lived in East Africa, and ended in disenchantment. Zola’s photography held a much more central role in his later years. Rimbaud’s remaining prints show him almost in disguise in a foreign land, while Zola’s represent a welcoming, charming London (the city that housed him during his exile from France after the publication of his controversial J’Accuse !). Still, I argue that the two writers’ photographic repertoires actually serve a far less disparate purpose than appearances would suggest: in both cases, they situate the photographer within a landscape either foreign or made so by circumstance, and paradoxically offer the comfort of familiarity through the illusion of strangeness. As such, we can interrogate the role of photography in the creation of national identity at the end of the nineteenth century: are these images witnesses, artifacts of colonialism and a preciously shifting political system? Or are they artifictions, participants in a continuum of representation that recreates the constructs of subjectivity and nationalism despite a superficial mimesis of otherness? I propose that the photographs these two writers left behind invite a new way of seeing their literary work as well: a new poetics of subjectivity and a new politics for interpreting the framing gaze.