DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-618779
title: The end of illustration: the photographic novels of Henry James, André Breton, Virginia Woolf, and W. G. Sebald

description: This study takes the illustrated text as a privileged site for investigating the relationship between word and image; tracing the history of illustration from medieval illuminated manuscripts to Victorian novels, it offers a genealogy that culminates in a series of twentieth century novels that directly incorporate photography into the text. The relationship of text and image prior to the twentieth century was a complicated one, in which the illustration was supplementary to the text while at the same time acting as an interloper that threatened to dominate it. Correspondingly, critics tend to treat the illustration of a given text either as “irrelevant,” or, conversely, as the “key” to understanding the text’s hidden meanings. With the introduction of photography in the nineteenth century, as well as offset printing technologies that allowed photographs to be reproduced on the page, all this changed dramatically. Illustration fell largely out of favor, at the same time that a few select writers began to explore the possibilities of photographic illustration that did more than just illustrate. ❧ Henry James, André Breton, Virginia Woolf, and W. G. Sebald all worked in different literary traditions, and each writer’s decision to incorporate photography into their writings; yet, the problematic nature of photography itself, and its interaction with the juxtaposed text, creates a similar uncanny effect in all three writers’ works. James, who commissioned Alvin Langdon Coburn to photograph frontispieces for his New York Editions, saw the photographs as “empty stages”: refusing to allow Coburn to document the characters or the actions themselves, these photographs instead show landscapes eerily emptied of figures, which in turn reflect ghostly echoes back onto the text. ❧ Working in a Surrealist tradition that self-consciously attempted to reject much of traditional literary aesthetics, Breton’s Nadja uses photography as part of a complicated repertoire of stylistic and rhetorical techniques designed to undermine the function and reception of his work as a traditional novel—a tactic that, while not always successful, creates an unstable and constantly shifting text. ❧ Woolf, meanwhile, uses photography to undermine a different tradition, namely, the static and patriarchal history of both biography and portraiture: in her novel Orlando, Woolf satirizes the genre of biography through a supernatural figure whose life and actions becomes the mean to reinvest the function of “life writing.” Through photographs composed of its mythical protagonist, Orlando plays against the notion of portraiture, adopting a “snapshot” aesthetic that adheres closer to Woolf’s emphasis on interiority and subjectivity. ❧ Sebald, finally, inheritor of both Breton’s Surrealist tendencies and Woolf’s modernism, uses photographs in a series of novels which foreground the instability of memory and documentation, in turn highlighting the fragmented, ruinous condition of modernity. ❧ In all of these works, the photograph acts as an aberrant but crucial interruption; with its “auratic” (Benjamin) and “memento mori-like” (Sontag) qualities, the photograph bears a temporal specificity in direct conflict with that of the novel. In Woolf’s Orlando, for example, the eponymous protagonist is seemingly immortal, living well beyond the novel’s end, yet the photograph of her (in fact a portrait of Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West) bears the visible trace of Sackville-West’s own mortality (having died over forty-five years ago). In this context, the portrait’s caption—“Orlando at the present time”—raises layers of ambiguity that play on the relationship between text and image, since it is precisely the meaning of “the present time” over which  the two mediums disagree. ❧ Repeatedly in these works, the tension between text and photograph is expressed allegorically, following Paul de Man’s use of the term: “The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition…of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority.” The photographs here do not “illustrate”; rather they evoke the temporal bridge between the time of the text and the time of the novel, a semiotic repetition that can never be bridged.