Exposed Memories: Family Pictures in Private and Collective Memory

History, Narration, and the Frozen Moment of Photography in Richard Powers’ Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

55 That photography goes hand in hand with narration hardly needs to be explained . We take photographs in order to be able to remember an event, a person, a moment. And when we remember, we reconstruct the story of that long-past—perhaps also long-forgotten—moment, made present and alive again by the impact of the picture. It leads us out of its frame, out of its “frozen” timelessness, back into time, into story, circumstance, or back to the person we once were or whom we once loved—the sepia tone of the picture reminding us of how much time has passed since then; how much of our time: Here is the childhood face, there the house and street that have long since disappeared. The past brought, in this way, back to life is thus always a memento mori—a re-embodiment of mental images of people we once saw and touched now long gone; History, Narration, and the Frozen Moment of Photography in Richard Powers’ Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée Heinz Ickstadt 5 HISTORY, NARRATION, AND THE FROZEN MOMENT OF PHOTOGRAPHY and thus, implicitly, also a memento of our own inevitable dying, of our own passing into oblivion—unless there is someone to develop the stories hidden in the pictures by remembering them. This is indeed their raison d’être: they at once embody and create memory, hide and generate narrative. The photographic image always needs a “reader” who remembers and narrates, who makes its muted story heard and felt.1 In the early and mid-1980s, Richard Powers and the Korean-American writer, filmmaker, and performance artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha published texts that make use of the photographic image in distinctly different ways. In both cases, a photograph is connected with a search for identity as well as with an effort to connect the present with the past. In Cha’s case, the picture of the mother—the cover picture of Dictée—marks a personal loss but also a history of colonial repression. The nameless speaker has to remember and in remembering also to destroy that history in order to find “self” in the rediscovery of her lost maternal origin. The complex narrative of Powers’ Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985) is an imaginative interpretation of the photo displayed on the book’s cover—August Sander’s photograph “Young Westerwald Farmers on Their Way to a Dance,” which Sander took in late 191 or early 1914. (Powers dates it to May 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I.) Powers came upon it quite unexpectedly at a photo exhibition at the Boston Fine Arts Museum. Its very impact, “the great amounts of historical narrative that photo ignited in my brain,” made him quit his job and write the novel (his first). The young men’s direct gaze at the spectator seemed to invite, even challenge, him to interpret their history. It is a history yet unknown to them but apparent to him; positioned in the contemporary present: he knows the nature of the “dance” the future has in store for them. In their eyes, however, the author (as well as the narrator of the novel) believes he can recognize their terrified awareness of what was soon to come—together with an urgent appeal to the observer that he, positioned in the future, unfold the narrative contained in this awareness, so that, by connecting the present with the past, the past could “intersect” and interfere with the present.2 In this way, the novel itself is a narrative “dance” between stories situated on different time levels and told in different voices and from different perspec- HISTORY, NARRATION, AND THE FROZEN MOMENT OF PHOTOGRAPHY 5 tives: “the past looking full-faced into the present and recognizing it.” Powers calls this “remembering forward” and “trying to open a conversation” between different time periods, discourses, or areas of experience normally sealed off from each other.4 Although Sander’s picture is not a family photograph, Powers’ interpretation of it makes it one. By having one of his protagonists recognize himself in one of the photographed figures, Powers makes him trace the tentative lines of a (his) family history—a history he most likely makes up but that is also part of a collective experience the author shares with his readers. Perhaps it...