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Self-imaging: Visual Representation and Identity in Fictional Autobiography
Nanette OBrien, Kings College London

The surface
Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases
Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept
In suspension, unable to advance much farther
Than your look as it intercepts the picture.
From Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery

The aims of representing a life and reproducing an image converge in the use of photography
and illustration in fictional autobiography. While photography and fictional autobiography do
not make the same claims to representational truth, both may be understood as, and at the
same time mistaken for, a representation of reality. In Gertrude Steins Autobiography of Alice
B. Toklas and W. G. Sebalds Rings of Saturn (1998, originally published 1995 in German),
photography provides the author with opportunities to play with mirroring and ideas about
mirroring in representing the life of the subject, the self, and other subjects.1 This often results
in a concurrent visual counterpoint to the narrative of the work. In E. V. Lucas and George
Morrows What a Life! (1911), reproductions and collages of cutouts from the London
department store Whiteleys mail order catalogue are employed, not only for comic effect, but
to continue the story in pictures, often complicating and distorting meaning to expand the
implications of the story beyond its immediate context. In the aforementioned three examples
of visual and literary representation in twentieth century fictional autobiographies, the
1

Mirroring is of course a term associated with Jacques Lacan. The term in Lacanian psychoanalysis
encompasses the formation of subjectivity in infants and adults, particularly in the understanding of the
ego or moi as separate from the self (sujet) when viewed in the mirror. The subjects understanding of
his/her reflection is a kind of misrecognition (mconnaisance) because, as Lacan argues, the moi seen in
the mirror is the image shaped by external forces such as parents and society, and is separate from, not
equal to, the subjective, internal sujet. The concept of mirroring has been enormously influential in
psychological and cultural studies and there is room for the implications of mconnaisance in fictional
autobiography to be further explored. For further reference see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978).

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placement and inclusion of photographs and reproduced images raise important questions
about what it is to make representational art. Representation and replication, and the problems
of copying an original, are issues that charge these texts and images with comedy, absurdity,
and pathos. I will frame my examination of photographic reproduction and narrative duality in
these texts with a discussion of the photograph and the implications of this medium in Roland
Barthess Camera Lucida (1984). Across these works, it is apparent that something is invariably
lost in the process reproduction, but we will also search for what is gained.

Photography and loss are inextricably linked, if only in that the photograph is a reminder of a
moment in time that is lost. Barthess Camera Lucida, a book written ostensibly about the
nature of photography, but also about the death of his mother, draws on the paradigm of loss,
permanence and creativity in thinking about photographs: What the Photograph reproduces to
infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be
repeated existentially. 2 Photography fascinates us because the multiplication of the original
defies the natural processes of death and regeneration. It is an artificial replication that
captures, but of course is not the same as, its original. Barthes uses the Photograph as a
concept to encompass the duality of the natural and the artificial, but there is something else at
stake in the reproduction:
By nature, the Photograph (for conveniences sake, let us accept this universal, which
for the moment refers only to the tireless repetition of contingency) has something
tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe. It is as if the
Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or
funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together,
limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like
those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy as
though united by an eternal coitus. (p. 6)
For Barthes, the photograph holds the original subject captive. Though artificial, the photograph
is the condemned man, it has the shadow of death indelibly printed on it. To the extent that a
2

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1981), p. 4. Subsequent page references are incorporated in the text.

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photograph attempts to reproduce an individual, the Photograph can be compared to
autobiographical writing, particularly the artful, fictional kind discussed here. As we will later see
in Gertrude Steins and W. G. Sebalds texts, photographs carry a narrative of their own, with
themes of loss and death, both contributing to and confusing any written narrative about an
individual.

Another element of what is lost in the taking of a posed photograph, which is also an element of
the mediums creativity, is the subjects artlessness. When a person is conscious of being
photographed, there is an artistic process that is creative for both the photographer and the
subject. Barthes describes the change that occurs in the subject of the photograph in knowing
his photograph is being taken. The self creates and therefore multiplies before the image is even
developed and present in hard copy:
Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in
the process of posing, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform
myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the
Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this
mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or
even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by
Thiers's police and shot, almost everyone). (pp. 10-11)
The posing of the self immediately creates an image in the mind of the subject which he or she
projects outward. Barthes cannot resist the comparison with death and the documentary nature
of photography in this interpretation. His inclusion of the parenthetical summary of the
massacre of the French Commuards by Adolphe Thiers in 1871 enacts in prose the close
connection of the photographic record with record of death or cause of death. The parentheses
of Barthess sentence carry historical reference within the discussion of photography the way a
photograph carries its own referent. So, in the taking of the photograph of an individual
something is both recorded and created: a second aspect of the self comes to life and yet that
new self does not live outside the photograph. Again, the comparison with fictional
autobiography is relevant: carried within an ambiguously fictional life is the imprint of the real
author, which like the condemned man and the corpse are ultimately inseparable. Elements of

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the real author, as in almost any creative work, can be found in the text. This is further
complicated when photographic reproductions and images of the subject sustain a
corresponding narrative within the fictional narrative.

Modernist photography is the natural complement of modernist fictional autobiography; both

are self-consciously deploying a style emphasising contrast and wit. It is appropriate that Man
Ray is the photographer of the frontispiece of Gertrude Steins Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
(1933). His playfulness, seen elsewhere in Le Violon dIngres (1924), in which the f-holes of a
violin are painted onto a photographic print of the back of a seated nude woman wearing a
turban, is revealed through a juxtaposition of realism and conscious artfulness. Autobiography
appears at first glance to operate with some of the physical structure of a traditional
autobiography, using photographs in a conventional way: there is a photograph on the dust
jacket of the 1933 Harcourt edition and a cropped version of it as the glossy frontispiece of the
subject with her life-long partner, captioned, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein | From a
photograph by Man Ray.3 The title page of the 1933 London edition advertises the pictures
below the title: With 17 Illustrations. The book is scattered with glossy reproductions of
paintings and further photographs of friends, of Gertrude Stein throughout her life, and of the
couple together, among others. Yet the frontispiece may be most telling because in the
foreground of the photograph is a large Gertrude Stein, seated writing at her desk, and Alice B.
Toklas, the ostensible subject of the book, hangs back in the doorway in the corner of the frame.
Just as Toklass character says she sits with the geniuss wives rather than claiming the status of
genius for herself, so she is presented in the background in photographic portraiture, although
this time she is standing.4

Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (London: John Lane, 1933).
I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be geniuses, in short, I have sat very often
and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses (p. 15).
4

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A cover portrait or frontispiece traditionally lends authority to a biography. It proclaims: here is
my subject, faithfully represented on the page as selected by the biographer as the best
likeness. In an Autobiography like this one we understand that any selection of photographs is
subjective; we are suspicious that the subject may be trying to flatter herself or trying to deceive
readers. However, there was a precedent for this kind of deception. Virginia Woolfs fictional
biography Orlando, published shortly before Steins Autobiography in 1928, included pictures of
its dedicatee, Vita Sackville West, and her ancestors, although they are not labelled as such in
the text. Woolfs biography of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings dog, Flush, which appeared in the
same year as Steins Autobiography, included an uncaptioned black and white photograph of
Woolfs own spaniel, Pinka, a gift from Vita, as the frontispiece.5 The biographers
autobiography is intertwined with the subjects. As in Steins work, the autobiographers voice
coincides with a different voice, becoming both subject and observer.

Perhaps the most significant photographic reproduction in the Autobiography is the final glossy
photograph, which is also the last page of the book. It follows the final words:
About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever
going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write
it for you. I am going to write it simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson
Crusoe. And she has and this is it. (p. 267)
The final photograph is captioned, First page of the manuscript of this book. As a photograph
of the text itself, it is a mirror of the entirety of the Autobiography, bringing us immediately back
to the beginning of the book and reminding us of the issue of authorship. The clue in the
reference to the famous fictional autobiography Robinson Crusoe suggests a duality of
authorship and identity that is emphasized by the inclusion of this manuscript photograph at the
end of the book. Barthess idea of the photograph containing the referent of the original is
particularly compelling in this case, for the issue of authorship is pointed to in this image of
handwriting. Linda Wagner Martin, on discovering in the Yale archives that Gertrude Stein had

Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (London: Penguin, 2000).

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written a different beginning to the Autobiography, and that there also existed a few sheets of
the actual beginning in Alices handwriting, has hypothesized that Alice composed the beginning
herself: Alice gave her the start that enabled Stein to continue and to mimic the voice that had
told her stories for more than twenty-five years.6 However, the script in the final photograph is
Steins large, well-spaced slanted cursive rather than Toklass smaller, neater script. Wagner
Martins suggestion that the words may truly be Toklass along with Steins reproduction of her
own manuscript serves only to destabilize the idea that representation can be of one reality and
one authorship. The inclusion of the reproduction of the manuscript with the opening words
also prompts the reader to return to the beginning of the book, reflecting Steins idea of the
continuous present in her lecture on writing, Composition as Explanation (1925), that in her
writing, time is a spiralling consciousness that keeps spinning back on itself. To read the
conclusion of the Autobiography is also to read its beginning, and start all over again.

W. G. Sebald weaves photography into the narrative of his writing with a skill that belies the
many visual and symbolic layers of his work. Initially, the images may be taken for granted as
illustrations of the near text. But because the images have no captions, it is as if each is veiled in
a film of mystery, requiring the reader to puzzle over the significance and placement of each
image. The Rings of Saturn is catalogued by the Vintage Classics publisher as a combined trio of
genres, Memoir/Travel/History, but may fall more suitably into the category of
autobiografiction. As Max Saunders proposes, the term autobiografiction, from Stephen
Reynoldss 1906 essay on the genre, fuses spiritual experience, fictional narrative, and the
essay.7 Although Rings of Saturn features a narrator called Sebald walking around Suffolk who
lives and works as the author does, the book is a meditation on death through the lens of a
variety of stories. The narrator intersperses memories of his own life amidst discussions of
Thomas Browns Urn Burial (1658), Enlightenment anatomy theatres, the dying fishing industry
6

Linda Wagner Martin, Telling Womens Lives: The New Biography (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers
University Press, 1994), p. 74.
7 Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 18.

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in England, all woven together with the recurring theme of the silkworm that must be killed to
extract its silk. The silk trade and sericulture connected the East with the West and finally was
part of the Nazi effort to make Germany economically independent. James Wood regards
Sebalds writing as autobiographical and argues that it is the tragedy of what Sebald does not
say when looking back at life that is lost and mourned for: All that has disappeared from his life
is what has also disappeared from the narrative. This is why neither we, nor he, can make sense
of these backward glances. Reticence becomes the very stutter of mourning [emphasis
authors].8 In writing the story of a life, or even of a journey, whether semi-fictional or
completely autobiographical, the experience of recollection is similar to that of looking at an old
photograph. In each experience, there may be gaps in memory or available information. Sebald
has made the readers experience parallel his narrators by denying the reader certain
information with regard to his own story and the included images. Absence, or reticence, is
involved in Sebalds placement of photographs. By not captioning his images, Sebald allows
them to interrupt the pace of the narrative sometimes on part of one page, sometimes on two
page spreads. These absences signify mourning for the narrator, and if the reader is engaging
intensely with the text, the reader experiences the stutter of mourning for himself.

Images in Sebalds writing occasionally illustrate both the narrators personal anecdotes and
historical and cultural musings, but their dominant function is to create a visual sub-narrative, a
counterpoint to Sebalds prose. Patience (After Sebald) is a film by Grant Gee that closely follows
the locations and photographs in Sebalds Rings of Saturn. In it, Lise Patt examines both the
photograph of North Sea fishermen during a time of surfeit posing with mounds of dead herring
and an illustration of a fish with three dorsal fins that we assume is a herring. The film shows us
that the image of the dead fish resembles the following two page photographic spread of prone
human bodies in the woods, surrounded by bare trees, and over lays the two photographs to

James Wood, W.G. Sebalds Uncertainty in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New
York: Picador, 2010), pp. 239-248 (p. 245).

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show their convergence.9 Patt does not say that the uncaptioned photograph is actually of the
bodies of dead prisoners after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen, nor does
she acknowledge that the illustration of the fish is actually a codfish, rather than a herring.
Sebald gives us a red herring to direct our attention to his images, to make us rethink their
implications.

The context of the series of images is crucial to Sebalds underlying visual narrative. Because
they are not captioned, we receive these images as they are in Sebalds narrators subconscious,
or as he is intentionally planting them there for the readers subconscious to draw on, without
explanation. Perhaps there is no way that the parallel can be drawn overtly, so it is drawn
obliquely instead. The narrator muses: An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when
dead, it begins to glow; this property, which resembles phosphorescence and is yet altogether
different, peaks a few days after death and then ebbs away as the fish decays (p. 58). Although
no reference book on fish cites this phenomenon as actually occurring with herring, this does
not mean it is not true for Sebalds narrator, who says it is only like phosphorescence and is yet
altogether different. This is the after glow of the mind, of the significance and memory of an
image persisting beyond the immediate sight of the image. The phosphorescence is the visual
echo that is enacted in the photograph of the Belsen concentration camp. The transition to the
photograph is painful and striking. After discussing the herring, Sebalds narrator describes the
darkening of the evening, and an article he has read on the death of Major George Wyndham
Le Strange, whose great stone manor house in Henstead stood beyond the lake. During the last
war, the report read, Le Strange served in the anti-tank regiment that liberated the camp at
Bergen Belsen on the 14th of April 1945 (p. 59). The page ends on a comma in the middle of
the sentence and the following two pages are devoted to the photograph of bodies, covered in
tarpaulin, lining the forest floor. The resemblance to the herring comes from the partial
exposure of the bare legs and feet of the human bodies. The physical darkness of the
9

Grant Gee, Jonathan Pryce, Sarah Caddy, Gareth Evans, Di Robson, and Winfried G. Sebald. Patience
(after Sebald) (New York: Cinema Guild, 2012).

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photograph makes it difficult to distinguish individual bodies, but the bodies are white against
the darkness of the woods. The bodies themselves seem to glow with a haunting
phosphorescence. After the photograph, the sentence continues on the third page with no
acknowledgement of the image: but immediately after VE-Day returned home from Germany to
manage his great uncles estate in Suffolk, a task he had fulfilled in exemplary manner, at least
until the mid-Fifties, as I knew from other sources (p. 62). A shadow of a memory, discussion of
the photograph is absent as the man goes on with his life after the war, as is perhaps necessary
if lives are to continue with any normalcy. But as Sebalds photographs suggest, there is no
normalcy for these figures of history, nor for himself, as he finds them in his thoughts and
memories, their photographs, mistakes, and traumas intertwined with his.

For photographs in fictional autobiographies there is necessarily a disconnect between what is

said and what is visually reproduced; this is the metaphor for the limitations about what can be
said and represented of an individuals life. When it comes to inclusion of illustrated images of
mass reproduction, such as are found in catalogues, the fictional autobiography is complicated
by the associations and connotations of a collective recognition. The included images are
familiar to many and therefore have many meanings. Looking back to the early twentieth
century, Max Saunders sees E. V. Lucass and George Morrows collaborative fictional
autobiography, What a Life! as the predecessor to Terry Gilliams work in Monty Python. It may
also be seen as the forebear of Sebalds work in its use of image and object to juxtapose unusual
concepts and create links across time and place. Saunders finds a surreal pathos in the title of
What a Life! that takes the clich, hovering between resignation and celebration, and turns it to
suggest that our lives are more permeated and determined by everyday objects and possessions
than we (or most autobiographers) might care to think (p. 231). I will extend this idea of surreal
pathos to argue that Lucas and Morrow are playing with, and reflecting, an idea of the world as
it is changed by concepts of empire and consumption through reproductions of Whiteleys
department store catalogue cutouts. Though the book is essentially a jaunty parody of the genre
of modern autobiography, the disconnect between what the cutout images are and what they

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are supposed to represent in the narrative creates a deeper irony that comments on the nature
of representation of the self in a sincere way.

The disjuncture between what we see and what is said is particularly poignant in the chapter on
Travel and Adventure, when the expansiveness and exoticism of the wider world is interpreted
by and shrunken into miniature novelty items. The narrator travels around the world: From
Naples I passed on to India, that land of mystery and Eastern splendor.10 This statement is
accompanied by cutouts of tiny elephant figurines, one of which may be a pincushion, with a
large hump on its back. While in India, the narrator finds himself amidst the Paticaka Guerilla
War and takes up forces against the Gherkins (p. 100), playfully substituting puns on
pattycake and the South American Lake Titicaca, and the Nepalese Gurkhas. The obvious
reduction and infantilisation of actual place names, and the conflation of a Nepalese people and
a South American locale, is a twist on the very real British imperialism of the 1910s. The book
employs pastiche to hold a mirror up to its readers that is both teasing and serious.

Immediately after this warfare and wordplay, the autobiographical subject is in a terrible train
accident: It was on leaving Paticaka that I had the narrowest escape from death that I have yet
experienced. I took my seat in the Calcutta train and settled myself to repose, when, with a
fearful crash, the carriage was overturned. We had disregarded the signal (p. 103). The accident
of the train appears innocent enough, accompanied by images of a toy train and a scale, but the
following page describing the result is very strange: The scene was appalling; human remains
strewed the ground (p. 104). The images are individually cut out female stocking-ed legs, an
arm, a hand, a womans and a mans head, and what looks like an embroidered heart, all
arranged at odd angles. It is charming and distressing, for the arrangement does strongly evoke
severed limbs. What is odd about it is that this scene is the first likeness that immediately
resembles what it is supposed to resemble. The overturning of the carriage and dismemberment
of its passengers caused by disregarding the signal is an example of the way Lucas and Morrow
10

E. V. Lucas and George Morrow, What a Life! (London: Collins, 1987), p. 97.

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turn the subject of autobiography and representation. All of the images are themselves signs
whose original intention as catalogue objects to be purchased is disregarded. Additionally, in
representing disembodied limbs the book plays on the functions of catalogue display. In a
catalogue, objects appear without context, particularly novelty objects in the shapes of other
things, which is part of the comedy Lucas and Morrow use throughout the book.

Rachel Bowlby suggests that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the
department store brought the world to one place for the consumer. It made shopping a leisure
activity, like going to a play or visiting a museum [...]. Thus the fantasy world of escape from
dull domesticity was also, in another way, a second home.11 Just as the store itself was a
theatrical, museum-like experience, so a catalogue for these stores would bring images of the
array of goods representing images from around the world to the individual, right into their
home, to be cut up and arranged as anyone liked. What a Life! takes every day objects and turns
them into the stuff of fantasy, creating a second life for itself by using the images of
consumerism and British imperial wealth. The department store displays support the imperialist
view that the world is for the taking, and supports the incorporation of the exotic into one place.
What a Life! presents an illustrated fictional life composed out of the shrinking and compacting
of representations of human figures and objects, arranged as nonsensical comedy. There is no
clear political message in What a Life!; the persistent lightness rules above all. However, the decontextualising of imperialism through these scenes also renders what it is to be a British man
writing ones autobiography absurd and childlike, the stuff of catalogue cutouts.

Whether or not the ability to capture the essence of the self is ultimately about creating another
version of the self rather than a reproduction, in words and images, the artistic representation
of the self in fictional autobiography is both undercut and supported by the use of visual
imagery. From photographs to illustrations to catalogue cutouts, the authors and narrators of
11

Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985),
p. 4.

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the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the Rings of Saturn, and What a Life! play with the
complexity of the idea of reproducing an original self through different media. The subject is
mirrored by the texts and images that represent it, yet these images also connect the subject
self with the unfamiliar, with the shadows and memories of the outside world. Barthess
concern with photographys unshakeable relationship to death and creativity, Lacanian
mirroring, and reflexivity link both to the duality of authorship between Stein and Toklas in the
Autobiography, and to the recurrent themes of loss in Rings of Saturn. Yet the outside world is
not all unfamiliar, and it seems impossible not to see the self in other aspects of the world. A
certain playfulness in pulling the wool over the readers eyes connects all three of these texts as
they confront reflections of the self in society, and present a constructed self-portrait in words
and images. The result is that the self is seen everywhere, and nowhere. It is individual and yet
multiple, visual and literary, isolated, and yet connected to a network across history that weaves
startling patterns between lives and images.

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Nanette OBrien 2013