Black and Blue

Audacious and genre-defying, Black and Blue is steeped in melancholy, in the feeling of being blue, or, rather, black and blue, with all the literality of bruised flesh. Roland Barthes and Marcel Proust are inspirations for and subjects of Carol Mavor's exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and to comprehend the incomprehensible. At the book's heart are one book and three films—Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Chris Marker's La Jetée and Sans soleil, and Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour—postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret, and violence and history, through aesthetic refinement.Personal recollections punctuate Mavor's dazzling interpretations of these and many other works of art and criticism. Childhood memories become Proust's "small-scale contrivances," tiny sensations that open onto panoramas. Mavor's mother lost her memory to Alzheimer's, and Black and Blue is framed by the author's memories of her mother and effort to understand what it means to not be recognized by one to whom you were once so known.

"Carol Mavor has developed a unique way of responding to images and to their uses by artists and writers: with appetite and fastidious delicacy, she brings the full sensorium synaesthetically into play. Black and Blue is a highly wrought montage, an original attempt to open up the meanings of visual objects in relation to experience, and a startlingly daring account of a symbolic field. It resonates with—and pays tribute to—such key art historical works as Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and William Gass's prose poem, On Being Blue."—Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, "In Black and Blue, Carol Mavor lives with the wounding memories of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the regime of hate in American racial history. She looks at herself through a kaleidoscope of texts and images whose pain her own writing seeks to alleviate. The reader witnesses conflicted emotions circulating within a gallery of figures defining the melancholic tenor of critical and creative labors of the last three decades. As a testament and a symptom, Black and Blue belongs to a growing number of first-person accounts that have coped with the years 1939–46 and after, including those by Sarah Kofman (Rue Ordener, rue Labat) and Jean-Luc Godard (Histoire(s) du cinéma), in which the 'author' deals with his or her own relation with the past, from a highly autobiographical standpoint. What makes Black and Blue stand out is its movement to and from a theoretical critical canon, through an impressive body of films, texts, and images, which literally punctuate the book."—Tom Conley, author of An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France, “Black and Blue is only partly, though brilliantly, about the colours of its title. It’s avowedly indebted to novelist-philosopher William H. Gass’s extraordinary 1976 essay On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, and shares that book’s super-subjective love of lists and tendency to intuitive digressions.... Black and Blue has a poetic logic of mourning, and its rage to make too much sense.”, “It is impossible to make sense of and represent catastrophes—Hiroshima, the Holocaust, loss of memory, death—and these are all approached in an oblique way that makes one ponder the concept. This reviewer would answer in the affirmative Mavor’s indirect question when she seems to wonder if she ‘effectively’ ‘combines catastrophe with frivolity as the text moves between the public and the private, in an effort to make sense.’ This well-maintained tension is the underlying thread that makes the reader watch, read, and think more deeply. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, faculty, general readers.”, “The overall effect is hypnotic, aided by the stunning visual affect of the book, tis elegant typesetting and the variety of the images that litter the text. . . . a joy to read . . . a veritable feast for the eyes.”

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott; Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina Viscountess Hawarden; and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, all also published by Duke University Press.