Taking Pictures de Anne Enright : le rien dans l’image,images de rien

Abstract

The title of Enright’s volume of stories, Taking Pictures, highlights the snapshot-like aspect of the short story, which because of its inherent brevity is bound to draw the reader’s attention to what is missing from the text. Enright makes much of lack and absence in her texts, for instance by withdrawing precise references to the narrator’s identities, etc. What is more, Enright tries to suggest in each of her stories what the characters, most of them female, are lacking in their lives, but which they are unable to pinpoint. Indeed, as Jacques Lacan has argued, desire is essentially ‘the desire for nothing’, that is to say that the object of desire remains invisible, unspeakable, unnamable. Nevertheless the object of desire manifests itself through metonymies which are more or less kinds of ‘pictures’. Desire, for Lacan, is linked an essential ‘lack of being‘, which underlies most of Enright’s stories, populated with ghosts and unexplainable longings.

Keywords

• A. Enright
• absence
• invisibility
• lack
• lack of being
• metonymy