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Issue # 126
| Karin
Cope
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After Image by Helen Humphreys.
Toronto: Harper Flamingo Canada, 2000.
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Helen Humphreys' widely and justly acclaimed second novel, Afterimage,
is a finely paced, carefully researched, and exquisitely told historical
tale of ambition, longing, and unrealized dreams. In precise and sensuously
evocative language, Humphreys weaves together the lives and emotions of
Isabelle Dashell, a childless Victorian woman of some wealth and great
sensibility who turns to photography, Eldon, her map-making, delicate
and bookish husband who is enraptured by tales of arctic exploration,
particularly Franklin's failed last search for the route through the Northwest
Passage, and Annie Phelan, their new Irish maid, literate, beautiful,
and an apparently orphaned survivor of the Irish potato famine. Humphreys'
narrow focus on the passions and dramatic events affecting a handful of
characters living on a country estate in Sussex during the course of a
single year - 1865 - offers contemporary readers an afterimage of sorts
of the Victorian era; we are offered a persuasive and revisionist view
of new freedoms, technologies, and acts of conscience in place of more
familiar tales of repression, pious moralization, and the angel in the
house. Darwin is thus a shadowy but important figure in the narrative,
as are numerous explorers; the mapping of Canada, particularly the arctic,
takes up a good deal of imaginative space, as does a subtle elaboration
of anti-colonial sentiment and various progressive views on class and
the education of women. The foregrounding of such concerns, while historically
significant, also serves to give a contemporary flavour to the narrative.
We are not yet done with the geographies and states of soul that the Victorian
era charted.
As Humphreys acknowledges in her "Author's note," the story
that Afterimage tells is in part inspired by the lives and images
left by two historical female figures - the pioneering Victorian photographer,
Julia Margaret Cameron, and one of her maids and models, Mary Hillier.
Indeed, one of Cameron's portraits of Hillier adorns the cover of Humphreys'
novel, and almost every chapter is oriented around the capture of a photograph
or two which very nearly approximate existing photographs by Cameron of
Hillier, from "Beatrice," "The Echo," "The Angel
at the Tomb," to the Madonna series: "Devotion," "Divine
Love," "Mary Mother." Cameron's photographic techniques
are carefully described in the novel, from her use of wet collodion negatives
and albumen prints to her predilection for staging literary and allegorical
scenes, and the agony of long exposures (three to seven minutes) during
which models had to hold still. Cameron's trademark soft-focus technique
is also described in a glorious scene of intimacy and discovery in Humphreys'
Sappho chapter; there, this soft focus is an invention of the maid Annie
Phelan; it brings out the eyes and renders all else soft, transient; what
remains is a wordless communication between photographer and photographed,
a silent declaration of love, of longing, of sorrow and depth of emotion.
The photograph as Humphreys writes it thus renders Sappho's words: "a
thin flame runs under my skin": light captures, etches, keeps a feeling,
as if it were a fact - as perhaps, poetry, too, does.
But if Humphreys has borrowed much from the life and repertoire of Cameron
for the character of Isabelle Dashell - her fabled recklessness and impatience,
her habit of trailing silver nitrate over everything, her use of a glass
chicken house and coal cellar for her art, Afterimage is far from
being limited to or by these historical or biographical facts. They are
jumping off points, a set of terms around which to anchor and orient the
narrative, a certain guarantee of its authenticity - as are the novel's
uses of Victorian literature, maps, and travel narratives. These historical
objects help to frame and contain the imaginings and voicings of the characters,
they are the landscape that Humphreys sketches, the tableaux against which
she exposes the conditions of soul of her characters. In the end, for
example, Isabelle, the photographer, the one who organizes and captures
the images, the artist engaged in a debate with painting who decries the
deadness of still-lives, is shown to be one who cannot keep another alive,
one who misses life, who turns everybody into an end, a still and unloving
thing.
Certainly one of the fine achievements of this novel is the imaginative
filling in of a largely missing story, a "half not told" by
official histories of the nineteenth century: the delineation of the terms
of a love triangle between a woman, her husband, and their maid, as well
as the elaboration of the individual character and emotions of the Irish
maid, Annie Phelan, a woman of acute and literate sensibility who is physically
constrained by her class position, gender, and origins, but whose thoughts
and acts sometimes fall well outside of these constraints. Another fine
accomplishment of this novel is in the evocativeness and precision of
its language. The fact that Humphreys is a gifted and experienced poet
shows up most markedly in her precise and constant use of simile to evoke
visual texture in the novel. Again and again her similies are as precisely
etched as a photographic image carved onto a glass plate by the interaction
of the colloquially unmixed of elements of light and matter. A singular
thing is turned into the likeness of another through an extraordinary
alchemy of words. This use of simile is so constant that it comes to underscore
an important question posed by Isabelle's practice of photography, her
will to stage everybody as some other, to represent Annie as Ophelia,
Mary the Madonna, Faith, Humility, Grace. As the book ends, Isabelle reflects
upon the limits of her work, the distance between art and life:
This is what she has always feared. That she will not be able, not
matter how she wills it or orchestrates it, to create an image as pure
and true as [something happening.] That what she does is not really
about life, about living. It is about holding on to something long after
it has already left.
Like grief. Like hope.
Life is the unexpected generosity of a kiss.
It is the falling moment. Unrecorded. (248)
What is an afterimage? A term of the 1870s, unlike an afterthought, the
clever riposte arrived at too late, it is an image that lingers on and
lasts beyond its transient moment; it is a memory that impresses or burns
itself upon the mind's eye. It is no accident that this book about photography
and its failures - the way the picture can put to death with love - should
begin with memory and in flame, and end with a meditation on the distance
between a leap and the drop to earth. In a photograph, a simile - or perhaps
even in a novel - it does not matter if this distance is infinitesimal
or infinite: neither distance allows for arrival, coincidence, fusion
- or even definite relation. As with an afterthought, there is something
in an afterimage that smacks of time out of joint.
From a fascination with such an unbridgeable pause - perhaps we could
call it longing - it would appear that much of Helen Humphreys' work stems.
In Humphreys' first novel, Leaving Earth, two pioneering women
pilots circle and circle the city of Toronto and its environs, trying
to set an endurance record for number of days aloft. They fall into intensely
physical semi-conscious states, circling around and around this fact -
that loving and passing through the element of air together makes at least
one of them fall in love with the other, lose her grip on earthbound relations,
hover silently about the one thing she must never say to the other - "I
love you." This mixture of intimacy and silence is what makes the
novel particularly fine - and also oddly unbearable, as if one is suspended
in some forever with these two, never to arrive, for arriving will always
mean a crash of some sort.
In Afterimage, Eldon tells Annie that "to look at a photograph
is always to have arrived" (112). I am not sure that Humphreys agrees.
For her, photographs, both historical and imagined, have been points of
departure, more like charts than destinations. Indeed, one might say of
both of her novels that they sketch a territory that hardly admits of
being mapped; both tales insist quite clearly that, for the characters
concerned at least, relations of desire between women are not of this
earth. Not only do they take place across impossible divides of physical
space and class relationship, across divides of age and experience, but
they describe a body of passion almost without any body at all, weightless,
terrifying, never quite cut free; suspended, flying, these bodies appear
just at the moment before the fall. The rest is unrecorded. Anything could
happen - even nothing.
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