Obstinate Heritage and the Family Photo Archive in Lily Tuck’s "The Double Life of Liliane"

In Lily Tuck's intermedial novel, The Double Life of Liliane (2015), traces of elusive pasts haunt the recollections of the autofictional narrator, Liliane.In the novel, old family photographs are entangled with fragments of memory and with conceptions of race (and gender) in mid-century America.By employing an intermedial strategy, the obscurity of the past is emphasized even as its secrets are made visible.The article explores the interpretive possibilities for unraveling the family's enigmas at the intersection of two media: writing and photography.The constrained narrative voice and intricate narrative strategy read in conjunction with the cryptic archival images has the potential to reveal new expressions which can yield alternative understandings of the past and its ongoing influence on the present.The article discusses WWII familial dislocations, the Ivy League Posture photos, and repressed family history through the theoretical lens of narrative (Kristeva's symbolic-semiotic interplay), photography (Barthes; Crimp; Smith), and intermediality (Rajewsky; Rippl; Ryan), and culminates in the emergence of the abject (Kristeva).