toward a photography of love

8/3/2019 Toward a Photography of Love

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Toward a Photography of Love: The Tain

of the Photograph in Anne Carson's

Autobiography of Red

E.L. McCallum

2007 PMC17.3

1. "Today everything exists to end in a photograph."--Susan Sontag, On

2. To speak of ending in a photograph, as Susan Sontag does, would stowards death, an association it has held since its inception and one th

photography theory. While Sontag means that our photophilia will turn

like to ask what it means to end in a photograph, and what kind of end

like to interrogate the different ways of being a photograph. Will literaphoto finish? Does this end perhaps open up the form a photograph ca

photography is thanatography? Might photography's end be a prolifera

3.


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4. Because film photography is, as Derek Attridge has pointed out, "achallenge in the digital age when the photograph "can always notbe th

paper" (86). The change from emulsion to pixels impels us to rethink f

Can we compare image pixels to those that comprise words? The chan

there is a change in the photographic relation as well: would photograpthat matter through the contiguity of the negative and the printing pape

theory of digital images. But before we reach that end, before we cons

come to in the age of the digital, I'd like to turn back and offer a palino

Examining what's behind the photographic image leverages a space to

photography might come between film and digital.

5.

6. One can read Sontag's claim as tracing out the conventional analogphotography. To be sure, some of the most widely read photography th

ending in a photograph. Sontag herself sweepingly claims that "all pho

remarking on a photograph of himself in Camera Lucida (the book he

Barthes tells us that "death is the eidos of that photograph" (15). Even

with death tie it to implicitly deathly things: Andr Bazin, for instance

embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor" in all o

that photography in particular "embalms time" (14). Eduardo Cadava's

oeuvre of Walter Benjamin leads him to attest that "photography is a mmortification" (11). Geoffrey Batchen reveals that the link might reachwhen subjects' "heads were inevitably supported by a standing metal d

seconds. Photography insisted that if one wanted to look lifelike in the

if dead" (62); even so, "photography was a visual inscription of the paof every viewer's own inevitable passing" (133).

7.

8. Bazin's and Batchen's revelation of time as key to photography's thChristian Metz's insights when comparing film and photography. Metz

against film's motion and multisensory appeal to support his assertion

Metz goes further, noting that through its linkage with death, the photoobject out of the world into another world, into another kind of time" (


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photograph, in contrast to the film's display of temporality--which, how

moment, is nonetheless replayed in "an unfolding time similar to that othe photograph from film in Metz's account. He cites Phillipe Dubois's

piece of time brutally and forever escapes its ordinary fate, and thus is

Likewise, Barthes's conception of photography is so imbued with timeclocks for seeing" (15). Photography's baleful association has become

of absence and temporality that the medium engages. Batchen, reflecti

Daguerre "like Talbot, seems to be suggesting that the primary subject

9.

10. If photography is really about time, it may be aligned with narrativ

back time, photography appeared once again to be playing with life anengagement with time and ends is like narrative's, might it also turn toform narrative has, like love or loss or immortality? The persistent alli

troubled as it settles into axiom, because a too-pat conflation of death

that photography theory can articulate.

11.

12. Little else but time comes to an end in the photograph. We might e

"another kind of time" emerges, is it not linear time but layered time--a future time, or the more immediate folding of time that digital photo

proliferation on a network, affords. The fixing of the image--which ev

happens in the middle of the photographic process, before the image c

association with death might recast that figure as the middle, rather tha

as the tain of time, bouncing the past into the future like the silver bac

to our eyes.

13.

14. The photograph, however, offers not simply to perpetuate a momenindicate the absence or displaced trace of the depicted, but produces a

the photograph itself is supplanted by or transformed into verbal descr

object/time of the photograph? It is not now doubly absented, but osci

(which may or may not exist as actual object) and the verbal descriptio


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photography is to intimate that the disjunction of the image might offe

residue whose unending potential for recombination suggests a tantaliand absence, folded space and the space enfolded, invites us to consid

examining some absent photographs, by which I mean photographs th

visual representations. These absent photographs, rather than silencingopenings around which meanings can collect and layer across linear ti

function as photographs despite the difference in medium.

15.

16. My concern, therefore, is less with the possibilities of visual narratCamera Lucida is compelling in no small part because there Barthes n

presumption that what is seen is necessarily present. Perhaps one of thunreproduced photograph of his late mother, the image Barthes calls this not the only writer who verbally produces an absent photograph, an

representation--the photograph being the absent object that is represen

-opens up a space to rethink the possibilities and parameters of photog

argues, "Barthes's practice . . . shows that the referent is not the source

referential may indeed be crucial" (87). Verbal photographs produce a

absence of the depicted object, namely the visual photograph. In seein

referent) but the absent image of his mother, we not only perceive an e

of originary loss, but are vulnerable to be wounded by the punctum ofextensively with well-thumbed texts of Sontag and Barthes--texts whiconcerns here, because their insights incessantly return from the dead

problem of narrating photographyy by reading a more recent text that

17.

18. Anne Carson's novel in verse, The Autobiography ofRed, conclude

photographs, or at least chapters that claim to be photographs. This is,with a photograph, whose trajectory is predicated on a series of final oseven parts, the longest of which, "Autobiography of Red: A Romance

narrative of the seven. The "Romance" has 48 one- or two-page chapte

making it all the more notable that the section ends with a series of chdifferent subtitles (although the very last one, "The Flashes in Which a


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contrast to this pattern). The reader encounters five shorter sections be

"Interview," after it. My initial focus is on the "Romance," a modern rof the red, winged monster Geryon, since the relation between narrativ

Carson's version, Geryon grows from childhood to manhood, becomin

monstrosity and his unrequited love for Herakles. More classically, Geand the murder of whose cattle was one of Hercules's labors. Stesichor

an early section, breaks free of the Homeric convention of relying on a

Homer mentions blood, blood is black. . . Homer's epithets are a fixed

monster's view, rather than the hero's. These ancient innovations and t

"Romance" invite us to reflect on how we might understand the interv

photography. If film photography fixes the image to the paper, what d

unfix?

19. I. A Fine Romance

20. The Autobiography ofRedposes a number of visual and narrative pPerhaps the most obvious one is that Red did not write this Autobiogra

the life story of Geryon, a monster who becomes a photographer. And

through a life, and Geryon is in fact red, it becomes clear that the refer

Romance itself or the novel as a whole, but rather elements in the text

end. In other words, the autobiography referred to is visual, not verbal

Indeed, the autobiography as an object in the narrative is referred to as

photographic essay" (60), although this mention, midway through Ger

form of its object, implicitly raising the question of whether the photophotographic essay.

21.

22. A second complication ofAutobiography ofRedis its range of com

romance's front matter--two essayistic sections on the poet Stesichorothe historical poet's long poem on the red, winged monster Geryon wh

cattle. The first section begins with second-order representation, alread

recounted: Stesichoros's poem survives only in fragments, some of whThis prolegomenon foregrounds the form of the fragment and renders

fragments of the Geryoneis itself read as if Stesichoros had composed


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pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lectur

instigates Carson's theory of photography in this text: the fragmentatiophotographs do to what they depict. That the fragments are still being

photographs function in our daily lives: buried in boxes, files, or album

of clutter shift to turn them up either purposefully or inadvertently.

23.

24. The "Romance"'s ending photographs are, first of all, not visual imdescriptions of scenarios, a snapshot of what readers conventionally pr

continuous experience of what transpires with the protagonists--Geryovolcano Incchantikas. In narrative terms, this mode seems to be summ

what appears to be a description of the photograph that is the chapter'sevident descriptions: "It is a photograph of four people sitting around "a close up photograph of Geryon's left pant leg just below the knee" (

visualizable nouns to more abstract, existential claims: "It was a photo

(142), or "It was a photograph he didn't take; no one here took it" (145

chapters not describe verbally some visual representation or work of a

or situation in which Geryon takes the photo. Because the attention tur

representation rather than to what is captured by that process, the nove

object, is described, and yet the description creates the absent photogr

recording the image is absent from the text; our attention turns to the cthe moment when the shutter clicks. Just as a photograph, according tomoment from the stream or continuum of experience, so too does this

of the experience in the narrative.

25.

26. The peculiarity of the narrative's shift into photographically packag

part of the narrative framed through photographs, or, more precisely, pphotographs emerge only at the end point in the "Romance," since Gerautobiography for many years?3 What sort of end do they spell?

27.

28. The easy answer to the question why the "Romance" ends in photo


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his story, and the photographs' surfacing indicate Geryon's growing m

this answer is complicated before we even arrive at the photographic eRed" has no single referent and each form of the autobiography carrie

autobiographies marked by the time of production: Geryon's first auto

mother's overheard phone conversation informs us (35), and the photoautobiography takes not quite midway through the book (60) and whic

the adolescent moment when the shift to photography takes place. Ind

to the trajectory of the Romance entitled "Autobiography of Red," disp

autobiographies which are marked by the retrospective temporality of

protagonist of the Romance, and the stories of Geryon as a composite

that make up Carson's novel's beguiling range of reference. This mont

the photo-essay autobiography as a largely absent object that we only

authored autobiography thus becomes like Barthes's Winter Garden phorganizing the verbal exploration of the meaning of photography and t

29.

30. The turn to photograph chapters at the end of the novel should be unineteenth chapter, set on the morning when Herakles first breaks up w

marks what ought to have been the end of the romance, had Geryon no

decades more. The last lines of chapter XIX directly reference the auto

Geryon's autobiography/ this page has a photograph of some red rabbiit 'Jealous of My Little Sensations'" (62). The breakup happens when tage; only the last lines describe the autobiography from the retrospecti

unspecified future time--when taking the photographs is anterior to as

time of the breakup or the photographing, which is implied to be his atrauma of Herakles's breaking up with Geryon, yet the event can only

the two in this chapter. The turn to the photo-autobiography at the end

concluding turn towards photographic chapters and makes the object s

lying in bed planning this autobiography the very morning of the breakproject is going on in parallel with the unfolding events of the romanc

why we only become aware of this parallel register of representation a

paralleling connects Geryon's photography with his romance, it also p

enables, and suggests that Geryon has trouble giving up the romance bPhotography becomes the way that Geryon learns to deal with his own


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romance. Through Geryon's example, Carson demonstrates how photo

at stasis, but an experience of duration; with this move she also aligns

31.

32. These closing lines of chapter XIX unquestionably mark a temporaechoes the fragmentation of time Metz, among others, finds in the pho

"From the Archaic to the Fast Self," contains within it the ambiguity btheory of photography unfolds through its verbal photographs. If on fi

slipping away (as youth does), the phrase also describes the self made

The temporal displacement of a photograph is moreover enacted in thito the moment of narrating the story from some future point. This mor

struggle to represent himself by the (to Geryon devastating) breakup wmentions a photograph and its title. The disruptive temporality of this novel of development will not be following the usual progressive traje

middle to rework the problem of ending by folding proleptically upon

33.

34. Yet this photograph is odd for other reasons as well. The synaestheforegrounds the text's concern with the way representation works and

The monstrosity of showing sound provides an apt figure for the kind impossibility of conveying the past to the future except through a descto concoct the impossible temporal plenitude. Geryon is a photographe

sight, while Carson's verbal photographs mark a similar synaesthetic e

introduction of radical sensory difference in this text's depiction of ph

is breaking away fixed forms of representation, just as Stesichoros bre

Carson's photography, however, unfixes vision as the privileged and s

that we rethink photography as a synaesthesia of touch and sight, or so

35.

36. The synaesthetic density of description in Carson's poetic theory ofrelation of photography and narrative. Might photography's fragmenta

enables seduce narrative away from linearity to embrace collage? (The

narrative offers a telling example of how photography assimilates narr


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a moment from a continuum of experience, can photographs even tell

cannot, arguing that we never understand anything from a photograph experience.4 Her claim, however, hinges not only on the fragmentary n

atomize reality, but on the presumption that such atomization impedes

elements. Carson is not simply pushing the limits of photography fromon the fragment, and her formal reliance on verse, she also pushes the

against atomizing forces, as if challenging Sontag's claims directly. By

rather than culminates the narrative, and opens up the possibility that a

might not end in death. At every level of this text, Carson invites us to

are if anything more likely to be taken up into narrative relations as w

whole. But should we perceive that filling-in as positive or as negative

those that purportedly relate in some way beyond mere juxtaposition,

to organize the fragments andtheir gaps into meaning.

37.

38. Photographs, if they can be said to narrate, would seem to do so pritelling in far less time than it takes the events to unfold. This presume

representation instantaneously, rather than slowly over time.5 Do phot

telling the story in the same amount of time as it would take for the ev

absence of the visual image slows down the telling and its relation to t

immediate and intensified experience of scene. At a narrational level, moments at the end marks a turn from summary into scene, a recalibradiscourse. But one must also consider why the photographs themselve

the abstract; this shift in focus implies a turn from some actual experie

camera, to the processing of the meaning of that materiality. That the fmarks an endpoint to this trajectory: "flashes" are still material but the

be said to be the trace of that material ephemerality. We are to attend n

object illuminated in its moment and the network of gestures, meaning

present moment of photographic reception. The increasing abstractionattention toward time, which the narrative shift to photographs unders

of showing and seeing (and their dissimilar temporalities).

39.


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40. By its end, the romance presents a doubled mode of narration, forenarration-as-showing). The opening of this second order, however, alsmechanical perception and representation into the human activity of cr

Where the story and the photograph might have recorded or represente

media, this doubling means that the narrative records the event of photor photography does). The leap from shutter click to shutter click is le

photograph logically accounts for the progression through the chapter

41.

42. As the narrative turns explicitly photographic, becoming less a talethe taking of pictures, Geryon inserts himself into the mode of represe

role as the subject of representation and being instead the instigator ofdistanced from the tale into which they had been absorbed, becoming visual and narrative, but Geryon himself is distanced from his photogr

comes just before the photograph chapters Geryon thinks, "I am disap

(135), as if the next sequence of chapters is the residue or remnant from

photograph's gradual manifestation on the page under the darkroom's r

Herakles, and Herakles's new boyfriend Ancash--so no wonder he feel

negotiating the appropriate distance. Ordinarily--that is, if we were sim

protagonist and the events he experiences--we might say that the came

from being too involved in the subject of the story and photography. Bnarrative and the object of the photography in this text were the same-

43.

44. Rather, I suggest that the role of photographing at this point is apothappening, to stave off the end of the narrative. Indeed, Sontag argues

observation, but active participation in a scene: "it is a way of at least

is going on to keep happening" (12). So Geryon's photographs, and thespace for him to participate in the narrative itself, not only its events bemergence in the narrative signals his own self-realization. At the sam

phototheory's deathly obsession--the end.

45.


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46. The photo finish of this novel, then, defers the end of the story as min doing so it transforms both. His photography helps him establish a nAncash, and not just by giving him something to do while tagging alo

Geryon's Bildungsroman: his autobiography is a story of formation or

fling with Herakles at the climax of the "Romance"--for which Ancashconvince Geryon that he has something other than his lovelorn connec

he has his creative vision to proliferate. This proliferation, the novel's

or culmination but as expansion or dissemination. The very last chapte

Himself," returns us to the scene of photographing and compares it to

flames, Herakles (lustily) the bakers, and Geryon a volcano over whic

faces,/ night at their back" (146). Without a camera, Geryon nonethele

inspiration. Photography, at the end of the Romance, has become fully

box/lightsource/recording mechanism/image configuration of the men

47.

48. But the book's culminating photographic turn also speaks to larger not just that, as Sontag claims, "everything exists to end in a photograp

transform narrative, becoming an aim rather than a stopping point. In

the actual, it shows him learning how to make something of himself w

end of photography is an aim rather than a finality. If the end is in a ph

constant flutter of the shutter is an attempt to stave off that end, then esustaining a meaningful tension. On this view, narrative's typical deathrecourse to photography.7

49. II. Punct-Time

50. In his recent reading of Barthes's punctum as an anti-theatrical aestemerges through the difference between seeing and being shown. "Th

but not because it has been shown to him by the photographer, for whothe agency of the presenter--human intention or accident--implies that

just as Sontag had speculated. That is, the antitheatricality of photogra

narrative relation between photographer and observer: they cannot seeobserver is something to which the photographer is impervious. On th

punctum emerges in this gap between showing and seeing evokes a vi


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differently, folded along the lines of the observer's relation to the obje

51.

52. Although this antitheatrical mode entails "depicting figures who apthinking, and feeling and who therefore also appear wholly oblivious t

back in to a realist or even mimetic practice of representation, the insu

and the observer that the gap between showing and seeing produces diclaim of photographs remains; photographs refract the difference betw

of the image certainly plays a role in this refraction. As Mary Ann Do

foregrounded, not escaped" as we look at old photographs and films (1still in a photograph, the peculiarly layered temporality of photograph

being anchored in reality, and for all their evocation of realist descriptwhat they show. If photographs are agential machines, not just clocks,monstrous witnesses to an event?

53.

54. Exploiting this misalignment, Carson's book is avowedly not mimetransparency of the surface of representation--the beauty of the line ofwounding as any thing, event, or experience it tells of--even as it foreg

embedded in seeing rather than being shown. Fried's contention aboutphotographer is blind to, articulates the paradox of Carson's photograpwork goes beyond his in attending to what the more tangible or palpab

from the visual to the tangible, Carson's photographs explore the tensi

surface and the power to move--witnessing being a form of seeing tha

hermeneutic circuit even as it keeps one on the outside of the experien

me" Carson's photographs say "this" or "here," employing the deictic s

indexical nature.

55.

56. The synaesthetic power of the punctum, thus, is central to what CarAlthough Barthes posits the punctum as that accident that pricks, bruis

(27), and he articulated the punctum as the most tangible effect of the

something present in the photograph as it is the performative of the ph


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rather subtly becomes the site where narrative attaches itself to the im

woman in her Sunday best has had, for me, a whole life external to heprecisely where narrative intersects with the photograph; what grabs o

we start to speculate on a host of other interpretive relations extending

the visual transubstantiates into the felt.

57.

58. Perhaps because this last part of Carson's "Romance" lays before usensation beyond the moment of the text, the photograph chapters gro

photograph chapter concerns itself with the time it takes a stoned persoovert but also fairly straightforward markings of time. Only later does

photographs: In the photograph the face ofHerakles is white. It is the fa

thought Geryon months later when he was standing in his darkroomlooking

groping out of the bones. (144)

59.

60. This is a narrative of the punctum. Geryon's realization arrives in thphotographic punctum--a simultaneous "this will be and this has been,

What strikes Geryon here is the likeness as it emerges in its unlikenes

less blurred beneath the abundance and the disparity of contemporary photographs: there is always a defeat of Time in them" (96). This read

apotropac turn to photography at the end of the novel is not a resoluti

of something with a definite temporal end into something that can defe

across time through the photograph. For this reason, it offers a vector

61.

62. Fried's reading intimates that every photograph could come to have

antitheatrical insofar as its meaning unpredictably unfolds through thepersistence or duration of the photograph--opens up surprises in the ph

This view counters the exclusion of narrative from photography in Son

photographs having narrative capabilities served only insofar as it view

present.


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63.

64. Carson's verbal photographs, however, provide a different fold of tprocesses of narrative alongside a montage of temporalities. The anach

striking; in the present of developing the photograph, Geryon discernslodged in the past, having been taken, is actually taken from the future

of the stream of lived time, this temporal disturbance in the narration m

back on his obsession from the safe distance of having resolved it. In athe moment of seeing the image rather than the moment of taking the

narration of the rest of the photograph chapters.

65.

66. The disparity calls attention to how the present of narration is implpresent of looking at the photograph recalls that the image is perpetua

photograph, as Metz noted, is always hearkening from sometime else.

of simultaneously now and then, the photograph can be construed as aset of spatio-temporal relations, which insofar as they evoke narrative

Although Fried wants to suggest that "it would be truer to Barthes's le

the punctum of death as latent in contemporary photographs, to be bro

sense of the term), by the inexorable passage of time" (561), such a vi

(just as Barthes relies on this genre), and thus keeps the thematics orietemporal change. Does a landscape or monument die in a photograph?

for us forgetful beings to comprehend such a death. While of course p

longer there, this return to the theme of the death in/of the photograph

photograph, marks a familiar anxiety over the death or disappearance everything we make, actually, an embodiment or projection of our ow

little more insistently? What then is unique about photography's balefu

decontextualization of space and time that photography instigates chal

for what is shown. Yet the important thing we gain in thinking the temphotographs continue to develop, even after they are "fixed" onto the p

see in a photograph, it thwarts the terminal sense of the "end" of a pho

seeing, and establishes the means by which narrative can enfold the im


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67.

68. Notwithstanding the significance of the final photos of the "RomanCarson gives us outside the "Romance" section that might help us not

readings but divert us from a death-driven interpretation of photographfound in the description of Stesichoros's poem in the very first section

read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then

box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat. The frpieces fell out of the box" (6-7). On the one hand, this description rath

images fall out of the box of the camera, their numbered positions on t

of the film camera) or on the index print showing their order of appear

linear temporal order of their taking. Of course, individual photograph

from the box; they are always independent of that order, selected for th

69.

70. The radical fragmentation and dissonant juxtaposition described in photography colludes with how Metz and Barthes perceive photograph

photographic image will always hearken back metonymically to some

hails, whose light waves it records. Just as we presume Stesichoros's n

text, so too are photographs seen to be fragments from a past, coheren

future moment. This metonymy, however, rather than tethering to whophotograph's recording of the real. Those metonymic temporal linkage

conjunction of the present of narration-time and the past of narrated-ti

embedded in different, contingent relations, as varied as meat and lect

the world disrupts the presumption of spatio-temporal continuity, and in "reality" around it. As Metz claims, the essence of the photograph i

the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of tim

this "object" as the thing photographed, reading him with Carson sugg

photograph itself. The abduction of the object, however, disrupts the ranterior promise of the photograph warrants that it will come back to h

71.

72. The moment when Geryon develops the image of Herakles's face in


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narration is so temporally disruptive, just like a photograph. The mom

chapter, "Photographs: Like and Not Like"; the first line describes theold days. Or was it?" (142). At first we may think this is a more existe

previous chapter) that describes a photograph of a dead guinea pig on

photo montage has shifted from the concrete to the abstract. And we cwith the story's development: Herakles has cheated on Ancash by slee

relationship from the old days and realizes it is not just like then. (Inde

how it felt, Geryon says "degrading" [144], although whether the feeli

changed is notably ambiguous.) But what has also happened is that the

displaced from the first line to the end of the chapter, while the first lin

to the image. Thus, here the narrative displays or rather stages the pun

reason that Barthes ostensibly will not reveal the Winter Garden photo

showing the effects of the punctum, the unexpected or startling revelatlets us see Geryon's ambivalence about Herakles, or even his desire tohimself (what the photographer, in this instance, was blind to). This st

narrative's scope is now moving out beyond the moment Geryon took

picture-taking, showing us how the image turns out as well as how Gearc of time, of duration, enables both the showing of the punctum's eff

focalization) and unfolds the immediacy of photography to the mode o

making the punctum possible. The punctum Geryon experiences markthe photographer who could not see Herakles's aged face at the momen

73.

74. If the penultimate photograph chapter displaces its photographic coexistential or abstract claims but--as the chapter develops as the photothe concrete or "real," this chapter claims its solidarity with the previo

photograph chapter, on the other hand, seems to describe an impossibl

no one here took it," captions the image linked with the seventh chapt

photograph is in a sense the most real of all those in the novel, or at lefictional images were ever actually taken. It prepares us for the final c

the photograph--although not photography, or the photographic event-

understand the photograph to represent changes; we exchange what it

they let us see. Carson thus provokes us to imagine photography witho


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75.

76. The frankness of the chapter "Photographs: #1748" suggests why thnarration in the end--indeed, shows why this text exists to end in a pho

narrative is inextricable from the incision of the photograph, even if thmoment too, even though it is not even fictionally photographically re

imagistically; the essence of photography has so fully overtaken the na

must be on photographic terms, in the tension between seeing and shoencapsulates in its time of development. And yet, rather than give in to

image the verbal portrayal would represent; the novel lets us see some

to give us the photographs as visual objects, nor, I would argue, does s

a visual image, in part because she is depicting the moment of represe

so doing, she gives us a new kind of photograph. As Barthes uses the prepresentation, to communicate a being-moved that is neither visual no

synaesthetically linked to both, Carson takes us to a level of photograp

unrelated to the novel's being in verse, for verse intimates more than p

of documentary aspect of photography, essays to give us the full pictupromise, whereas verse always holds back from full verbalization.

77.

78. What the photograph purports to show is something impossible--Gvolcano: He peers down at the earth heart of Incchantikas dumping all the camera: "The Only Secret People Keep." (145) Like the previous

click, but here, because the camera turns on the photographer, the subj

recorded as well. Notably, the camera must be aligned with the volcaneye." The scene is that with his camera Geryon records being seen by

79.

80. This photograph chapter is called #1748, unlike the previous photowords. The photograph, however, appears to be titled "The Only Secre

emerges in the chapter, as the narrative reclaims the moment of the sh

This displacement of photograph caption into narrative underscores th#1748 refers to the number of the Emily Dickinson poem that serves a


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Autobiography. The "Romance"--and here I invoke not just the section

Geryon's travel adventures and thematically links the myth of the yazcthrown into the volcano, who are thus eyewitnesses to immortality, wi

reticent volcano keeps/ His never slumbering plan--" and ends, "The o

in Carson 22). The title of the photograph is the penultimate line of thethe impossible photograph of Geryon flying into the volcano supposed

would be to turn Carson's warping of the axiomatic link between death

suffers the persistence of the representation of the subject long after th

persistence out of its own time and space, its long-term iterabilities, su

death but immortality. But the photograph itself bears an inevitable de

recipe for immortality than Ozymandias's monument. Barthes's refusa

is not merely that "it exists only for me" but that "it cannot in any way

(73)--as if a science in some way precludes a capacity to wound. But wostensible refusal to reveal the image, Barthes does, consistently, verbthe book: that verbal description is the photograph for us, and has its o

Winter Garden photograph is as invisible as the photograph itself, yet

some way. As what matters, what endures, that objectivity or that visibimmortality rather than to mortality; but on the contrary, it is the more

evocative sensations that tenders the photograph over to immortality.1

81.

82. The impossibility of the image the volcano snaps of Geryon, its arrbecome increasingly abstract, tantalizes us with the question of wheth

visible. Is this last chapter an image of immortality? Tempting as this

most interesting question to pose, partly because it presumes a kind ofmetaphor and eschews the metonymic workings of photography. Rath

witness are the dead in the photographs, who reach out to touch us not

projection? What secret are they not keeping by their metonymical tes

things that are hidden from view, buried? Insofar as the punctum cominstantiating the photograph as the obverse of reality, it conceals as mu

blind to--what is the tain of the photograph?

83.


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84. The tain, which is what, itself invisible, disappearing or folding behdistinct from that detail in the image we might not readily see. For inst

photograph from Carson is the apparatus, caught up as we may be in th

photograph Geryon takes in his flight over Incchantikas is for Ancash

our / beauty. He peers down" (145). But the equipment Geryon has tak"record."

85.

86. The fact that the climax of the novel hinges on the recording of expphotographs, not by the looking at them--suggests that ultimately this moving toward resolution of a discombobulated equilibrium, but abou

combinatorial force; the flashes of inspiration titling the final chapter oThe struggle is also Geryon's struggle over whether and how to be taktake Geryon? These two questions are imbricated in the novel, so as to

into love. For Geryon to be taken, to be loved, he must love himself, b

Carson reformulates such stock self-help-book themes to show how th

not before it. The novel pursues Geoffrey Batchen's question, "when i

Bildungsroman paradigm to turn it, palinodically, towards "when is ex

and temporal disruption of the photograph, its presumptive immediacy

coming into being, its inherent Nachtrglichkeit, generates our experie

recorder, which Geryon flicks on as he flies over the volcano, has bechis monstrosity, his imbrication with the mechanical registering of expinterest in the paradoxical, even monstrous, combinations of sound an

tape recorders, the Autobiography remains a narrative about photograp

moebiously, recombining life and story and their relation with a twist,photography does, a slice of time in a sort ofpetitmort. The fragment

perceive as photography's essence are also what makes possible a serie

fixity. Photographs offer not motion but motility.

87. III. What a Difference a Tain Makes

88. The claim that the novel's depiction of the photographs refuses ekpgiven the novel's rewriting of ancient Greek mythology, where ekphra

suggest that the novel is doing more than describing photographs, eve


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in relations of representation that the book's theory of photography int

descriptive mode of photography itself. Just as Stesichoros changes thcreative and open-ended use of adjectives, so too does Carson challen

photographic relation through her non-ekphrastic photographs.

89.

90. The story of how Geryon resolves his unrequited romance with Heimmortality is enmeshed in a parallel, second-order story of how these

and how they relate to Geryon's life in complex, often anachronistic w

Geryon's transformation into an active agent in his own representationcharacter in the objects' narrative. Such splitting recapitulates photogr

agency of the photographer and the mechanical action of the camera obetween human agent and instrumental object mirrors the narrative of process. The tain of the photograph might come to be understood as th

interrupts mimetic or indexical relation of subject and object.

91.

92. Monique Tschofen ponders the question that Carson's first chapter Stesichoros Make?" and replies that through his use of adjectives "one

a way of using language that invites us to perceive with all of our bodisee that words say but that they also show, that they make us think, buargues. Her insights tie in with the notion of punctum as a specific kin

photographs, as Carson plays off the felt and the thought, the sensible

Carson's sensible approach commingles sound and sight just as langua

monstrous hybrid of Geryon's recurring synaesthetic experiences (it's n

flight at the end; much earlier, for instance, he frets over the noises co

him," the "silver light of stars crashing against/ the window screen," g

93.

94. If in the narrative of the taking of the picture what strikes us is the more than we can see the scene before us, that click is also the momen

narrative is sutured. Barthes relies on narrative to explain why or how

comes to mediate the synaesthetic experience of seeing and feeling. Th


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oscillation between the events of making and looking, between the sen

intelligible. Carson's language is unquestionably sensual, not the least sensory, while the artful concreteness of the diction gives texture and v

sensory appeal produces a punctum. How are we struck, as Geryon is

photographic bath? It is, of course, not a question of we but of I: whatthe deadpan tone of "pants leg."

95.

96. Tschofen points out, furthermore, that Carson views Stesichoros's ihis contribution to narrative, as a second difference he makes. Let us slaunches his discussion of the Winter Garden photograph as a palinod

his examination of public photographs thus far has honed his understaenabled him to discover the nature of photography: "I would have to mthe palinode form explain the absence of the mother's photograph, per

determination that we could not see how he sees this photograph? It ce

photograph. The absent referent provides the palinode: Stesichoros's a

photograph, Geryon's autobiography. The palinode serves as the backi

surface, the ode, into sharper focus.

97.

98. While Tschofen astutely turns the question of the difference StesichCarson's writing make?" (40), her answer invites more photographic d

her own work that "words bounce," Tschofen suggests that "words bo

with the people who use them" (41). Through this "bounce," Tschofen

free from the constraints of the past" while she simultaneously "asks u

"bounce" of words to be akin to the "bounce" of a light beam off the ta

palinode, the parallel opens up to emphasize the transformations in un

Moreover, Tschofen's insistence on what difference Carson's writing mfrom the past and connects us to it is strikingly isomorphic with the phfragmentation from the originary temporal flow and its indexically sed

never experienced it directly.

99.


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100. Tschofen's reading of the significance of the palinode picks up impthrough Geryon's own figuration as a photographer, suggesting that heto the beginning and revise his own ending" (44). Stesichoros's palino

Helen and made her blind him; the palinode thus narrates from what c

the palinode sets up a relation between stories that opens up the endingequilibrium, into a circuit of meaning strung in the tension between se

shown and seen. A counter-song bounces or reverberates with the song

new aspects, undoing some of the initial meanings, underplaying or re

palimpsestic blurring of the original in relation to the new song. It is n

photographs; the pictures come to palinodically erase the event we act

turn to the palinode, which counters the story told in the ode. Perhaps

chapters, the book turns to an interview with Stesichoros, since an inte

around.

101.

102. The interview as a form is anti-narrative, dialogical, and in this instcome before. Like a photograph, an interview usually comes after som

hoc representation that also takes on its own autonomy, its own iterati

what happened in the Romance, however, Stesichoros tells of his seein

seeing: an atelier in 1907 with paintings covering the walls right up to

I saw" and "I saw everything everyone saw" (148), phrases that echo Snotes that "my eyes have always told me more than my ears. Anythingsee, well of course it has some sound but not the sound of noise" (89).

(of Alice B. Toklas) as "a description and a creation of something that

again but as it had been which is history which is newspaper which is what is happening not as if it had happened not as if it is happening bu

103.

104. In this passage, Stein transforms description--what photographs aretheir mechanical seeing--into creation. The concatenation of disparate

newspaper, illustration, history--recalls Stesichoros's meat scraps and

his poem fragments. And like meat scraps and lecture notes and song lare all fragments that refer to or conjure both something else, somethin


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Similarly, Carson's description of Geryon creates his process of creatin

that thing."

105.

106. In that interview, Stesichoros not only sees as if he were Gertrude Sdifference between a volcano and a guinea pig is not a description why

bookends the theory of photography from the first section. If asking torefers complicates referentiality in the text, either by multiplying or di

referent(s), it does so in order to begin to articulate this theory of phot

solution that solidifies a representation to its real object. If the theory oinherently fragmentary, then that too helps us to see better why photog

problem of likeness, photography is not based in likeness but in differcomes from likeness, can we shake free of the idea that photography'sthan with the recombination of the likenesses?

107.

108. It is therefore no accident that this version of Geryon's story is a ropossibilities and potentialities for recombination rather than about the unities of time, space, action. As a romance it is a story of the tangled

is also a romance in its engagement with the fantastic or supernatural-volcanoes to take pictures. Its notion of photography itself is also romsupernatural process for manipulating time, or a way to access a ghost

important thing Carson's text does is redefine photography not in relat

theory of photography embedded in Stesichoros's Steinian sentence is

difference between a volcano and a guinea pig is not a description why

109.

110. Photography is typically construed to be about likeness, to producecapacity to document is one example of this presumption.12 As Sontagworld, with its limitless production of notes on reality, makes everythi

darn well its capacity for distortion, the photograph's power to describ

the photograph, we habitually think that the mirror is a reflection of th

the mirror to indicate some unmediated representational process. In ou


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photography's capacity to represent, as when we see photographs on so

presume that the image in the photograph is pretty much like what it dhave that disorienting reaction to our own photograph (do I look like t

we've just taken to see how they look. This disorientation or impatienc

likeness of /in a photograph: it is not a similarity, but a radical differenthat accounts for "why is it like it."

111.

112. On this view, photography is a metonymic practice that fundamentconcurs, at least as far as metonymy goes; he begins Camera Lucida btransmission of light waves that touch their subject and bounce back to

before they touch our eyes (3). Sontag, on the other hand, uses an impchallenge our sense of how it produces likeness: "A photograph is notthat subject; a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it"

on its original context while nonetheless asserting some relational, eve

anterior object. Yet the indexicality of the photograph--on which both

thinking that photographs have a relation to the object. Photographs de

completely disparate things--guinea pigs and volcanoes, for instance,

likeness is based on contiguity or, rather, on a set of contiguous relatio

nonetheless still poses a question. Indeed, indices, as Doane notes, "ha

nevertheless, cause them" (133). The question for photography, and focould be founded on the contiguity rather than on the relational or refe

113.

114. Contiguity, the underpinning of the figure of metonymy, is about spattests to a particular spatial configuration, viz., the presence of the ph

and the photographing subject or agent. By contrast, metaphoricity tur

in a field of difference that does not require the same spatial distinctiohinge on metaphorics. Certainly the sense that metaphor transports mewhat a photograph does, temporally speaking: it transports meaning, a

space. Yet when we try to say "why is it like it," why the photograph i

insistence on the photograph's indexicality to guarantee its connectionGeimer observes, the indexicality of photography is repeatedly figured


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photograph operates like the photogram, which records the physical co

medium, rather than recording a pattern of lightwaves. Geimer avers tcareful to speak of continuity and touching in a rather narrow sense of

light qualify as direct physical contact . . . ? Does light 'touch' the obje

'imprint' of something?" (16). Yet while Geimer puts pressure on the tthe weathervane, the death mask), he does not give up entirely on cont

chance event, the contingencies captured by the photograph in its mak

human agent, and uncertain of how long it will take to make a photogr

image to be selected for printing or for the image to be seen--"photogr

doing" (19).

115.

116. Geimer's questions open up the space (if you will) to think throughacknowledging and embracing the synaesthesia between the visual and

anticipate and articulate so clearly. The indexical relation of the photo

vision is material contact, rendering the seen as something fundamenta

contiguity of photographs frees us from "the old idea that some aspect

photographic double" (Geimer 23), without relinquishing the idea that

makes them so compelling. The indexical relation of the beholder to th

search for likeness along metonymic lines, to discern what touches. Li

metonymy rather on simile. Barthes's sense of his visual connection toof Bonaparte's brother, constructs the photograph as a long-dure rearv

117.

118. A mirror works because of its tain, the thin layer of silver backing reflectivity, that makes it a mirror and not a window. The tain of the m

makes it possible to see differently. It alters--arguably creates--the vis

object mirrored to the subject beholding; often, those are the "same" enot). The tain not only returns the gaze blindly but enables us to see bethus provides us with a metonymical relation to ourselves or mediates

I'm interested in this figure of the tain for what its analogy to photogra

photography has such a strong convention of direct representation, of


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functions reassuringly as deixis. What, then, is the tain of the photogra

119.

120. Although--or rather, because--silver is used in the printing of blackpatterning on the page like the black of print letters or the colors whos

not the tain of the photograph. Silver composes the materiality of the p

redirect or re-destine the mirror image. In the gelatin photograph, silvesamenesses (of tone or pattern or line) in a field of difference in order

functions metonymically, bending the spatial relations of light into a f

the function of the tain: it works metonymically to fold space into newimage.

121.

122. Carson's thematics suggest that the tain of the photograph is not silstrip, and the color of the darkroom light, in which the image emerges

paper. Red is what we do not see in the process of the image's develop

development and production. That same red light is the color of a volc

emanating from below the solid black fragments of rock that break apa(another illumination of material production). When Geryon flies over

which redirects his life trajectory and maybe even makes him immortaeruption is akin to, isomorphic with, the eruption of the image onto theGeryon watches Herakles's face emerge in the photographic bath unde

that photograph was taken: it is no coincidence that Herakles had look

(144). The unmarked ellipsis in the text between Herakles's comment

erupts to redirect the timing of the story (the shift from moment of shu

meaning of Herakles's question (is it a reference to Ancash's having ex

Geryon to use those wings and fly over the volcano? To the repetition

volcano? Is the time of volcano time a projection of the future or of thsame way, photographs have their own volcano time, have erupted intthe light of day and disrupting the surface of that daily experience. As

reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear

reality, and of realism" (87). Red keeps the film blind to the manufactu


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not see as we make images our reality. The read photograph redirects

123.

124. Sontag's assertion does several things: it invites us to rethink Metz'fragment reality, a view that remains subtended by a theory of likenes

reality is if they bear some likeness to it); it suggests how photographs

rather than against) through their normative power to subordinate our we might want to understand photography through Carson's purely ver

Sontag discerns in photography's authority over realism that elucidate

the difference Stesichoros makes. In the forcefulness of their represenextreme form of likeness. The chain of making--Geryon's making pho

shift to the level of Geryon's photograph making, and Carson's remakiidea that photography records reality, but opens up gaps within which pose this question when we see beyond or other than what we are show

opening for the duration of the photograph to assert itself whether thro

condensation of a feeling into what we see. Carson's verse photograph

Barthesian readers, is the temporal distance mapped by the image, a d

Lucida is a work of mourning). What wounds us as Carson's photogra

intimated but unsaid, the circumstances of the making of the image for

Carson takes the antitheatricality Fried finds in Barthes's photography

rendering the tain of the photograph more dynamic than quicksilver. Cthe photograph is the palinode that enables us to ask "Why is it like it?

125.

126. The mirroring that photographs purportedly do describes yet also ainvite a fascinated speculation or deduction from the evidence before o

pervasiveness of photography belies its lack of access to the world, to

"Strictly speaking," Sontag tells us, "one never understands anything fsimultaneously to refute the access to reality that photography's documaccount for a necessary fascination with a photograph, that even if a p

subject, it takes time really to see what is in a photograph. What one u

gap in the image's relation to the world. One may never understand anunderstand something from what one sees in a photograph. That seein


28/32

and layers introduced by the photograph. If we reconsider the claims b

fragment time, isolating moments one from another, they conceal howcan revisit how we might understand something from a photograph, at

recombinatorial power of the fragment is, importantly, a generative fe

is it like it?" as the force of (photographic) description.

127.

128. Just before she concludes her essay in which she makes the claim wcontrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something loo

functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explainedunderstand" (23). That Autobiography ofRedis indeed a romance, a s

it so forcefully engages the problem of how photography looks, and wphotograph in words. Sontag sets the photograph as instantaneous apptemporal understanding. But because as a romance Autobiography ofR

relationship, and Geryon seeks that understanding through photograph

photography, Sontag's opposition ought to be reconsidered. The fragm

paradoxically initiates a theory of photography in an ancient poet, but

understood temporality to work in the photograph: time's linearity and

photograph structure the metonymic relation of the image to its object

very contingency of photography, its simultaneous excision and interp

necessitates narrative--indeed, cannot shake it off. A photograph howeinto a new narrative relation, underpinned by time's metonymy and pr

129.

130. Which brings us back to the problem of the tain. The tain of the miintervenes with contiguity to create likeness, bringing out the informat

the photograph is that which intervenes to change the direction of the

The tain of the photograph, then, shows that the photograph is not an enarrative, from material to immaterial, conveying a play on the ambigbut of liking. The tain of the photograph, like the palinode, folds the n

death-drive towards fixity and stasis. The redirection participates in a

transformation. If this is the autobiography of Red, it is because it is thobverse workings of photography as a practice of love. This is why no


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tain of the photograph is what makes these verbal constructions photo

indexicality of the subject's lightwaves registering on emulsion, and mquestion of why is it like it, which is itself produced by the photograph

cannot account for their production, cannot represent the red light of th

it is not only the special light that enables us to see the image as it emebut the Doppler-shift of time moving away from us. We are the ones a

captured in the snapshot is itself in motion, working along the comple

the afterlife of a moment. The "red" of the figure of the photograph's t

written story of this tain, then, provides the account of how intractably

making.

131.

132. The tain or palinode of the photograph redirects our look at the "reaof the narrative image. If, today, everything exists to end in a photogra

indexicality beyond an affirmation of thereness. What "Autobiography

transformative power of this reflection. It is and is not the life story of

is and is not the photographic montage Geryon makes about his life; it

the story of photography's transformation of the real into something th

133. English DepartmentMichigan State [email protected]

134.


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135. Copyright 2007 E.L. McCallum NOTE: Readers may use portions of this work in addition, subscribers and members of subscribed institutions may use the entire work for any internal no

or fax to one person at another location for that individual's personal use, distribution of this article outsi

from either the author or the Johns Hopkins University Press is expressly forbidden.Notes

photographs in postmodern literature. From Bob Perelman's poem "Chof Chinese scenes, to the climax of John Edgar Wideman's Two Cities

quintessential figure of postmodern representation, providing the occadescription. 2. There are two senses of "take" in the last caption; not

shutter to record the photograph, but also the possibility of appropriati

rather, since the gesture is cast in the negative, a refusal to bring it alo

VIII, "Click," narrates a youthful Geryon determinedly focused on tak

to find out "who is this new kid you're spending all your time with?" (

with Herakles, so while the chapter hinges on the taking of the picturestory of Geryon's silence about the relationship and his feelings. (In fa

[40].) It's a silence that nonetheless speaks to readers. Such earlier refe

distinctly different from the ending photographic chapters. 4. Sontagthey acknowledge" (111), yet at the same time she underscores that th

undermine the commonly held notion that photography is "an instrum

"knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kinhumanist" (24); with Barthes, this sentiment is transformed into the po

opposition of understanding and photography aligns narration and tim

what happens in Antonioni's Blow-Up, where the photographer comeswhat the picture shows, in the same time frame that the murder myster

development of the murder's mystery parallels the time of the develop

Benjamin notes that the first photographs "present the earliest image o

7. See Peter Brooks's reading of Freud's Beyondthe Pleasure Princip

of this death drive in relation to narrative. 8. Geoffrey Batchen explo

Making," which opens with the question, "When is the photograph ma

prints by photographers depending on the aesthetic trends of the mom

twenty-seven years before printing an image he took around 1889, andconcludes that photographs "exist only as a state of continual fabricatitwists and turns of their own unruly passage through space and time" (

photograph is so memorable precisely because it does wound us. More

and re-read Camera Lucida in precisely the way that Fried's reading oabsent photograph only wounds us because it is a verbal photograph; b


31/32

to Barthes's palinode, that is the only way in which its punctum can be

obsession with death is thus really a fixation on the persistence of the as "the inescapable necessity of matter, despite its inevitable corrosion

immortality of photographs is therefore not lodged in the materiality o

and its power to affect us. Along similar lines, Doane's reading of Gommedium is leads her to posit that "the experience of a medium is neces

between materiality and immateriality" (131). 11. Bazin notes that w

the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the in

thus emphasizes the objective aspect of photography and downplays th

observed, the question of what the photographer really adds is certainl

paradoxes of the figure of the professional photographer she undersco

photography. See her "Photographic Evangels" chapter. 12. Siegfrie

aspect by beginning his essay on photography with a discussion of thegrandmother (47-48). While he contends that as time passes, the signiarchives the elements it documents, he concludes that this residual org

fact not an organization yet at all, but rather that "the photograph gath

underscores my larger concern in this essay with fragmentation and ph

Antonioni, Michaelangelo. Blow-Up. MGM Studios. 1966.AttrMeaning" Writingthe Image after RolandBarthes. Ed. Jean-Michel R77-89. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections On Photograph

and Wang, 1981. Batchen, Geoffrey. Each Wild Idea: WritingPhoto

Bazin, Andr. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." WhatIs C

Berkeley: U California P, 1967. 9-16. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcade

McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap, 1999. Brooks, Peter.Readingfor

New York: Vintage, 1985. Cadava, Eduardo. WordsofLight: These

Princeton UP, 1997. Carson, Anne. Autobiography ofRed: ANovel

Dickinson, Emily. The Complete PoemsofEmily Dickinson. Ed. ThDoane, Mary Ann. "Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specif

Fried, Michael "Barthes's Punctum." CriticalInquiry 31.3 (Spring 2Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm." Trans. Kata Gellen.

Kracauer, Siegfried. "Photography." The Mass Ornament: WeimarE

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. 46-63. Metz, Christian. "Photograph

Contemporary Photography. Ed. Carol Squiers. Seattle: Bay P, 1990.

Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Vol


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Perelman, Bob. "China." Sont

Noonday P, 1977. Stein, Gertrude. Everybody'sAutobiography. CamMonique. "'First I Must Tell about Seeing': (De)monstrations of Visua

Carson's Autobiography ofRed." Canadian Literature 180 (Spring 20

Cities: A Love Story. Boston; Mariner, 1999.

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