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Photographs on the Walls of the House of Fiction

Timothy Dow AdamsEnglish, West Virginia

Abstract This essay considers the history o photography in ction, concentrat-ing on issues o genre. Starting with a survey o nineteenth-century novels whichincluded physical photographs, the essay moves to twentieth-century novels, dis-cussing ways in which the generic rules o written narratives inuence the relation-ship between word and image and the ctiveness o photographs within novels.

Unlike earlier writers, who used photographs or illustration o place, postmodernnovelists requently use photographs as documentation, both in support o and inopposition to the written narrative. The last section o the essay uses W. G. Sebald’she Emirants , an especially complicated novel which combines ction and nonc-tion, biography and autobiography, as a case study.

“Photography is a record o what we see, or a revelation o what we cannot see, aglimpse o what was previously invisible.”W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want ?

“Memory heals the scars o time. Photography documents the wounds.”Michael gnatie, he Russian Album

The ontological status o photographs has always been ambiguous, theirreerential power conusing, and their identity vexed. When they appearwithin works o literature, the situation becomes even more complex

because the way we read photographic images has always been inuencedby generic rules that govern written narratives. When photographs are

Poetics oday 29:1 (Spring 2008) DOI 10.1215/03335372-2007-022© 2008 by Porter nstitute or Poetics and Semiotics



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physically present within novels, questions about their status grow stillmore complicated because images reproduced in a work o ction areusually read dierently rom those in nonction. n this essay want to dis-

cuss photography within novels by concentrating on issues o genre, con-sidering such questions as these: Why did authors begin to include photo-graphic images within ction soon ater the discovery o photography in1839? How do the generic rules o written narratives inuence the way weregard the relationship between word and image? What does it mean tocall a photograph ctional? How did authors understand the purpose o photographs within nineteenth-century novels, and how do writers in therst decade o the twenty-rst century use images? Following a brie survey

o photography within literature, in which will discuss these questions, will turn to an especially compelling case study, W. G. Sebald’s novelhe Emirants , rst published in English in 1996. have chosen he Emi-

rants because Sebald’s novel is the strongest example know o to illus-trate Suzanne Seed’s (1991: 403) observation that “photographs have anontological unction as well as the obviously anthropological, descriptiveone they are oten narrowed to by iconoclasts. Photographs are an exten-sion not just o our sight, but o our thought. Like human thought itsel,they use displacement, metaphor, and analogy; they step back to give usperspective and orientation. They allow us to evolve.”

While ickens, Scott, Thackeray, and Hardy were not in competitionor accuracy with the line drawings that appeared in their novels, theadvent o photography changed the general relationship between ctionand illustration. Many early descriptions o the photographic processemphasized the action o the sun in reproducing nature as i unmediatedby humans. This can be seen in some o the names chosen or the pro-cess by its inventors: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce preerred the term “helio-

graph,” while Henry Fox Talbot reerred to “photogenic drawing,” whichwas “impressed by nature’s hand” (Marien 1991: 20). As a result o thisemphasis on nature’s light writing, early photographs within novels werealmost always illustrations o picturesque places or romantic atmosphererather than o characters. There are no photographs o Pierre or Ahabin the works o Melville, and although the autobiographical Hawthorneoten slips himsel into his own ction in the orm o ctional preaces thatpose as actual ones, no photographs o Hester Prynne or Miles Coverdale

appear within his novels.1. For a history o the discovery o photography, see Newhall 1982, Greenough et al. 1989,and Marien 1991.2. For a detailed discussion o the relationship between photography and ction in the nine-teenth century, see Rabb 1995 and Armstrong 1999.



Adams • Photographs on the Walls of the House of Fiction

Many nineteenth-century authors imagined that photographic illustra-tions might compete with their written depictions o ctional characters,though not with their rendering o realistic scenes in nature. Although such

writers o the period as John Ruskin, Samuel Butler, Arthur Conan oyle,Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, and Lewis Carroll, to name only a ew, wereamateur photographers, they chose not to include photographs withintheir ction. As Timothy Sweet (1996: 34) notes, “The era o the hal-tone,beginning around 1885 or magazines and about a decade later or books,saw the emergence o ‘categories o appropriateness’ or relations betweenimages and texts: ctional literature came to be illustrated with drawings,and actual literature such as news and travel accounts, with photographs.”

The most likely reason or this avid interest in the photographic processcoupled with an absence o the actual product within novels is, as JaneRabb (1995: xl) writes, that “perhaps they elt their presence might implythat the words were insucient or their readers verbally unsophisticated.”Photographs o people directly identied with the text seldom appeared inpre-twentieth-century novels.

Typical o many nineteenth-century authors who were aced with thechoice o using drawing or photography within their novels, Henry Jameswas not usually interested in any sort o illustration. There are no imageso sabel Archer or Milly Theale in the Alvin Langdon Coburn New Yorkedition o the works o Henry James, despite the presence o Alvin Lang-don Coburn’s photogravures. James believed that illustrations should notbe asked to perorm the descriptive work o the writer, that they undercutthe ecacy o literature, and that using the visual in support o the ver-bal pandered to a popular audience. Beyond his disdain or illustrationin general, his particular dislike or photography was based on his belie that photographers lacked crat and genius, that photography was more

mechanical than artistic, and in part on the popular argument that writerso realistic ction were comparable to photographers who reproduced sur-ace details with delity but without insight.

n many cases, the presence o photographs within narrative resulted inquestions, not about the authenticity o the image but about the genre o the narrative. For example, an early instance o photography within ctionis André Breton’s Nadja, a novel which has entered the literary canon as awork o ction, although Breton claimed that Nadja was not intended as

a literary work but as a document “taken rom lie” (Wareheim 1996: 45).Françoise Meltzer (1987: 125) notes o Nadja, “The photographs includedare the author’s proo, as it were, that his narrative is truth, not story,”

3. n the relationship between Coburn and James, see Bogardus 1984.



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though she adds that their value as proo is undercut by the act that theyare oten images o handwriting, meant to be examples o sentences cre-ated by the ctional character’s own hand.

While photographic renditions o landscapes, buildings, or even crowdso people grew increasingly common, photographs o ctional characterswere once very rare in ction or the obvious reason that, being ctional,the characters—no matter how much drawn rom lie—didn’t actuallyexist; thereore, any photograph that purported to represent a ctionalcharacter must itsel necessarily be ctional. We might at rst imagine thatphotographs appearing within ction are automatically ctional or thatctional photographs could only take the orm o a prose description o an

image that is not reproduced within the text. But the history o photogra-phy contains a rich history o physical photographs which are presentedas ctional, despite the presence o actual people, because they representstaged scenes, oten o an allegorical nature: these include works by cele-brated British pictorialists, Henry Peach Robinson’s Fadin Away and scarRejlander’s he wo Ways of Life. Long beore the advent o photoshoppedor manipulated images, photographs were thought o as ctional eitherwhen they were manipulated through the photographer’s skill in printingand combining or when they were staged so that the pictures they showedwere not what they seemed to be. From Hippolyte Bayard’s pretense thathis Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, complete with prose on the reverse side,depicted his own suicide to such celebrated examples as F. Holland ayportraying himsel as a tortured and crucied Jesus Christ, photographshave always had the capacity to present ctional scenes. The idea o call-ing a photograph ctional in this sense echoes a long-established tradi-tion in painting. For example, in he Elements of Life, a study o parallelsbetween biography and painted portraiture, Richard Wendor (1990: 16–

17) exemplies ctional painting rom Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Siddons as the raic Muse: a painting not o the celebrated stage actress as hersel or in a particular role but as a personication o a tragic muse. The sameeect, o course, is oten created in ordinary snapshot situations, whereactual ceremonies are re-created or the purpose o recording them beorethe camera and everyone is required to smile, no matter what their actualmood beore the camera appeared. This reminds us that, in a sense, allposed photographs are ctional, as Harry Berger (1994) suggests with his

phrase “Fictions o the Pose.”As photography moved, soon ater its discovery in 1839, rom daguerreo-types to haltones through the invention o the dry-plate process around

4. For a thorough discussion o Bayard’s sel-portrait as a suicide, see Sapir 1994.




1885, as exemplied by the pictorialists (who emphasized painterly pho-tography), and on to the rst years o the twentieth century, dominatedby photo-secessionists (who preerred “unmanipulated,” straight images),

modernist novelists began to emphasize their revolt rom realism by experi-mental prose that depicted distorted images and inner rather than outerreality. These techniques did not seem to call or photographic illustrationat a time when photography was seen less as an art and more as a stunningmechanical process or providing detailed and precise reproductions o theperceived world. espite the requent intellectual interactions betweenmodernist novelists and photographers, ew literary gures o the periodturned to photography or illustration. As Jane Rabb (1995: xlii) explains,

photographers were “determined to have their medium viewed as a sepa-rate, equal art, independent o others, including literature, and resentedlosing control too oten over the nal appearance o their pictures in verbaland visual collaborations.”

By the middle o the twentieth century, photographs o literary charac-ters began to appear primarily in texts with some claim to documentaryvalue, such as travel essays or sketches. As the photo-texts o the 1930sbegan to be published, the images were at rst kept separate rom theprose, as in the James Agee/Walker Evans collaboration Let Us Now Praise

Famous Men or the Margaret Bourke-White/Erskine Caldwell text You Have

Seen heir Faces . However, an early pioneer in conating words and image,Wright Morris, used his ostensibly nonctional photographs within hisnovels in the orm o both physical reproductions and prose descriptionso actual pictures. As both a writer and a photographer, he oten displayedone o his own photographs within a work o nonction, as in he Inhabi-

tants , then in he Home Place (1948), a novel with photographs included,and nally had the same image described in prose by a ctional character

within a novel. At times he undercuts the whole distinction between wordsand images by photographing pages o prose, as in the excerpt rom Sin-clair Lewis’s Babbitt that appears in God’s Country and My People (1968).

Where earlier novelists imagined that photographs would compete withtheir descriptive abilities or add to the verisimilitude o their writing, post-modernist novelists have come to believe the opposite, using photographsas the reverse o representation in a manner suggested by Judy Fiskin(1991: 268): “The more accurate the representation, the more sharply elt

is the absence o the represented subject. . . . representation cannot keepits promises.” Unlike those early writers who incorporated photographsinto their novels, imagining that the presence o such realistic imagesmainly served to urther illustrate the narrative, or those writers romthe late nineteenth century who worried that photographs would render



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their prose inauthentic, contemporary postmodern novelists have recentlybegun to include photographs as another way to provide authenticity orthe purpose o having something authentic to undercut. Because what we

see when we look at a photograph within a novel and how we see are inu-enced by questions o genre, reading photographs is especially dicult ata time when many postmodernist theorists have suggested that genre is aless than useul construction. n he Ideolog of Genre: A Comparative Study

of Generic Instability, or example, Thomas . Beebee (1994: 257) describeswhat he calls the paradox o genres: they seem real and at the same timeindenable. What do readers in the twenty-rst century see when theylook at actual photographs embedded within ctional constructions which

deliberately complicate their ctiveness by including images that blur dis-tinctions between various generic worlds?Beore turning to a detailed analysis o Sebald’s use o photographs in

he Emirants , want to consider, by way o contrast, some other recentexamples. Echoing what E. L. octorow names as a “alse document,”such writers as Mark anielewski, ave Eggers, Lauren Slater, GordonSheppard, and Jonathan Saran Foer have incorporated into their textsphotographs, medical orms, drawings, and other orms o documenta-tion, resulting in a sort o literary trick in which invented, ctive materialpretends to be merely reproduced, nonctive documentary. Philip Stevick(1976: 11) describes the unction o what he calls “the mock act” as existingsomewhere between parody and put-on, undercutting the very standards“by which acts are asserted.”

Many novels in which photographs are described but never presentedhave been recently published, such as Salman Rushdie’s Midniht’s Children (1981) or Penelope Lively’s he Photoraph (2004): others, such as RichardPowers’s hree Farmers on heir Way to a Dance (1985) and Marguerite uras’s

he Lover (1998), depend in part on the resonance o the images on theircovers with the ctional characters within. ther recent writers have begunto include physical photographs o their characters within novels, includ-ing Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s he Fatiue Artist (1996), Ronit Matalon’s he

One Facin Us (1995), and Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize–winning he Stone

Diaries (1994). When Shields includes photographs o her ctive characterswithin he Stone Diaries , instead o adding verisimilitude to the charac-ters, the photographs automatically become ctional because they do not

always match her prose descriptions. A comparison o the author’s like-ness on the back cover with photographs labeled with ctional characters’names makes clear what extra textual inormation has conrmed: someo the pictures are o her own children (Parini 1994). Where the postmod-ernists used ctive acts to undercut the conventions o traditional novels,




more recent writers seem intent on producing what Roland Barthes (1974:44) calls a “multivalent text,” that is, a text intended “to carry out its basicduplicity only i it subverts the opposition between true and alse . . . i it

aunts all respect or origin, paternity, propriety, i it destroys the voicewhich could give the text its organic unity.” Barthes’s words apply to suchrecent novels as anielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Foer’s Extremely Loud

and Incredibly Close (2005), and Sheppard’s Ha! A Self-murder Mystery (2004),each o which eatures a combination o prose, documentary materials,and photographs.

Readers o House of Leaves are presented with multiple raming devices(orewords, introductions, dedications, exhibits, appendices, and credits)

that claim that the narrator, Johnny Truant, has edited the entire manu-script—a sort o ctional “casebook” about a lm that, Truant nally sug-gests, does not actually exist. The text, an elaborate combination o suchmock documentary genres as he Blair Witch Project and Nabokov’s Pale

Fire, includes an introduction printed in a ont that appears to be typewrit-ten and a series o documents (ootnotes, lm notes, alternate chapter titles, journal entries, poems, letters to the editor, and an index). The photo-graphs, which are grouped at the end as part o the appendices, includeimages which are said to be rephotographed pages o various earlier ver-sions o the text as well as various “Sketches and Polaroids” which seemto be part o an earlier idea or a nonexistent documentary lm abouta blue house. ther photographs are included within a category called“Collages” and in a nal section, labeled Appendix “Contrary Evi-dence.” The photographs in House of Leaves are nally just another exampleo mock documentation, images that, or all o their layers o reerence, donot depict any o the characters in the novel.

n the other hand, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a novel

narrated by a child searching or his ather, who died in the events o Sep-tember 11. This novel includes news photographs o actual people, suchas Stephen Hawking, a French astronaut, and a tennis player, along withimages o some o the characters rom the novel, which the narrator, skarSchell, has supposedly taken with his grandather’s camera and pastedinto a scrapbook. The images o the novel’s characters, however, are neveridentiable because they only depict hands or the back o a character’shead. The most celebrated photograph in the text is an image o a man

alling or jumping rom one o the twin towers o the World Trade Center,a photograph which is repeatedly reproduced in various sizes. n the lastew pages o the novel, the alling-man image becomes a sort o reversechildren’s “ip book,” which allows the reader to duplicate the narrator’sdesire to reverse the ow o events, returning to saety the alling gure,




newspaper clippings, matchbook covers, addresses and phone numbers,sketches, doodles, handwritten notes, snapshots, newspaper and magazinephotographs, tickets, cigar bands, to name only a random sampling. All o

these representations o physical objects echo James Agee’s wish or Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941: 13): “ could do it, ’d do no writing at allhere. t would be photographs; the rest would be ragments o cloth, bits o cotton, lumps o earth, records o speech, pieces o wood and iron, phialso odors, plates o ood and o excrement.”

espite these similarities to other work, the signicant dierence inSebald’s case is that his book is a novel in the orm o our ctional biog-raphies told by a semiautobiographical gure, who both resonates with

a similar narrative gure in Sebald’s subsequent books and also links theour biographical novellas, thereby making the book, rom my perspective,more o a novel than a collection o novellas. The objects in the book areall complicated representations that undercut the traditional documentaryvalue but reinorce i not an accurate memory at least an acceptable one.Poised somewhere between the point o remembering horrors preciselyand obliterating unpleasant and guilty memories entirely, he Emirants isalways o balance, deliberately conusing our expectations. Although thenovel’s our biographies are held together by the central narrator, whoselie parallels the author’s, he Emirants leaves unspoken not only detailsabout the narrator’s lie, but also direct reerence to the subject which liesbehind these tales o emigration—the Holocaust. Sebald ocuses on theminutiae o the horror he is documenting, in eect suggesting that pileso impersonal shoes in the context o a memorialized Holocaust, such asthose one sees in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,C, do not express the depth o atrocity so poignantly as does an intimateawareness o a single shoe out o any context, with the horror let unspo-

ken and or that all the more aecting. n the context o our unimaginablevast and pervasive modern atrocities, any attempt at memorialization mustitsel be unspeakably vast and pervasive. To commit such things to mem-ory devoid o experience is a disservice, but it is at least reassuring that orthe most part we seem unwilling or unable to orget.

Numerous commentators on he Emirants have tried to explain thevarious genres it encompasses. A wide range o terms has emerged, includ-ing travel writing, meditative essay, documentary, scrapbook—all genres

in which photography might more naturally be at home than in ction(see Long and Whitehead 2004: 4). Sebald himsel oten named prose ashis natural orm without making urther distinctions between ction andnonction, answering those who needed help with classiying the genre o his books by explaining that “acts are troublesome. The idea is to make it



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seem actual, though some o it might be invented” (Atlas 1999: 282). Atrst glance, the idea o including photographs with a documentary eel ina novel whose subtext is the erasure o memory might seem perverse. But

on closer examination o some o the actual images that appear within thetext, we can begin to see why Sebald’s scrapbook approach to biography isso unsettling and nally moving. The images are oten unsettling becausewhat they illustrate is almost always ambiguous; nevertheless, they are alsooten moving because they represent emotions such as trauma and name-less dread, eelings which are hard to depict in photographs. The autobio-graphical narrator, who is researching the lives o our emigrants beorewriting their biographies, spends most o his time physically retracing the

journeys o his subjects. n so doing, his memories—some o which wewitness as they are being created, some o which are actually combinationso the memories o other people’s memories—begin to interere with hisattempts to document the past, even as his own personal past simulta-neously grows more distinct.

When the narrator, as a visiting student, checks into a hotel during hisrst trip to Manchester, he is particularly pleased by the teas-maid, anelectrical device which combines the unctions o an alarm clock, a light,and a tea-maker (see gure 1). Sebald’s teas-maid o a book is an odd yethighly unctional construct, in which various genres coexist. The teas-maid, worked by decanting boiled water into a pot, which, once it grewsuciently heavy, triggered an alarm and light to announce that the teawas ready: this parallels Sebald’s genre mixture, both simultaneously per-orming more than one unction. Sebald’s genres, though they’re inter-related and designed to wake us up as we struggle to know whether weare reading ction or nonction, also provide stimulation and illuminationand yet catch us o guard by sometimes providing more weight than is at

rst obvious.Although he Emirants is a novel, the author includes cameo appear-

ances, beginning with Nabokov, whose actual photograph appears, ollow-ing a description o an apparently ctive riend who is said to resemble theauthor o Speak, Memory. Another cameo occurs when Sebald’s narrativesel actually appears within the text in a photograph so hazy and indis-tinct that its resemblance to the author photograph printed at the book’send cannot be established (see gure 2). As Sebald said in an interview,

“Although try to stay as anonymous as possible in the text, at the sametime ’m anxious to declare my position” (Green 2007). The Sebald-likenarrator’s ctive Uncle Kasimir describes the scene as existing at “the edgeo the darkness,” which is “a long way away,” though he adds, “ neverquite know rom where” (Sebald 1996: 88). Standing at odd angles to the




sea and the land, the narrator is both distinct and indistinct, and like hisown story, which is always there but seldom shown, Uncle Kasimir, who isthe ctive photographer o the image, is absent rom the picture.

Sebald blurs distinctions between his physical descriptions o charactersin prose and their photographic representations by various devices. Hethus tends to combine precision with ambiguity in the same sentence in

a manner that parallels the shrouded nature o the narrator’s image onthe beach. For example, he describes the subject o his rst biography,r. Henry Selwyn, as someone who was “tall and broad shouldered butseemed stocky, even short” (ibid.: 5). Selwyn is later said to be spending“his attention on thoughts which grew vaguer and more precise” (ibid.: 11).Paul Bereyter, the subject o the second biography, is depicted as a person“who was always in good spirits and seemed so cheerul” but who “was inact desolation itsel ” (ibid.: 42). ten the author is somewhat ambiguous

about who is narrating the various layers o the our biographies. n thenarrative about his great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth, the Sebaldian narra-tor’s Aunt Fini tells him a story that Uncle Kasimir told her, which begins:“ don’t know much about Ambros” (ibid.: 87).

Some o the photographs o the more minor characters are airly generic

Figure 1 The narrator o he Emirants is pleased by the teas-maid, an electricaldevice that combines the unctions o an alarm clock, a light, and a tea-maker.

From Sebald 1996: 154.



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and could actually represent almost any amily members. According toCarol Bere (2002: 189), however, approximately 90 percent o the photo-graphs in he Emirants are authentic in that they came rom the collec-tions o some o the people who served as living models or their ctional

counterparts in the book. For example, the Sebaldian narrator describesa amily photograph album that once belonged to his mother, an albumwhich includes photographs o some o his relatives who had emigratedto the United States (1996: 70–76). The text incorporates one such imagerom this album, and the narrator identies a ew o the aces in the pic-ture. Because none o the people in the image are described in sucientdetail to allow the reader to attempt to match words and image, we haveno way o knowing how authentic the photograph really is. n the other

hand, the narrator asserts that the painting on the wall in the photographis actually o his hometown in Germany, though that painting has nowdisappeared. Thus the author reverses the normal idea that photographsare more representational than paintings, calling into question again thereason or including photographs within a novel.

Figure 2 Sebald’s narrative sel appears in he Emirants (1996: 89) within a photo-graph so hazy and indistinct that its resemblance to the author photograph printedat the book’s end cannot be established.




An obvious dierence between a painting and a photograph involves theact that a photograph has diculty with selectivity, with leaving out any-thing that’s beore the camera. This is what Roger Scruton (1984: 588) is

getting at when he remarks that “the photograph lacks that quality o ‘inten-tional inexistence’ which is characteristic o painting.” Because photogra-phy has long been celebrated or its ability to depict things precisely, or itsautomatic prousion o detail, Sebald oten seems to be undercutting thisprecision by deliberately selecting images that are vague. t is sometimesdicult to be certain exactly what we are seeing; in image ater image, weare presented with deserted streets, ogged-in buildings, ambiguous scenes,and vague architectural details. n his book-length study o Sebald, Mark

McCulloh (2003: 7) notes that, while some “photographs and other imagesare interspersed throughout the text to conrm a detail o appearance orto ‘document’ an event,” they oten serve another unction: “to assist thereader in visualizing a dream or dream-like encounter o the real, to cap-ture again or a moment what has passed, or is passing, away.”

An especially complicated set o images depicts the character called PaulBereyter, who may actually have been one o Sebald’s primary schoolteach-ers. The narrator claims that, some years ater he was Bereyter’s student,he became ascinated with his ormer teacher. This was mainly because o the teacher’s eventual suicide, caused in large part by Bereyter’s inabilityto accept the long-term results o the Nazi persecution o the Jews. Want-ing to go beyond his personal memories o the teacher, the narrator imag-ines him outside o the classroom beore stopping himsel with the admo-nition, “t is in order to avoid this sort o wrongul trespass that havewritten down what know o Paul Bereyter” (1996: 29).

The autobiographical narrator provides us with a diagram o his class-room ollowed by a photograph o students in a classroom that matches

the diagram and includes Bereyter in the background. this photographthe author writes, “He taught a pack o children scarcely distinguishablerom those pictured here, a class that included mysel ” (ibid.: 47). Sebald’sdeliberate ambiguity prevents us rom being sure whether he means thatBereyter taught many other such groups o children in the same classroomor i he means to suggest that we can see in this photograph both theteacher and the narrator as a young boy. Claiming to have come acrossa amily photograph album o his ormer teacher, the narrator provides

several images that resemble the man in the schoolroom, including whatis suggested to be an image o him as a member o the German army’smotorized artillery in the Second World War. Again there is a clear like-ness between the ace in this army picture and the other images o theteacher, and yet the image o Paul Bereyter leaning out o the window o a



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military vehicle also seems very amiliar, something we might have seen ina silent lm eaturing Harold Lloyd or in Woody Allen’s Zeli .

Sebald presents a bare-chested picture o the teacher, which is said to

have been captioned in his own handwriting with the ollowing words:“one was, as the crow ies, about 2,000 km away—but rom where?–andday by day, hour by hour, with every beat o the pulse, one lost more andmore o one’s qualities, became less comprehensible to onesel, increas-ingly abstract” (ibid.: 56). Just as the narrator’s photo by the sea is preciselyat the edge o the darkness, so the sense that photography’s power o pre-cision can be undercut by a lack o geographical detail occurs requentlyin the novel. And so we have, in a semiautobiographical narrative, a some-

what imagined biography o an actual person rom the author’s lie, docu-mented with photographs which seem to demonstrate, on the one hand,the actual existence o the teacher and, on the other hand, the increasingabstract nature o the person depicted, a man who might be anywhere.The narrator wants to rely on the power o photography to documentwithout losing the power o the memory to create. He uses amily photo-graphs, in the case o his teacher and others, with an aim clearly explainedby Annette Kuhn (1996: 472) in an essay called “Remembrance”: “n orderto show what it is evidence o, a photograph must always point you awayrom itsel. Family photographs are supposed to show not so much that wewere once there, as how we once were: to evoke memories which mighthave little or nothing to do with what is actually in the picture. The photo-graph is a prop, a prompt, a pre-text; it sets the scene or recollection.” Anespecially good example o the way an inauthentic photograph providesa deeper sort o accuracy occurs, according to Sebald, in a group photo-graph o a large Jewish amily, where the children appear in Bavarian cos-tume. “That one image tells you more about the history o German-Jewish

aspiration than a whole monograph would do,” said Sebald in an interview( Jaggi 2001: 3).

According to the author, who was oten asked why so many photographsgure in his novels, “They act as a token o authenticity—but they can bededuced, orged or purloined. And o course that in turn throws up oneo the central problems o ction writing, which is that o legitimacy andthe arrival at the truth on a crooked route” (Green 2007). n describing theconvoluted path his ction ollows, Sebald is also describing the inherent

complications o both collective and personal memory. “Autobiographyis memory,” writes aniel Goleman (1985: 96), “its author is the sel, anespecially potent organization o schemas.” But the sense o sel behindautobiography, both ctional and nonctional, relies on a kind o narra-tive memory which is inuenced by both what is remembered and what




makes the story t together. Autobiographers are always authors, narra-tors, and protagonists o their own stories and as such the most reliable o witnesses. n the other hand, autobiographers can never see themselves

rom an outside perspective.As Jerome Bruner (1993: 46) puts it, “The task o autobiographical

composition consists, o course, in combining witness, interpretation, andstance to create an account that has both verisimilitude and negotiability”;this phrase echoes the ollowing lines rom Robert Lowell’s poem aboutphotography, “Epilogue”: “heightened rom lie, / yet paralyzed by act.”Sebald’s deeper subject—the eects o the Holocaust on the lives o Ger-man emigrants—calls or verisimilitude, especially considering the history

o Holocaust denials, but his narrator also needs negotiability because heis constructing lives out o both memory and imagination. Sebald’s moti-vation in including photographs and other documents within his ctionalconstruct stems rom a larger truth about memory. n the one hand, hisautobiographical character is aided by documents and images in remem-bering details about his our biographical gures, but on the other hand, hecomes to realize that sometimes the images themselves distort his memoryor create alse memories. John Berger (Berger and Mohr 1982: 89) arguesthat still photography diers rom memory because, while “rememberedimages are the residue o continuous experience, a photograph isolates theappearances o a disconnected instant. And in lie, meaning is not instan-taneous. Meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist withoutdevelopment. Without a story, without an unolding, there is no mean-ing.” n Here Is Where We Meet (2005), Berger’s recent “ction,” a characternamed John, provides the reader with a Sebaldian sense o memory, travel,melancholy, especially in the scenes in which his long-dead mother returnsphysically to Lisbon to carry on conversations with her son, sometimes in

the voice o her seventeen-year-old sel.n dealing with personal history, a character’s distorted or combined

memories are sometimes as important as more accurate ones. The semi-autobiographical narrator, attempting to retrace the actual steps o thepainter Max Ferber, his nal subject, becomes angry over “the lack o memory that marked Germans, and the eciency with which they hadcleaned everything up” (1996: 225). Trying to get to the stories behind hisour emigrants, he comes to realize that the photographs and documents

don’t always tell an accurate version and that there is a dierence betweennarrative and historical truth. Frequently the actual documents begin to

5. For a classic discussion o the relationship between author, narrator, and character inautobiography, see Lejeune 1989.



0 Poetics Today 29:1

ail: a glass slide shatters while he is viewing it, insects eat through someo his uncle’s manuscripts, his narrators remember some details with greatspecicity but are vague about others, and one narrator asks or shocktreatment mainly to erase painul memories.

Sometimes photographs are as valuable or what they do not show as orwhat they do. For example, a telling detail is what is not visible at the cen-

ter o an overhead photograph o Manchester—the ormer Jewish Quar-ter. Like the images, the documents are sometimes rustrating. Looking athis great-uncle Adelwarth’s travel diary, or instance, is complicated by theact that the words are in more than one language, the entries are ambigu-ously dated and physically dicult to read (see gure 3). n addition, hisuncle was to a degree a participant in the general cover-up that allowedSebald’s generation o Germans to avoid understanding the history o Jew-ish oppression.

The nal biographical subject, Max Ferber, points out to the narratorthat a particularly damning piece o evidence, a newspaper photograph o a book burning in Würzburg in 1933, is a ake, actually depicting anotherevent that has been doctored to include a plume o smoke (ibid.: 183–84). The author includes both the ake photograph and the exposure o

Figure 3

Sebald’s great-uncle Adelwarth’s travel diary. From Sebald 1996: 132.




its deception because he wants to rebalance the evidentiary relationshipbetween words and image. What actually happened is o paramount impor-tance, but what happened in the aulty memories o survivors and their

children is also important. As Siegried Kracauer argued, a photograph“is the very opposite o a literal record. . . . A language o depth replacesthat o surace” because “the power o the medium” includes the ability“to open up new, hitherto unsuspected dimensions o reality” (quoted inClarke 1997: 21).

Autobiographies and biographies have as one o their goals the pro-duction o an accurate, recognizable portrait, though at the same timethe impossibility o judging the accuracy is built into the process. espite

the natural parallel between biography and portrait, autobiography andsel-portrait, all portraits are in a sense sel-portraits. Autobiographers arealways seeking ways to illustrate the autobiographical act, which consistsin part o reconciling the gaps between the story o a person’s sel and theway that person has lived, between the sel and the lie. Because the narra-tor o he Emirants is producing both biography and autobiography, he issimilarly attracted to the autobiographical act o creation and re-creation,as illustrated by his recurrent visits to the painting studio o a ctionalcharacter called Max Ferber in the English translation and Max Auerbachin the original German. The semi-ctional painter is modeled on an actualpainter, Frank Auerbach, whose actual charcoal portrait is reproduced inthe German text but not in the English versions (McCulloh 2003: 43). Andalthough a photograph described as being an image o a young Ferber/ Auerbach is reproduced in the text, readers have no idea exactly who the young boy in the picture was in actuality. n Sebald’s semi-ctional portraito the painter—which is also a sel-portrait, given the many similarities inthe lie stories o Ferber and the author—Ferber’s portrait-making act is

described in detail. Working in paint and charcoal with an actual model,Ferber constantly applies paint and then erases it with a dust-encrustedcloth, so that, as the portrait slowly appears and disappears on his canvas,the amount o dust and paint particles on the oor o his studio begins topile up. Ater describing this process in detail, the narrator notes: “When watched Ferber working on one o his portrait studies over a number o weeks, oten thought that his prime concern was to increase the dust”(1996: 161).

As the passage o time increased the physical dust o history, Sebald’sbooks and his method o creating them attempt to preserve and producethe debris o the past at once, simultaneously revealing and concealingstories, lives, guilt, and horror. This impulse to show and yet to hide is atthe heart o both the autobiographical and the photographic processes. We



Poetics Today 29:1

nd it described in the ollowing words rom hree Farmers on heir Way to

a Dance (1985: 321–22), a novel by Richard Powers based on the photogra-pher August Sander:

The strange persuasion o photographs rests on selective accuracy wedded toselective distortion. The reproduction must be enough like the original to starta string o associations in the viewer, but enough unlike the original to leave theviewer room to esh out and urnish the rame with belie. Photography seemsparticularly suited or this precarious hybrid. . . . Because the process mixesmechanical control with the surprise o light, and because the product mixestechnical exactitude with veiling and distortion, the viewer’s response is a crossbetween essayistic rmness—“this, then, the dossier, the acts”—and the invita-

tion o ction—“What can we make o it?”The way photographs appear within he Emirants serves as a metaphor

or memory: they combine specic details with a limited time rame anda vague sense o location, they provide ragmented images that supersedeother memories, they appear enigmatically out o order, and even as theyestablish evidence, they also document coincidence and undercut the pro-cess o coming to terms with repressed memories. Paul John Eakin (1992:229) tells us that “the art o memory recalls us not to the lie we have lost

but to the lie we have yet to live,” an especially poignant notion when werecall that ew o Sebald’s narrators live a ull lie, dying early, instead, asdid Sebald himsel at the age o ty-seven.

Sebald, like many postmodern writers, ound the ambiguity and illogi-cality o genre to be his advantage. Thomas Beebee (1994: 283) writes:“Constellations are an imaginary way o representing real relationshipsbetween stars. Generic distinctions are imaginary in a similar way.” Whenthe somewhat imaginary concept o genre is applied to the constellationscreated by the photographs within the dierent sections o he Emirants ,another genre problem emerges. While their power to enhance atmo-sphere, create an enigmatic mood, or document is ultimately haunting,many o the images are themselves o ordinary genres: amateur snapshots,class pictures, amily images, postcard images, architectural images, andphotographs o diagrams, journals, and handwriting.

By proposing in this essay that one way to think about how to look atreal photographs in ctional narratives is by imagining both word andimage in terms o genre, want to argue that the instability o genre and

the diculty o overcoming the almost magical power o photographs torepresent are mutually reinorcing. While we might agree in general thatphotographs are to nonction as paintings are to ction, the examples o photographs within ction considered in this essay, and standing or manyother examples, suggest that despite their physicality, photographs may




operate along various lines. Already used by writers in dierent eras orvastly dierent purposes, they can also be used by postmodern writers orvery dierent eects.

Where Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close seems nally some-what articial and less than progressive in the long history o the novel,Sebald’s he Emirants strikes many readers as overpoweringly authentic,hardly an example o trickery, and the beginning o a new way o writing.espite the act that Sebald makes clear within the text that the docu-mentary power o photography is both invaluable and suspect, no contro-versies have arisen over his novel’s basic truth value. At a time when suchambiguous Holocaust-related texts as Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Framents or

Elie Wiesel’s Niht join James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces in a complicateddebate about the reasons why authors chose one genre over another andthe publishing world vies with television hosts to argue or or against ablack and white distinction between ction and nonction, Sebald’s workscontinue to provide an especially authentic eel, despite their open admis-sion o generic conusion.

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