Identity decompositions. «The Girl with the Leica» by Helena Janeczek as a plural biography

Abstract

Reading Helena Janeczec’s The Girl with the Leica, it becomes clear that fiction, disguise, the pursuit of pseudonyms, the unspoken, the tricks of seeking escape routes are part of the grand theater of the world and are in some cases the world itself; but for the characters in this story, as for Janeczec herself, this is an extremely serious game, just as extremely serious was the game of civic engagement for the photographer Gerda Taro, whose biography Janeczec reconstructs. Reality is the residual element, what remains despite the incessant carousel of disguises to which one must playfully submit. It is only in the epilogue that, in the laborious and at times impervious approach to Gerda’s identity, a short circuit between life and work is generated: this is the point at which the frontiers between fact and fiction – the liminal spaces that Françoise Lavocat has investigated with extraordinary critical acumen – become visible, multiplying the pleasure of narration and granting to fiction that extraterritoriality that is its own and that identifies it as such with respect to what fiction is not.