1Commenting on a passage from To the Lighthouse, Patricia Waugh writes: ‘No-one speaks. If the passage is not an expression of personality, it is because it is an expression of itself as aesthetic reality.’1 ‘No-one speaks’ can be read in many ways, and for that reason, offers an interesting definition of impersonality, and yet it is potentially misleading, as Waugh suggests. Although impersonality rejects, for instance, any direct expression of emotion, it can be considered to convey emotion in a more direct way by removing the artifice of discourse to replace it by an object ‘through which the emotion is immediately evoked.’2 At the same time the so-called ‘difficulty’ of a number of modernist works suggests that there is at least a risk that nothing will speak to the reader when emotion is conveyed in too ‘immediate’ a way.

2The question of whether emotion is heightened or threatened in works where ‘no-one speaks’ can be approached through photography, an art which Susan Sontag interestingly compares to the modernist poem:

Poetry’s commitment to concreteness and to the autonomy of the poem’s language parallels photography’s commitment to pure seeing. Both imply discontinuity, disarticulated forms and compensatory unity: wrenching things from their context (to see them in a fresh way), bringing them together elliptically, according to the imperious but often arbitrary demands of subjectivity.3

3The idea that emotion could be reinforced by a form of mediation which is also a form of effacement is particularly relevant in the case of photography not only because it is an art which speaks through silent images, but because of its very particular semiotic status: in Barthes’s words, the photographic image is fundamentally ‘a message without a code,’4 even if codes get inevitably inscribed into it. Susan Sontag, as for her, emphasizes the double status of photographs as ‘artifacts’ and objects that have ‘the appeal’ of ‘found objects, unpremeditated slices of the world’ so that photography seems ‘to trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and on the magic of the real.’ (69)

4Rachel Seiffert explores both these aspects in The Dark Room where she uses photography to deal with a subject which is highly emotional, and yet for that very reason, elicits a certain wariness towards emotions. The book which is divided into three parts juxtaposes three slices of life, the lives of three generations of Germans living before, during and after World War II. Helmut, Lore and Micha are differently involved in or affected by the war, but in a way they all remain on the margin of the History that shapes their lives: Helmut, who suffers from a physical handicap from birth does not make it into Hitler’s army and becomes a photographer. Lore is only a child when her Nazi parents are taken away from her and she has to walk miles across a defeated Germany to find her grandmother again. As for Micha, he is the grandson of a former Waffen SS soldier, whose past starts tormenting him. All three share the characteristic of being obsessed with, or haunted by, photographs that they either take, steal or stumble upon, that they hoard, carry around with them or destroy.

5Photography is used here thematically as a motif which structures the text and problematises the characters’ perception of a world that changes and crumbles around them. The Dark Room is not just the room in which Helmut takes refuge to develop his negatives. It is the world at large which has become unreal and fragmented, where one no longer really knows who is who, and where images of happiness and quiet order are replaced by images of the Holocaust. But The Dark Room is also the book itself, a closed space producing images in a sparse, descriptive style that could be termed ‘photographic.’ The result can be compared to the juxtaposition of three photo-albums out of which three stories emerge. There are no chapters in the stories, or no large subdivisions but only a long succession of individual paragraphs clearly marked out and grouped into short sections which can be likened to pages or clusters of pages in an album.

6Within the stories, the role of photography is inextricably fictional and metafictional: as it mediates the characters’ changing perspectives on the world, photography becomes the means to reflect on art itself. The impersonality of photography can then be seen as the instrument of two opposite aesthetics, one that seeks closure and an escape from emotions; and one that exposes the viewer or the reader to fragmentation, uncertainty and lets emotions loose. Yet, in both cases, the outcome is a form of emotional paralysis, to which only perhaps the third character escapes. But it is mainly Seiffert’s ‘photographic writing’ which suggests that, between repression and terror, impersonality may also offer a way out of paralysis and, in paradoxical ways, save emotion.

1 Reality turned into shadow

7In the Dark Room, impersonality appears first as a way of describing the process through which the characters see their world transformed into a world of reflections and shadows. As the past recedes and the present dissolves, photographs threaten to become the only fragile link between the characters and reality. By substituting fixed images for people, they provide to a certain extent a refuge against disintegration and sustain the idea of a stable and familiar reality. But the very fixity of the image is also what emphasises the sense of unreality, dissociation and instability that hits the characters in the emotional crises they go through. The photo is thus endowed in the book with a sort of anamorphic power which stresses the ambiguities of an art easily associated with realism, but which is also according to Susan Sontag, one of the most surreal arts.

8The photographs that crowd the book can be separated into different kinds, yet one of the most significant distinctions in this mass of pictures is the opposition between the photographs which are framed, displayed or tidied away in a photo-album, and the photographs which are, or become detached. Far from being a collection of fragments of the past, the family album gives us, according to Susan Sontag ‘an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal.’ (9) While the album may be considered to be a hoard of memories and emotions, the book suggests that its purpose is to forget as much as to remember, to suppress emotions as much as to keep them alive. Thanks to the album the past remains secure: the individuals that people it are reduced to fixed images that can be neatly tidied away. This sense of safety is conveyed by Gladigau’s ritual photo-sessions and his habit of framing and putting under glass the photos he takes every six months to ‘record’ Helmut’s childhood and adolescence. By offering to ‘create a photographic record of family life,’5 Gladigau does in fact nothing but help the family in their attempt to conceal Helmut’s physical disability and all the bitter feelings it generates, as each photo with its carefully calculated pose hides, as much as it can, Helmut’s crooked arm.

9Impersonality can thus first be seen as the instrument of a realism trying to conceal itself as art or artifice, trying to efface all trace of presence or discourse in order to naturalise its subject and the responses it arouses. In the case of Helmut, the attempt to disappear behind the camera goes further as he sets himself the task of documenting Berlin, its streets and monuments. And yet Helmut’s vision of Berlin can hardly be called objective or emotionally neutral. The photographer makes himself blind to what happens in the city and the one time he is faced with a violent scene—gypsies behind forcibly taken away—he panics and botches the photos. His placid photos of buildings and streets which seem devoid of emotion answer a vital emotional need. Helmut hides behind the camera to escape the gaze of the world, and falls to pieces when the world, in this case ‘the eyes of a shouting, pointing gypsy,’ (37) starts looking back at him through the lens.

10If the impersonality of photography amounts to killing the person to sustain its fiction, that fiction can then also prove brittle. The photo that was always there in the album or on the wall can suddenly stop being familiar or reassuring, becomes unreal or too real, comes off loose. In fact, the three main characters either lose, or deliberately damage or destroy their family albums as the fiction of familiarity and unity they give cannot be sustained anymore, or as the levelling of all difference (the juxtaposition of the same grandfather before and after the war) seems obscene. If photography still (or perhaps more than ever) provides a model for an impersonal art, it is an art based on scattered or isolated images, on negatives that cannot be developed, or on surreal prints like the ones Helmut imagines when he pictures his flat destroyed: ‘Exposures of fragmented glass, shards of prints, prints seen from the corner of an eye. Papi’s fingers, Mutti’s eyes, her arms.’ (53) Two of the stories revolve around a photo travelling in a pocket after being stolen. Micha leaves a gap in his grandmother’s album, allegedly to make his inquiry into the past easier, but is never seen to replace the stolen photo. As for Lore, she successfully makes it back to Hamburg thanks to a photo which, as she discovers afterwards, did not belong to the unknown young man that helped her and produced his ID every time they got stopped, but to a Jew who died in a camp. As the photo is revealed to prove no identity but a mere resemblance, the dead man seems to die ‘a second death’; simultaneously Thomas, the man who stole the photo and disappears without leaving a trace, recedes into total obscurity. The photo has then become the shadow of a shadow. Far from being simply an instrument of deception, it now stands as a powerful symbol of alienation or ‘a potent means for turning the tables on reality—for turning it into a shadow.’ (Sontag 180)

11The power of the photo lies no longer in its ability to efface itself as an image but in its remarkable anamorphic power to transform itself and turn the familiar into the strange: to turn life into death, but also death into life. From being a means to become blind to the world and deaf to one’s emotions, the photo starts to escape control. While Helmut finds refuge in the silence of images, Lore finds herself more exposed to the power of images in the silence that surrounds her, a silence only broken by snatches of conversation or conflicting views overheard at random. At the same time as familiar faces become strange, Lore is brought face to face with photos displayed on public places which show human beings who look like living corpses. The ‘mythological’ dimension of the photo (Barthes 1982, 23) is then not deconstructed by its ability to reveal itself as mere image, but by its power to impose itself as found object, ‘an emanation of the referent.’6

12In this case however, if the emotional impact of the image places the character in front of something real (in Lacan’s sense), it thus fails to connect her to any kind of reality. In fact what Lore and the people around her see appears to them as unreal. After a while, some are shown to go as far as saying that the photos are fakes, and the figures on them actors. Beyond the unbearable lie or denial, the suggestion underlines the fragility of the image on its own. In the case of Lore the photos become unreal because they are too real, like hallucinations. They find no place in her world and thus reappear nightly in her dreams or rather her nightmares, where the skeleton people find themselves doomed once more to be shadows of shadows. Whether mirage or magic of the real, the photo in the case of Lore seems to definitely confine the real to the impossible.

2 The absent voice

13In the second story, photography is thus connected with a general process of a depersonalisation and a questioning of identity which can be seen as a release from a number of fictions, myths or lies. But in setting emotions free, the uncertainties produced by conflicting images create an emotional confusion which risks ending once again in paralysis. The traumatic power of some images amounts in fact to a cancellation of emotion. At the end of the story, Lore seems only to seek oblivion as she is shown to stand motionless in the wind: ‘Her eyes are closed, seeing nothing, streaming brittle tears.’ (217)

14Micha’s role, as a child born long after the war and as a history teacher is perhaps to rescue dumb images from silence. In his tireless inquiry into the past, he tries to put a story behind a face, and to find a way out of the emotional chaos he has created by breaking the stable, mythological order of the album. But Micha experiences the limits of his attempt to know and reappropriate the image that has become strange. All he wants when he starts off is a clear and clean answer: he spends his evenings in libraries, consults endless databases, before he realises he might have to go all the way to Belarus to investigate his grandafther’s past. Having hoped that some anonymous, disincarnated voice over the phone would reveal the truth to him, he ends up face to face with a sort of double of his grandfather, a Belarussian who turns out not to be a former victim of the Germans, as Micha initially thought, but a collaborator. His repeated journeys and interviews of Joseph Kolesnik transform themselves into an emotional ordeal: Micha finds himself sucked into the past, but also becomes indebted to a former murderer to whom he goes back with a mixture of conflicting feelings, and who starts thinking of him as a friend. In fact to thank Kolesnik and his wife, Micha is obliged to take a photograph of the couple before he leaves, and only just escapes having his own photo taken with the man.

15Having made a hole in the album, having tried to dispel the silence of the photo and to separate the good family man from the soldier, Micha finds himself forced to undo what he did and to become in his turn a maker of images. Yet in silencing the past, the photo does not simply betray it; it finally stands for what remains a story that can never be complete (Micha is left with strong suspicions but no certainty) and for contradictions that can never be cancelled. In taking that last photo, Micha is made to accept that he must stop unearthing truths that do not exist. From that perspective the image shows all there is to see.

16Overall, impersonality corresponds in the book to the disappearance of a voice that could explain, connect, certify. Images are what the characters are left with in the absence of that voice. In that respect it is relevant that all three become in one way or another orphans: Lore becomes physically separated from her parents and has to substitute for them to save her brothers and her sister, while she is to led to question and mistrust everything they told her. Micha faces the silence but also the hostility of his parents’ generation as he starts to dig up the past. As for Helmut, he loses both his parents in the bombing of Berlin, but in a way, he has lost his father from the start by robbing him of the strong, healthy boy he wanted. Helmut starts taking photographs to escape the gaze of his own father and to replace him at the same time by a substitute father, Gladigau, who offers him the silent perfection of an alternative reality.

17If Seiffert tries to transform the traditional narrator into a kind of photographer, her aim, as far as she is concerned, seems to be to refuse to replace the failing father. She does invent an album of sorts, thus repairing perhaps what is impaired or lost forever for some of the characters. But at the same time, she makes her own holes in that album and orphans the reader in her own way by depriving him/her, of a closed, homogeneous text, of a proper story but also of proper characters as Helmut, Lore and Micha seem destined to the same unreality and fragmentation as the photos they carry around with them. In imparting to her writing the impersonal quality of photography, she translates the world of the characters, which means at the same time that she brings that world closer and makes it recede, as the text does not simply convey loss but is affected by it. But the tension between immediacy and distance that Seiffert’s ‘photographic writing’ introduces seems precisely to come as an answer to the emotional paralysis experienced by the characters either through extreme detachment or extreme involvement. The choice of an impersonal technique then comes across as an attempt to save emotion in contradictory and paradoxical ways.

3 Freeing and Freezing Emotion

18First impersonality could be perceived as a way of saving emotion from itself, as it is created through and not just in spite of detachment. The distance introduced by photography as a fictional and metafictional tool but also as model for an impersonal aesthetics tends to transform the characters into remote figures. But somehow, it is as remote figures and not just as characters that Helmut, Lore and Micha move us. One way of accounting for this paradox is to say that the impersonality of photography allows for a kind of purification of emotions. The emotion we feel could then be compared to the effect Lacan decribes in his commentary on Antigone in his Séminaire VII. Lacan insists that beyond the dialogues, the power of the play lies for a large part in the radiant image of Antigone, ‘l’éclat d’Antigone,’ or what he calls her ‘beauty.’ It is thanks to the power of that image that catharsis is made possible: ‘... par l’intermédiaire de la pitié et de la crainte, nous sommes purgés, purifiés de tout ce qui est de cet ordre-là. Cet ordre-là, nous pouvons d’ores et déjà le reconnaître—c’est, à proprement parler, la série de l’imaginaire. Et nous en sommes purgés par l’intermédiaire d’une image entre autres.’7

19‘The imaginary’ corresponds to the ordinary human emotions we experience through identification, and if Antigone has the power to free us from these emotions, it is because she seems to be beyond human feelings such as hatred, guilt and fear. As Lacan points out she no longer completely belongs to the world of living, being already in-between life and death, ‘dans l’entre-deux-morts.’ (315) From the remote place she inhabits, she deeply affects us, but in a way that freezes all particular emotion. Unlike melodrama, tragedy does not make us cry.

20Seiffert’s choice of form shows a desire to stay clear of tragedy, but she brings us in her own way face to face with inhuman forces that can perhaps only be approached with that same emotion which forbids tears. Through her photographic style, her characters, whoever or whatever they are, become aloof, detached from a particular history although they are involved in it and thus remain partly out of the reach of the imaginary. Emotions can then be considered to be purified through a resistance to a fictionalisation which is on the other hand necessary to involve the reader in the first place. The relentless use of the simple present which tends to transform the whole narration into description deliberately breaks the magic of the tale, but to replace it by the intentness of a hypothetical gaze, the concentration and intensity of vision.

21But if the book attempts a purification of emotions, there is no cathartic movement from involvement to detachment in the text, but rather a permanent tension between the two, as the juxtaposition of images builds a story of sorts at the same time as it puts that story at a distance. This is all the truer as for a large part the stories that emerge awaken in the reader a complex of contradictory feelings which precisely calls into question the possibility of catharsis. The situations of emotional complexity that the book creates may free us in their own way of too easy an imaginary response, but they do so by multiplying our responses rather than reducing them. The gaps and uncertainties created by the impersonal order of the book reflect the sense of disorientation that the characters experience in their orphaned lives, and yet, they also offer a way out of paralysis as they enable the reader to approach uncertainty as liberating rather than crippling. Once again impersonality appears at the same time as the expression of a crisis and the very means to deal with that crisis.

22The artificial order of the album that the invisible narrator creates makes it possible to contain emotions whilst letting them loose, thus achieving a compromise between the closed but potentially stifling space of the family album and the wide world where photos are torn away from their original support and get lost. In trying to make itself look like a photo-album, the written text presents itself as a book rather than a story, as spatial unit rather than an order determined entirely by linear progression. Although strictly chronological, the division into three books and the fragmentation of each book into a collection of paragraphs make it easy to move backwards and forwards through time. The replacement of an authorial voice by an impersonal order makes room for disturbing juxtapositions and gaps, facilitates connections over time, allowing photos to detach themselves from their temporal moorings, to migrate, and thus to produce new correspondences, new meanings, new emotions. Susan Sontag emphazises the ability of the photo, as a fragment, ‘to drift away’ (71) and she also suggests comparing photos to quotations. The idea that the photo, once detached from its origin, ceases to belong to anyone and can be used to identify almost anyone—just like the isolated quotation can be made to mean almost anything—might be frightening. And yet as the book shows, displacement and ‘dis-appropriation’ may bring to light some truths: the stolen photo which so strangely resembles Thomas lies and does not lie. It calls into question rigid divisions and clear-cut distinctions: after all Thomas too has been reduced to a skeleton; he can be considered to be more a victim than a criminal. Impersonality thus becomes a way of questioning the notions of identity, origin and belonging. As a space made of detachable units, the book frees us from the strictly linear perspective which haunts Micha. The family tree that he silently pictures can then be replaced by a more extended map, where other resemblances, other filiations, and other legacies can be found.

23In The Dark Room, the fact that impersonality becomes associated with dehumanisation does not prevent it from being also potentially an extension of the individual. Yet this extension in no way takes the amplitude that it achieves in a number of modernist or postmodernist texts where the defeated ego makes room for a multiplicity of voices, where one consciousness echoes another, and where the characters become spoken by history, myths or other literary texts. The emotions that the silent juxtaposition of sparse descriptions produces are emotions of quiet intensity. And because the writer, like a photographer, seems to focus on the creation of self-contained individual units which are then put together, the mobility and the echoes that the book generates do not cancel the sense of separation that each image or sequence, enclosed in one moment, produces.

24In fact, the photo-album gives equal importance to the whole and to the fragment: by modelling itself on it, the book adopts both an aesthetics of compensatory unity and an aesthetics favouring the detail, a detail that can resist being integrated into the whole. From that perspective, it is interesting to note that as we move from one story to the next, the segments of the text correspond more and more to short film sequences with a number of pauses on particular images which become like stills—frozen images that remain and can take on a particular significance or on the contrary cannot be fully integrated. Emotion then becomes ‘punctual,’ not just because it is localized in one particular image, or fragment but because it may take the form of what Barthes calls the ‘punctum’ of the photo. Emotion is then not just linked to the power of the image to translate something immediately, to its power to resist translation, to its opaque or obtuse quality—Barthes’s ‘sens obtus,’ which corresponds partly to what he later calls the punctum. As he tries to define this punctum, Barthes says that the photo forbids all development and all catharsis: ‘elle est indéveloppable,’ (81) ‘elle est indialectique... elle exclut toute catharsis, toute purification.’ (141) In L’Obvie et l’obtus, Barthes opposed the ‘traumatic effect’ of the photo to its ‘mythological effect.’ (23) In La Chambre claire, trauma is replaced by an oxymoron: the photo produces ‘a quick immobility,’ ‘une immobilité vive,’ (81) an effect of stasis, suspension rather than a form of paralysis that would cancel emotion itself.

25Whether impersonality is the instrument of a purification of emotions or on the contrary helps convey a sort of pure, untamed emotion that allows no catharsis, we can wonder if and how the written text can achieve an effect which is specifically associated with the power of the image. Barthes develops his punctum in relation to photography, but in his various attempts to describe its ‘quick immobility,’ he uses a textual equivalent and draws a parallel between the photo and the Japanese haiku. If the haiku can shed light on the arresting power of the photo, it is perhaps because it manages to be both clear and opaque, because of its power to give to an extremely brief, simple and concrete description an enigmatic, or silent quality. In her own way, Seiffert strives to achieve this tension thanks to a style that juxtaposes sparse descriptions often free of qualification. At the same time as they conjure up images, some of these descriptions also conjure up an invisible field of vision. ‘Dès qu’il y a punctum, un champ aveugle se crée,’ Barthes says. (90) It is the existence of this invisible space that, according to Barthes, distinguishes the erotic image from the pornographic image.

26By suggesting through words a similar division between the visible and the invisible, the text can be considered to compete with the photo and to possess the same power to produce what Barthes calls a ‘supplement’ (89) that punctuates and punctures the imaginary and discursive space that it builds. But emotion is also created in this case by the inscription of real or imaginary photographs which introduce a tension between text and photo. On the one hand, we can consider that by conjuring up photos which it cannot show, the written text makes room outside itself for images whose emotional power it falls short of. Emotion would then be present in the text as a remainder which cannot be included, a distant echo, in particular the echo of some real photos the reader might have seen. But on the other hand, by effacing the photos, the text contributes perhaps to bringing out the invisible quality of the image or to making the silence that surrounds it more tangible. Either way, photography and text meet where the other is not and emotion lies in the gap, in the very impossibility of their coincidence.

27Whether text and photography are approached in terms of equivalence or as a way of installing a division in the book, the impersonality of the photo is used by Seiffert to serve a purpose which is fundamentally contradictory: to tell and not to tell, to rescue images from silence and to strip them of meaning, to free emotions and to freeze them. In that respect Micha’s quest is significant: it is both a journey out of silence and towards silence.

28Gladigau starts taking pictures of Helmut’s family because he can’t afford to pay his associate properly. The weight of a debt that can never be repaid divides the text and creates a tension between the need to involve the reader and the need to keep him/her at a distance, which is typical of postmodernist fiction. At the same time the book stands out for its determination to produce emotion out of its very limits, through the suspension of meaning and imaginary identification: emotion is then not just introduced to be put at a distance, it is a supplement or a remainder which lodges itself in what the text screens or hushes, in what it fails to show or tell. Simultaneously allowed and forbidden, sharpened and frozen, it persists through this ‘quick immobility’ which is what remains perhaps from the last image of the text, when having finally gone back to see his grandmother, Micha stands still in front of her high-rise apartment with his waving daughter:

Micha’s eyes smart. Watery. Blurred vision against the blinding sky.
Yes. Can you see?
Yes.
Dilan does not sound too sure but keeps waving, and Micha keeps his eyes on the tiny speck of movement which comes in reply.