Audacious and genre-defying, Black and Blue is steeped in melancholy, in the feeling of being blue, or, rather, black and blue, with all the literality of bruised flesh. Roland Barthes and Marcel Proust are inspirations for and subjects of Carol Mavor's exquisite, image-filled rumination on efforts to capture fleeting moments and to comprehend the incomprehensible. At the book's heart are one book and three films-Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Chris Marker's La Jetee and Sans soleil, and Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour-postwar French works that register disturbing truths about loss and regret, and violence and history, through aesthetic refinement.
Personal recollections punctuate Mavor's dazzling interpretations of these and many other works of art and criticism. Childhood memories become Proust's "small-scale contrivances," tiny sensations that open onto panoramas. Mavor's mother lost her memory to Alzheimer's, and Black and Blue is framed by the author's memories of her mother and effort to understand what it means to not be recognized by one to whom you were once so known.
Industry Reviews
"In Black and Blue, Carol Mavor lives with the wounding memories of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the regime of hate in American racial history. She looks at herself through a kaleidoscope of texts and images whose pain her own writing seeks to alleviate. The reader witnesses conflicted emotions circulating within a gallery of figures defining the melancholic tenor of critical and creative labors of the last three decades."--Tom Conley, author of An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France "Black and Blue is only partly, though brilliantly, about the colours of its title. It's avowedly indebted to novelist-philosopher William H. Gass's extraordinary 1976 essay On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, and shares that book's super-subjective love of lists and tendency to intuitive digressions... Black and Blue has a poetic logic of mourning, and its rage to make too much sense."-Brian Dillon, Art Review, October 2012 "Carol Mavor has developed a unique way of responding to images and to their uses by artists and writers: with appetite and fastidious delicacy, she brings the full sensorium synaesthetically into play. Black and Blue is a highly wrought montage, an original attempt to open up the meanings of visual objects in relation to experience, and a startlingly daring account of a symbolic field. It resonates with - and pays tribute to - such key art historical works as Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and William Gass's prose poem, On Being Blue." - Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights "[T]he overall effect is hypnotic, aided by the stunning visual affect of the book, tis elegant typesetting and the variety of the images that litter the text... a joy to read ... a veritable feast for the eyes." - Lucy Scholes, TLS "Black and Blue is an unabashedly first person, nonprescriptive account from one such reader-viewer, one that seeks to combine "catastrophe with frivolity" in its quest to reveal something of the link between private and public affect by staging a struggle between them." - Dylan J. Montanari, Los Angeles Review of Books "Black and Blue is a thought-provoking belletristic work. At times the style reaches the heights of Mavors' beloved Barthes and Farber. Also, many of the contemporary artists discussed will be unfamiliar to readers within film studies, and will no doubt provide additional ways of thinking and angles of inquiry. It's also worth noting that Black and Blue is beautifully presented, with ample screenshots taken from the films, and colour plates of the other artworks Mavor discusses." - Scope, February 2014
