‘Not intended to be perfect representations’: Photograph and Narrative in Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts (2007) and James Ellroy’s My Dark Places (1996)

Abstract

This article will address James Ellroy’s My Dark Places and Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts as attempts and failures to tell familial stories of murder. These problematics of ‘telling’ will be teased out through the way both texts approach photographs. Ellroy actively reproduces photographs within his narrative, often accompanying them with highly poetic italicised sections of writing in which he vows not to forsake his mother. In contrast, Nelson refuses to reproduce crime scene photos, instead describing them in italicised sections which are aesthetically distinct from the rest of the text. The use, or deliberate non-use, of photographs allows for both authors to puncture and rupture their own texts, creating moments of anti-narrative in which the self’s inability to process the loss of family members is foregrounded.