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

1901年，年轻的e·m·福斯特在写给他在剑桥的一位导师的信中，将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，我并不打算毫无保留地使用它。”福斯特在《小说的方方面面》（1927）一书中再次谈到了摄影。1929年，他将辛克莱·刘易斯（Sinclair Lewis）作品的快照特征确定为这位美国小说家风格的显著特征。福斯特写道：“摄影的方法贯穿始终，点击一下，照片就是我们的了。”克里斯托弗·伊舍伍德（Christopher Isherwood）在1937年出版的《柏林日记》（a Berlin Diary）中发表的著名言论与这句话有明显的呼应：“我是一台打开快门的相机，非常被动，记录下的不是思考。”除了在文学理论的背景下讨论摄影之外，福斯特在他所有的小说中都加入了虚构的照片，从《天使不敢涉足的地方》（1905）、《最长的旅程》（1907）和《看得见风景的房间》（1908）开始，接着是《霍华德庄园》（1910），最后是《印度之旅》（1924）。虽然这些“心灵的照片”看起来很普通，但它们总是记忆的仓库，在福斯特的叙事背景下，经常暗示过去和未来的悲剧。艺术和建筑的照片取代了它们所代表的对象，并作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、尊贵和品味。肖像照片为次要人物提供了形式和意义，使福斯特能够在不允许他们在场的时候和地方将他们引入他的故事。此外，它们作为亲属关系和记忆的图像具有日常功能，这是20世纪初欧洲乡土摄影的典型功能。福斯特在《印度之旅》中穿插了一幅摄影肖像，这张照片体现了不同寻常的一面，而不是传统的一面。我已经在两篇文章中以一种初步的方式提出了这些观点——《现在的过去：e·m·福斯特作品中的古典艺术照片》（2003年）和《在过去与未来之间：e·m·福斯特小说中的肖像照片》（2006年即将出版）。目前的书长研究将更充分地发展照片和摄影对福斯特小说的结构、节奏和象征主义的重要贡献这一论点。福斯特绝不是第一个在作品中加入照片的作家。1868年，费奥多尔·陀思妥耶夫斯基在《白痴》中为纳斯塔西娅·菲利波夫娜的首次亮相准备了一张照片，1897年，亨利·詹姆斯在《梅奇知道什么》中以类似的方式使用了一张橱柜照片。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·刘易斯和其他人都以类似的方式使用肖像照片。在法国，马塞尔·普鲁斯特（Marcel Proust）将照片编入了福斯特毫无保留地欣赏的小说《爱的回忆》（A Ia recherche du temps perdu）。在本研究中，我的目标是详细研究上述主题，考虑福斯特关于摄影和文学风格的想法，并研究他和他的同时代人如何将照片和摄影融入他们的作品中。我的研究也将试图解释这些思想和母题在现代主义文学中的流行，并将提出对“摄影”写作风格的发展和小说中摄影母题的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·本雅明（Walter Benjamin）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重要的形式和象征角色也就不足为奇了。

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.