RE: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism

Postmodern Realism and Photographic Subjectivity in The Stone Diaries

229 Postmodern reaLism and PHotograPHiC subJeCtivity in ThE sTonE diariEs1 dEboRah c. boWEn What makes photography a strange invention—with unforeseeable consequences—is that its primary raw materials are light and time. –John Berger Another Way of Telling On the cover of Linda Hutcheon’s The Canadian Postmodern (1988) is an image by Canadian photographer Nigel Scott (Figure 1), which Hutcheon describes as paradigmatic of postmodern parody because it simultaneously exploits and undercuts traditional photographic discourse, in this instance those traditions concerning the representation of women (8). Here the female icon is poised for activity rather than passivity , she does not offer herself as an object of the male gaze, and she is divesting herself of an “everyday banal bathrobe” rather than sporting the wings of the Rolls Royce icon that Hutcheon 1 Parts of this article appeared in a somewhat different form in Stories of the Middle Space: Reading the Ethics of Postmodern Realisms (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010). I am grateful to McGill-Queen’s University Press for permission to adopt that material here. dEboRah c. boWEn 230 reads as the target of Scott’s parody. In particular, argues Hutcheon , the obtrusive backdrop points to “the entire photograph’s existence as construction” rather than reflection. This rhetoric obviously spoke to a cultural moment when the notion of a “final definitive inscription of subjectivity” had not yet quite died. Hutcheon was then, as always, interested not in any sterile narcissistic reworking of the past imaginary but rather the way in which parodic intertextuality “brings about a direct confrontation with the issue of the relation of art to the world outside it— to the world of those social, cultural, and ultimately ideological systems by which we all live our lives” (9). And now speaking to a later cultural moment, but sharing with Hutcheon the same underlying concern, I’d like to consider that confrontation again, this time looking at the photographic centre-pages in Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries (1993). For when a novel about fictional characters includes a swath of photographs of these characters,akindofreaderlyvertigoensues.Mustnotsuchphotographs , however thoroughly co-opted for the author’s own purposes, inevitably affirm the intransigent materiality of their original human subjects? Figure 1 poStmodERn REaliSm 231 One of the strangely powerful things about a photograph is that it attests simultaneously to its subject’s reality and to that subject’s absence. Whereas a drawing is a translation from appearances , a photograph is the trace of a material relation: “Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them” (Berger, Another Way 93, 96). Because a photograph is developed directly from the light and time and materiality of the actual world, the co-optation of photographs into much contemporary fiction can be read, as I’ve argued elsewhere, as paradigmatic of a postmodern kind of realism that recognizes the “givenness” of the empirical world alongside the necessarily constructed nature of our apprehensions of it.2 In this paper I particularly want to consider the implications of that “alongside .” And apropos material traces, it seems appropriate to begin by turning first to a phenomenologist and then to a Marxist, each of whom has meditated extensively on the nature of photography . bartHes aLongside berger When Roland Barthes’s mother died, not much more than a year before his own death, his interest in the semiotics of photography dramatically intensified. In Camera Lucida (1980), he reasserted the conventional belief that photographs can testify to the certainty of what has been; indeed, he turned away from his earlier embrace of an endless deferral of textual reference and toward photography as “authentication itself.” He speaks here of the photograph as “a certificate of presence,” not merely an image but “reality in a past state” (87, 82); he argues that “[t]he realists, of whom I am one […] do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of a past reality : a magic, not an art” (88). If Barthes is to be taken seriously as a self-styled realist, it is clear that the category of “realism” as 2 See Stories of the Middle Space: Reading the Ethics of Postmodern Realisms, Chapter 4, 166–198. dEboRah c. boWEn 232 traditionally understood, with the implications it carries of mimetic transparency and stable self-present subjectivities, must undergo some seismic shifts. Moreover, Barthes argues that what a photograph shows cannot be put into words; in...