Page 128 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

122 CULTURAL STUDIES

narratives that may be partly true, but they are also narratives that must be
fictionalized in order for us to make sense of our lives… in order to survive. ‘We
are condemned to tell stories’, but we cannot (in our hearts of hearts) believe that
they are altogether true. 7
I learned from my grandmother that it is the mother’s duty to create palpable
narratives of our lives. It is the mother’s duty to love things. My grandmother
passed on to me this love of things (which is both wonderful and burdensome).
Yet, not all things can be passed on; not all pictures make it into the album.
Though I begged for and got my grandfather’s old chair, he is virtually absent in
the album. He is barely visible in the front seat of the Packard. Striding into the
back door of the cabin, he turns his face away from the camera—the old Ford
grimaces and returns the camera’s gaze for him. In a family picture with
unknown aunts, he stands so far apart from my father’s hand which reaches out,
futiley trying to pull him in, that it is as if he were not in the picture at all. There
is a silent gap between them. Like a parenthetical phrase skipped, the space
between them is calling to be read. (With each successive look, the silence
between them bristles more and more. I feel my father’s pain. I catch sight of my
father-as-boy huddled on the front porch with his older brother: the crashing
sound of the china cabinet overturned in a drunken rage by the silent man fills
the brackets, amplifies the space.) Despite the scary silences that many of my
grandmother’s objects give way to, I collect the things that she has given to me:
the chair, the albums, the huge Parisian turn-of-the-century glass vase whose
surface imitates carved turtle shell, the odd dark little oil painting of a monk
playing the trombone (painstakingly painted with a fine brush and plenty of
linseed oil), the silver spoons collected from all over the world, the white fluted
wedding teacups, so thin that you can see through them, as if they were made of
paper or skin.
Henriette Barthes, Roland Barthes’ mother, was also a ‘keeper’ of bric-a-brac.
Shortly after her death, Barthes, finding himself lost, went through boxes of
photographs, relics of their lives spent together and apart. Barthes claims that at
that moment, he was not looking for her, that he had no hope of finding her. He,
after all, had already cut himself off from her, had faced his/her absolute loss. ‘I
had acknowledged that fatality, one of the most agonizing features of mourning,
which decreed that however often I might consult such images, I could never
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recall her features (summon them up as a totality).’ Yet his desire belies him, he
continues his looking. Sorting through the pictures, he finds her not caught so
much by the camera, but rather by the objects in the picture that define her. The
objects that he writes about, some of which are clothing, are rich in fetishistic
lure.

With regard to many of these photographs, it was History which separated
me from them. Is History not simply that time when we were not born? I
could read my nonexistence in the clothes my mother had worn before I
can remember her. There is a kind of stupefaction in seeing a familiar