Between Past and Future: Portrait Photographs in the Novels of E. M. Forster

Abstract

This study draws attention to E. M. Forster's practice of incorporating fictitious photographs into his novels and sheds light on how he employed them. It proposes that photographs contribute to the construction, rhythm and symbolism of Forster's novels. Photographs of art and architecture take the place of the objects they represent and serve as metonyms for the cultures that produced them. While their first level of meaning is as souvenirs, such photographs also perform complex roles, signifying leisure, accomplishment and taste. Portrait photographs give form and meaning to secondary characters and enable Forster to introduce them into a 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. The last part of the study demonstrates that Forster was not unique in incorporating photographs into his literary repertoire. Among contemporary Anglophone writers, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Sinclair Lewis used portrait photographs in similar ways. In France, Marcel Proust likewise incorporated photographs into A la recherche du temps perdu, a novel Forster admired unreservedly. The study proposes that an explanation for the popularity of this new literary trope lies in the modernity of photography. As Walter Benjamin made clear, photography was a new technology that enabled modern men and women to record, organize and comprehend modern life. It is therefore not surprising that it played important formal and symbolic roles in modern literature.