‘Camera is the eye of history’: on the genre-forming potential of photographic ekphrasis in G. Swift’s novel ‘Out of this world’

The article deals with the role of photography in the novel Out of This World (1988) by the contemporary British writer G. Swift, which is not translated into Russian. The changed socio-cultural status of photography as an artefact is traced: from the ‘pencil of nature’ (G. F. Talbot) in the middle of the 19th century. to ‘simulacrum’ (L. Hatcheon) in the postmodern paradigm, implying ambiguity and variability in the ‘reading’ of a photographic image. Photography is presented in the novel at the main poetological levels: level of the plot, of the characters, spatiotemporal, narrative, motive-thematic levels. Photography allows one to ‘tell’ different types of stories: both family ones and those related to the tragic events of the 20th century. The protagonist of the novel, professional war photographer Harry Beach, creates photographs while in hot spots: Vietnam, Oran, Congo, etc. He does not only capture, but philosophically comprehends what is happening on the world stage. Photographs taken by Harry (in the form of photo-ekphrasis) are a historical photo chronicle, and he himself is a photo chronicler, presenting to the world the truthful documents that have an accusatory status. Harry realizes that it is a crime to ‘smooth out’ the cruel reality, especially in the age of modern media that abuse photo manipulation and are guided by the principle of replacing reality with simulacra. It seems possible to define the genre form of G. Swift's novel, based on a series of photographs (both personal and public), as a photo-ekphrastic novel and classify it as a so-called novel-photoreflection, which has been developed since the late 1970s.