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

在1901年写给他在剑桥的一位导师的一封信中，年轻的E.M.福斯特将他自己的文学风格与摄影联系在一起，他写道，我认为我有你所说的摄影天赋，但在我确定我不能做得更好之前，我不打算毫无保留地使用它。福斯特在小说《1927》中再次提到了摄影，1929年，他认为辛克莱·刘易斯笔下的快照人物是这位美国小说家风格的显著特征。福斯特写道：“这种方法自始至终都是照相的，点击一下，照片就是我们的了。”这与克里斯托弗·伊舍伍德在《柏林日记》(1937)中的名言不谋而合：我是一台快门打开的相机，相当被动，记录而不是思考。除了在文学理论的背景下讨论摄影，福斯特还在他的所有小说中加入了虚构的照片，从天使害怕踏上的地方(1905)、最长的旅程(1907)和有风景的房间(1908)开始，继续到霍华德庄园(1910)，最后是《印度之行》(1924)。虽然这些“心灵照片”中的一些可能看起来很普通，但它们始终是记忆的储藏库，在福斯特的叙述中，它们往往暗示着过去和未来的悲剧。艺术和建筑的照片取代了它们所代表的物体，并成为产生它们的文化的隐喻。虽然它们的第一层意义是作为纪念品，但这些照片也扮演着复杂的角色，象征着休闲、区别和品味。肖像照片赋予次要人物形式和意义，使福斯特能够在不允许他们活生生地出现的时候和地方将他们引入他的故事中。此外，它们还发挥着亲情和回忆的日常功能，这是20世纪初欧洲白话照片的典型功能。以福斯特融入《印度之行》整体结构的摄影肖像画为例，这张照片通过对比展示了特殊的而不是传统的。我已经在两篇文章中初步阐述了这些想法--《过去在现在：E·M·福斯特作品中的古典艺术照片》(2003)和《在过去和未来之间：E·M·福斯特小说中的肖像照片》(2006年即将出版)。目前的书籍长度研究将更全面地阐述照片和摄影对福斯特小说的结构、节奏和象征意义的重要贡献这一论点。福斯特绝不是第一个将照片融入他的作品的作家。1868年，费奥多·陀思妥耶夫斯基准备了一张照片，让读者为纳斯塔西娅·菲利波夫娜在《白痴》中的首次亮相做好准备，1897年，亨利·詹姆斯以类似的方式使用了一张梅西知道的内阁照片。在福斯特的同时代人中，詹姆斯·乔伊斯、弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫、辛克莱·刘易斯和其他人也以类似的方式使用肖像照片。在法国，马塞尔·普鲁斯特将照片融入了福斯特毫无保留地欣赏的小说《我的一生》中。我的研究目的是详细考察上述主题，考虑福斯特关于摄影和文学风格的思想，并考察他和他的同代人如何将照片和摄影融入他们的作品中。我的研究还将试图解释这些观念和主题在现代主义文学中的盛行，并将提出对摄影写作风格的发展和摄影主题在小说中流行的解释可能部分归因于摄影本身的现代性。正如沃尔特·本杰明在20世纪30年代明确指出的那样，摄影是一种新技术，它使个人能够记录、组织和理解现代生活。因此，它在现代主义文学中扮演着重要的形式和象征角色就不足为奇了。

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.