"Specters of Kath": Negatives and Negativity in Penelope Lively's The Photograph

Critics and photographers insist on the lethal and petrifying power of the photographic act, through which the subject becomes reified and disincarnated in a "micro-experience of death," as Barthes puts it in Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire 14). The photographic act seen as an "embalming" is such that the subject photographed "truly [becomes] a specter," Barthes goes on to say (14), thus taking up again almost word for word Susan Sontag's analysis in On Photography for whom photographic images are "ghost images," "death masks," and even "memento mori" (84, 168, 26). Conversely, the photographic image—whether its referent in the real world is already dead or still alive—has this quasi-magical power of maintaining it in an illusion of perpetual life, as it is cut off from time, and therefore of endowing it with a spectral quality. Photography as the trace of a body without a body, a "paradoxical incorporation" (Derrida 6) or the "tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh" (7), as Derrida puts it, thus corresponds to the definition of the specter as a "phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit" that he gives in Specters of Marx (6).

Much has been said about the literary use of photography for realistic purposes—photography being on the side of evidence, of authenticity because of its indexicality—or illusionistic ones—photography being a construct, and as such capable of lying and deceiving. Less has perhaps been made of its spectral nature and the fictional games made possible by what Régis Durand calls the "photographic fantastic" (77). Fiction, whose vocation is also to give life, through the reading process, to "paper beings" (Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue 68), is in that sense akin to the spectral nature of photography, with the exception of its indexicality. As such, it will feed on the multiple combinations made possible by the inclusion in praesentia or in absentia of the photographic image within the text.

The novel entitled The Photograph by contemporary British novelist Penelope Lively, which was published in England in 2003, seems to be a perfect illustration of the close links between photography, spectrality, and fiction. The novel starts with the discovery by an academic, Glyn, of a compromising photograph revealing an adulterous relationship, years ago, between his late wife Kath and a man (the photograph showing them hand in hand, but only from the back) who turns out to be his own brother-in-law. This photograph in absentia, since it is evoked ekphrastically but never materially reproduced in the text, is the starting point of an investigation carried out by the husband among Kath's family and friends—Elaine, her sister, Nick, her husband, and Oliver, her long-time and platonic friend—an investigation whose unexpected revelations will completely change their lives.

What makes this novel interesting is not so much the by now fairly common way in which the photograph as matrix generates both the narrative and the "re-incarnation" of the deceased character, the photograph thus becoming a "medium" in both senses of the term. Neither is it the resolutely spectral nature of Kath, in death of course since she haunts every single character in the story, but also in life, where her sudden appearances were already "apparitions," ghostly "manifestations." And neither is it the profound irony of a text in which the secret "delivered" by the photograph as matrix or "mother" of the narrative is precisely that Kath cannot have children—those equally as ghostly "non-babies" (Lively 221) who will cause her to end her life.

What makes this novel truly original is, as Janice Hart claims, "its photographic-ness" (118), or "photographicity," as François Soulages calls it after Todorov's "literarity"—namely, "what is photographic in photography," "this abstract property which is the uniqueness of photography" (Soulages 1). However, whereas Janice Hart remains quite vague regarding what she calls "[Penelope Lively's] profound ability … to think photographically" (112), merely evoking photography's nature as "portal" enabling the deceased character to step out of the petrifying image and become alive again, we...