| Summary: | This paper wishes to discuss photo-textual autopathography as a narrative model that testifies to the ways in which, as per Cathy Caruth, “one’s own trauma is tied up to the trauma of another” (Unclaimed Experience 8), and may thus respond to the challenges of addressing an allegedly unrepresentable traumatic experience, while establishing a nexus of affiliations between different traumatized subjects irrespective of spatiotemporal specificities. Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008) consists in a disguised autobiography and a fictional biography, and constitutes an eloquent example of Leigh Gilmore’s suggestion that life-writing trauma is often performed by an individual narrating their life story through the experience of others. Significantly, these (auto)biographical gestures are performed in photo-textuality, in other words the combination of written text and photography—and its particular, as per Barthes, relation to death—in a relationship of reciprocity and complementarity. As this paper will argue, thanatography offers a starting point for the writer to address, perhaps even reclaim, his own traumatic experience and foster a sense of a collective identity marked by a history of victimhood. At the same time, the employment of the privileged medium of photography and the juxtaposition of life stories performed, both verbally and pictorially, allow for Hemon’s fiction to transcend the professed impossibility of representing a collective traumatic experience, as they render trauma life-writing possible through the photo-textual inscription of the death of the other.
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