A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1839-1945

Conclusion. Likeness Has Ceased to Be of Any Help: Fiction and Film

199 conclusion Likeness Has Ceased to Be of Any Help Fiction and Film this book has argued that photography shaped American fiction not by offering novelists a model of faithful reproduction, but by offering them a language in which to record the increasing homogeneity of modern identity, a homogeneity that is itself the product of photography. What American literature’s repeated invocations of the camera tell us is not that the two mediums see the world in the same way but that the world American fiction sees is one shaped by photography. Hence it ultimately does not matter whether American writers see photography as signaling either the impossibility of mimesis or its perfection. Christopher Isherwood’s proclamation “I am a camera” thus needs to be read alongside rather than against Sherwood Anderson’s belief that “[n]o man can quite make himself a camera,” William Dean Howells’s praise for “the every one looks like some one else gertrude stein, “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans” 200 Conclusion impartial fidelity of the photograph” alongside rather than against Mark Twain’s insistence that “[t]he sun never looks through a photographic instrument that does not print a lie.”1 Indeed for Twain it was precisely photography’s ability to produce accurate likenesses of its subject that rendered the image a lie: “The piece of glass it prints is well named a ‘negative’—a contradiction—a misrepresentation—a falsehood. I speak feelingly of this matter, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic, a Solomon, a missionary, a burglar and an abject idiot—and I am neither.”2 By joking that he is “neither” one of five different things, Twain implies that, although he might have looked like a lunatic, a wise man, a missionary, a burglar, and an idiot at the various times he was photographed, these seemingly exclusive states are not who he is. The very particularity of the photographic image, in other words, ends up being read in terms of typicality: Twain looks like the way a missionary , burglar, and lunatic are supposed to look—an expectation that is the result, ironically enough, of photographic reproduction. Twenty years later Twain, one of the most photographed Americans of the nineteenth century, was still facetiously insisting that the camera misrepresented him. He remarked that Napoleon Sarony’s famous portrait of him actually depicted a gorilla, though admittedly a gorilla wearing his overcoat: “The result was surprising. I saw that the gorilla, while not looking distinctly like me was exactly what my great grandfather would have looked like if I had one.” Although frustrated that this gorilla was being constantly mistaken for him, Twain congratulated Sarony on having “found my great grandfather in the person of the gorilla.”3 Twain displaces the question of the foreignness of his photographic image onto the strangeness of the idea of family resemblance, for in a sense the unlikeliness of a gorilla looking like him is equivalent to the unlikeliness of likeness in general, since exactly where can likeness be said to take place? “In a certain photograph, I have my father’s sister’s ‘look,’” Roland Barthes reflects in Camera Lucida.4 What this “look” consists of, however, remains as unclear to Barthes as it did to Oliver Wendell Holmes a century before. “There is something in the face that corre- Likeness Has Ceased to Be of Any Help 201 sponds to tone in the voice,” Holmes declared in 1864, “recognizable, not capable of description; and this kind of resemblance in the faces of kindred we may observe, though the features are unlike.”5 For Barthes the features that unite family members are a matter of “the structure of the face,” but what intrigues the French critic about photography is that it occasionally reveals something “more insidious, more penetrating than likeness: the Photograph sometimes makes appear what we never see in a real face (or in a face reflected in a mirror): a genetic feature, the fragment of oneself or of a relative which comes from some ancestor.”6 It is this actual material fragment, this genetic feature, seemingly, that Twain sees in the Sarony photograph, yet for him this likeness is precisely what renders the photograph foreign. No wonder, then, that the photograph does such violence to our sense of likeness. Barthes’s belief that the photograph uncovers a likeness unavailable to the naked...