Photographic fiction #3: Sixty Lights

One subgenre of the historical novel puts aside any ambition of recreating the past's "feel."  Stumbling upon a novel of this type, the reader may feel a bit bewildered: even though the novel is clearly set in a definite historical time and place, the characters appear to think thoroughly modern thoughts, and the author makes only the most modest efforts at providing local color.  On closer examination, however, these novels often seize on some element of history--an object, a political movement, an issue--in order to craft what is, in essence, an exploration of interiority.  That is, history plays a metaphorical or symbolic part in the novel's structure; it is not, per se, the novel's subject.  May Sinclair's Mary Olivier: A Life is one example; Gail Jones' recent Sixty Lights is another. 

Like the other "photographic fictions" I've written about here--Helen Humphreys' Afterimage and Penelope Lively's The Photograph--Sixty Lights uses photography as a jumping-off point to reflect on the nature of memory.  The novel consists of sixty short chapters, some as short as a paragraph in length, and proceeds in only partly linear fashion.  Suspense doesn't form part of Jones' plan: we know from the beginning that our protagonist, Lucy Strange, will die at the age of twenty-two, that her brother will long outlive her, and so forth.  Instead, Jones seizes on the birth of popular photography and related Victorian technologies (especially the magic lantern) to imagine the possibility of a new type of sight and memory:

For Victor photography was purely fake--vain posturings; the stiff fictions of a happy marriage, placement in other, more remote and more comfortable worlds.  For Lucy it was a shift in time itself, and a celebration of the lit-up gaze.  The imposture of studio work did not really trouble her: she knew it was one mode among many of the concentrated image.  There were still moments in time, moments arcane, seductive, trivial, breathtaking, that waited for the sidelong glance, the split-second of notice, the opening up of a irrefutable and auratic presence.  She had always known this.  She had always believed this to be so.  She had always been, after all, a photographer.  (142)

Lucy always understands photography as a means of creating memory, not simply recording it, but the difference stipulated in this paragraph is essential to the novel.  Sixty Lights distinguishes between photography as pure image-making, which assimilates the person/object photographed to established norms (in this case, the "happy marriage"--Lucy and her "husband," Isaac, are not, in fact, married), and photography as a means of capturing the transcendent, the transient, and the accidental.  The former compresses the subject; the latter releases it, allows it to explode, celebrates its imperfections. 

In fact, Lucy develops what her friend Isaac dubs a "maculate" aesthetic, one in which the world is "[m]arked, and shadowed, and flecked with time" (146).  This aesthetic owes something to Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty", but it also links Lucy to Julia Margaret Cameron; in any event, Lucy thinks of it as a feminine aesthetic, something that stands against the Society of Photographers' demand for clarity and perfection (199).  In particular, Lucy leaves accidental signs of herself in the photograph--thumbprints, for example (199)--and thus reminds the viewer that there is an artist's gaze and craft informing the work.  But these signs of the artist also indicate her humility in the act of creation, not her mastery: "She would allow error and chance--ripples in the collodion, over and under-exposures, bright whitish patches or unexpected shadows--to enter her work, welcomed, as a mark of relinquishment of control" (234).  For readers of nineteenth-century literature, this aesthetics of imperfection may ring a bell.  Robert Browning's "Andrea del Sarto," after all, fails as an artist because he achieves perfection, not because he misses it:  "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grey,/Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!"  And romantic irony rejoices in art's necessary failures.  Lucy's ability to "relinquish" control over her creation, however, seems to be an artifact of photographic technology; the mechanics of photography, in other words, create the possibility of a more accidental--not more precise--image. 

As one might expect, Lucy Strange's surname tells us something about the novel's understanding of photography.  Lucy is, in one sense, always "strange" in relation to her surroundings; she is also, as her lover Jacob Webb notes, a genuinely "strange woman" (218), who appears to perceive the world according to different rules of temporality; and, last but not least, she strikes the reader as a decidedly "strange" Victorian.  (For starters, she seems remarkably--ah--uninhibited by Victorian standards, although her surprising openness to Isaac's confession of his unconsummated homosexuality may owe something to Jane Eyre's equally surprising response to Rochester's account of his past.  Jane Eyre plays an important thematic role in Sixty Lights.)  This strangeness enables her photographic vision, but it does not make her equivalent to the detached, desexed observer of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories.  Lucy can "see" because she is simultaneously enmeshed in the world's messiness and, at base, estranged from it; the world of photographic vision operates on its own time.