Today everything exists to end in a photograph.Susan Sontag,
On Photography
- To speak of ending in a photograph, as Susan Sontag does, would seem
to aver photography's orientation towards death, an association it has held
since its inception and one that has become practically axiomatic in
photography theory. While Sontag means that our photophilia will turn
everything eventually into an image (24), I'd like to ask what it means to
end in a photograph, and what kind of end the photograph presents. For that
matter, I'd like to interrogate the different ways of being a photograph.
Will literature, too, end in a photograph or come to a photo finish? Does
this end perhaps open up the form a photograph can take, complicating the
truism that photography is thanatography? Might photography's end be a
proliferation rather than a singular event?
- Because film photography is, as Derek Attridge has pointed out,
"analogically bound to the referent," it faces a challenge in the digital age when
the photograph "can always not be the direct effect of the referent on
sensitized paper" (86). The change from emulsion to pixels impels us to rethink
fundamentally what photography might be. Can we compare image pixels to those that
comprise words? The change in medium raises the question of whether there is a
change in the photographic relation as well: would photography no longer work
through analogy, or for that matter through the contiguity of the negative and the
printing paper? These questions push us headlong into the theory of digital
images. But before we reach that end, before we consider what end has photography,
or literature, come to in the age of the digital, I'd like to turn back and offer
a palinode on the theory of the photographic image. Examining what's behind the
photographic image leverages a space to consider how the verbal medium for
photography might come between film and digital.
- One can read Sontag's claim as tracing out the conventional analogy
between
life and death, living and photography. To be sure, some of the most widely read
photography theory focuses on death as the way of figuring ending
in a
photograph. Sontag herself sweepingly claims that "all photographs are
memento mori" (15). Similarly, remarking on a photograph of himself in
Camera Lucida (the book he wrote after the death of his
mother), Roland Barthes tells us that "death is the eidos of that photograph" (15). Even critics who do not
explicitly link photography with death tie it to implicitly deathly things: André
Bazin, for instance, after suggesting that "the practice of embalming the dead might
turn out to be a fundamental factor" in all of the plastic arts (9), goes on to claim
later that photography in particular "embalms time" (14). Eduardo Cadava's more recent
reading of photography in the oeuvre of Walter Benjamin leads him to attest that
"photography is a mode of bereavement. It speaks to us of mortification"
(11). Geoffrey
Batchen reveals that the link might reach back to portrait photography's earliest days,
when subjects' "heads were inevitably supported by a standing metal device to keep them
steady for the necessary seconds. Photography insisted that if one wanted to look
lifelike in the eventual photograph, one first had to pose as if dead" (62); even so,
"photography was a visual inscription of the passing of time and therefore also an
intimation of every viewer's own inevitable passing" (133).
- Bazin's and Batchen's revelation of time as key to photography's thanatographic
inscription is congruent with Christian Metz's insights when comparing film
and
photography. Metz uses the photograph's stillness and silence against film's motion and
multisensory appeal to support his assertion that photography is a thanatography. But
Metz goes further, noting that through its linkage with death, the
photograph "is an
instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another
kind of time" (158). It is the temporal disjunction of the photograph, in contrast to
the film's display of temporality--which, however similarly severed from the indexical
moment, is nonetheless replayed in "an unfolding time similar to that of life"
(158)--that most clearly demarcates the photograph from film in Metz's account.
He cites Phillipe Dubois's remark that "with each photograph, a tiny
piece of time
brutally and forever escapes its ordinary fate, and thus is protected against its own
loss" (158). Likewise, Barthes's conception of photography is so imbued
with time that
he declares that "cameras in short were clocks for seeing" (15).
Photography's baleful
association has become a usured figure for articulating the problems of absence and
temporality that the medium engages. Batchen, reflecting on protophotographic theory,
avers that Daguerre "like Talbot, seems to be suggesting that the primary subject of
every photograph is time itself" (12).
- If photography is really about time, it may be aligned with
narrative. Batchen notes that "in stopping or turning back time,
photography appeared once again to be playing with life and death" (132).
But if photography's engagement with time and ends is like narrative's,
might it also turn to concerns other than death that as a literary form narrative has, like love or loss or immortality? The persistent alliance of
death and photography needs to be troubled as it settles into axiom,
because a too-pat conflation of death and ending occludes other concerns
with time that photography theory can articulate.
- Little else but time comes to an end in the photograph. We might even ask of
Metz, what kind of time? If "another kind of time" emerges, is it not linear time but
layered time--whether a moment excised and pastiched into a future time, or the more
immediate folding of time that digital photography, with its instant playback or easy
proliferation on a network, affords. The fixing of the image--which evokes the cultural
associations with death--happens in the middle of the photographic process, before the
image circulates. Perhaps, then, photography's association with death might recast that
figure as the middle, rather than the end. The photograph would offer itself as the tain
of time, bouncing the past into the future like the silver backing on a
mirror that bounces our image back to our eyes.
- The photograph, however, offers not simply to perpetuate a moment or event
beyond its time, nor does it merely indicate the absence or displaced trace of the
depicted, but produces a new fold in the networks of meaning. When the photograph
itself is supplanted by or transformed into verbal description, what happens to the
absent or lost object/time of the photograph? It is not now doubly absented, but
oscillating between the impossible "photograph" (which may or may not exist as actual
object) and the verbal description. To reevaluate absence and time in photography is
to intimate that the disjunction of the image might offer an escape route from death,
provide a residue whose unending potential for recombination suggests a tantalizing
immortality. The interplay of presence and absence, folded space and the space
enfolded, invites us to consider such recombination and folding by examining some
absent photographs, by which I mean photographs that structure a text but that do not
appear as visual representations. These absent photographs, rather than silencing or
subtracting by their absence, organize openings around which meanings can collect and
layer across linear time. As verbal objects, these depictions function as photographs
despite the difference in medium.
- My concern, therefore, is less with the possibilities of visual narrative than
with the narrative of the visual. Camera Lucida is compelling in no
small part because there Barthes narrates the visual and challenges the presumption
that what is seen is necessarily present. Perhaps one of the most memorable images in
the book is the unreproduced photograph of his late mother, the image Barthes calls
the "Winter Garden photograph" (70). Barthes is not the only writer who verbally
produces an absent photograph, and the reversal of the usual order of
representation--the photograph being the absent object that is represented rather than
representing the absent object--opens up a space to rethink the possibilities and
parameters of photography in relation to narrative. As Attridge argues, "Barthes's
practice . . . shows that the referent is not the source of photography's special
power--although the referential may indeed be crucial" (87). Verbal photographs
produce a kind of hypotyposis that hinges on the absence of the depicted object,
namely the visual photograph. In seeing not Barthes's mother (a doubly-layered
referent) but the absent image of his mother, we not only perceive an experience
analogous to Barthes's experience of originary loss, but are vulnerable to be wounded
by the punctum of the verbal photograph. Yet rather than work extensively with
well-thumbed texts of Sontag and Barthes--texts which nonetheless remain in contact
with my concerns here, because their insights incessantly return from the dead like
photographs--I want to elucidate the problem of narrating photographyy by reading a
more recent text that narrates absent photographs.[1]
- Anne Carson's novel in verse, The Autobiography of Red, concludes
its main narrative section with a series of photographs, or at least chapters that
claim to be photographs. This is, therefore, a text that almost literally ends with a
photograph, whose trajectory is predicated on a series of final or closing shots. The
book is composed of seven parts, the longest of which, "Autobiography of Red: A
Romance," offers the most extensive and detailed narrative of the seven. The "Romance"
has 48 one- or two-page chapters, most pithily titled by a single word, making it all
the more notable that the section ends with a series of chapters titled "Photographs"
and having different subtitles (although the very last one, "The Flashes in Which a
Man Possesses Himself" offers a remarkable contrast to this pattern). The reader
encounters five shorter sections before the "Romance" and one final segment, an
"Interview," after it. My initial focus is on the "Romance," a modern rewriting of the
ancient poet Stesichoros's tale of the red, winged monster Geryon, since the relation
between narrative and photography is most explicit there. In Carson's version, Geryon
grows from childhood to manhood, becoming a photographer and negotiating both his
monstrosity and his unrequited love for Herakles. More classically, Geryon was a
mythic monster whose murder and the murder of whose cattle was one of Hercules's
labors. Stesichoros's writing of the tale, Carson points out in an early section,
breaks free of the Homeric convention of relying on a specific adjective for each noun
("When Homer mentions blood, blood is black . . . Homer's epithets are a
fixed diction" [4]). Steisichoros also adopts the monster's view, rather than the
hero's. These ancient innovations and the fact that their explication frames the
"Romance" invite us to reflect on how we might understand the interventions Carson
makes in thinking about photography. If film photography fixes the image to the paper,
what does Carson's verbal photography fix--or unfix?
I. A Fine Romance
- The Autobiography of Red poses a number of visual and narrative
paradoxes, and these hinge on photography. Perhaps the most obvious one is that Red
did not write this Autobiography. Rather, a largely unmarked narrator tells the life
story of Geryon, a monster who becomes a photographer. And while the text offers a
recognizable trajectory through a life, and Geryon is in fact red, it becomes clear
that the referent of "Autobiography of Red" may not be the Romance itself
or the novel as a whole, but rather elements in the text--the series of photographs
described at the end. In other words, the autobiography referred to is visual, not
verbal, and the title is eponymous, not categorical. Indeed, the autobiography as an
object in the narrative is referred to as having "recently taken the form of a
photographic essay" (60), although this mention, midway through Geryon's life story,
curiously destablilizes the form of its object, implicitly raising the question of
whether the photographs at the end are part of this same photographic essay.
- A second complication of Autobiography of Red is its range of
composite references. In what might be called the romance's front matter--two
essayistic sections on the poet Stesichoros and three list-like appendices--we learn
of the historical poet's long poem on the red, winged monster Geryon who was killed by
the hero Herakles for his red cattle. The first section begins with second-order
representation, already reflecting on how the story is being recounted: Stesichoros's
poem survives only in fragments, some of which are still being discovered, we are
told. This prolegomenon foregrounds the form of the fragment and renders Stesichoros
a rather postmodern poet: "the fragments of the Geryoneis itself read as if
Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and
buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat"
(6-7). This excerpt instigates Carson's theory of photography in this text: the
fragmentation and jarring juxtapositions typify what photographs do to what they
depict. That the fragments are still being discovered, moreover, intimates how
photographs function in our daily lives: buried in boxes, files, or albums, they are
still being uncovered as the sands of clutter shift to turn them up either
purposefully or inadvertently.
- The "Romance"'s ending photographs are, first of all, not visual images, but
rather page-or-two-long verbal descriptions of scenarios, a snapshot of what readers
conventionally project to be a more extensive, more continuous experience of what
transpires with the protagonists--Geryon, Herakles, and Ancash--on their trip to the
volcano Incchantikas. In narrative terms, this mode seems to be summary. Each of the
chapters has as its first line what appears to be a description of the photograph that
is the chapter's subject. The first five are fairly concrete, evident descriptions:
"It is a photograph of four people sitting around a table with hands in front of them"
(136) or "a close up photograph of Geryon's left pant leg just below the knee" (137).
But the last two shift from concrete, visualizable nouns to more abstract, existential
claims: "It was a photograph just like the old days. Or was it?" (142), or "It was a
photograph he didn't take; no one here took it" (145).[2] None of these chapters is ekphrastic; the chapters not describe
verbally some visual representation or work of art. Instead, these chapters narrate
the moment or situation in which Geryon takes the photo. Because the attention turns
to the instigating moment in the process of representation rather than to what is
captured by that process, the novel refuses ekphrasis. The context, not the object, is
described, and yet the description creates the absent photograph by pointing to it.
Strikingly, the instant of recording the image is absent from the text; our attention
turns to the context of the photographic process and misses the moment when the
shutter clicks. Just as a photograph, according to Metz and Barthes and Sontag,
excises a moment from the stream or continuum of experience, so too does this text
excise the photograph from the coherence of the experience in the narrative.
- The peculiarity of the narrative's shift into photographically packaged moments
raises the questions: Why is this part of the narrative framed through photographs,
or, more precisely, photographing? Why do the titular photographs emerge only at the
end point in the "Romance," since Geryon has been at work on this photographic
autobiography for many years?[3] What sort of end do
they spell?
- The easy answer to the question why the "Romance" ends in photographs is that
Geryon's a photographer, this is his story, and the photographs' surfacing indicate
Geryon's growing mastery over recounting his autobiography. But this answer is
complicated before we even arrive at the photographic ending, precisely because
"Autobiography of Red" has no single referent and each form of the
autobiography carries with it its own peculiar time. There are the autobiographies
marked by the time of production: Geryon's first autobiography in the form of a
sculpture, as his mother's overheard phone conversation informs us (35), and the
photographic essay form that Geryon's autobiography takes not quite midway through the
book (60) and which is elaborated for nearly thirty years beyond the adolescent moment
when the shift to photography takes place. Indeed, the composition of the latter runs
parallel to the trajectory of the Romance entitled "Autobiography of Red," displacing
the titular referent. There are also the autobiographies which are marked by the
retrospective temporality of narration: the story of Geryon as the protagonist of the
Romance, and the stories of Geryon as a composite of ancient and postmodern mythic
monsters that make up Carson's novel's beguiling range of reference. This montage of
possible autobiographies of red renders the photo-essay autobiography as a largely
absent object that we only glimpse at telling moments. Geryon's self-authored
autobiography thus becomes like Barthes's Winter Garden photograph, an absent image
hypotypotically organizing the verbal exploration of the meaning of photography and
time.
- The turn to photograph chapters at the end of the novel should be
understood in
relation to the end of the nineteenth chapter, set on the morning when Herakles first
breaks up with Geryon. The mid-novel chapter thus marks what ought to have been the end
of the romance, had Geryon not carried the torch for his lost love for decades more. The
last lines of chapter XIX directly reference the autobiography as object, observing that
"in
Geryon's autobiography/ this page has a photograph of some red rabbit giggle tied with
white ribbon./ He has titled it 'Jealous of My Little Sensations'" (62). The breakup
happens when they should be still in their youth, not middle age; only the last lines
describe the autobiography from the retrospective time of the narration. This is an
unspecified future time--when taking the photographs is anterior to assembling and
titling them--different from the time of the breakup or the photographing, which is
implied to be his adolescence. The temporal rupture marks the trauma of
Herakles's
breaking up with Geryon, yet the event can only be inferred from the actions and
responses of the two in this chapter. The turn to the photo-autobiography at the end,
moreover, recapitulates the Romance's concluding turn towards photographic chapters and
makes the object stand in for the event. That Geryon had been lying in bed planning this
autobiography the very morning of the breakup (60) indicates that the autobiographical
project is going on in parallel with the unfolding events of the romance (in the sense
of affair). The question is then why we only become aware of this parallel
register of representation at this time, and so briefly. While this paralleling connects
Geryon's photography with his romance, it also points to the layering of time that
photography enables, and suggests that Geryon has trouble giving up the romance because
it has come unstuck in time. Photography becomes the way that Geryon learns to deal
with his own monstrous sense of the timelessness of the romance. Through Geryon's
example, Carson demonstrates how photography's temporality is not an end, an arrival at
stasis, but an experience of duration; with this move she also aligns photography with
love.
- These closing lines of chapter XIX unquestionably mark a temporal disjuncture in
the chapter's narration that echoes the fragmentation of time Metz, among others,
finds in the photograph's power. The title of the chapter, "From the Archaic to the
Fast Self," contains within it the ambiguity between stasis and dynamism that Carson's
theory of photography unfolds through its verbal photographs. If on first read the
"fast self" is the one speedily slipping away (as youth does), the phrase also describes
the self made fast, as if fixed in the photographic medium. The temporal displacement of
a photograph is moreover enacted in this particular narrational turn, in the prolepsis
to the moment of narrating the story from some future point. This morning/this chapter,
which initiates Geryon's struggle to represent himself by the (to Geryon devastating)
breakup with Herakles, is also the first moment that mentions a photograph and its
title. The disruptive temporality of this chapter is our first hint that this
photographic novel of development will not be following the usual progressive
trajectory. The autobiography thus starts from its middle to rework the problem of
ending by folding proleptically upon itself.
- Yet this photograph is odd for other reasons as well. The synaesthetic paradox of
a photograph of a rabbit giggle foregrounds the text's concern with the way representation
works and with the limits of photographic representation. The monstrosity of
showing sound provides an apt figure for the kind of temporality the photograph
evokes--the impossibility of conveying the past to the future except through a
description that can only induce us imaginatively to concoct the impossible temporal
plenitude. Geryon is a photographer who aims for the edge between sound and sight, while
Carson's verbal photographs mark a similar synaesthetic edge in their image-pressure
on the word. The introduction of radical sensory difference in this text's depiction of
photography indicates one way in which Carson is breaking away fixed forms of
representation, just as Stesichoros breaks from Homeric epithet. The monstrosity of
Carson's photography, however, unfixes vision as the privileged and singular medium of
the photograph, suggesting that we rethink photography as a synaesthesia of touch and
sight, or sound and sight, much as written language is.
- The synaesthetic density of description in Carson's poetic theory of photography
offers insight into thinking the relation of photography and narrative. Might
photography's fragmentation and the complex temporal layering it enables seduce
narrative away from linearity to embrace collage? (The film Memento's
photographic and retrojected narrative offers a telling example of how photography
assimilates narrative to its own time). If photography excises a moment from a
continuum of experience, can photographs even tell a story? Sontag suggests that perhaps it cannot,
arguing that we never understand anything from a photograph because it is excised from
the flow of experience.[4] Her claim, however, hinges
not only on the fragmentary nature of the photograph, its capacity to atomize reality,
but on the presumption that such atomization impedes narration or any other form of
linkage among elements. Carson is not simply pushing the limits of photography from the
visual into the verbal but in her emphasis on the fragment, and her formal reliance on
verse, she also pushes the limits of narrative and its tendency to work against
atomizing forces, as if challenging Sontag's claims directly. By ending in photographs
"Romance" disperses rather than culminates the narrative, and opens up the
possibility that an autobiography, a narrative, or a photograph might not end in death.
At every level of this text, Carson invites us to consider how fragments narrate;
fragments are if anything more likely to be taken up into narrative relations as we seek
to put a story to them to fill out their whole. But should we perceive that filling-in
as positive or as negative space? Fragments in a series, especially those that purportedly
relate in some way beyond mere juxtaposition, can produce relations complex enough so as
to organize the fragments and their gaps into meaning.
- Photographs, if they can be said to narrate, would seem to do so primarily in the
narrative mode of summary, telling in far less time than it takes the events to unfold.
This presumes, however, that we can take in visual representation instantaneously,
rather than slowly over time.[5] Do photographs
ever actually function as scene, telling the story in the same amount of time as it would take
for the events to happen? In this novel's case, the absence of the visual image slows down
the telling and its relation to the event in order to produce the more immediate and
intensified experience of scene. At a narrational level, the shift in this romance
toward photographic moments at the end marks a turn from summary into scene, a
recalibrating of the relation between story and discourse. But one must also consider
why the photographs themselves, or their descriptions, swap the concrete for the
abstract; this shift in focus implies a turn from some actual experience, some material
presence before the camera, to the processing of the meaning of that materiality. That
the final chapter is not a photograph but "Flashes" marks an endpoint to this
trajectory: "flashes" are still material but they are also ephemeral, and photography
could be said to be the trace of that material ephemerality. We are to attend not to the
object but to the tension between the object illuminated in its moment and the network
of gestures, meanings, signs that link that time/space to the present moment of
photographic reception. The increasing abstraction of the photographs' captions directs
our attention toward time, which the narrative shift to photographs underscores in its
focus on the interrelated processes of showing and seeing (and their dissimilar
temporalities).
- By its end, the romance presents a doubled mode of narration, foregrounding the
seeing as well as the telling (or narration-as-showing). The opening of this second
order, however, also coincides with the introduction of mechanical perception and
representation into the human activity of creation--a monstrous encounter indeed.[6] Where the story and the photograph might have
recorded or represented the same events in parallel but disparate media, this doubling
means that the narrative records the event of photographic recording (if that is what
narrative or photography does). The leap from shutter click to shutter click is less
disruptive; moving from photograph to photograph logically accounts for the progression
through the chapters.
- As the narrative turns explicitly photographic, becoming less a tale of events in
the hero's life and more a tale of the taking of pictures, Geryon inserts himself into
the mode of representation alongside the narrator, minimizing his role as the subject of
representation and being instead the instigator of the process. At once not only are the
readers distanced from the tale into which they had been absorbed, becoming more aware
of its layers of mediation both visual and narrative, but Geryon himself is distanced
from his photographic objects. At the end of the chapter that comes just before the photograph
chapters Geryon thinks, "I am disappearing. . . but the photographs were worth it" (135),
as if the next sequence of chapters is the residue or remnant from his disappearance (a
reversal of the photograph's gradual manifestation on the page under the darkroom's red
light). Geryon is travelling with his ex, Herakles, and Herakles's new boyfriend
Ancash--so no wonder he feels rendered invisible, and struggles with negotiating the
appropriate distance. Ordinarily--that is, if we were simply absorbed in the
identification with the protagonist and the events he experiences--we might say that the
camera serves prophylactically, protecting Geryon from being too involved in the subject
of the story and photography. But that would only be if the object of the narrative and
the object of the photography in this text were the same--and they are not.
- Rather, I suggest that the role of photographing at this point is apotropaïc: it
serves to extend and subtend what is happening, to stave off the end of the narrative.
Indeed, Sontag argues that photographing is not merely passive observation, but active
participation in a scene: "it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly,
encouraging whatever is going on to keep happening" (12). So Geryon's photographs, and
the titular torsion towards them, carve out a space for him to participate in the
narrative itself, not only its events but its telling, just as much as the photographs'
emergence in the narrative signals his own self-realization. At the same time, photographing wards off--pace phototheory's deathly obsession--the end.
- The photo finish of this novel, then, defers the end of the story as much as of
Geryon's relation to Herakles, and in doing so it transforms both. His photography
helps him establish a new relationship to Herakles as well as to Ancash, and not just
by giving him something to do while tagging along with them. Photography is what
enables Geryon's Bildungsroman: his autobiography is a story of formation or
development as a photographer. A recidivist fling with Herakles at the climax of the
"Romance"--for which Ancash gives Geryon a walloping--serves to convince Geryon that
he has something other than his lovelorn connection to Herakles for which to be
responsible: he has his creative vision to proliferate. This proliferation, the
novel's photo finish, redefines "end" not as resolution or culmination but as
expansion or dissemination. The very last chapter, "The Flashes in Which a Man
Possesses Himself," returns us to the scene of photographing and compares it to the
fires of a bakery oven; Ancash sees the flames, Herakles (lustily) the bakers, and
Geryon a volcano over which the three of them soar, "immortality at their faces,/
night at their back" (146). Without a camera, Geryon nonetheless pictures the moment
in a flash of inspiration. Photography, at the end of the Romance, has become fully
insinuated into actuality, as the box/lightsource/recording mechanism/image
configuration of the men's figures silhouetted by the oven suggests.
- But the book's culminating photographic turn also speaks to larger truths for
novels in the age of the image. It's not just that, as Sontag claims, "everything
exists to end in a photograph," but that this end must be understood to transform
narrative, becoming an aim rather than a stopping point. In this case the end shows Geryon's turn
towards the actual, it shows him learning how to make something of himself without the camera,
and demonstrates that the end of photography is an aim rather than a finality. If the end
is in a photograph, or
series of photographs, and the constant flutter of the shutter is an attempt to stave off that end,
then ending becomes a set of relations or a matrix
sustaining a meaningful tension. On this view, narrative's typical death drive is
subverted or diverted by the recourse to photography.[7]
II. Punct-Time
- In his recent reading of Barthes's punctum as an anti-theatrical aesthetic, Michael Fried
argues that the punctum emerges through the difference between seeing and being shown. "The
punctum, we might say, is seen by Barthes but not because it has been shown to him by the
photographer, for whom it does not exist" (546). The difference in the agency of the
presenter--human intention or accident--implies that photography can be pitted against narrative
just as Sontag had speculated. That is, the antitheatricality of photographs means that they mark
an impasse in the narrative relation between photographer and observer: they cannot see the same
object, and indeed what moves the observer is something to which the photographer is impervious.
On the other hand, Fried's suggestion that the punctum emerges in this gap between showing and
seeing evokes a visual dialectics that can engage narrative differently, folded along the lines of
the observer's relation to the object itself.
- Although this antitheatrical mode entails "depicting figures who appear deeply
absorbed in what they are doing, thinking, and feeling and who therefore also appear
wholly oblivious to being beheld" (549), and thus invites us back in to a
realist or even mimetic practice of representation, the insurmountable misalignment of
the photographer and the observer that the gap between showing and seeing produces
diverts us from the mimetic. Yet the indexical claim of photographs remains; photographs
refract the difference between mimesis and indexicality. The materiality of the image
certainly plays a role in this refraction. As Mary Ann Doane points out,
"the historicity of a medium is foregrounded, not escaped" as we look at old photographs
and films (144). Precisely because time does not stand still in a photograph, the
peculiarly layered temporality of photographs means that for all their apparent
guarantee of being anchored in reality, and for all their evocation of realist descriptive codes,
what photographs let us see is not what they show. If photographs are agential machines, not
just clocks, for seeing, how might they serve as monstrous witnesses to an event?
- Exploiting this misalignment, Carson's book is avowedly not mimetic; it plays on
the opacity as well as on the transparency of the surface of representation--the beauty of
the line of poetry or the power of the figure is as wounding as any thing, event, or
experience it tells of--even as it foregrounds the accident of witnessing, the chance
embedded in seeing rather than being shown. Fried's contention about the punctum as, in
essence, what the photographer is blind to, articulates the paradox of Carson's
photographic thematics of witnessing, although her work goes beyond his in attending to
what the more tangible or palpable effects of that witnessing are. Opening out from the
visual to the tangible, Carson's photographs explore the tension between the opacity of
the representational surface and the power to move--witnessing being a form of seeing
that touches one, tangibly brings one into a hermeneutic circuit even as it keeps one on
the outside of the experience witnessed. In their appeal to "what moves me" Carson's
photographs say "this" or "here," employing the deictic shifters of language to secure
the photograph's indexical nature.
- The synaesthetic power of the punctum, thus, is central to what Carson brings to a theory
of photography. Although Barthes posits the punctum as that accident that pricks, bruises, or is
poignant to the photograph's viewer (27), and he articulated the punctum as the most tangible
effect of the photograph, the punctum is not so much something present in the photograph as it is
the performative of the photograph. In Barthes's hands, the punctum rather subtly becomes the site
where narrative attaches itself to the image: "on account of her necklace, the black woman in her
Sunday best has had, for me, a whole life external to her portrait" (57), he confesses. The
punctum is precisely where narrative intersects with the photograph; what grabs or strikes us
about a particular image is where we start to speculate on a host of other interpretive relations
extending from the photograph. Narrative enters where the visual transubstantiates into the felt.
- Perhaps because this last part of Carson's "Romance" lays before us a series of
photographic puncta, projecting a sensation beyond the moment of the text, the
photograph chapters grow increasingly to be about time. The first photograph chapter
concerns itself with the time it takes a stoned person to set up a photograph; it is
permeated with overt but also fairly straightforward markings of time. Only later does
time emerge more paradoxically in the photographs:
In the photograph the face of
Herakles is white. It is the face
of an old man. It is a photograph of the future, thought Geryon months
later when he was standing in his darkroom
looking down at the acid bath and watching likeness come groping out of the bones. (144)
- This is a narrative of the punctum. Geryon's realization arrives in the temporal mode that
Barthes locates in the photographic punctum--a simultaneous "this will
be and this has been," a sense of the future anteriority of death. What strikes Geryon
here is the likeness as it emerges in its unlikeness. As Barthes notes, "this punctum,
more or less blurred beneath the abundance and the disparity of contemporary
photographs, is vividly legible in historical photographs: there is always a defeat of
Time in them" (96). This reading of the punctum suggests that the apotropaïc
turn to
photography at the end of the novel is not a resolution so much as a transformation, a
conversion of something with a definite temporal end into something that can defeat
time. The punctum provides a transversal across time through the photograph. For this
reason, it offers a vector for narrative.
- Fried's reading intimates that every photograph could come to have a punctum and
could come to be antitheatrical insofar as its meaning unpredictably unfolds through the
passage of time. Time--through the persistence or duration of the photograph--opens up
surprises in the photograph, renders seen what is not shown. This view counters the
exclusion of narrative from photography in Sontag's work, for Sontag's objection to
photographs having narrative capabilities served only insofar as it viewed photographs
in the instantaneity of the present.
- Carson's verbal photographs, however, provide a different fold of time, a more
layered temporality, revealing the processes of narrative alongside a montage of
temporalities. The anachronicity of the passage from Carson is striking; in the present
of developing the photograph, Geryon discerns that the image, which would be already
lodged in the past, having been taken, is actually taken from the future. Like a
photograph's fragmenting disruption of the stream of lived time, this temporal
disturbance in the narration marks the moment from which Geryon looks back on his
obsession from the safe distance of having resolved it. In addition, the narrative
prolepsis shifts us into the moment of seeing the image rather than the moment of taking
the image, in stark contrast to the time of the narration of the rest of the photograph
chapters.
- The disparity calls attention to how the present of narration is implicated in
the look at the photograph. The present of looking at the photograph recalls that the
image is perpetually thrown or projected into the present. The photograph, as Metz
noted, is always hearkening from sometime else. Because of its multiple, complex
temporality of simultaneously now and then, the photograph can be construed as a
fragment that disrupts a moment's contextual set of spatio-temporal relations, which
insofar as they evoke narrative, fill in and smooth over the disjunction. Although Fried
wants to suggest that "it would be truer to Barthes's less than fully articulated
argument to think of the punctum of death as latent in contemporary photographs, to be
brought out, developed (as in the photographic sense of the term), by the inexorable
passage of time" (561), such a view rests heavily on the portrait photograph (just as
Barthes relies on this genre), and thus keeps the thematics oriented towards death as
the key figure for temporal change. Does a landscape or monument die in a photograph?
Indeed, such depiction may be the only way for us forgetful beings to comprehend such a
death. While of course photographs can reveal landscapes that are no longer there, this
return to the theme of the death in/of the photographic subject, the ending of
everything in a photograph, marks a familiar anxiety over the death or disappearance of
the Subject in the postmodern era. Is not everything we make, actually, an embodiment or
projection of our own death, and photography just realizes that a little more
insistently? What then is unique about photography's baleful end time? Metz's
discussion of the radical decontextualization of space and time that photography
instigates challenges us to rethink the end of photography for what is shown. Yet the
important thing we gain in thinking the temporality of the punctum is the idea that
photographs continue to develop, even after they are "fixed" onto the page.[8] If the punctum hinges on what we can see in a
photograph, it thwarts the terminal sense of the "end" of a photograph through the
unceasing return of seeing, and establishes the means by which narrative can enfold the
image.
- Notwithstanding the significance of the final photos of the "Romance," it is the
theory of photography that Carson gives us outside the "Romance" section that might help
us not only to capitalize on Metz's and Fried's readings but divert us from a
death-driven interpretation of photography. The novel's first theory of photography is
found in the description of Stesichoros's poem in the very first section
of the text:
"The fragments of the Geryoneis read as if Stesichoros had composed a
substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with
some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat. The fragment numbers tell you
roughly how the pieces fell out of the box" (6-7). On the one hand, this description
rather strikingly compares to how photographic images fall out of the box of the camera,
their numbered positions on the strip of film (to choose that archaic form of the film
camera) or on the index print showing their order of appearance and hearkening back to
an implicitly linear temporal order of their taking. Of course, individual photographs
would not be tied to that linear emergence from the box; they are always independent of
that order, selected for their various purposes and iterated elsewhere.
- The radical fragmentation and dissonant juxtaposition described in what I'm
calling Carson's first theory of photography colludes with how Metz and Barthes perceive
photography's mode of representation, for a photographic image will always hearken back
metonymically to some other space and time and object from which it hails, whose light
waves it records. Just as we presume Stesichoros's now fragmented poem recapitulates a
whole text, so too are photographs seen to be fragments from a past, coherent experience
now indexically posted to a future moment. This metonymy, however, rather than tethering
to wholeness, fragments the holism of the photograph's recording of the real. Those
metonymic temporal linkages, moreover, invoke narrative's peculiar conjunction of the
present of narration-time and the past of narrated-time. The photograph is always an
object embedded in different, contingent relations, as varied as meat and lecture notes
and song lyrics; its intervention in the world disrupts the presumption of
spatio-temporal continuity, and displacing even the non-photographic objects in
"reality" around it. As Metz claims, the essence of the photograph is the fragment, "an
instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another
kind of time" (158). While Metz wants us to understand this "object" as the thing
photographed, reading him with Carson suggests that the abducted object is in fact the
photograph itself. The abduction of the object, however, disrupts the relations in that
first world, because the future anterior promise of the photograph warrants that it will
come back to haunt the scene of its inception.
- The moment when Geryon develops the image of Herakles's face in the
darkroom is striking because its narration is so temporally disruptive, just
like a photograph. The moment comes at the end of the photograph chapter,
"Photographs: Like and Not Like"; the first line describes the photograph: "It
was a photograph just like the old days. Or was it?" (142). At first we may
think this is a more existential claim than the line (for example from a
previous chapter) that describes a photograph of a dead guinea pig on a plate,
and this difference signals that the photo montage has shifted from the concrete
to the abstract. And we can understand this existential claim to tie in with the
story's development: Herakles has cheated on Ancash by sleeping with Geryon, so
Geryon tries out that relationship from the old days and realizes it is not just
like then. (Indeed, when Ancash confronts him, asks him how it felt, Geryon says
"degrading" [144], although whether the feeling is what has changed or Geryon
has changed is notably ambiguous.) But what has also happened is that the
concrete description of the image has been displaced from the first line to the
end of the chapter, while the first line captures the subjective reaction Geryon
has to the image. Thus, here the narrative displays or rather stages the
punctum. It is not our punctum, for the same reason that Barthes ostensibly will
not reveal the Winter Garden photograph: it won't strike or wound
us.[9] By showing the effects of the
punctum, the unexpected or startling revelation of Herakles's old-man face, the
narrative lets us see Geryon's ambivalence about Herakles, or even his desire to
be free of him, which he cannot admit himself (what the photographer, in this
instance, was blind to). This staging is concomitant with the fact that the
narrative's scope is now moving out beyond the moment Geryon took the photograph
to complete the plot arc of picture-taking, showing us how the image turns out
as well as how Geryon first reacts to it. The opening up of an arc of time, of
duration, enables both the showing of the punctum's effect (on Geryon, and on us
through that focalization) and unfolds the immediacy of photography to the mode
of temporal distance that Fried posits as making the punctum possible. The
punctum Geryon experiences marks him as different from, if only incrementally,
the photographer who could not see Herakles's aged face at the moment of the
shutter click.
- If the penultimate photograph chapter displaces its photographic
concreteness, slipping into the guise of existential or abstract claims but--as
the chapter develops as the photograph develops--reasserting its investment in
the concrete or "real," this chapter claims its solidarity with the previous
photograph chapters. The last (explicitly) photograph chapter, on the other
hand, seems to describe an impossible image: "It was a photograph he didn't take;
no one here took it," captions the image linked with the seventh chapter,
"Photographs: #1748" (145). Yet this photograph is in a sense the most real of
all those in the novel, or at least the most honest, as none of these purely
fictional images were ever actually taken. It prepares us for the final chapter
of the romance, which leaves behind the photograph--although not photography, or
the photographic event--altogether. In this transition the way we understand the
photograph to represent changes; we exchange what it is possible for photographs
to show for what they let us see. Carson thus provokes us to imagine photography
without or beyond the photographer.
- The frankness of the chapter "Photographs: #1748" suggests
why the photographs take over the romance's narration in the end--indeed, shows why
this text exists to end in a photograph. This end-moment, this climax of the narrative
is inextricable from the incision of the photograph, even if that incision is itself
fictional. And so this moment too, even though it is not even fictionally
photographically recorded, nonetheless must be framed imagistically; the essence of
photography has so fully overtaken the narrative that all of the text's
representations must be on photographic terms, in the tension between seeing and
showing that the photograph so monstrously encapsulates in its time of development.
And yet, rather than give in to serving visuality, the novel becomes the image the
verbal portrayal would represent; the novel lets us see something beyond what it
shows. Carson seems not to give us the photographs as visual objects, nor, I would
argue, does she really give us the verbal representation of a visual image, in part
because she is depicting the moment of representing, not the content of
representation. Yet in so doing, she gives us a new kind of photograph. As Barthes
uses the punctum to show us something beyond visual representation, to communicate a
being-moved that is neither visual nor verbal but--because it is
bodily--synaesthetically linked to both, Carson takes us to a level of photography
beyond deixis. Its innovation is not unrelated to the novel's being in verse, for
verse intimates more than prose does, insofar as prose, like a certain kind of
documentary aspect of photography, essays to give us the full picture and disavows the
impossibility of that promise, whereas verse always holds back from full
verbalization.
- What the photograph purports to show is something impossible--Geryon's
self-portrait on his flight into the volcano:
He peers down at the earth
heart of Incchantikas dumping all its photons out her ancient eye and he smiles
for the camera: "The Only Secret People Keep." (145)
Like the previous photographs, the image records the shutter's
click, but here, because the camera turns on the photographer, the subject or event
registered by that click is recorded as well. Notably, the camera must be aligned with
the volcano, "dumping all its photons out her ancient eye." The scene is that with his
camera Geryon records being seen by the volcano. Or is it?
- This photograph chapter is called #1748, unlike the previous photographic
chapters which all are subtitled by words. The photograph, however, appears to be
titled "The Only Secret People Keep," although the title only emerges in the chapter,
as the narrative reclaims the moment of the shutter click from its position as the
caption. This displacement of photograph caption into narrative underscores the
curiosity of the numbered chapter. The #1748 refers to the number of the Emily
Dickinson poem that serves as the epigraph to the "Romance" part of the
Autobiography. The "Romance"--and here I invoke not just the section of
this book but also the genre--tells of Geryon's travel adventures and thematically
links the myth of the yazcamac, the people who came back from being thrown into the
volcano, who are thus eyewitnesses to immortality, with Dickinson's poem which begins,
"The reticent volcano keeps/ His never slumbering plan--" and ends, "The only secret
people keep/ Is Immortality" (qtd. in Carson 22). The title of the photograph is the
penultimate line of the poem, which tempts us with the question, is the impossible
photograph of Geryon flying into the volcano supposed to be an image of Immortality? To
affirm so would be to turn Carson's warping of the axiomatic link between death and
photography towards a positive end that suffers the persistence of the representation
of the subject long after the subject has passed. Certainly a photograph's persistence
out of its own time and space, its long-term iterabilities, suggests that photographs
might instantiate not death but immortality. But the photograph itself bears an
inevitable degradation in its material existence--no more a recipe for immortality than
Ozymandias's monument. Barthes's refusal to republish the Winter Garden photograph is
not merely that "it exists only for me" but that "it cannot in any way
constitute the
visible object of a science" (73)--as if a science in some way precludes a capacity to
wound. But what is the empirical object here? Despite his ostensible refusal to reveal
the image, Barthes does, consistently, verbally, let us see it all through the second
part of the book: that verbal description is the photograph for us, and has
its own punctum effect. The poignancy of the Winter Garden photograph is as
invisible as
the photograph itself, yet both become objects of our knowledge in some way. As what
matters, what endures, that objectivity or that visibility seduces us to link a
photograph to immortality rather than to mortality; but on the contrary, it is the
more ephemeral element of the photograph's evocative sensations that tenders the
photograph over to immortality.[10]
- The impossibility of the image the volcano snaps of Geryon, its arrival as a
final chapter in a series that has become increasingly abstract, tantalizes us with the
question of whether immortality is secret because it is not visible. Is this last
chapter an image of immortality? Tempting as this interpretation may be, I think this is
not the most interesting question to pose, partly because it presumes a kind of
representational logic that hinges on metaphor and eschews the metonymic workings of
photography. Rather we might inquire: What kind of immortal witness are the dead
in the photographs, who reach out to touch us not as subjects but as the punctum's
temporal projection? What secret are they not keeping by their metonymical testimony?
Are secrets only silences, or are they things that are hidden from view, buried?
Insofar as the punctum comes from the other side of the camera, instantiating the
photograph as the obverse of reality, it conceals as much as it reveals. What is the
photographer blind to--what is the tain of the photograph?
- The tain, which is what, itself invisible, disappearing or folding behind the
image, makes the image work, is distinct from that detail in the image we might not
readily see. For instance, what is not quite apparent to us in this photograph from
Carson is the apparatus, caught up as we may be in the gesture of representation. The
immortal photograph Geryon takes in his flight over Incchantikas is for Ancash to
remember him by: "This is a memory of our / beauty. He peers down" (145). But the
equipment Geryon has taken is a tape recorder. On his flight, he hits "record."
- The fact that the climax of the novel hinges on the recording of
experience--encapsulated by the taking of the photographs, not by the looking at
them--suggests that ultimately this text is not about the death-drives of narrative,
moving toward resolution of a discombobulated equilibrium, but about narrative
possibilities of the life-drive and its combinatorial force; the flashes of inspiration
titling the final chapter of the "Romance" are not just metaphorical. The struggle is
also Geryon's struggle over whether and how to be taken. Who will take Geryon's picture?
Who will take Geryon? These two questions are imbricated in the novel, so as to
transform the death-drive of photography into love. For Geryon to be taken, to be loved,
he must love himself, become real, throw himself into experience--Carson reformulates
such stock self-help-book themes to show how the real, the actual, comes after the
photograph, not before it. The novel pursues Geoffrey Batchen's question, "when is a
photograph made?" through the parallel Bildungsroman paradigm to turn it,
palinodically, towards "when is experience unmade?" The very fragmentation and temporal
disruption of the photograph, its presumptive immediacy disavowing the deferral of the
image's coming into being, its inherent Nachträglichkeit, generates our
experience even as it seems to document it. The tape recorder, which Geryon flicks on as
he flies over the volcano, has become his apotropaïc defense; he won't give up his
monstrosity, his imbrication with the mechanical registering of experience, so easily.
Precisely because of its interest in the paradoxical, even monstrous, combinations of
sound and the
visible, verbal and visual, cameras and tape recorders, the Autobiography
remains a narrative about photography's ability to produce experience moebiously,
recombining life and story and their relation with a twist, rather than fixing, as Metz
posits photography does, a slice of time in a sort of petit mort. The fragments
of time or reality that Metz and others perceive as photography's essence are also what
makes possible a series of recombinations that overcome such a fixity. Photographs offer
not motion but motility.
III. What a Difference a Tain Makes
- The claim that the novel's depiction of the photographs refuses ekphrasis
might seem surprising, particularly given the novel's rewriting of ancient Greek
mythology, where ekphrasis was invented. I make this claim not only to suggest that the
novel is doing more than describing photographs, even imagined ones, but to emphasize
the change in relations of representation that the book's theory of photography
introduces, how it contests the presumably descriptive mode of photography itself. Just
as Stesichoros changes the mode of representation through his more creative and
open-ended use of adjectives, so too does Carson challenge our conventional
understanding of the photographic relation through her non-ekphrastic photographs.
- The story of how Geryon resolves his unrequited romance with Herakles and
becomes
an eyewitness to immortality is enmeshed in a parallel, second-order story of how these
fragments, these photographs, come to be and how they relate to Geryon's life in
complex, often anachronistic ways. The conventional, subject-focused tale of Geryon's
transformation into an active agent in his own representation thus renders him instead
a secondary character in the objects' narrative. Such splitting recapitulates
photography's own twofold functioning: the human agency of the photographer and the
mechanical action of the camera or tape recorder.[11] The novel's negotiation between human agent and instrumental
object mirrors the narrative of photography itself as a representational process. The
tain of the photograph might come to be understood as the third term in this
deconstruction that interrupts mimetic or indexical relation of subject and object.
- Monique Tschofen ponders the question that Carson's first chapter poses in
subtitle: "What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?" and replies that through his use of
adjectives "one 'difference' Stesichoros makes is thus to find a way of using
language
that invites us to perceive with all of our bodily senses--to make us feel" (39). "He
lets us see that words say but that they also show, that they make us think, but they
also make us feel" (40), Tschofen argues. Her insights tie in with the notion of
punctum as a specific kind of synaesthesia at work in these verbal photographs, as
Carson plays off the felt and the thought, the sensible and the intelligible in her
photo chapters. Carson's sensible approach commingles sound and sight just as language
itself does, and helps us account for the monstrous hybrid of Geryon's recurring
synaesthetic experiences (it's not just during his tape-recorded photographic flight at
the end; much earlier, for instance, he frets over the noises colors make, roses
"roaring across the garden at him," the "silver light of stars crashing against/ the
window screen," grass clicking [84]).
- If in the narrative of the taking of the picture what strikes us is the click of
the shutter, a click we can hear no more than we can see the scene before us, that
click is also the moment when in the making of a photograph a narrative is sutured.
Barthes relies on narrative to explain why or how the punctum wounds or moves him;
narrative comes to mediate the synaesthetic experience of seeing and feeling. That same
moving is at work in Carson's oscillation between the events of making and looking,
between the sensory appeal of language and what it renders intelligible. Carson's
language is unquestionably sensual, not the least because its poetic form foregrounds
the sensory, while the artful concreteness of the diction gives texture and vivid
dimension to the language. Yet that sensory appeal produces a punctum. How are we
struck, as Geryon is struck, by Herakles's likeness emerging in the photographic bath?
It is, of course, not a question of we but of I: what I am struck by as I read these
photographs is the deadpan tone of "pants leg."
- Tschofen points out, furthermore, that Carson views Stesichoros's invention
of the palinode, the counter-song, as his contribution to narrative, as a second
difference he makes. Let us similarly give weight to the fact that Barthes
launches his discussion of the Winter Garden photograph as a palinode. He ends
Part One with the suggestion that his examination of public photographs
thus far has honed his understanding of how his desire works, but has not enabled him to
discover the nature of photography: "I would have to make my recantation, my
palinode" (60). Does the palinode form explain the absence of the mother's
photograph, perhaps better than Barthes's parenthetical determination that we
could not see how he sees this photograph? It certainly helps explain why we
are blind to that photograph. The absent referent provides the palinode:
Stesichoros's ancient fragmented text, the Winter Garden photograph, Geryon's
autobiography. The palinode serves as the backing, the tain, which brings the
image on the surface, the ode, into sharper focus.
- While Tschofen astutely turns the question of the difference Stesichoros
makes to "what difference does Anne Carson's writing make?" (40), her answer
invites more photographic development. Drawing on Carson's claim about
her own work that "words bounce," Tschofen suggests that "words bounce when they
connect with other words and with the people who use them" (41). Through this
"bounce," Tschofen suggests, "Carson shows us ways to break free from the
constraints of the past" while she simultaneously "asks us to connect with it"
(41). If we take this "bounce" of words to be akin to the "bounce" of a light beam
off the tain of the mirror, the return path of the palinode, the parallel opens up
to emphasize the transformations in understanding that such a "bounce" entails.
Moreover, Tschofen's insistence on what difference Carson's writing makes as a
dual temporality that both frees us from the past and connects us to it is
strikingly isomorphic with the photograph's temporality, its simultaneous
fragmentation from the originary temporal flow and its indexically seducing us
back to that past, even when we never experienced it directly.
- Tschofen's reading of the significance of the palinode picks up implicitly
on this idea of bounce, and she does so through Geryon's own figuration as a
photographer, suggesting that he is "a creature of reversals destined to go back
to the beginning and revise his own ending" (44). Stesichoros's palinode took back
the story he made that ticked off Helen and made her blind him; the palinode thus
narrates from what cannot be seen. The construction of the ode and the palinode
sets up a relation between stories that opens up the ending, which typically
resolves into stasis or equilibrium, into a circuit of meaning strung in the
tension between seen and unseen, as well as the dialectic of shown and seen. A
counter-song bounces or reverberates with the song it counters, and in that
reverberation reveals new aspects, undoing some of the initial meanings,
underplaying or redeploying others, but opening up space for the palimpsestic
blurring of the original in relation to the new song. It is not unlike the way memory
works by photographs; the pictures come to palinodically erase the event we
actually experienced. We complete the ode and turn to the palinode, which counters
the story told in the ode. Perhaps this helps explain why, after the photographic
chapters, the book turns to an interview with Stesichoros, since an interview
offers a forum in which to bounce ideas around.
- The interview as a form is anti-narrative, dialogical, and in this instance
paradoxical in its relation to what has come before. Like a photograph, an interview
usually comes after some event, some achievement, as a kind of post-hoc representation that also takes on its own
autonomy, its own iterations. Rather than give any clear insight into what happened in
the Romance, however, Stesichoros tells of his seeing. Yet his seeing is really Gertrude
Stein's
seeing: an atelier in 1907 with paintings covering the walls right up to the ceiling
(147), where "naturally I saw what I saw" and "I saw everything everyone
saw"
(148), phrases that echo Stein's Everybody's Autobiography, where she notes
that "my eyes have always told me more than my ears. Anything you hear gets to be a
noise but a thing you see, well of course it has some sound but not the sound of noise"
(89). Stein describes her previous autobiography (of Alice B. Toklas) as "a description
and a creation of something that having happened was in a way happening again but as it
had been which is history which is newspaper which is illustration but is not a simple
narrative of what is happening not as if it had happened not as if it is happening but
as if it is existing simply that thing" (312).
- In this passage, Stein transforms description--what photographs are
conventionally understood to be doing in their mechanical seeing--into creation. The
concatenation of disparate things that that "happening" is to be--newspaper,
illustration, history--recalls Stesichoros's meat scraps and song lyrics and lecture
notes in the box with his poem fragments. And like meat scraps and lecture notes and
song lyrics, the illustration, newspaper, and history are all fragments that refer to
or conjure both something else, something meaningful, and the items in themselves.
Similarly, Carson's description of Geryon creates his process of creating, produces a
text "as if it is existing simply that thing."
- In that interview, Stesichoros not only sees as if he were Gertrude Stein but
also speaks like her: "What is the difference between a volcano and a guinea pig is not
a description why is it like it is a description" (148). This claim bookends the theory
of photography from the first section. If asking to what object the title
"Autobiography of Red" refers complicates referentiality in the text,
either by multiplying or differently connecting the title and the referent(s), it does
so in order to begin to articulate this theory of photography as a problem of
likeness, not a solution that solidifies a representation to its real object.
If the theory of photography finds the photograph to be inherently fragmentary, then
that too helps us to see better why photography would be a problem of likeness. As a
problem of likeness, photography is not based in likeness but in difference. And if we
lose the idea that photography comes from likeness, can we shake free of the idea that
photography's end is inextricably linked with death, rather than with the recombination
of the likenesses?
- It is therefore no accident that this version of Geryon's story is a romance,
not a tragedy. It is about the possibilities and potentialities for recombination
rather than about the force of destiny played out within the tragic unities of time,
space, action. As a romance it is a story of the tangled complications and
combinations of love, and is also a romance in its engagement with the fantastic or
supernatural--such as red-winged monsters flying over volcanoes to take pictures. Its
notion of photography itself is also romantic, whether photography is theorized as a
supernatural process for manipulating time, or a way to access a ghostly presence of
real objects. The most important thing Carson's text does is redefine photography not
in relation to death but in relation to love, and the theory of photography embedded in
Stesichoros's Steinian sentence is crucial to that redefinition. "What is the
difference between a volcano and a guinea pig is not a description why is it like it is
a description." (148).
- Photography is typically construed to be about likeness, to produce a likeness;
our habitual reliance on its capacity to document is one example of this
presumption.[12] As Sontag notes, "the photographic
purchase on the world, with its limitless production of notes on reality, makes
everything homologous" (111). Even though we know darn well its capacity for
distortion, the photograph's power to describe lets it be taken for a mirror. As we do
with the photograph, we habitually think that the mirror is a reflection of the world,
of reality. We use the metaphor of the mirror to indicate some unmediated
representational process. In our everyday presuppositions about photography's capacity
to represent, as when we see photographs on someone's desk or in the newspaper, we
presume that the image in the photograph is pretty much like what it depicts. But if
that were the case, we would not have that disorienting reaction to our own photograph
(do I look like that?) or eagerly play back digital images we've just taken to see how
they look. This disorientation or impatience speaks to a fundamental truth about
likeness of /in a photograph: it is not a similarity, but a radical difference that
must be bridged by the description that accounts for "why is it like it."
- On this view, photography is a metonymic practice that fundamentally questions
why is it like it. Barthes concurs, at least as far as metonymy goes; he begins
Camera Lucida by considering that a photograph is a transmission of light
waves that touch their subject and bounce back to be registered on the photographic
film before they touch our eyes (3). Sontag, on the other hand, uses an implicitly
metonymic view of photography to challenge our sense of how it produces likeness: "A
photograph is not only like its subject . . . it is an extension of that subject; a
potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it" (155). The photograph is
radically contingent on its original context while nonetheless asserting some
relational, even referential claim to have an originary or anterior object. Yet the
indexicality of the photograph--on which both Barthes and C.S. Peirce rely--misleads us
into thinking that photographs have a relation to the object. Photographs describe only
insofar as they say why two completely disparate things--guinea pigs and volcanoes, for
instance, or a photograph and its object--are like. If that likeness is based on
contiguity or, rather, on a set of contiguous relations from object to camera to
photograph, it nonetheless still poses a question. Indeed, indices, as Doane notes,
"have no resemblance to their objects, which, nevertheless, cause them" (133). The
question for photography, and for the Autobiography of Red, is how
likeness could be founded on the contiguity rather than on the relational or
referential claim.
- Contiguity, the underpinning of the figure of metonymy, is about spatial
relations; the photograph's indexicality attests to a particular spatial
configuration, viz., the presence of the photographed object in relation to the
camera and the photographing subject or agent. By contrast, metaphoricity turns
on a kind of likeness, a striking similarity in a field of difference that does
not require the same spatial distinction. So the problem of likeness would seem
to hinge on metaphorics. Certainly the sense that metaphor transports meaning
across difference seems to encapsulate what a photograph does, temporally
speaking: it transports meaning, an image, across a differential field of time
and space. Yet when we try to say "why is it like it," why the photograph is
like its represented object, we look to the insistence on the photograph's
indexicality to guarantee its connection to that displaced time and space. As
Peter Geimer observes, the indexicality of photography is repeatedly figured
metaphorically, through the trace, as if the photograph operates like the
photogram, which records the physical contact of the object itself on the
light-sensitive medium, rather than recording a pattern of lightwaves. Geimer
avers that "in the case of photography we must be careful to speak of continuity
and touching in a rather narrow sense of the words. Or does the appearance of a
ray of light qualify as direct physical contact . . . ? Does light 'touch' the
object upon which it shines? Is a lit surface an 'imprint' of something?" (16).
Yet while Geimer puts pressure on the tactile impression of the index (the
footprint, the weathervane, the death mask), he does not give up entirely on
contiguity, for contiguity makes possible the chance event, the contingencies
captured by the photograph in its making. Poised between the mechanical and the
human agent, and uncertain of how long it will take to make a photograph--a
second for a click or decades for the image to be selected for printing or for
the image to be seen--"photographers are only partly aware of what they are
doing" (19).
- Geimer's questions open up the space (if you will) to think through the
contiguity of photography by acknowledging and embracing the synaesthesia
between the visual and the tactile that Carson's photographs anticipate and
articulate so clearly. The indexical relation of the photographic object
suggests to the observer that vision is material contact, rendering the seen as
something fundamentally touching. This understanding of the contiguity of
photographs frees us from "the old idea that some aspect of the depicted scene
has gone into its photographic double" (Geimer 23), without relinquishing the
idea that photographs have the power to attest which makes them so compelling.
The indexical relation of the beholder to the object photographed suggests that
we search for likeness along metonymic lines, to discern what touches. Likeness
in photography thus hinges on metonymy rather on simile. Barthes's sense of his
visual connection to Napoleon, mediated through the photograph of Bonaparte's
brother, constructs the photograph as a long-durée rearview mirror.
- A mirror works because of its tain, the thin layer of silver backing on
the glass that gives the glass its special reflectivity, that makes it a mirror
and not a window. The tain of the mirror blocks our view but at the same time
makes it possible to see differently. It alters--arguably creates--the visual
dialectic, redirecting light waves from the object mirrored to the subject
beholding; often, those are the "same" entity (although as Lacan suggests, they
are not). The tain not only returns the gaze blindly but enables us to see
behind ourselves. A mirror, through the tain, thus provides us with a
metonymical relation to ourselves or mediates our metonymical relation to
distant objects. I'm interested in this figure of the tain for what its analogy
to photography reveals about the visual, given that photography has such a
strong convention of direct representation, of being a mirror to the world. The
mirror functions reassuringly as deixis. What, then, is the tain of the
photograph?
- Although--or rather, because--silver is used in the printing of black and
white photographs, where it forms the patterning on the page like the black of
print letters or the colors whose lightwaves are reflected in the mirror, it is
not the tain of the photograph. Silver composes the materiality of the
photographic image rather than serving to redirect or re-destine the mirror
image. In the gelatin photograph, silver operates like a metaphor, organizing
samenesses (of tone or pattern or line) in a field of difference in order to
convey meaning. In the mirror, silver functions metonymically, bending the
spatial relations of light into a fold, a new set of contiguities. This
elucidates the function of the tain: it works metonymically to fold space into
new relations. It is the touch that redestines the image.
- Carson's thematics suggest that the tain of the photograph is not silver
but red: red is the color of the negative strip, and the color of the darkroom
light, in which the image emerges in its chemical bath, to be fixed onto the
paper. Red is what we do not see in the process of the image's development but
what lets us see the image's development and production. That same red light is
the color of a volcano's lava flow, the earthly liquid glow emanating from below
the solid black fragments of rock that break apart in the pulsion of the
volcano's eruption (another illumination of material production). When Geryon
flies over the volcano and witnesses the red glow, which redirects his life
trajectory and maybe even makes him immortal, the push from below of the
volcanic eruption is akin to, isomorphic with, the eruption of the image onto
the photographic page. The chapter in which Geryon watches Herakles's face emerge
in the photographic bath under the red light also recounts the moment when that
photograph was taken: it is no coincidence that Herakles had looked then at
Geryon and said "Volcano time?" (144). The unmarked ellipsis in the text between
Herakles's comment and the photograph's emergence nonetheless erupts to
redirect the timing of the story (the shift from moment of shutter click to time
of processing) and the meaning of Herakles's question (is it a reference to
Ancash's having exploded at Geryon? To Ancash's telling Geryon to use those
wings and fly over the volcano? To the repetition of their previous plans to
journey to a volcano? Is the time of volcano time a projection of the future or
of the past or a queer time that is neither?). In the same way, photographs
have their own volcano time, have erupted into our reality, emerging from the
red bath into the light of day and disrupting the surface of that daily
experience. As Sontag posits: "Instead of just recording reality, photographs
have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very
idea of reality, and of realism" (87). Red keeps the film blind to the
manufacturing process, but also figures as what we do not see as we make images
our reality. The read photograph redirects our gaze at reality and realism.
- Sontag's assertion does several things: it invites us to rethink Metz's
claim about photography's power to fragment reality, a view that remains subtended
by a theory of likeness (that the only way photographs fragment reality is
if they bear some likeness to it); it suggests how photographs are aligned in
relation to narrative (i.e., with rather than against) through their normative
power to subordinate our seeing to what is shown; and it advises why we might
want to understand photography through Carson's purely verbal text. For it is
the power over seeing that Sontag discerns in photography's authority over
realism that elucidates the difference of Carson's argument about the
difference Stesichoros makes. In the forcefulness of their representational
relation, photographs impart an extreme form of likeness. The chain of
making--Geryon's making photographs as his autobiography, the narrative's shift to
the level of Geryon's photograph making, and Carson's remaking of Geryon's
story--not only challenges the idea that photography records reality, but
opens up
gaps within which the question "why is it like it" resonates. We pose this
question when we see beyond or other than what we are shown--that is, when the
punctum marks the opening for the duration of the photograph to assert itself
whether through narrative or through synaesthetic condensation of a feeling into
what we see. Carson's verse photographs do both. What wounds Barthes, if not
Barthesian readers, is the temporal distance mapped by the image, a distance
always resonant as loss (Camera Lucida is a work of mourning). What
wounds us as Carson's photographic witnesses is the richness of what is left
intimated but unsaid, the circumstances of the making of the image for what they
suggest about the unshown image. Carson takes the antitheatricality Fried finds
in Barthes's photography theory to a new level of anti-mirroring, rendering the
tain of the photograph more dynamic than quicksilver. Carson's photographs
propose that the tain of the photograph is the palinode that enables us to ask
"Why is it like it?"
- The mirroring that photographs purportedly do describes yet also atomizes
reality to such an extent that they invite a fascinated speculation or deduction
from the evidence before one. Sontag is concerned that the pervasiveness of
photography belies its lack of access to the world, to knowing the world, to
understanding. "Strictly speaking," Sontag tells us, "one never understands
anything from a photograph" (23). This claim works simultaneously to refute
the access to reality that photography's documenting function promises, as well
as to account for a necessary fascination with a photograph, that even if a
photograph instantaneously shows us its subject, it takes time really to see
what is in a photograph. What one understands of a photograph comes from the gap
in the image's relation to the world. One may never understand anything a
photograph shows, but one can understand something from what one sees in a
photograph. That seeing is meaningful because of the temporal gaps and layers
introduced by the photograph. If we reconsider the claims by Metz and others
that as photographs fragment time, isolating moments one from another, they
conceal how that moment, event, or object functions, we can revisit how we might
understand something from a photograph, at least from some photographs. The
recombinatorial power of the fragment is, importantly, a generative feature, and
emerges from the question of "why is it like it?" as the force of (photographic)
description.
- Just before she concludes her essay in which she makes the claim with
which I begin, Sontag observes that, "in contrast to the amorous relation, which
is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions.
And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that
which narrates can make us understand" (23). That Autobiography of
Red is indeed a romance, a story about an amorous relation, explains why
it so forcefully engages the problem of how photography looks, and why it must
torque appearance figured as the photograph in words. Sontag sets the
photograph as instantaneous appearance in opposition to narrative as a temporal
understanding. But because as a romance Autobiography of Red is
also a quest to understand that relationship, and Geryon seeks that
understanding through photography and through a narrative that becomes
photography, Sontag's opposition ought to be reconsidered. The fragmentation of
Carson's narrative photographs paradoxically initiates a theory of photography in
an ancient poet, but does so in order to revisit how we have understood
temporality to work in the photograph: time's linearity and the disruption of
that linearity by the photograph structure the metonymic relation of the image
to its object. The verbal photographs demonstrate that the very contingency of
photography, its simultaneous excision and interpellation of fragments of space
in time, necessitates narrative--indeed, cannot shake it off. A photograph
however lost from its original object inserts itself into a new narrative
relation, underpinned by time's metonymy and propelled by the question of
likeness.
- Which brings us back to the problem of the tain. The tain of the mirror
helps transform light from wave to image, intervenes with contiguity to create
likeness, bringing out the information or data that lightwaves carry. The tain of
the photograph is that which intervenes to change the direction of the light's
trajectory--the narrative's trajectory. The tain of the photograph, then, shows that
the photograph is not an end, only a redirection: from image to narrative,
from material to immaterial, conveying a play on the ambiguity of "like"--not just
a question of likeness but of liking. The tain of the photograph, like the
palinode, folds the narrative away from an ending, away from its death-drive
towards fixity and stasis. The redirection participates in a transformation, and
narrative lodges within transformation. If this is the autobiography of Red, it is
because it is the story of the tain of the photograph, the obverse workings of
photography as a practice of love. This is why no "real" photographs appear
in the text. The tain of the photograph is what makes these verbal constructions
photographs. It has less to do with the mythic indexicality of the subject's
lightwaves registering on emulsion, and more to do with posing the photographic
question of why is it like it, which is itself produced by the photograph's
layered, volcanic temporality. Photographs cannot account for their production,
cannot represent the red light of their tain. If "red" is the tain of the
photograph, it is not only the special light that enables us to see the image as
it emerges, or the film itself as it is manufactured, but the Doppler-shift of
time moving away from us. We are the ones anchored in the present, while the
moment captured in the snapshot is itself in motion, working along the complex
temporality of the duration of the image, as the afterlife of a moment. The "red"
of the figure of the photograph's tain is the touch of distance itself. The
self-written story of this tain, then, provides the account of how intractably
narrative folds into the monstrous matter of making.
- The tain or palinode of the photograph redirects our look at the "real
world" and turns us instead to the sensation of the narrative image. If, today,
everything exists to end in a photograph, that end bends the trajectory of
indexicality beyond an affirmation of thereness. What "Autobiography of Red"
"refers" to, then, is the transformative power of this reflection. It is and is
not the life story of Geryon, red-winged monster photographer; it is and is not
the photographic montage Geryon makes about his life; it is and is not the process
of narrating that tells the story of photography's transformation of the real into
something that makes us ask, why is it like it?
English Department
Michigan State University
emc@msu.edu
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Notes
1. There is no shortage of narrated
photographs in postmodern literature. From Bob Perelman's poem "China," which
purports to caption photographs of Chinese scenes, to the climax of John Edgar Wideman's
Two Cities the
absent photograph may be the quintessential figure of postmodern representation,
providing the occasion for the collapse of narrative into description.
2. There are two senses of "take" in the
last caption; not just the idiomatic expression of clicking the shutter to record the
photograph, but also the possibility of appropriating an image, abducting it from its
time or, rather, since the gesture is cast in the negative, a refusal to bring it
along and thus leaving it behind.
3. Chapter VIII, "Click," narrates a youthful
Geryon determinedly focused on taking a picture of his mother while she's trying to
find out "who is this new kid you're spending all your time with?" (40). It's
the beginning of Geryon's relationship with Herakles, so while the chapter hinges on
the taking of the picture, the picture-taking is subordinated to the story of
Geryon's silence about the relationship and his feelings. (In fact, Geryon "had
recently relinquished speech" [40].) It's a silence that nonetheless speaks to
readers. Such earlier references to photographic action remain distinctly different
from the ending photographic chapters.
4. Sontag claims that "photographs do not
explain: they acknowledge" (111), yet at the same time she underscores that they conceal as they
reveal. Sontag aims to undermine the commonly held notion that
photography is "an instrument for knowing things" (93). In her view, the "knowledge
gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether
cynical or humanist" (24); with Barthes, this sentiment is transformed into the
powerful notion of the punctum. Sontag's opposition of understanding and photography
aligns narration and time against the image (23).
5. Arguably, this is what happens in
Antonioni's Blow-Up, where the photographer comes to realize over
the course of the weekend what the picture shows, in the same time frame that the
murder mystery it seems to represent takes place. The development of the murder's mystery
parallels the time of the development of the film into image.
6. Walter Benjamin notes that the first
photographs "present the earliest image of the encounter of machine and man" (678).
7. See Peter Brooks's reading of Freud's
Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Reading for the Plot for
an exposition of this death drive in relation to narrative.
8. Geoffrey Batchen explores this dynamic at
length in "Taking and Making," which opens with the question, "When is the photograph
made?" and examines the selection of different prints by photographers depending on
the aesthetic trends of the moment, for example Steiglitz's holding off for
twenty-seven years before printing an image he took around 1889, and then not
exhibiting it until 1921. Batchen concludes that photographs "exist only as a state
of continual fabrication, constantly being made and remade within twists and turns of
their own unruly passage through space and time" (106).
9. Of course, Barthes's Winter Garden
photograph is so memorable precisely because it does wound us. Moreover, our
perception of it changes as we read and re-read Camera Lucida in
precisely the way that Fried's reading of the punctum as development invites.
But this absent photograph only wounds us because it is a verbal photograph;
because of the significance of that photograph to Barthes's palinode, that is
the only way in which its punctum can be revealed.
10. Photography theory's obsession with
death is thus really a fixation on the persistence of the afterlife of the image,
what Doane describes as "the inescapable necessity of matter, despite its inevitable
corrosion, decay, and degeneration" (146). The immortality of photographs is
therefore not lodged in the materiality of the image on the paper, but in the punctum
and its power to affect us. Along similar lines, Doane's reading of Gombrich and
Krauss on the question of what a medium is leads her to posit that "the experience of
a medium is necessarily determined by a dialectical relation between materiality and
immateriality" (131).
11. Bazin notes that with photography,
"for
the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes
only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent" (13). He thus emphasizes the
objective aspect of photography and downplays the agency of the photographer. As
Sontag has observed, the question of what the photographer really adds is certainly
still significant, but by elucidating the paradoxes of the figure of the professional
photographer she underscores the importance of human agency in photography. See her
"Photographic Evangels" chapter.
12. Siegfried Kracauer, for instance,
foregrounds this aspect by beginning his essay on photography with a discussion of
the likenesses of a film diva and of a grandmother (47-48). While he contends that as time
passes, the significance of likeness fades as a photograph archives the
elements it documents, he concludes that this residual organization of
elements in old photographs is in fact not an organization yet at all, but rather
that "the photograph gathers fragments around a nothing" (56) underscores my larger
concern in this essay with fragmentation and photography.
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