Photographs and Photography in the Writings of E. M. Forster and his Contemporaries

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In a letter of 1901 to one of his mentors at Cambridge, the young E. M. Forster linked his own literary style to photography, writing, 'I think I have the photo graphic gift of which you spoke, but till I'm sure 1 can do no better, I don't mean to use it unreservedly'. Forster touched on photography again in Aspects of the Novel {1927) and in 1929 he identified the snapshot character of Sinclair Lewis's writing as the distinguishing feature of the American novelist's style. 'The method throughout is the photographic', wrote Forster, 'Click and the picture's ours'. There is a clear echo of this statement in the famous pronouncement made by Christopher Isherwood in 'A Berlin Diary' {1937): 'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking'.In addition to discussing photography in the context of literary theory, Forster incorporated fictitious photographs into all his novels, beginning with Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907) and A Room with a View (1908), continuing in Howards End (1910), and culminating in A Passage to India {1924). Although some of these 'photographs of the mind,' may appear to be commonplace, they are invariably repositories of memory and, in the context of Forster's narratives, often allude to past and future tragedies. Photographs of art and architecture take the place of the objects they represent and serve as metaphors for the cultures that produced them. While their first level of meaning is as souvenirs, such photographs also perform complex roles, signifying leisure, distinction and taste. Portrait photographs give form and meaning to secondary characters and enable Forster to introduce them into his story at times and in places that do not allow for their live presence. In addition, they perform everyday functions as images of kinship and remembrance, typical functions of vernacular photographs in Europe in the early twentieth century. In the case of a photographic portrait that Forster wove into the whole fabric of A Passage to India, the photograph exemplifies by contrast the exceptional rather than the conventional. I have already presented these ideas in a preliminary fashion in two articles-'The Past in the Present: Photographs of Classical Art in the Writings of E. M. Forster' (2003) and 'Between Past and Future: Portrait Photographs in the Novels of E. M. Forster' (forthcoming 2006). The present book length study will develop more fully the thesis that photographs and photography contribute significantly to the construction, rhythm and symbolism of Forster's novels.Forster was by no means the first writer to incorporate photographs into his writings. In 1868 Fyodor Dostoevsky had a photograph prepare the reader for the first appearance of Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot, and in 1897 Henry James employed a cabinet photograph in a similar manner in What Maisie Knew. Among Forster's contemporaries, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Sinclair Lewis and others used portrait photographs in similar ways. In France, Marcel Proust incorporated photographs into A Ia recherche du temps perdu, a novel Forster admired unreservedly.My goal in the present study is to examine the foregoing themes in detail, considering Forster's ideas with respect to photography and literary style, and examining how he and his contemporaries incorporated photographs and photography into their writings. My study will also attempt to explain the prevalence of these ideas and motifs in modernist literature, and will propose that explanations for the development of 'photographic' styles of writing and for the popularity of photographic motifs in fiction may be attributed in part to the modernity of photography itself. As Walter Benjamin made clear in the 1930s, photography was a new technology that enabled individuals to record, organize and comprehend modern life. It is therefore not surprising that it played important formal and symbolic roles in modernist literature.