‘Now I See Me, Now You Don’t’: Working with/against Paternal Influence in Marie Nimier’s Photo-Photo

Abstract

In a recent interview, Marie Nimier states that she sees Photo-Photo and her previous works as forming parts of a larger fresco.¹ We might say that she views each novel as though it were part of a puzzle that she is both inventing and discovering as an overall picture emerges. And this puzzle is profoundly concerned with influence, or the effects of the ‘absent’ on the ‘present’, when each term of that dichotomy bears the trace of its opposite (a situation that justifies the increasingly common term ‘presence-in-absence’). Although it would be reductive to read Photo-Photo as exclusively concerned with the absence/presence of the father, I will concentrate below on the influence of that figure on the narrator’s portrayal of her life and writing.