Snapshots: Fotografische Spuren in Félix Vallottons Roman La vie meurtrière

The transformation of narrative techniques in works from the nineteenth to the twentieth century clearly shows the existence of some forms of interaction between literature and photography. This interaction defines ‘The Photographic’ as a Denkfigur of linguistic mediality, as the analysis of the exemplary novel La vie meurtrière (1907/08) by the writer-artist Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) reveals. His écriture can be associated with the semiotic properties of the technical medium of photography. The author aspires to leave a photographic ‘trace’ throughout his novel by attempting to appropriate techniques such as the snapshot. In this way, the text creates a medial simulation, which generates breaches between the visible and the invisible, thereby dealing with the linguistic representation of mental, ‘non-representable’ images.