The Short Story and Photography, 1880's-1980's: A Critical Anthology by Jane M. Rabb (review)

Abstract

YES,31, 200I YES,31, 200I This volume has brought together detailed readings of a range of texts and mapped the constructivelimits of its genre, and also contains usefulbibliographical material for anyone approaching research in detective literature. It does not, however, reallyofferthe 'new theoreticalframeworks'promisedin the introduction. There are certainly a range of theorists invoked in different articles, including Lacan, Barthes,Blanchot, and Heidegger, but there is insufficientdebate between thesepositions to allow for the development of any innovative framework.Nor does the structuringof the volume allow any secure sense of the historicalsignificanceof the genre to emerge. Whatwe aregiven is a literaryhistoryof influenceand citation, but this does not connect the genre to other aspects of cultural or social history. Finally,both the introductionand the articleby Susan Elizabeth Sweeney end with a tantalizinglybriefreferenceto GertrudeStein which servesto complicatethe map of influence and significanceso securelyin place for most of the collection. We are told that since both the authorsof and the detectiveswithin metaphysicaldetective fiction are overwhelminglymale a feministapproachto the genre would be 'fraught with difficulties'(p. 20), but there is a lingering feeling that this fraughtnesscould have generated some interestingcriticaland theoreticalquestions. QUEEN MARY AND WESTFIELD COLLEGE, LONDON MORAG SHIACH The ShortStoryand Photography, I880's-Ig80's: A CriticalAnthology. Ed. byJANE M. RABB. Foreword by EUGENIAPARRY. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. I998. xviii + 269 pp. $I9.95. This anthology presents stories by E. W. Horning, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, Bing Xin, Daphne Du Maurier,Italo Calvino, Eug&ne Ionesco, Julio Cortazar,John Updike, Guy Davenport, Michel Tournier, Raymond Carver, and Cynthia Ozick, and extends Jane Rabb's engagement with the relationship between writing and photography earlierexplored in her anthology Literature andPhotography. Interactions, 1840-1900 (I995). In this later collection Rabb suggests that 'the capacity of photography for both documentary realityand moral and psychological ambiguity may explain why so many of [these] storiesinvolve mysteries'(pp. ix-x), and more contentiouslyproposesthatthepreferencefor shiftingperspectivesand inconclusive endings by contemporarywritersreflect'theprofound moral and ethical uncertainties rampant throughout the world since -and partly owing to -the birth of photography' (p. x). It is difficultto see how the birth of photography can be held responsible, even partly, for the moral and ethical uncertainties of the modern world even if photography'scapacity for picturingsuch conditions is demonstrable in certain genres, such as the photographing of war, natural disasters and their consequences, famine, and social deprivation in urban and rural communities. In all these scenarios,the photographer'sgaze is a tellingwitnessto these uncertainties whose responsibility is in bringing them to light. In this anthology the use of a photographic image seems to justify the reprinting of some banal stories, as in Horning's use of a doubly exposed negative which leads to the blissfulunion of a young couple, or Hardy's An ImaginativeWoman', a run-of-the-milltale of a wife with a taste for poetry whose gunsmith husband denies the legitimacy of their last child on the basis of his wife's assumed infidelitywith a poet whose photographic image she has fallen for. Thomas Mann's 'Gladius Dei' is a bleak account of a saturnine young man's revolt against the commercial vulgarization of art as a commodity, particularlyin the photographic reproductionof a sensuousportraitof This volume has brought together detailed readings of a range of texts and mapped the constructivelimits of its genre, and also contains usefulbibliographical material for anyone approaching research in detective literature. It does not, however, reallyofferthe 'new theoreticalframeworks'promisedin the introduction. There are certainly a range of theorists invoked in different articles, including Lacan, Barthes,Blanchot, and Heidegger, but there is insufficientdebate between thesepositions to allow for the development of any innovative framework.Nor does the structuringof the volume allow any secure sense of the historicalsignificanceof the genre to emerge. Whatwe aregiven is a literaryhistoryof influenceand citation, but this does not connect the genre to other aspects of cultural or social history. Finally,both the introductionand the articleby Susan Elizabeth Sweeney end with a tantalizinglybriefreferenceto GertrudeStein which servesto complicatethe map of influence and significanceso securelyin place for most of the collection. We are told that since both the authorsof and the detectiveswithin metaphysicaldetective fiction are overwhelminglymale a feministapproachto the genre would be 'fraught...