Barthes for Barthes' Sake? Victorian Literature and Photography beyond Poststructuralism

Abstract

Scholars of nineteenth-century literature have been inspired by the multiplicity of connections that existed between writing and early photography. Critics have often argued that writers in Britain, America and elsewhere understood photography to be a profoundly realist practice, and as such that it stood as an analogue of literary realism. As this article demonstrates, such arguments have been enormously inf luenced by the Art History narrative of photography, as well as late twentieth-century poststructuralism. Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida has been particularly prominent. Yet though it has much to say about the phenomenology of posing, as well as the affective quality of images, Barthes' 'modest book' makes assumptions that have been problematized in subsequent photographic scholarship. These assumptions, which include indexicality and medium specificity, support an ideology of photographic realism. This ideology has dominated comparative studies of Victorian literature and early photography, including work on Thomas Hardy and Henry James. One result has been for literary critics to overlook the nuances of particular technologies, such as the daguerreotype, and to treat nineteenth-century photography as if it were a single medium. Another has been a privileging of modernism. This last result has been concomitant with a tendency for literary scholars to view photography solely as art. Important recent work in the history of photography has challenged the Art History narrative, but this has been slow to filter through to literary studies. This article will conclude by noting encouraging signs that this situation seems to be changing.Photography, which means 'writing with light', was woven through with writing from the very beginning. Connections formed in a variety of ways: the copying of written documents was, for example, one of photography's earliest proposed uses, while many people first experienced daguerreotypes and calotypes through written reports. Nineteenth-century authors often wrote about photography in greater depth than did practitioners. Inspired by these links, literary scholars have frequently turned to the aesthetic relations between photography and literature. According to Carol Shloss, critics can legitimately use the experience of photographers 'as analogues for the more hidden activities of writers' because writers and photographers often collected materials in similar ways (6). Though all analogues are, of course, arbitrary, the photography-writing nexus has proven particularly fruitful for literary studies.In order to examine the relationship between photography and writing in the long nineteenth century, it is necessary to be not only a literary scholar but also, to some extent, a historian of photography. This is because of the significant differences that existed between photographic methods during the Victorian period -differences that find no equal in the twentieth century. 1 Between World War One and the advent of digital, photography settled into a singular medium for ease of excha...