Fiction in the Age of Photography (review)

Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Nancy Armstrong. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. xiii + 338; 52 illustrations. $29.95.

When you read Nancy Armstrong you expect to see the world you thought you knew transformed into something rich and strange. Certainly this is the unnerving and exhilarating effect of Fiction in the Age of Photography. The title is misleading, suggesting that the book might be about realism and documentation, as is the description inside the jacket, which implies that it will be of interest primarily to Victorianists. But just as Desire and Domestic Fiction radically redefined the domestic novel and with it our history of middle-class subject formation, so Fiction in the Age of Photography challenges what we thought we knew about realism, periodization, images, and identity. This book is really about the onset of mass visuality, how visual images came to have the power they have today.

Armstrong defines literary realism as writing that can be identified by "the fidelity of language to visual evidence" (10). The visual description we associate with realism "refers not to things, but to visual representations of things, representations that fiction helped to establish as identical to real things and people before readers actually began to look that way to one another and live with such stereotypes" (3). Literary realism is "realistic" to us when it refers to "a world of objects that either had been or could be photographed" (7). Fiction doesn't merely react to the development of photography, it anticipates that development by promising to get its readers in touch with the world through visual information, and it makes that visual information the basis for the intelligibility of the narrative. As Armstrong defines it, realism occurs when images replace writing as the grounding of fiction. One need only compare a novel by Jane Austen to one by Charlotte Brontë to see how little is conveyed through visual information about characters at the turn of the century, and how much by 1848. By the 1850s, older kinds of visual information, like phrenology, give way to the kind of information photographs have not yet, but will shortly convey: the identity of Esther Summerson, the heroine of Charles Dickens's Bleak House, is not dependent on the size of her forehead, but on the likenesses and differences between the image of her face and the image of her mother's face. This interplay of likenesses and difference that produces identity through conformity to and difference from a visual stereotype, is, Armstrong argues, how the photographs that flooded the middle-class Victorian home in the 1860s made themselves intelligible.

For what makes the photographic image intelligible is not its reference to a person, place, or thing in reality, but its reference to the giant visual archive of photographic images, all the other photographs of cities, of degenerates, of the urban poor, of quaint regional folk, of prostitutes, criminals, madwomen, domestic interiors, middle-class women, celebrities, Africans, Asians. As Armstrong describes it, an increasingly vast number of people, places, and things were photographed, but the number of visual categories that organize these pictures--the poses, camera angles, degrees of opacity or transparency--remain remarkably constant, and serve to organize the entire Victorian world into observers and observed, normal and deviant, us and them, good space and bad space, modern and primitive. Every time the Victorians and we their heirs catch sight of a photographic image, or read a passage of realist description, we call up all the images we have ever seen and all the visual categories in which they fall in order to place that image in the visual order of things, and as we place it, we place ourselves. Indeed the copious illustrations in this book (52, mostly photographs), allow the reader to enact that process of building a photographic archive and sorting images into categories as she reads.

Armstrong's prose is deceptively simple...