In The Dark Room

Brian Dillon

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781910695739
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Boldly combining the highly personal with the brilliantly scholarly, In the Dark Room explores the question of how memory works emotionally and culturally. It is narrated through the prism of the author's experience of losing both his parents, his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was on the cusp of adulthood and of trying, after a breakdown some years later, to piece things together. Drawing on the lessons of centuries of literature, philosophy and visual art, Dillon interprets the relics of his parents and of his childhood in a singularly original and arresting piece of writing reissued for the first time since its original publication in 2005, and including a new foreword from prize-winning biographer Frances Wilson.

PHOTOGRAPHS

‘Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance, on account of their scars.’

— Chris Marker, La Jetée

‘When will they invent a machine to know who I am?’

— Jacques Henri Lartigue

¶ Archive

In the winter of 1997, without, initially, giving much thought to the significance of what I was doing, I began spending my nights poring over a selection of photographs from the family hoard. For some months, I had been huddled deep inside the folds of a depression that had lately made it almost impossible for me to engage by day with the postgraduate research I had left Dublin to complete at a provincial university in the south of England. In truth, I had made scarcely any headway with my work since arriving two years earlier. My ill-concealed lack of productivity was beginning to tell against me in every respect: academic, financial and personal. I felt myself constantly in flight from all those who might notice some sign of the new vacuousness of my being, the dull ache at the centre of my chest that denoted my absconded hopes, plans and talents. As deadlines passed and the promised doctoral thesis failed to materialize time and again, I cast about desperately for some prop to shore up my slowly spalling sense of self, but succeeded only in adding to the confusion of a mind long past hope of being cleared by its own efforts. By this time, my second winter away from home, I had made a comprehensively tangled mess out of all ties to the world around me. During the summer of that year, there were days when – having lain awake most of the night, adrift between the vicious reality of my situation and my increasingly fantastic notions of how best to end my torment – I could hardly raise myself from my bed before mid-afternoon. Once up, I was a frantic wreck before the awful challenge of the day, quickly debilitated again by the panic that overtook me when faced with the simplest decision. Eventually, I was persuaded (it was already autumn, and I realized that I had no memory of the sun shining at all that summer) to drag myself, emaciated and, so I am told, actually grey in the face, to a doctor.

In the weeks that followed, my fogged brain began to respond slowly to the drugs I had immediately been prescribed. The deeper roots of my disarray would continue, for many months, to leach hope and energy from my life. But I was at least lucid enough to appreciate how far I had wandered from myself. And I had regained sufficient physical and mental function to begin to reflect on what had led me astray. Any doubts I might previously have had about the wisdom of a pharmacological cure for emotional torment were quickly dispersed: I could feel the disease as a palpably organic entity, a parasite. (Depression, wrote the glum Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran, is as much physical as mental: left unchecked, it would attack even the fingernails.) The long-term effects of my breakdown – the word, I came to realize, should be understood in a literal, mechanical, sense – would take years to resolve. I do not think it was only as a result of a therapist’s inevitable broaching of my family history, nor of the certainty that I had always had of my one day emulating my mother’s plunge into depression, that I found myself mulling over the artifacts of my past. While I could not bring myself to face the demands of my unwritten thesis, I began an eccentric communion with the few photographs I had taken from our family home some years earlier. I entrusted something of myself, of my future, to them each night as I closed the door of a cramped bedroom and sat down at a tiny desk to peruse my archive once more. I realized that I had never really looked at them with anything other than a distant, even embarrassed, sense that the world they depicted was no longer a part of me. Now, however, they seemed to have accosted me from the tattered box file where they had lain since my leaving the house. The process of their rediscovery had begun during the terrible summer just gone. One night, as I wrestled with my hopelessness and rage, I had suddenly, quite unaware of what I was doing, ripped a photograph of my parents from the wall of my bedroom and thrown myself on the bed, holding it tightly to my sobbing chest. I remember gradually realizing the absurdity of the gesture, and how I was utterly unable to communicate to the one person there (the lover whose life had contracted around my sapping and cruel presence) why my misery had taken such a melodramatic turn.

Each night, for perhaps an initial week or two, I would take the photographs out and place them one by one on the desk in front of me, until the whole collection had been divided among a few unruly piles. Each comprised photographs of a particular subject: myself, my parents individually or together, my family, various relatives, a few unknown persons. On those occasions, I would simply stare at the images in a sort of stupor, unsure what had motivated these long hours of desultory handling. Before long, however, another impulse took over: I began to write about the photographs. I had to overcome a distinct embarrassment. I told myself that the furtive marks I was about to make in the pages of a large softbound notebook were entirely unrelated to the halting words I spoke weekly to my therapist. Whatever I imagined I was doing with these photographs, it was not, I insisted, therapeutic. It was of another order entirely: some belated reckoning that might turn out to be unbearable, to undo all the therapist’s good work (I could never decide if she was an angel or an idiot; but her unnerving silences seemed to have freed something in me, even if I didn’t yet believe in it). I resolved to describe what I saw in these photographs, rather than indulge in any excessive reminiscence or conjecture about their significance. What I wanted, I think, was at last to recall simply what I saw there, no longer to feel so detached from the scant remains of my own past. I had long been fascinated by – and now re-read obsessively – the pages of Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes’s melancholy reflection on photography and death, which treat of certain photographs of his mother uncovered after her death. I had already half mythologized my own collection according to the details of Barthes’s troubled engagement with the image of his mother. He writes: ‘according to these photographs, sometimes I recognized a region of her face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the movement of her arms, her hands. I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether.’ Now, I thought, I would test my own photographs against the misery that kept me confined to my room. Perhaps I would recognize something there; and if I didn’t, I would at least discover the consolation of expressing my failure.

I began nightly to write a few lines (in my exhausted state, I could manage no more) about a particular photograph. Over a period of some weeks, I completed eleven fragments: each one numbered and appended with a brief statement of (so far as I could discern) when, where and by whom the snapshot was taken. I recall now that it was only, each time, by a prolonged act of concentration that I could begin to piece together precisely what I was looking at. Certainly, the bare essentials of each scene were usually clear to me: it was the details that seemed completely foreign. I sometimes spent hours simply sitting and staring, before certain spaces, objects or textures became recognizable, and I started to fit them to the abstract image I had in my head of each occasion or era made visible there.

The first photograph that I tried to describe was taken when I was about seven: it shows my brothers and me sitting rather nervously in a row in the gym of our primary school. At the end of a day’s photographing of individual pupils, we had been brought specially from our respective classes to sit for this picture of what might well have been the only trio of brothers in the school at that time. There is, really, nothing else of note about the photograph, and in my short written account of it I have remarked only that I recall being even more uncomfortable in front of the camera than I look. Here I am again, according to the second passage in the notebook, perched on a deckchair in the back garden: an insignificant image but for the barely visible fraying of the fabric of the chair around its metal frame. Years later, somebody (it may well have been me) would fall straight through the torn seat. And again: proudly straddling a brand-new bicycle, aged seven; or a small blur on a rug five years earlier; or squinting towards my father at the height of a summer’s holiday in Kerry; or glumly edging from the frame, aged thirteen, on the occasion of my brother’s confirmation.

Those paragraphs comprise only my first broaching of a territory from which I retreated before long. Which is not to say that the other photographs – of the world my parents inhabited before my birth – did not intrigue me: I gazed at them for hours, became obsessed with certain scenes depicted there, but they never made it into my written record of the collection. I seem to have avoided looking at photographs of my parents without me, as if I was not yet willing to accept that the collection as a whole was the evidence of their disappearance. Why was I unable to write about the photographs of my parents in the same way? I am quite prepared to believe that my depression was a function of an incomplete process of mourning (if the truth be told, a process not even begun: mourning, surely, requires some voicing of one’s grief, and this was exactly what I could not begin to attempt). But if so, my solitary scribblings didn’t get me much further along the route to a complete reckoning with my loss; instead, I became entranced by the details and the surfaces of these other images. I may not have been able to write about them, but it was these photographs of a world in which I was not yet present that appeared then (and seem now) to contain the most telling memories of all.

I have the photographs in front of me now. There are thirty-six of them: the first taken some time in the mid-1930s, the last in the summer of 1985. About a third of them – the fraction that I described in the notebook which I have also just unearthed – belong to my lifetime. I am present in almost all of these. The others, mostly black and white, show my parents: first individually, then, briefly, together, before I join them in various sunlit gardens and parks. I remember that as I looked at these photographs in that depressed autumn, I felt as though I were seeing some of them for the first time. Having recently faded so far from the world around me that I thought myself unrecognizable, I seemed to discover in them a means to verify my own existence. Here, at least, I thought, I have been really present. I imagined that if I could reconstruct those fleeting moments of proven being before the camera, I might be able to work out why I had now apparently evanesced to the point where, on being photographed, I barely credited that I would register on film. This was not an entirely fanciful notion: snapshots from this time show me as an emaciated wraith, and I recall very clearly my feeling that each time there was a little less of me to photograph.

¶ Reliquary

I had never seen most of these photographs of my parents until they were both dead. What I was looking at as I stared at them alone in my room was a world that, for me, had only come into existence with the disappearance of the figures at its centre. At least, this is how I remember it: that the images of them I found in their room after my father’s death allowed me to picture for the first time what they looked like and the world they inhabited. Can this be true? Did they really never present me with the evidence of their lives prior to my own? Was there never an evening when, together, we passed around the mostly black and white images, my father ruefully noting his full head of hair, my mother recalling school-friends and flatmates? It seems an eccentric lapse: to behave as if our family had no visual history worth sharing. Not for the first time, I compared my own photographic inheritance unfavourably with the means I imagined other families employing to protect theirs: the photograph album’s material repository and the ritual (by which one comes to know the photograph as well as, if not better than, the moment captured there) of communal perusal.

The family photograph has not always been subject to the same curatorial regime. In the earliest days of the medium, the daguerreotype – a print whose solid metallic base held an image of such fragility that it only manifested itself at a specific attitude to the light, and might be erased if exposed too long – was kept in its own individual case. Many of these cases have, of course, survived: their varnished wooden exteriors and rich velvet insides attest to the reverence with which the faint image would once have been treated. The clearest evidence of their special status is to be glimpsed in mid-nineteenth-century photographs themselves, where whole families can sometimes be seen gathered around a daguerreotype of an absent or deceased relative. Often, the photographed picture is actually invisible. Still hidden in its miniature cabinet, it nevertheless accrues to itself a care and veneration which seems to be based as much on touch as on vision. Semi-orphaned siblings surround their remaining parent, who holds the tiny sliver of a lost spouse’s memory: the whole family reaches out to touch the frail relic. Mothers whose children have died in infancy cradle minute reminders of exhausted little bodies. Seeing the photograph is only one way of making it mean something: its presence is as resonant (perhaps even more so, if the image has started to fade) as its appearance.

For the Victorians, such reminders of the photograph’s tactility extended its significance, and, by means of an impressive variety of ancillary objects and appended matter, ensured that the physical spell of the picture spread around it like the shrine that threatens to overwhelm the relic of a saint. All manner of things were attached to the photograph. (We ought not to conclude that the picture simply needed its mnemonic power upgraded: image and object formed a circuit of reciprocal energies.) The scrap of hair, secreted in a locket alongside the photograph, is only the most obvious addition: this traditional memento might be further worked to form a decorative border to the photograph, or even woven to compose a consoling verse. A thriving domestic industry, overseen mostly by the women of a family, affixed poems, flowers both dried and artificial, fragments of clothing, certificates of birth or death, elaborately executed drawings or paintings in which the photographed figure might appear to perform in a pious or nostalgic tableau. In turn, the photograph could itself become an adjunct to a more solid piece of domestic furniture: sewn on to a cushion or inserted into a shrine to a deceased child. By such means, the humble image was made to live again according to the new chronology of remembrance, of which our modest photographic albums seem only to have understood the barest outlines. Still, they preserve an element of order and ritual which is quite foreign to my own experience of the photographs I own.

¶ Lumber room

The photographs I have managed to salvage from the house of my childhood – that is, those of them that I have not, over the years, lost, foolishly discarded or (even worse) given away – are subject to no visible principle of organization whatsoever. Protected but uncelebrated, they have sat (apart from that brief period when they became a nightly obsession) in a succession of more or less forgotten corners. Occasionally, I have taken one or two out and displayed them for a while. Looking back, I realize that I have only ever chosen those which seemed to have some vague artistic merit: the particularly striking composition of a photograph of my father on a Parisian street half a century ago (reminiscent of the work of Robert Doisneau, though more affecting because less sure of its own appeal to the romance of the city), or the fancied resemblance of a picture of my mother’s family in the 1930s to something seized on by August Sander: a study, say, in the taxonomy of rural respectability. Or I might simply have been drawn by an image that seemed to accord with an almost caricatured notion of what a ‘family photograph’ ought to look like: awkward and poetic, luminously ordinary. I invested some energy in these decisions, but risked no reflection that could be said to have properly reckoned with their real meaning for me. Then, for that short, and wretched, period in my late twenties, certain photographs of my parents became, as I lingered over them, allegorical images of my own sorry state of mind. Still, I coul...