Afterimage by H. Humphreys as a Photoreconstruction Novel: Genre Peculiarities

Abstract

This article is devoted to the study of the peculiar genre features of Afterimage (2000), a novel by the English-born Canadian writer Helen Humphreys. The author of the article introduces the definition of the concept of photographic ekphrasis, i.e. a description in the text of a photograph that is the subject of a character’s reflection or the result of a collaboration of the photographer and the model. The photographic discourse penetrates the plot-compositional, character, space-time, and narrative levels of the poetics of the novel. Starting with the analysis of the title of the novel, the author of the article concludes about the decisive role of photography in the genre structure of the novel. This makes it possible to introduce the term “photoreconstruction novel” and categorise the novel analysed as belonging to this type. This genre form implies a number of characteristic features: the presence of protophotographic ekphrasis (the existence of a real photographic prototype in culture defined by the reader on the basis of secondary cultural experience (this term is introduced for the first time)); the novel is set in a period remote from the modern times, as a rule between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the main character is a photographer-reconstructor of a myth / mythological image; supported by the motif of theatricalisation (“the character of being staged”). Particular attention is paid to the link of allegorical photographic works of the English Victorian photographer J. M. Cameron and photographic ekphrases in the novel by H. Humphreys. The organic synthesis of two types of art — artistic words and photographic art — forms intermediate connections in the novel, expanding the field of interpretation and implying an active role of the reader. Humphreys’ Afterimage based on the genre structure of a photographic ekphrasis fits into the context of the phototextual English-language novel of the late nineteenth — early twenty-first centuries.