Mimesis, magic, manipulation: A study of the photograph in contemporary British and Canadian novels

The photograph is of interest to the writer because it is uniquely a product both of the realm of objective, physical reality and of the realm of artifice. Its ambiguous status as the physical emanation of a past referent endows it with an uneasy authority. It appears to offer assurances of identity and clarity; at the same time, it undermines the attempt to control experience by demonstrating that to freeze time and space is to render them obsolete. Thus the photograph can be seen as a metaphor for the life-giving and death-dealing enterprise of writing fictions. Moreover, because the photograph is a reflection of the past, private or public, a comparison of the use made of photographic images in the fictions of two different cultures, one older, one newer, may reveal differences in aesthetic between those two cultures.;A look at several contemporary British novelists who use photographic imagery (Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Martin Amis, Fay Weldon, Penelope Lively, Anita Brookner, Timothy Mo, Salman Rushdie) suggests that these writers tend towards an ironical distancing of the photography, which is seen as parodic of traditional mimesis. Such novelists thus ascribe to and yet undermine Sontag's concern with narrative control. A number of contemporary Canadian writers (for instance, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Timothy Findley, Norman Levine, Diane Schoemperlen, Janette Turner Hospital, Michael Ondaatje) find within the photograph a representational magic that transcends boundaries of spatial and temporal logic. They share Barthes' belief in the intransigent value of appearances. An examination of these different writers' use of the photographic image thus provides a commentary upon their various understandings of the real, the fictive, and the relationship between the two.;A theoretical dialectic for exploring the use made of the photograph in contemporary British and Canadian fiction can be constructed by comparing the thesis of Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977) with that of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida (1980). Sontag is concerned with the camera as an instrument of power which victimizes its subjects; she sees the text as necessary to contextualize the image according to its function in time. Barthes understands the photograph's fragmentariness as potentially revelatory, and text as parasitic upon image. Where the Sontagian model emphasizes narrative contextualization and the photographer/writer as wielder of power, the Barthean model emphasizes a vertical hermeneutic of epiphanies and the spectator/reader as creator of meaning.