Photofiction as Family Album: David Galloway, Paul Theroux and Anita Brookner

Author(s): BRENT MacLAINE

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal , Spring 1991, Vol. 24, No. 2
(Spring 1991), pp. 131-149
Published by: University of Manitoba

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780508

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 Photofiction as Family Album:
David Galloway, Paul Theroux
and Anita Brookner

BRENT MacLAINE

Among the large number of novels which combine photography with na

tive—either by actually including photographs with texts, like Michael Ondaa
Coming Through Slaughter (1970), or simply by describing photographs, lik
Julio Cortazar's "Blowup" (1967)—novels which pretend to be family pho
graph albums define a recognizable subgenre. Family album novels, like mos
photofictions, explore the tension between the simultaneously factual
interpretative qualities of photographs. More specifically, in their attempt
create a fictional family history, such novels treat the family photograph a
reliable historical document, on the one hand, and as as a highly unstable an
misleading image, on the other. Narrators in family album novels, although
they may begin disinterestedly or nostalgically, usually end by question
both the photographic image and the family itself as instruments of coheren
More often than not, when the narrators look at the detailed context of liv
beyond the images, they discover that the photographic portrayal of the fam
is a distorting one—certainly, an incomplete one—although this discove
does not preclude or dissipate the power of the romanticizing image.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables (1851) establishes
precedent for this subgenre, and it can be found in diluted or altered form
a range of contemporary novels: Margaret Laurence's The Diviners (1974), Larr
Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall; A Family Album (1976), Timoth
Findley's The Wars (1977) and The Telling of Lies (1986), Margaret Atwoo
Surfacing (1972), Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981) and Gunter Grass's The T

Mosaic 24/2
0027-1276-91/010131-19S01,50©Mosaic

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132 Brent MacLaine

Drum (1959). The most ambitious and complex examples of contemporary

family photo novels, however, are David Galloway's A Family Album and Paul
Theroux's Picture Palace (both published in 1978) and Anita Brookner's
Family and Friends (1985).
Each of these novels uses the metaphor of the family photo album as a
narrative device to explore the tensions between the public, immediately
accessible meaning of the photograph and its private, often mysterious and
inaccessible meaning, which, when revealed, shows or "tells" a quite different
"picture." The photographs in these works—whether included with the text
(on the dust jacket in the case of Galloway's novel) or only implied and
described (in the case of Theroux's and Brookner's novels)—record in a
documentary way family events and characters, while the narrative accompanying
the photographs uncovers the unrecorded events, biographies, psychologies
and souls. On the one hand, the narrators of these novels appear to have before
them valuable documents that reveal much; on the other hand, the documents
exist as pictorial barriers which must be penetrated to permit access to a truer
document of the past. In each case, the world as shown and the world as the
narrator knows or discovers it to be are positioned in an ironic collision.
Although the playfully experimental and interdisciplinary nature of the project
gives these novels a post-modernist patina, the narratives generated from
family album photographs are, in fact, in the service of a recognizably romantic/
realist enterprise: the exploration of the way that significant images from the
narrator's personal or family past shape adult sensibility.
The narrator in such novels usually begins with an investigative interest in
the lives and moments documented in the photographs. Gradually, however, the
"research" reveals a biographical or autobiographical compulsion: the narrator,
who stands in a fractured or problematic present, in the midst of a declining or
fragmenting family, undertakes seemingly disinterested research into the family
of the past in an attempt to solve the problem of his or her alienated distance
from the photographed family and to regain the sense of unity and coherence
suggested by the photographs—regardless of the "facts" discovered or re
membered about the family. Indeed, the "distortion" of the facts—by reason of
the pictorial transformation of people and events into images—becomes a
metaphor for the transformation, in the narrator's memory and imagination, of
the past into stilled moments of unity and revelation—into what, in terms of
Wordsworthian romanticism, we might describe as "spots of time."
Unlike memory and imagination, however, the photograph does not so
much transform the real as carry two versions of it simultaneously. This
ontological ambivalence of the photographic image—its simultaneous ability
to evidence reality and to alter it—is recognizable in the very contractual
nature of the photograph's invention in the early nineteenth century. As
historians of photography (Rosenblaum; Gernsheim) have noted, Joseph
Nicephore Niepce's initial experiments with fixing images on chemically
sensitized plates relied on etchings and engravings for their subject matter. At
the same time, Daguerre, an accomplished painter, especially of dioramas,

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 Family Album Novels 133

was also attempting to fix images, particularly those of the camera obscura.
He had constructed various boxes with lenses and other mechanisms but
lacked the technical expertise and science to proceed further. Daguerre, the
artist, was in need of a chemistry and a mechanism; Niepce, the technician and
chemist, until he turned to the natural scenes outside his window, was in need
of a graphic image. The resulting partnership and legal contract established
from the beginning the dual nature of the photograph—it was referred to as a
"mirror with a memory" (Scharf 33). "The history of photography," says
Susan Sontag, "could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different
imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truthtelling.. .a
legacy from the sciences..." (86). While the evidential nature of the photo
graph has from the beginning been aligned with its supposed ability to stabilize
the world "realistically," its destabilizing or transforming function, as family
album novels show, is more variously aligned with a number of compromising
factors: the photographer's selection and manipulation of the image, the
subject's posturing, private or privileged knowledge, context, nostalgia, memory,
artfulness and elegiac purpose.

In Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, the ontological ambiva

lence of the photograph's status is revealed through Holgrave—a daguerreotypist
and possibly the first photographer to be depicted in literature. Holgrave's
mysterious and deceptively threatening nature springs from his dual if not
divided interests: on the one hand, he arrives at the Pyncheon house as a kind
of family investigator, objectively and analytically gathering information to
solve a crime; on the other hand, he follows the conventions of the artist by
living in the gable room and making, as he says, "pictures out of sunshine"
(110). Although he is emotionally cool—Phoebe feels "his eye, often; his
heart, seldom or never" (216)—he warms enough to marry her after he solves
the mystery of the Pyncheons. That he is aware that the photograph can both
record and interpret reality is perhaps clearest when he shows Phoebe the fact
of Judge Pyncheon's death documented and confirmed with a daguerreotype
miniature. "'This is death!' shuddered Phoebe, turning very pale" (372).
Holgrave explains: "As a point of evidence that may be useful to Clifford, and
also as a memorial valuable to my self... I use the means at my disposal to
preserve this pictorial record of Judge Pyncheon's death" (372-73).
The daguerreotype miniature, then, has both a public and a private func
tion; it is a statement about events and people in the factual, material world,
and at the same time, a useful autobiographical touchstone. According to
Carol Schloss, Holgrave represents Hawthorne's way of recording "his un
derstanding of the photograph as an artifact and his anxieties about photog
raphy as a process of human interaction" (41). That anxiety concerns Hawthorne's
own artistic debate about the ethics of the artist's detached observation and the
necessity of his intervention, what she calls a debate "between his wish that

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134 Brent MacLaine

viewing could be a passive experience and his knowledge that it could not be,
between his desire to be disinterested and his conviction that disinterest was
impossible..." (50). Holgrave is caught between his supposed disinterested
role as a documentarian of events and characters and his obviously very
personal interest in the Pyncheon affairs by virtue of his being Maule's
descendent, not to mention his falling in love with Phoebe. In the end,
Hawthorne shows that, like the novelist, neither the photograph nor the
photographer can remain disinterested.
In addition to addressing these issues, Hawthorne also explores another
central concern of contemporary writers of family album fiction: namely, the
way that photography intervenes in family history. Holgrave, the photographer,
becomes the archetypal meddler in family affairs. His "wizardry," his da
guerreotype which reveals both character and mystery, is, after all, primarily
responsible for undoing the curse on the Pyncheon house and family, a curse
initiated by his ancestor Matthew Maule who was executed for witchcraft.
Holgrave is aware of his ancestry and, in fact, sees his relationship to the
family in that light: "I represent the old wizard," he says, "and am probably
as much of a wizard as ever he was" (390). With the truth-revealing power of
his camera—that is, by detecting a character's likeness not immediately ap
parent when looking at the interpretative "distortions" of the painted portrait—
he solves the mystery, thus breaking Maule's supernatural hold on the family.
Holgrave extricates the family from the curse of its romantic past, freeing its
surviving members from the threat of poverty and divisiveness. Thus, while
Holgrave enters the novel primarily in the guise of the artist, surrounded by
a romantic legacy, he operates chiefly as an instrument of démystification.
In this respect, he is like Austen's Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey who
rescues Catherine from the excesses of her Gothically romantic fantasies, for
what the narrator says of Austen's heroine toward the end of that novel applies
just as much to Hawthorne's Phoebe: "the visions of romance were over"
(164). Although Holgrave, like Henry, gets the heroine, the marriage in
Hawthorne's novel has additional significance. Having been a country sales
man, an editor of a small-town newspaper, a peddler of cologne water, a
traveling dentist, a packet-ship official and a dabbler in mesmerism, Holgrave,
when he proposes to Phoebe, makes a momentous decision. He agrees to
confine himself within "ancient limits" and to "set out trees" and "make
fences" (377). The domestication of the itinerant photographer, his embracing
the domestic vision and his role in extricating Phoebe and her family from the
oppressions of a romance, are as much emphases in The House of Seven Gables
as the more obvious themes of lingering retribution or the tyranny of the past
over the present.
The literary depiction of the connection between photography and family
history has, of course, a historical and social context. Walter Benjamin notes
that portraiture quickly became central to nineteenth-century photography
partly because "the cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead" (228)
became a defense mechanism against the loss of value accompanying the rise

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 Family Album Novels 135

of technical modes of reproduction. As early as 1871, a contributor to Macmillan' s

Magazine noted the prominence of photographs in the lives of lower-class
families: "Anyone who knows what the worth of family affection is among the
lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits stuck over a
labourer's fireplace...will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the
tendencies, social and industrial, which are everyday sapping the healthier
family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all
the philanthropists in the world" (qtd. in Sontag 203). Thus, relatively early
in its history, photography formed a democratic alliance with the family,
particularly those families besieged by the forces of nineteenth-century in
dustrialism. Photography, the Macmillan contributer feels, may help to alle
viate the social and economic pressures which threaten to destabilize family
ties and affections.
Hawthorne's Holgrave fits the pattern inasmuch as he is instrumental in
rescuing Hepzibah from the poverty of her pennystore and Phoebe from a very
uncertain future by establishing what the Macmillan writer calls "healthier family
affections." The fall of the portrait and the efficacy of the photograph, not to
mention the marriage of an itinerant odd-jobber, like Holgrave, into the
established Pyncheon family, may serve as emblems for the increasing democ
ratization and ascendency of image-making in the nineteenth century; as John
Tagg has recently pointed out, "portraits" were no longer the exclusive prop
erty of the wealthy. Although the photographs in contemporary family album
novels do not so easily reestablish family unities and affections, they do testify
to a nostalgia for such values, if not to a current affirmation of them.

The first-person narrator in David Galloway's A Family Album, discussing

the significance of the ascendency of family photographs at the expense of
traditional portraiture, notes that, while photography made "portraiture uni
versally accessible" and "eroded the aesthetic exclusivity of the ancien regime
(103)," its rapid widespread success meant that family photos never achieved
the value accorded by rarity to painted portraits. Yet, he also notes that, under
certain conditions, family photos do accrete a value of their own:

It thus requires a peculiar convergence of aesthetic energy, nostalgia, deco

rative flair, historical vision, and an available frame of the proper proportions
to rescue even a single one of these photographic mementos from the mothballed
recesses of the guestroom closet or the album with its bruised corners and
discoloring pages.
With the passage of time, however, certain photographs seem to become
particularly ripe for such display. Oddly enough, they may not have seemed
so at the time....Left long enough in the darkness of a bureau drawer, such
studies can be radically transformed by generous patinas of sentimentality
and nostalgia and thus fittingly robed for resurrection. (103-04)

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136 Brent MacLaine

Thus, just as Holgrave's daguerreotype operates both as a "point of evidence"

and as a "memorial," so Galloway's narrator understands that what the pho
tograph records may be transformed by an essentially romanticizing process,
which, like Wordsworth's recollections in tranquility, give new life to or
"resurrect" the data of the original experience.
The resurrection of photographs in A Family Album—five snapshots and
one studio portrait—includes lengthy analysis in the form of naive or disinter
ested "reading" of the image, disclosure of remembered details, facts and
information from other family members (what the narrator calls, "broken
narrations, irretrievable flashbacks, and blurred histories" [102]) and not least,
speculation and elaborate imagining inspired by the photographic image.
More than once the narrator "reads" into the photographs possible or imagi
nary stories only to contradict these readings with other information available
only to the narrator as a member of the family. Like Holgrave, then, the
narrator initially assumes a disinterested pose; he appears to be a researcher
carefully making inductive conclusions based solely on the information before
him—and us, since the photographs are reproduced on the dust jacket. The
researcher's pose is strengthened by the inclusion, before the discussion of
each photograph, of a historical and technical description of the particular
camera and a brief biography of each photographer. As a researcher, Galloway's
narrator finds himself involved in a kind of epistemological dialogue between
what can be logically and factually inferred from the photographs and what
can be discovered or is known independently of them. The drama of this
dialogue is the drama of the detective pitting his inductive skills against both
unforthcoming data and sometimes contradictory information.
Although Galloway's first-person narrator keeps a reticent distance from the
stories of the photographed characters, gradually, if reluctantly, he reveals that
the family is his own and that the photographs have been in his possession for
more than a quarter of a century. He knows and, on occasion, reveals more than
it would be logically possible to infer about the people in the photographs. For
example, in regard to the cover's photographic portrait of a small boy standing
with his arm around a dog sitting on a table (see Fig. 1), the narrator says: "Even
as an old man, the boy will find it easier to extend his clumsy, gruff affection
to a dog than to another human being" (46). The narrator, then, has privileged
information which, as the tone of resentment and criticism betrays, compro
mises his previously "objective" description of the photograph:

To the left, a dog sits on a table. To the right, his arm around the dog,
stands a boy in a checkered cap....The boy's arm embraces the dog in such
a way that his entire right hand is visible at the side of the dog's neck. The
position is clearly awkward to maintain, placing great stress on the muscles
of forearm and wrist. Two possibilities exist to account for such stiltedness.
Either the photographer has bent boy and dog into this essence of boy-with
dog pose, or the boy himself has adopted it for reasons of his own. Such
evidence as we have would point to the latter as a more probable explanation.
The boy's hand, held in stiff right angle to the neck of the dog, bears on the
second finger a squarish ring whose glint suggests at least an approximation
of silver. (41)

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 Family Album Novels 137

V <:«

EV
■
>■* 1 ^

1Ü

ig«Kâ|

Fig. 1. Photograph from Front Cover of A Family Album by David Galloway.

Reprinted with Permission of John Calder.

Galloway's narrator is an exemplary detective of the revealing detail and an

imaginative interpreter of the stilled gesture. Relishing inferential conclusions
and savoring closely observed particulars and nuance, he is an expert "practical
critic" of the photograph; certainly part of the fascination of Galloway's novel
is the way in which the narrator, like Sherlock Holmes, "reads closely" and
discovers cleverly.
There is also a kind of fascination in noticing the way in which such
disinterested analysis is betrayed by the narrator's personal involvement. In
the case of the cover photograph, the observations about the ring lead to
speculation about the boy's vanity, which the narrator knows all too well
because the "boy," we discover, is the narrator's father. Thus, the objective

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138 Brent MacLaine

description of the pose and the ring dove-tails with the narrator's resentmen
of his father's emotional coolness and vanity. Frequently in A Family Album,
the disinterested analysis of the public image blurs into a private account of
some aspect of the narrator's autobiography, which, we may legitimatel
speculate, is also a version of the author's. The autobiographical connectio
between author and narrator is supported by the fact that narrator and auth
share the name David, and careful attention to the novel's complex genealogy
reveals that the narrator was born, like Galloway, in 1937. Both the narrator
mother and the author's mother are named Kathlyn, and the boy in th
photograph is named James Henry, as is Galloway's father. In addition, th
narrator informs us that he has lived in Germany and that his son has
English accent, details congruent with Galloway's having worked in bo
Hamburg and Sussex. It would appear, then, that the novel is a thinly disguis
fiction based on the photographs of Galloway's own family (see Fig.2).
Family album history is rarely disinterested, as Galloway's narrator explain
in regard to his relationship to the family photographs: "Dialogue begins,
born fresh out of our own deep, dread yearning. Somewhere in that dialogue
is hidden the clue to who I am..." (225). Like Holgrave, who, in the proce
of unraveling the story of the Pyncheon family and his relationship to them
forsakes odd-jobbing and secures an identity for himself, Galloway's narrator
searches for an identity while telling the history of his own family.
One part of this search for identity involves creating a sense of coherence
finding a place for oneself in the context of family images. Sontag explains th
phenomenon of constructing family photo albums in terms of a family rite:
"Through photographs each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself—
a portable kit of images that bear witness to its connectedness." Such chronic
constructing began, according to Sontag, at the very time when the industri
alization of Europe and America began to assault the coherence and continuity
of the extended family: "A family's photograph album is generally about the
extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it" (8-9).
As a chronicler of connectedness, Galloway's narrator is admirably diligent
in his research, but, as Holgrave has shown us, a disinterested narrative o
family photographs is impracticable. Galloway's narrator identifies the prob
lem when he discusses the third photograph in the novel, a photograph of tw
girls in a goatcart: "here we can let play the force field of imagination as onc
we moved a magnet behind a paper covered with lead filings to make up new
patterns and counterpatterns..." (117). Galloway's presentation of varian
readings of this single photograph illustrate well that any narrative account
the image is necessarily multiple and even contradictory because of the way
in which imagination is magnetized by the image. Thus, although recordin
the history of the photographs occupies a large part of the narrator's time, i
is chiefly in the service of generating narrative. Galloway's narrator, a kind
Little Jack Horner, may sit down before the great pie of history, but h
preference is clear: "from the history, perhaps, we can at last pull the plum
a story..." (225). Halla Beloff in Camera Culture prefers a fishing metapho

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 Family Album Novels 139

"vt

Fig. 2. Composite Photographs from Back Cover of A Family Album by David Galloway.
Reprinted with Permission of John Calder.

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140 Brent MacLaine

family albums "are hooks on which are caught the 'real' story" (192), b
which she means the personal narrative.
This issue is addressed in the "Preface" at the outset of A Family Album in
the form of a historically accurate but presumably fictional letter written b
Niepce to his son. The inventor of photography speculates that "heliography
will give us another kind of record...one which will almost certainly alter the
most fundamental manner of our perception of the world in which we live, an
of the past that produced us" (21). Galloway emphasizes here that photograph
turns movement, moment and the texture of the present into "living history
It is, however, precisely this death of the present moving moment whic
challenges both viewer of the photograph and novelist, for the viewer—a
especially the novelist—insists on reactivating the photograph, because,
though it may be a "good likeness," it is static and hence unrealistic. Th
photograph, then, is an esthetic object that demands narrative; it challenges
the writer, dares him, invites him. Niepce, in the letter to his son, wonders,
he can fix images of people, "what quaint narratives and fragments of narrativ
could they suggest?" (21). Like novelists after him, Niepce recognizes th
photographs generate stories. Photographer Jean Möhr concurs: "I often feel
the need to explain my photos, to tell their story. Only occasionally is a
image self-sufficient" (Berger & Mohr 42). Roland Barthes, in Camera L
cida, makes the same point when he captions a photograph of a boy name
Ernest thus: "It is possible that Ernest is still alive today: but where? how
What a novel!" (83).
Why can we not leave the image static and story-less? The narrative
compulsion, I would argue, the novelist's ability to simulate movement over
time, is especially challenged by the stasis in the photograph. In this sense,
photography and fiction are jealous bedfellows. The latter is an essentially
temporal art which looks jealously—or even fearfully—at an essentially spatial
art—and vice-versa. Family album novels bring fiction and photography to
gether in such a way that each art aspires to the condition of the other. The
novel pretends to be an album; the photographs pretend to tell a story.
This story is not a single narrative generated by a single photograph; rather,
it is a story of connections between various photographs, the result being a
constructed coherence—an album. In the course of this project, biographers
and novelists—and for that matter, amateur photographers—when they con
struct family albums attempt to restore, however unsuccessfully, to the essentially
spatial art of photography a temporal dimension which photographs either
ignore or defy. This recreated narrative time of the album may be accidental
or purposeful. It may be simply chronological, or it may be arranged according
to significant events: birthday party, graduation, picnic or holiday. Yet the
album will necessarily record, even if unwittingly, past time. It records an age,
and in this way family history and social history are overlaid. Galloway's
novel gives us not only the history of the narrator's family, but also the history
of parts of early twentieth-century rural and small-town America, and, because
of the pre-chapter material on cameras and photographers, a historical sketch

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 Family Album Novels 141

of photography as a bonus. Family album novelists, eschewing grand history,

the epic canvas of revolutions, wars and heroes, prefer to transform, in fictional
terms, the modest histories of family quarrels, picnics and weddings. Clearly,
Galloway thinks in these terms when he imagines a photograph of his aunts
and uncles, not long before their deaths, as "some royal family before the
merciless tide of revolution" (202). He is, perhaps, alluding to a photograph
of the Romanovs.

Because of these layers of history—but especially because of the layer of

family history—the novels assume an elegiac mode. They are about the life of
a family which once was. They have what Roland Barthes says is distinctive
of all photographs, "a funereal immobility at the very heart of the moving
world..." (5-6). Photography, for Barthes, is "a kind of primitive theater....a
figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead"
(32). Galloway's narrator agrees: "Ultimately," he says, "photographs are
morbid objects, and the making of photograph albums is the assembling of
books of the dead" (224).
Family album novels are, thus, elegiac in two respects: first, they acknowl
edge the death of living moments behind the "theater" of narrative generated
by the photograph, and secondly, they memorialize loved ones for narrators,
while, at the same time, reminding them of their own mortality and their
position in the great chain of the family chronicle. "Photography is the invention
of mortality," claims Sontag; "photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability
of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photog
raphy and death haunts all photographs of people" (70). In regard to the final
photograph in A Family Album, which depicts four middle-aged picnickers
(the narrator's mother and three of her siblings), the narrator says: "Thus
composed together, they stand for the day's last act of commemoration. It is
also the last of an uncountable series of photographs that have been made of
them for over a half a century. If this were the final photograph of some royal
family before the merciless tide of revolution struck, or of a theatrical team
before its final performance in a theatre that was to collapse thunderously
during the curtain calls, it would be endowed with no greater dimension of
tragic foreboding" (202). Although this photograph reminds the narrator of
their deaths—within three months after the photograph was taken, two of the
siblings died—it also establishes for the narrator, what he calls their "ordination"
as elders of the family. The snapshot, like all memorials, reminds him of their
survival and the texture of their lives; "it is the life we want to know about,
not death" (224). The Tightness of this claim is, perhaps, supported by Beloff's
observation that "the ultimate impropriety by contemporary Western rules
would be picture-taking at a funeral" (199). Although photographs of dead
loved ones were common in the nineteenth century, it is hardly imaginable, for
example, that Galloway's contemporary narrator would substitute a photograph
of dead family members for a photograph of those same people "alive."
Photograph albums may be "books of the dead," but family album narrators
are, as Galloway claims, in search of life—narrative life.

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142 Brent MacLaine

The search for identity and narrative in family albums, however, is compli
cated by the problem of selection. Family albums necessarily tell a fragmented
and partial story. As Galloway's narrator admits, "When we consider the
problem, the number of things not visible in this photograph bulks over
whelmingly large" (50). And elsewhere, he confesses that the photograph
"yields its secrets slowly, reluctantly, and perhaps not at all" (51). Beloff is
detailed and explicit about the problems of selection in family albums:

We do not represent ourselves and our relations, neighbours and friends

in the more mundane aspects of our daily lives. We do not show work, even
if it were available for showing. We do not show the hurly-burly of argument.
Boredom, disagreement, preoccupation, sadness—none of these are allowed
to exist. They are expunged by two manoeuvres—the narrow focus of events
snatched, and the commands of "the pose".... It is this selectivity or, more
properly, partiality, that makes albums meaningless and therefore tedious for
outsiders. They see the surface uniformity in content and style. (191-92)

The narrative life of family album novels is drawn chiefly from these limita
tions. To get beyond the tedium of the family album photograph, narrators
attempt to restore the texture and—what Beloff does not mention—the drama
of life which has been removed by a narrow focus and posing.

In Paul Theroux's Picture Palace, the album metaphor is complicated by

the fact that the narrator, Maude Coffin Pratt, is a professional photographer,
seventy years old, famous and busy with a retrospective exhibition of her
work. Frank Fusco, the novel's museum curator, thinks that Maude's photographs
"laid end to end in a retrospective...would tell [her] complete story" (4). Like
the album photos in Galloway's novel, Maude's professional ones occasion a
narrative. But the retrospective "album" in the art gallery cannot, as Frank
Fusco thinks, "tell the complete story," a point which is made clear when two
young photographers visit Maude in hopes of seeing some of her famous
photographs; she sits instead with a family photo album on her lap, stalled at
an old photograph of her family. The young people are impatient, but Maude
insists that they see, as she says, "this picture, my clumsy lyric stuck on the
first page of my first album" (48).
Frank's idea of a story is limited to the progress of Maude's career and
public persona. The real story of Picture Palace is an autobiographical one
initiated by the "famous" photographs which Frank is researching, sorting and
arranging. For Maude, the family circumstances surrounding these photo
graphs and the memories, whether fond or painful, create a much more
important retrospective than the one in the museum. Maude's life, then, must
be doubly exposed, which explains her contradictory statements. "My life was
in my pictures," she claims, echoing Galloway's narrator who says that in a
snapshot he took of his aunts and uncles he could discover "the clue to who

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 Family Album Novels 143

[he is]" (225). Yet she says elsewhere: "I know the life I've had, and it ain't
them pictures....It's all the pictures I never took" (30).
Thus, while many pages of Theroux's novel are devoted to descriptions of
Maude Coffin Pratt's professional photographs, we also notice that many of
the photographs concern her family and point to events exposed only to the
emulsion of memory. It quickly becomes evident that there are two picture
palaces, one the windmill outside her Cape Cod family home which contains
boxes of her negatives and prints, and a second picture palace, Maude's mind
and memory, which contains a quite different story from the one told through
her photographs. Like Holgrave's daguerreotype which is both "evidence"
and "memorial," Maude's photographs have two lives: a public one for which
Maude has scorn, and a private one comprising memories which, once stirred
and uncovered, reveal an intensely intimate, dramatic and funny story about
which the public knows little.
In Another Way of Telling, John Berger articulates clearly the problem to
which Maude is responding: "All photographs have been taken out of a
continuity. If the event is a public event, this continuity is history; if it is
personal, the continuity, which has been broken, is a life story" (91). The
public thinks of Maud's photographs as autotelic and largely unrelated works
of art; Maud, like Galloway's narrator, thinks of photographs as opportunities
for biography and autobiography, stilled moments which initiate an attempt to
construct meaning and coherence in her life, a chance to restore the continuity
of a life story. The word "retrospective" aptly conveys both these public and
the private functions of Maud's photographs. In art-gallery terminology, the
retrospective is a look back at a career, at photographic achievements; in
autobiographical terms, the retrospective, like the album on Maud's knee, is
a look back at her emotional life, especially in regard to her family.
The public retrospective exhibition of Maude's photographs is a kind of
death. Frank Fusco intent on making his own career parasitically on Maude's
(she calls him a barnacle and a "skinflint critic mooching among the mas
terpieces"), says that he wants to "hang [her] pictures." "Hang them until
they're dead!" replies Maude, and later, "Frank Fusco, you're going to be the
death of me!" (109). She refers to curators and archivists as "undertakers," and
the retrospective she calls "morbid." "It was taxidermy, the artist and her work
laid dustily out like a museum turkey stuffed with dead grass and old newspapers"
(9). Like Barthes, who sees "that terrible thing which is in every photograph:
the return of the dead" (9), Maude calls her own portraits "stiffs," and with a
pun on the sexual, she refers to picture-taking as "doing"; "let me do you"; "I
did Lawrence." In an important sense, Picture Palace is not so much a story
about photography as it is a story about a photographer's discovery of its
limitations and her defection to narrative. Maude admits that a photograph is
"a deception [which] people took for the truth." She knows "how photography
lie[s] and mistakes] light for fact" (21).
Another reason for Maude's defection is her realization that photography
has been for her a substitute for lived experience. "Graham Greene," whom

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144 Brent MacLaine

Maude has been sent to photograph on assignment, makes this point forcefully
to her in an elaborate ruse which he stages in Bentley's restaurant. Recreating
the situation in his story "The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen," at a convenient
moment, Greene signals eight hired Japanese men to enter the restaurant and
seat themselves strategically, thereby presenting Maude with the perfect photo
opportunity: Graham Greene the artist with his creation behind him. Art
looking at life following art. Greene, however, pleads with Maude not to take
the photograph. "No," he says, "Don't spoil it....Let this be your first memory"
(32). Greene's advice echoes Jean Mohr's decision not to take photographs in
a hospital because "this time it was better to live totally on their [photographed
subjects'] side, so that the experience should be indelibly printed, not on film,
but in my memory" (79). Even photographers acknowledge, then, what Greene
makes Maude realize, that it is not always desirable to be more concerned with
rendering experience than with living it. The photograph, insists Theroux, is
no substitute for memory.
Maude's need to tell a story different from that of the public retrospective
is made forcefully clear when she discovers in Frank's room a set of pornographic
prints which, obviously, compromises his commitment to the higher esthetics
of photography, if it has not already been compromised by his careerism.
When Maude confronts Frank with her discovery—like Maude, he becomes
doubly exposed—he is indignant and threatens to call off the retrospective
because, as he says, "my personal life is in jeopardy—." "What about my
personal life!" replies Maude who notices a "scream rising in her throat"
(150). The scream is a measure of her frustration, for she knows that the
exhibition will not tell the true story which she needs to but fears to have told:
her fantasies of incestuous love for her bother, Orlando, her discovery of her
sister's not so fantastical incest with Orlando, her subsequent jealousy, their
deaths, her guilt, her failed socialization and immaturity, her father's middle
class debaucheries—all of the closets emptied in her middle-class Cape Cod
house. The proposed retrospective is, thus, partly psychotherapy, a peeling
away of the layers of tissue which soften and conceal the pain of a central
sore—a kind of photographic surgery of the unconscious.
Although Picture Palace is not any more ambitious in this regard than other
first-person narratives with a secret to tell, the special feature of Theroux's
novel is that he has used photography as a metaphor for art which both
conceals and reveals. As Maude says, "Photography is all about secrets, the
secrets in surfaces" (151). Whereas Hawthorne's Holgrave both conceals and
reveals with the one photograph, a pattern which is repeated in Galloway's
novel, Theroux has simply consigned one kind of photograph to revelation—
the public ones—and another kind or set of photographs to concealment—
Maud's family photographs. What he gains is an increased emphasis on the
personal compunctions behind art, photographic or otherwise, which are often
ignored, misread or confused in the public domain. Picture Palace is a plea for
sympathetic biography. Perhaps this dilemma explains Maude's dissatisfaction
with photography—significantly, the one photograph missing from her retro

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 Family Album Novels 145

spective is a self-portrait—and hence her turning to story rather than to

photography for autobiography. The narrative becomes Maude's way of clicking
the shutter of memory.
The real story in Picture Palace, then, is the family story which lies behind
the museum album. The tension between the photograph's public and private
functions becomes a statement about photography in particular and about art
in general, about the biographical necessity behind the public presentation. As
Maude complains: "People pretended that art was complete, but it had another
side that was hidden and human and wept and stank and snored and died; and
I wondered whether it was not perhaps truer than creation" (305). Maude's
photographs create an album of these two "sides."
With less drama and certainly with a less baroque plot, Galloway too
enjoyed the task of recovering a detailed family past and narrative continuity
from a small number of rather unimpressive snapshots which, to the outsider,
remain mute. While the narrator of A Family Album does not share the same
degree of psychological complexity or urgency for self-revelation as Maude,
he is, like her, privileged to information not in the photographs, and both exploit
the ironic clash between the propriety of a public image and the unphotographable
details of private lives. Like Hawthorne's Holgrave, these novelists and nar
rators use photographs to confirm the facts of experience while subverting
their documentary status by using the same photographs as memorials, as
personal icons of a more meaningful inner experience. The photographs be
come totems that reawaken a whole range of emotional responses, some of
them new, some of them remembered, some of them mere shadows of the
original.

When Anita Brookner reviewed Picture Palace and A Family Album in the
8 September 1978 edition of TLS, she found Theroux's elaborate plot and
sometimes flamboyant use of photographic metaphors for encouraging "alter
native perception" more successful than Galloway's somber treatment of
similar subject matter, which, she felt, required the reader's "gravest demeanour."
Acknowledging that Galloway's technique was "arresting," she, nevertheless,
found it too "easy to read the book as a documentary" (985). Family and Friends,
Brookner's own version of a family album novel written seven years later,
strikes a careful balance: it assiduously avoids excess or outrageousness, but
neither is there any mistaking the novel's fictivness for documentary. A slice
of Austen and James pared severely with contemporary skepticism and a
minimalist style, the novel is a stylistically tight, gently sardonic look at a
successful industrial family whose matriarch—Sofka Dorn—comes from the
old world of Continental Europe. Events are neither striking nor dramatic; the
neuroses, however debilitating, are understated.
The book takes for its interest the emotionally pinched lives of the over
bred and the well-moneyed. Behind the understatement of the opening—

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146 Brent MacLaine

"Here is Sofka in a wedding photograph..."—we discover, as we do in Picture

Palace and A Family Album, what does not show in the photograph, in this
case, a family's tensions, jealousies, mean-spirited disapprovals and discon
tent. In the way that cinema sometimes "releases" action from a still, Brookner
unfreezes the narrative from the wedding photograph to record the ruptures
and decline of the Dorn's monolithic nineteenth-century family structure.
Twentieth-century culture and "lifestyle" intrude: one of Sofka's daughters,
Betty, moves to New York and then to California to live pool-side, empty
headed, oppressed by a sexist movie magnate—Brookner's not very imaginative
idea of America as a metaphor for moral, intellectual and esthetic laxity.
Mimi, Sofka's other unmarried daughter, agrees to a loveless marriage with a
loyal, reliable foreman of the family. A baby who dies and future barrenness
are, apparently, the penalties which she pays. Frederick and Evie, her son and
daughter-in-law, remain distant in Europe and send telegrams when they are
not speeding about on their mopeds. Alfred, another son, remains unmarried
and childless.
The photographs described in the course of this narrative constitute stilled
moments of unsatisfactory respite from the scattering and fragmentation in the
face of which Sofka clings to a fragile power as an anachronistic matriarch.
The novel ends just as it began, with a description of another wedding photograph:
"Here they all are, family and friends, in the wedding photograph. It is the last
one in the album." While Sofka's immediate family remains either distant or
childless, however, in a young cousin the narrator notices a "Look on Vicky's
face, that imperious stare, so unlike a child, so like Sofka.... See the resem
blance. Wait for the dancing to begin" (187). The photograph album, then,
charts moments of composure and stiffening in the face of decline, but it also
charts the resilience of the family and its ability to rejuvenate itself. Artificial
and misleading as factual documents, the wedding photographs do, neverthe
less, like the weddings themselves, show moments of persistence, if not
hopefulness. "Wait for the dancing to begin" may be a tired repetition of the
narrator's, but it does indicate a continuation of sorts.
If Galloway's novel plots the invention of a family coherence by recording
the stories of relations and relationships, Brookner's novel, by contrast, but
using the same device, charts the dismantling of a family. Her characters
represent a twentieth-century diaspora of a nineteenth-century family, something
which Evie's father understands, for he warns Sofka privately of "conditions
in Europe and what they mean for families such as theirs. Wars and rumours
of wars. Let the children scatter, let them put down roots. Let them transplant.
Sofka knows that they are safe for the time being. But she also knows that they
can never go home again" (82). The echo of Thomas Wolfe underlines not
only the tragedy of exile and emigration but also the fact that for such families
as Sofka's the diaspora is a measure of safety, a way of ensuring that parts of
the family survive. The narrator of A Family Album, by contrast, must dis
cover connections of an already scattered family. Brookner's European novel
is a study of fragile continuity in the face of family dissolution, while Galloway's

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 Family Album Novels 147

American novel is a search for roots. In both cases, however, the photograph,
as metaphor and as narrative apparatus, betrays a lament for unity and con
nectedness, and in both works, there is an unmistakable nostalgia for the
family chronicle novel.
Michael Ignatieff, in his 1987 non-fictional family biography, entitled The
Russian Album (with ten pages of photographs), agrees that the photograph
album may be a response, generally, to threatened family unity, and specifically
in the case of his own Russian/Canadian family, to emigration and exile. Like
Brookner's fictional album, his family biography becomes a way of establishing
intimacy with a family, a heritage and a past from which his contemporary life
alienates him. According to Ignatieff, "For many families, photographs are
often the only artefacts to survive the passage through exile, migration or the
pawnshop. In a secular culture, they are the only household icons, the only
objects that perform the religious function of connecting the living to the dead
and of locating the identity of the living in time" (2).
About another nonfictional family album, Catherine Hanf Noren's The Cam
era of My Family (1976), Hella Beloff comments that such a book, which
includes family documents and photographs with a commentary, is "a human
correlate to the history books" (190), a description as apt for Noren's and
Ignatieff s real families as it is for the fictional ones of Galloway, Theroux and
Brookner. Moreover, given that Ignatieff acknowledges an element of fiction in
even his best attempts at historical accuracy, and given that Galloway's fictional
album quite possibly began with real snapshots, the line between fiction and
history, when it comes to family albums, may be impossible to draw.
Like Ignatieff's real family, then, Brookner's fictional one is a family in
exile; the wedding photos described in Family and Friends are gestures of
composure and coherence, a stiffening in the face of family disintegration—
icons to unity. As Jefferson Hunter says in regard to all family photos, they
"mitigate separations and keep the dispersed together" (162). Abbreviated,
fragmentary, incomplete, elusive, even misleading, the family album never
theless provides a measure of security in a world of contingency.

The play between photographs and narrative and the blurring of the line
between fiction and history might suggest that family album novels, like some
other photofictions (for example, Findley's The Wars and Ondaatje's Coming
Through Slaughter), qualify as postmodernist texts, specifically, in Linda
Hutcheon's terms, as "historiographie metafiction." Yet while family album
novels are anxious to foreground the representational maneuvers of photogra
phy, they are much less self-regarding about narrative. Family album fiction
may anticipate postmodernist photography, which, according to Hutcheon,
exposes "what may be the major photographic code, the one that pretends to
look uncoded" (44-45), but it is much less enthusiastic about exposing narra
tive codes.

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148 Brent MacLaine

One reason for these novelists' reluctance to bare the illusion of their
fictional representations may be the urgency of the narrator's need to establish
a firm sense of self, a project undertaken in the context of family history rather
than, as with historiographie metafiction, in the context of grand history. They
think that they can locate in family photographs authenticity of experience in
all its particularity of time and space, its "this-ness," or what Walter Benjamin
calls the "aura" of experience (228). But Galloway's, Theroux's, and to a
lesser extent, Brookner's narrators each comes to doubt—just as postmodernist
photography does—the ability of photographs to provide a truthful orientation
of the self in relation to the past and present. Their written stories, however,
show an unquestioning faith in narrative. Indeed, in Picture Palace, Maude's
decision to use narrative rather than photography for self-revelation amounts
to a kind of prize-giving in a contest among media over the right to appropriate
autobiography. Family album novels, then, utilize a cross-genre subversion:
they "quote" photographs in order to subvert them fictionally. Postmodernist
photography, unlike family album fiction, is primarily concerned with
foregrounding hegemonies; it is, as Hutcheon says, "political art of the first
order" (130). Family album fiction is directed not so much at the politics of
power as at the limitations of photographs to tell the stories of meaningful
inner lives.

Because family album novels rely on image fragments in this bio- or auto
biographical enterprise, they situate themselves, arguably, not so much in a
tradition of politically aware metafiction as in a romantic tradition stemming
from Wordsworth's autobiographical "spots of time." The authors of family
album novels have simply effected a shift; into the romantic progression of
significant experience mediated through memory and art, they have inserted
a complicating factor—the photograph—so that now the sequence becomes:
significant experience, photograph, memory, and art. In other words, family
album novelists attempt to imbue photographs with the status of remembered
images by restoring what the photograph removes from experience—narrative
meaning. John Berger addresses the issue in this way:

A photograph preserves a moment of time and prevents it being effaced

by the supersession of further moments. In this respect photographs might be
compared to images stored in the memory. Yet there is a fundamental differ
ence: whereas remembered images are the residue of continuous experience,
a photograph isolates the appearances of a disconnected instant.
And in life, meaning is not instantaneous. Meaning is discovered in what
connects, and cannot exist without development. Without a story, without an
unfolding, there is no meaning. (89)

The story which family album novelists unfold to giv

is largely elegiac and romantic in the same way th
tion of a significant experience in a subsequent m
elegiac—a recollection which in The Prelude he al
this context, when Holgrave in Hawthorne's rom

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 Family Album Novels 149

daguerreotype as a "memorial," he announces the need to render the photo

graphic image in personal terms. For Wordsworth, who did not contend with
the photographic image (at least directly), the lyricism of memory was ensured
by his very esthetic. Spots of time were both lyrical and significant precisely
because they were remembered, and vice versa; they were remembered be
cause they were poetic by nature. Memory was both sufficient and necessary.
We might speculate further and say that family album novels are searching
for a way of reintroducing romantic lyricism, spots of time, in a post-romantic
age. Photographs—and what are they, if they are not stilled spots of time?—
allow these authors that indulgence, that nostalgic wish for the completeness
of recovery in their fictional biographies or autobiographies. Like Wordsworth's
spots of time, moreover, the photographs "nourish" and "repair" the spiritu
ally downtrodden; in a post-romantic age, photographs are less likely to help
the spirit "when high" to mount "more high" as spots of time apparently did
for Wordsworth, but they are connected to "profoundest knowledge" and they
can be found "scattered everywhere," but especially, as with Wordsworth, in
the album of childhood.

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. London: Dent, 1932.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1970.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill, 1981.
Beioff, Halla. Camera Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.
Berger, John, and Jean Mohr. Another Way of Telling. London: Writers and Readers, 198
Brookner, Anita. Family and Friends. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
. "Sight Unseen." Rev. of A Family Album, by David Galloway, and Picture Pala
by Paul Theroux. Times Literary Supplement 8 Sept. 1978: 985.
Galloway, David. A Family Album. London: Calder, 1978.
Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison. The History of Photography. 1955. Rev. ed. London: Th
1969.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of Seven Gables. London: Oxford UP, 1924.
Hunter, Jefferson. Image and Word. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989.
Ignatieff, Michael. The Russian Album. New York: Viking, 1987.
Rosenblum, Naomi. A World History of Photography. 1984. Rev. ed. New York: Abbeville,
Scharf, Aaron. Pioneers of Photography. New York: Abrams, 1976.
Shloss, Carol. In Visible Light. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, 1973.
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988.
Theroux, Paul. Picture Palace. Boston: Houghton, 1978.

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