The Disaster Artist: Sophie Calle’s “histoires vraies”

Abstract

A tenant sets himself on fire in Sophie Calle’s childhood bed, which is tossed out and left in her building’s courtyard. A spiteful colleague assaults Calle with a stiletto, bringing her career as a stripteaseuse to an abrupt end. From divorce to self-immolation to strangulation to suicide, Des histoires vraies (2017), Calle’s ongoing compilation of autobiographical vignettes, is steeped in calamity, its photographs and micro-narratives detailing notable episodes in the artist’s life. I argue that Calle’s emotional and stylistic restraint allows her to compellingly depict disaster’s encroachment on the everyday while figuring a space for its artistic recuperation. Calle’s almost clinical detachment renders these depictions all the more poignant, her tightly-controlled vignettes evoking Roland Barthes’ notion of the photographic punctum. I focus on Histoires vraies punctured and punctuated by violence—texts whose precise, deceptively transparent prose constitutes another form of punctuation, interweaving the flatness of the quotidian and the shock of the tragic. I use these vignettes to comment on the veracity of Calle's autobiographical project, the subtle ways in which she blurs fact and fiction, in order to tease out the feminist implications of her depictions of violence.