National Photographic: Images of Sensibility and the Nation in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and Nadine Gordimer's July's People

Psychological frameworks for both a national and sensible are socially transmitted via photographic images and illustrations to female protagonists of Atwood's Surfacing and Gordimer's July's People. This essay examines protagonists' disruption of such visually instilled sensible and colonizing behaviour. ********** photographic paradox can [...] be seen as co-existence of messages, one without a code (the photographic analogue), other with a code (the art, or treatment, or writing, or rhetoric, of photograph).--Roland Barthes, The Photographic Message In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that nation is an political because the members of smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in minds of each lives image of their communion (6). Anderson locates source of a national collective consciousness in eighteenth and claims that nationalism, as a mode of thought, filled space left by decline of religious thought during a period of increased secularization (11). He credits printed text in form of novel and newspaper as two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in eighteenth century (25). Both forms of discourse served to construct imagined community of nation; daily newspaper became a collectively practiced prayer-like ritual that provided selective access to rest of world, and novel allowed readers to experience simultaneous occurrence of multiple events within a paradigm that conflated space and time in order to present concurrent narratives. According to Anderson, increased literacy and print-capitalism [...] made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate to others, in profoundly new (36). I would expand Anderson's argument by adding that particularly during twentieth century, visual images, in form of photographs and mixed commercial media, have played an increasingly significant role in ways that people access imagined and mythical information about themselves as members of imagined social and national communities. Furthermore, while Anderson uses concept of imagined community explicitly to define process of acquiring a national consciousness, a similar model can also be applied to formation of a culture of sensibility, socialization of manners and refined empathetic ability, that was also nascent in eighteenth-century England and is still prevalent in industrialized West today. In fact, nationalism, or ability to imagine a national community, is directly linked to emergence of artifice of sensibility cultivated by middle class, ability to imagine and empathize with physical and mental situations of less fortunate members of society. Visual representations--in form of photographs, film, magazine images, and artistically rendered illustrations--of both national and sensible forms of imagined communities are socially transmitted to and ultimately subverted by female protagonists of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and Nadine Gordimer's July's People. In this essay, I examine construction of sensible behaviour through these visual media as a colonizing agent in lives of white, middle class, female protagonists: Margaret Atwood's nameless narrator in Surfacing and Maureen, South African, liberal protagonist in Nadine Gordimer's July's People. Both narratives position protagonists in a period of interregnum, defined by Antonio Gramsci as apocalyptic moment during which the old is dying and new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms (276). For Atwood's narrator, this interregnum is time of looking for her missing father, a time that symbolically allows her to renegotiate her status as both Canadian and female and to deconstruct other side of binaries, American and male. …

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