Snapshots of the Pandemic. Vulnerable Humanity in Deborah Levy’s "August Blue"

This article aims to address the apparent duality of Deborah Levy’s literary take on the COVID-19 landscape in her latest novel, August Blue (2023). It demonstrates how fragility and the crisis of humanity and of the protagonist are depicted through the lens of the global event of the pandemic. The methodology combines photography theory, with a special emphasis on Roland Barthes’s and Susan Sontag’s diagnoses, and Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis supplemented with Bracha L. Ettinger’s theory of the matrix. This approach makes it possible to capture Levy’s photographic portrayals of post-lockdown society – people who are still afraid, but also weary and disappointed – and the complexity of the protagonist’s struggle with her past, her conflicting emotions, and a mysterious double who haunts her across the Europe of the early 2020s.