Photographs on the Walls of the House of FictionTimothy Dow AdamsEnglish, West VirginiaAbstract This essay considers the history of photography in fiction, concentrat-ing on issues of genre. Starting with a survey of nineteenth-century novels which included physical photographs, the essay moves to twentieth-century novels, dis-cussing ways in which the generic rules of written narratives influence the relation-ship between word and image and the fictiveness of photographs within novels. Unlike earlier writers, who used photographs for illustration of place, postmodern novelists frequently use photographs as documentation, both in support of and in opposition to the written narrative. The last section of the essay uses W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, an especially complicated novel which combines fiction and nonfic-tion, biography and autobiography, as a case study.“Photography is a record of what we see, or a revelation of what we cannot see, a glimpse of what was previously invisible.”W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?“Memory heals the scars of time. Photography documents the wounds.”Michael Ignatieff, The Russian AlbumThe ontological status of photographs has always been ambiguous, their referential power confusing, and their identity vexed. When they appear within works of literature, the situation becomes even more complex because the way we read photographic images has always been influenced by generic rules that govern written narratives. When photographs are Poetics Today 29:1 (Spring 2008) DOI 10.1215/03335372-2007-022© 2008 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics176 Poetics Today 29:1physically present within novels, questions about their status grow still more complicated because images reproduced in a work of fiction are usually read differently from those in nonfiction. In this essay I want to dis-cuss photography within novels by concentrating on issues of genre, con-sidering such questions as these: Why did authors begin to include photo-graphic images within fiction soon after the discovery of photography in 1839?¹ How do the generic rules of written narratives influence the way we regard the relationship between word and image? What does it mean to call a photograph fictional? How did authors understand the purpose of photographs within nineteenth-century novels, and how do writers in the first decade of the twenty-first century use images? Following a brief survey of photography within literature, in which I will discuss these questions, I will turn to an especially compelling case study, W. G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants, first published in English in 1996. I have chosen The Emi-grants because Sebald’s novel is the strongest example I know of to illus-trate Suzanne Seed’s (1991: 403) observation that “photographs have an ontological function as well as the obviously anthropological, descriptive one they are often narrowed to by iconoclasts. Photographs are an exten-sion not just of our sight, but of our thought. Like human thought itself, they use displacement, metaphor, and analogy; they step back to give us perspective and orientation. They allow us to evolve.” While Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, and Hardy were not in competition for accuracy with the line drawings that appeared in their novels, the advent of photography changed the general relationship between fiction and illustration.² Many early descriptions of the photographic process emphasized the action of the sun in reproducing nature as if unmediated by humans. This can be seen in some of the names chosen for the pro-cess by its inventors: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce preferred the term “helio-graph,” while Henry Fox Talbot referred to “photogenic drawing,” which was “impressed by nature’s hand” (Marien 1991: 20). As a result of this emphasis on nature’s light writing, early photographs within novels were almost always illustrations of picturesque places or romantic atmosphere rather than of characters. There are no photographs of Pierre or Ahab in the works of Melville, and although the autobiographical Hawthorne often slips himself into his own fiction in the form of fictional prefaces that pose as actual ones, no photographs of Hester Prynne or Miles Coverdale appear within his novels.1. For a history of the discovery of photography, see Newhall 1982, Greenough et al. 1989, and Marien 1991.2. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between photography and fiction in the nine-teenth century, see Rabb 1995 and Armstrong 1999.Adams•Photographs on the Walls of the House of Fiction 177 Many nineteenth-century authors imagined that photographic illustra-tions might compete with their written depictions of fictional characters, though not with their rendering of realistic scenes in nature. Although such writers of the period as John Ruskin, Samuel Butler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, and Lewis Carroll, to name only a few, were amateur photographers, they chose not to include photographs within their fiction. As Timothy Sweet (1996: 34) notes, “The era of the half-tone, beginning around 1885 for magazines and about a decade later for books, saw the emergence of ‘categories of appropriateness’ for relations between images and texts: fictional literature came to be illustrated with drawings, and factual literature such as news and travel accounts, with photographs.” The most likely reason for this avid interest in the photographic process coupled with an absence of the actual product within novels is, as Jane Rabb (1995: xl) writes, that “perhaps they felt their presence might imply that the words were insufficient or their readers verbally unsophisticated.” Photographs of people directly identified with the text seldom appeared in pre-twentieth-century novels. Typical of many nineteenth-century authors who were faced with the choice of using drawing or photography within their novels, Henry James was not usually interested in any sort of illustration. There are no images of Isabel Archer or Milly Theale in the Alvin Langdon Coburn New York edition of the works of Henry James, despite the presence of Alvin Lang-don Coburn’s photogravures. James believed that illustrations should not be asked to perform the descriptive work of the writer, that they undercut the efficacy of literature, and that using the visual in support of the ver-bal pandered to a