Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, by Daniel A. Novak

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction Carol Hanbery MacKay (bio) Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, by Daniel A. Novak; pp. xv + 222. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, £50.00, $95.00. While those of us who study nineteenth-century fiction have been turning to the period's photography for insight into the real life of Victorians and the realism practiced by many of their novelists, Daniel Novak has developed a counter-approach-arguing that photography can also be said to represent what is not real and that literary realism itself relies as much on typicality as on particularity and individuality. Novak starts out by asking the leading question, "what if we read photography and its interchangeable subjects as a 'model' for how we read character and identity in the realist novel?" (6), and he finds answers by looking especially at the composite or art photography of pioneer photographers Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Gustav Rejlander. There he uncovers instances of how they manipulated their composite images to construct what (for them) was more true than real, in a manner akin to the project of the realist novelist. The "erasure of identity and particularity" made possible by the "openness of the photographic frame" (21) thus exposes an "unlimited source for production of novel bodies and photographic narrative" (29). Novak's text unfolds through a series of chapters focused on reading the fictions of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar [End Page 145] Wilde against an intriguing selection of photographs, concluding with an "after-image" or coda entitled "Surviving the Photograph." Chapter 2, "Composing the Model Body: Re-membering the Body and the Text in Little Dorrit," builds upon links that Novak elucidates among photographic aesthetics, Karl Marx's theory of commodity production, and Dickens's notion of the artist's model articulated in his essays in Household Words. Utilizing Little Dorrit (1855-57), with supporting evidence from Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), this chapter seeks to establish the proposition that "what photography and realism shared was not necessarily their fidelity to detail but rather their inability to present these details in any coherent form" (63). In this respect, Little Dorrit's recurring supplication, "Do Not Forget," invokes dismemberment and abstraction as models for how the novel's fragmentation can transform into a whole-or how, from another angle, the reader's "serial amnesia" can translate into a comprehensible reading. By demonstrating that we forget in order to remember, Novak overtly recalls Roland Barthes's observation in S/Z (1970; trans. Richard Miller, 1974), "it is precisely because I forget that I read" (qtd. in Novak 71), recommending as well the ideal reader that Walter Benjamin describes as deriving from distraction the solution to the text's meaning. Novak's next chapter, "A Model Jew: 'Literary Photographs' and the Jewish Body in Daniel Deronda," lies at the center of his argument. In an earlier incarnation in Representations, this chapter has already had an impact on Eliotian criticism and theories of race. Here, Novak examines the composite photography Francis Galton employed to create a science of race typology, finding Galton's technique analogous to Eliot's depiction of her eponymous protagonist. One persistent critique of Daniel is that he seems more like a disembodied type than a realistic character, but Novak argues that this is precisely the point: "the more alienated and emaciated, spectral and disembodied, the more substantial and authentic the Eliot subject can become" (110). In the case of Daniel and the abstract notion of Jewish nationalism-both historically and in an indeterminate future-individuality and type conjoin to imagine a composite national body. Idealized yet typical, Daniel's sympathy may be, as the novel calls it, both "too reflective and diffuse" (qtd. in Novak 111), but as Novak contends, "this sympathetic flexibility, this 'negative capability' is the condition of possibility for Eliot's model of racial identity in the novel" (92). The fourth chapter, "Sexuality in the Age of Technological Reproducibility: Wilde, Photography, and Identity," juxtaposes two trials occasioned by Wilde's celebrity, ultimately showing how his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) foregrounds and allegorizes key issues raised and problematized by the...