The photographer's power lies in his ability to re-create his subject in terms of its basic reality, and present this re-creation in such a form that the spectator feels that he is seeing not just a symbol for the object, but the thing itself revealed for the first time. Guided by the photographer's selective understanding, the penetrating power of the camera-eye can be used to produce a heightened sense of reality—a kind of super realism that reveals the vital essences of things.

—Edward Weston, “What Is Photographic Beauty?”

In 1939, photographer Edward Weston envisioned a future in which images would surpass reality by capturing its essence rather than its surface. Instead of Weston's superrealism, however, we live in a world of hyperreality, defined by Jean Baudrillard as “the disappearance of objects in their very representations” (45). Postmodernists argue that a profusion of images precludes our ability to experience reality directly: the sign has replaced the referent, and the model has supplanted the real. Wright Morris, who has straddled the eras of modernism and postmodernism, evoked by the Weston and Baudrillard quotations, has long recognized that who we are and what we see are predetermined by previous images.¹ Indeed, describing his emotional response to a funeral procession that he witnessed in Mexico in 1958, Morris writes:

At the somber beat of the drums the procession approached the farther corner, where, in the shadow of a building, a truck had parked, the platform crowded with a film crew and whirring cameras. The director, wearing a beret, shouted at the mourners through a megaphone. This was a funeral, not a fiesta, did they understand? …

In my role as a gullible tourist, I had been the true witness of a false event.

(Time Pieces 3)

Ironically, a respectful Morris refrained from photographing the ostensibly sorrowful occasion only to discover that the event existed merely for its filmic value.

His encounter with the pseudofuneral reflects a feeling pervasive in his novels of the fifties—that reality is waging a losing battle with its own representations. The Works of Love, The Huge Season, and The Field of Vision are rife with fictional photographs that symbolize the dangerous potential of images to reduce and replace reality, particularly as sentimental souvenirs of the past or illusive depictions of paradise.² With their tendency to frame space and remove episodes from time, photographs engender the illusion of perfection, stability, and permanence, an illusion so desirable in a complicated and fast-paced society that viewers are eager to acquire it by imitating the image, regardless of the fact that perfection, stability, and permanence equal death. It's not surprising that many of Morris's characters are caught between the material and immaterial worlds, between dreams and reality, between immortality and mortality, between falsity and truth, because they have been deceived by images.³ On the other hand, Morris, himself a photographer, refuses to deprecate the medium of photography which, as seen in his photo-texts, has the power to reveal by resisting platitudes, by refusing to reduce its subjects to a predictable framed space, and, in that respect, his photo-texts are similar to postmodern photographs that deliberately challenge the reader's expectations. Literally, reusing space—Sherrie Levine's appropriations of famous photographs, including 1979 Untitled (After Edward Weston), a copy print from a reproduction of Weston's Torso of Neil, Richard Prince's recycling of magazine and other mass media images in his self-entitled “rephotography,” and Barbara Kruger's montages of reused images in dialogue with epigrammatic statements, such as “I shop therefore I am” and “Your money talks” boldly printed on the pictures—forces the reader to consider his/her relation to the images. Thus, Morris's fictional and actual photographs anticipate both the postmodern crisis, with its superfluity of images, and a possible postmodern response, which produces and/or recycles those images with a knowing eye.

The 1950s that Morris explores in his novels was a decade of representations, replicas, and microcosms. Baudrillard argues that hyperreality arose in the 1950s, epitomized by Las Vegas, “the absolute advertising city … of the 1950s, of the crazy years of advertising” (91). Disneyland, an amusement area dedicated to replacing reality with better, safer, and cleaner models, opened to the public in 1955, exemplifying Morris's statement that “our only inexhaustible resource at the moment is the cliché” (Territory Ahead 12). A standard travelogue realizes Morris's nightmare when it advertises Disneyland's Bear Country with the proviso “inspired by the great outdoors. What better way to see this rugged country than in Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes?” (McGrath 248). The Disneyland microcosm of nature is presented as better than the real thing. Why venture to Yellowstone or Yosemite, already tamed versions of the wilderness, when visitors can see it all without too much work and take home a plastic souvenir for their meager troubles?⁴ For those who wanted the pleasures of a miniature world without having to travel to Nevada or California, television delivered the visible world in a small, two-dimensional, black-and-white package while selling a stereotype of the jubilant white-aproned American homemaker smiling amidst her shining kitchen gadgets.

But before Las Vegas, Disneyland, or television dictated the American dream, picture magazines wielded considerable influence on American culture. According to a survey taken in 1950, when Life's circulation was 5,340,300, “Over half the population of America saw one or more issues of Life in any three-month period” (Goldberg 165). “Life,” writes Vicki Goldberg, “the closest thing to a national newspaper America had ever had, gave photography the largest forum in its history” (184). Perhaps because they deal in the nexus of words and photographs, Morris seems to find picture magazines the most odious of the decade's many lamentable products. While his own photo-texts of the forties, which united photographs and words to explore the less picturesque aspects of American culture, brought him little economic success, Life and Look, which relied heavily on the post-World War II financial boom to purvey a brand of homespun optimism and erase the gloom of the depression years, were selling extraordinarily well, marketing a particular vision of American culture largely through photographs. As Roland Marchand observes in Advertising the American Dream, consumers relied on advertising not to reflect society but to enhance it, to appeal to popular aspirations and fantasies in a credible form. The result was a “dramatiz[ation] of the American Dream” (xviii). Picture magazines fashioned and sold a paradigm of the American culture which relied on homogeneity and consensus, and much of what Wright Morris finds troubling about American culture is epitomized by the uniform buoyancy of periodicals, particularly Reverend Norman Vincent Peale's column in Look and Norman Rockwell's pictures in the Saturday Evening Post. To Morris, Rockwell's Post covers revel in sentimentality and predictability, satisfying “a hunger … for the Good Old Days” (Territory Ahead 118) to a generation that increasingly relies on technology and in a magazine in which advertisers “champio[n] the new against the old, the modern against the old-fashioned” (Marchand xxi).

This cultural schizophrenia, a dialectic between a mythicized past and a technological future that is devouring that past, is palpable in Wright Morris's fiction and essays. As he notes in his cultural manifesto, The Territory Ahead, “Nostalgia rules our hearts while a rhetoric of progress rules our words” (25). Notwithstanding his own affinity for photography, Morris sees the medium as dualistic, salvaging the fast fading wreckage of the past, but in its salvaging attempts it replaces things with images:

Just as there are people … who can only see clearly what has a frame around it, can we look forward to a generation that will only be at ease with a picture of something? A view, a pet, a loved one, a disaster? The image provides the confirmation that is lacking in the sight itself. Seeing is believing, if what we see is a photograph.

(Time Pieces 20)

As early as 1945, in The Man Who Was There, Morris depicts photography as a medium that reveals the facts but not the truth as Agee Ward, the enigmatic hero who is missing for most of the novel, explores a family album as a means of securing an identity. His efforts, however, to locate himself through images are unrewarding. Yet, by the 1950s, photographs in Morris's novels are not simply useless; they are misleading, impeding, perhaps even destructive. Beginning in The Works of Love (1952), Morris suggests that photographs can offer a dangerously attractive alternative to reality, illustrated by Will Brady's dis-ease with the world that makes him particularly vulnerable to framed and artificial spaces which mimic a photograph's stability. Two years later, in The Huge Season (1954), the effects of ubiquitous images are linked to the burden of literary inheritances: by hampering original experience, images and literature can prove deadly. In that novel, Morris suggests that the lack of authenticity in 1950s America began in the 1920s with the rise of advertising and celebrity, exemplified by Greta Garbo, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Charles Lindbergh. In his final novel of the 1950s, The Field of Vision (1956), Morris explores the subjectivity of perception, suggesting that cameras lie by depicting an objective reality while memory offers a greater truth by preserving the inaccuracies of vision. Each of these novels illustrates photography's reductivism, sentimentality, and stasis, its simultaneous proclivity toward materiality and immateriality, but throughout the works the possibility for characters to survive the dangers of an image-laden world increases: The Huge Season's Peter Foley and The Field of Vision's Gordon Boyd learn to form a salutary union of memory and image, while The Work of Love's Will Brady never acquires the imagination necessary to successfully combat the images around him.

Adam Brady of The Works of Love inaugurates the connection between image and desire that will eventually ruin his son, Will. Living in a sod house “west of the 98th meridian,” he recruits a bride through a deceitful photograph:

The picture shows Brady standing, hat in hand, with a virgin forest painted in behind him, and emerging from this forest a coyote and a one-eyed buffalo. The great humped head is there, but the rest of the beast is behind the screen.

The picture might have given any woman pause, but there was no indication, anywhere in it, of the landscape through the window that Adam Brady faced. There was not an inkling of the desolation of the empty plain. No hint of the sky, immense and faded. …

There was no indication that the man in the picture had on nearly everything that he owned, including a keywind watch with a bent minute hand.

(5-6)

The photograph lies about the very geography that defines these characters; identities are formed via images even in the wasteland of Nebraska.⁵ Though Adam's son attempts to escape his dismal heritage by moving east, he is too busy retrieving the past or envisioning the future to live in the present. The novel traces Will Jennings Brady's flawed attempts to connect with others, evinced in two failed marriages and an unsatisfactory relationship with his foster son, as well as his reliance on images as a vehicle for self-improvement. Will Brady, like his father, puts faith in advertisements, both those he places to secure a wife and those he answers to plan a vacation or to acquire a job. But perhaps the best example of Brady's reduction to a framed space is the coded message he sends his wife and son by having the manager of the Orpheum Theater flash a slide advertising Will Brady's Chickens and Eggs during a movie to announce his presence in the lobby.

Will's disconnection from humanity causes him to feel most alive in artificial places like lobbies of theaters and hotels, which are, like Brady himself, “both in … and out of this world” (172):⁶

The same things go along with lobbies that go along with dreams, great and small love affairs, and other arrangements that never seem quite real. The lobby draws a chalk line around this unreal world, so to speak. … For it is the purpose of hotel lobbies to take you out of the life you are living, to a better life, or a braver, more interesting one.

(173-74)

Preferring to glimpse the silver screen through the lobby doors, Brady stands in “the crack” between his world and another. The chalk line of the lobby is akin to a frame separating Brady from the rest of the world.

Hotel lobbies naturalize his constant self-consciousness, approximating the effect of gazing into a three-way mirror, in which “he sees himself … both coming and going, a man, that is, who was from someplace and was going somewhere” (172). Three-way mirrors offer Brady the sense of place that he lacks, providing him with three dimensions and making him feel less the impostor that he is.⁷ Windows serve a similar framing function by allowing Brady to view the world as a picture. Sorting waybills in a tower room in the freight yards, he “comes to life” while looking out a large window facing east, which provides a view of the city:

The bay window in the tower room was a frame around this picture. It hung there on the wall. … If he was more alive there than anywhere else—if he seemed to come to life when he faced this picture—it had something to do with the fact that he was cut off from it. Which was a very strange thing, since what the tower room made him feel was part of it.

(238-39)

But the frame through which Brady views the world is only the beginning of the containment devices the novel portrays. Gazing through his window, he watches people through theirs; between the cracks of the drawn blinds, he glimpses a woman peering into a mirror. Frame within frame within frame, Brady and the reader are trapped in endless reverberations of vision.

Like lobbies, windows, and film screens, postcards which always bear the same message serve as another framing device for Brady, effectively keeping him simultaneously connected to and disconnected from his foster son:

Dear Son—

Have moved. Have nice little place of our own now, two-plate gas. Warm sun in windows every morning, nice view of park. Plan to get new Console radio soon now, let you pick it out. Plan to pick up car so we can drive out in country, get out in air. Turning over in my mind plan to send you to Harvard, send you to Yale. Saw robin in park this morning. Saw him catch worm.

(221-22)

As the postcard becomes too battered and the writing smudged, Brady replaces it. No matter when he writes it, it is always spring on the card; the message is always the same. He refrains from mailing it until he can write the new address, the one with a view of the park, the one that never materializes. Brady traps himself in a pastoral convention, a nostalgic future that will never arrive. Experiencing life like frozen episodes, snapshots which defy the flux of time, Brady reduces everything around him to images but lacks the imagination to make them meaningful.⁸ Passing through his hometown late in life, Brady sees the scene as a photograph:

A lamp, with a green glass shade, hung inside. It threw an arc of light on the wide desk, the pads of yellow paper, and the hand of the man who sat there, a visor shading his face. The fingers of this hand were poised over the telegraph key. … He was staring, absently, into the windows of the passing cars. On the table before him lay a bamboo rod, curved at one end like a plant flowering, and a sheet of folded paper was inserted at the curved end. Will Brady saw all of this as if it were a picture on a calendar. Nothing moved, every detail was clear.

(212-13)

The postcard photographs, like the lobbies, are simultaneously real and unreal, in and out of this world, offering the possibility of permanence in a world of constant change. Because life beyond the photograph's frame is unstable, so clearly proven by the perennial gap between the depictions on posters and postcards and reality, the image within the frame can never be a reliable index of the future as Brady seems to believe it is. Akin to Brady's metaphorical three-way mirrors, photographs idealize, promising an undeliverable Eden or safeguarding a paradisiacal past. Brady runs off with his wife and son to Catalina because of a railroad poster of a glass-bottomed boat sailing from a white pier “toward happiness.” They get no further than Los Angeles, that “unreal city, a glittering mirage, … a show, another mammoth production, [a] hotel lobby … as big as the great outdoors” (191). Los Angeles is the source of the pervasive images that the characters mimic. The flirtatious, fluttering eye of Libby, the girl from whom he buys kisses, mimics the Orpheum billboards, and Gertrude, his second wife, confuses reality with film, as she spends eight hours a day in theaters.

In response to the confusion of a world which proffers hotels in lieu of homes, machine-made suntans, and department-store Santa Clauses, and oddly enough despite his attraction to such illusions and idealizations, Will Brady makes it his mission to produce something real: day-old eggs for the carriage trade (not to be confused with their celluloid-collared and false-cuffed impostors). A fresh egg, for Brady, becomes the epitome of the real, but, ironically, the candling-room, where he determines the freshness and perfection of each egg, resembles a photographer's darkroom, in which a streak of light in the midst of darkness gives rise to an image, thereby linking the “real” with the very image that has clouded reality.

The search for reality is equally daunting in The Huge Season, a novel which pits the inherent falsity of 1950s America against what initially seems to be a more original decade, the 1920s. A two-part narrative structure reinforces the dichotomy of the decades. Straightforward descriptive chapters entitled “The Captivity,” narrated by Peter Foley in generally chronological order, are paired with “Foley” chapters, stream-of-consciousness passages expressed in a third-person-limited point of view with Foley as the center of consciousness. The “Foley” sections are offered in reverse chronological fashion as Foley inversely recalls incidents of his past over the course of two days in 1952. His recollections and the subsequent actions, including a visit to his college friends, Montana Lou Baker and Jesse Proctor, are triggered by a newspaper photograph of Proctor, who is under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Similarly, the narrative in “The Captivity” sections is generated out of photographs and illustrations pinned to the sloping ceiling above an adolescent Foley's bed—images of Bebe Daniels, Sappho, Charles Lindbergh in the cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis, and particularly Charles Lawrence on the tennis court. They share the space with the declensions of Latin verbs, memorized on warm summer nights by the spark of trolley cars, providing a white flash in his dark room. Thus, early on, Foley learns to read the world as a negative metamorphosed into a positive through light.

The photographs of the 1920s, those images of heroes pasted above Foley's bed, bespeak possibility. In contrast are the cynical photographs of the 1950s: Proctor's face splashed across newspapers, alleging treasonous sensibilities. Fittingly, the decade in which coonskin hats replace the American frontier, and Disneyland's hyperrealism distracts the nation from the paucity of reality outside of its gates, is also the decade which manufactured the most famous fake photograph in American political history.⁹ Senator Joseph McCarthy's 1950 composite image of Senator Millard Tydings and Earl Browder, former head of the American Communist Party, implied, with the assistance of a suggestive caption, that the two were colluding.¹⁰ The photograph effected McCarthy's revenge on Tydings, who had accused the former of perpetrating “a fraud and a hoax … on the Senate of the United States and the American people” with his list of alleged active Communists in the State Department. Though the caption confessed that the photograph, which appeared only in a tabloid created for the occasion, was a “composite” (actually two photographs cut and pasted together and rephotographed), the Maryland public, who received complimentary copies of the newspaper several days before an election, did not understand the meaning of the term “composite,” and Tydings lost his Senate seat.

The politics of the fifties, like so much else from that decade, is revealed by the novel to be spurious, and so the reader, like many of the characters, is tempted to believe that the 1920s distinguished itself as more genuine and original than later decades by “establish[ing] standards that were hard to follow” (Huge Season 23); but that illusion is quickly obliterated by the redundancy of “the huge season” itself. Imitation and replication are revealed as the driving forces of the twenties, in which reality itself is replaced by film and literature. Chasing Montana Lou Baker, a hybrid of Greta Garbo, Fitzgerald's Jordan Baker, and Hemingway's Brett Ashley, through the streets of 1929 Paris, Foley “grabbed the belt across the back, swung her around, took a grip on her short hair as they did in the movies” (17). Like the still and film images that influence fashion and behavior, a history of fiction engenders imitation, thereby contributing to multiplying stereotypes and all but obviating original writing. The novels' manifold literary allusions Dante's (Inferno, Hamlet, Leaves of Grass, Ulysses, The Waste Land, many of Hemingway's and Fitzgerald's novels, especially The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby) reveal a respect for the authors' craft that is unfortunately fastened to an overwhelming sense of artistic oppression.¹¹ Jesse Proctor takes only four books to college with him—including The Sun Also Rises and a battered copy of This Side of Paradise, which bears his own name on the flyleaf “as if he were the author”—and eagerly steps into the Nick Carraway role of biographer to Charles Lawrence's Gatsby (68). Ironically, the three writers in the novel, Jesse Proctor, Lou Baker, and Peter Foley, cannot finish their own novels or live their own lives, haunted as they are by other works and characters, including Charles Lawrence.¹²

Proctor's imitation of Lawrence is, in effect, an imitation of an imitation, since, as Lou Baker observes, even Lawrence isn't original: “Lawrence is worse than anybody. … He's never been Charles Lawrence a minute of his life. He's always copied something, and right now he's copying Lawrence. He's waiting for Proctor to give him tips” (284). When not attired in the carelessly elegant collegiate look of leather patches and dusty white shoes reminiscent of Jay Gatsby, Lawrence recalls Walt Whitman, whose form is immediately identifiable to contemporary audiences because he was so often photographed. Indeed, Lawrence's evocation of Gatsby, a literary character who has fashioned himself after magazine images, and Whitman, a historical figure who idealized the democratizing powers of photography, points toward the similarity between literature and photography.¹³ The famous daguerreotype of Whitman in the first edition of Leaves of Grass is recalled by Lawrence's carriage, described as “nearly feminine, … a little insolent” and notable because his right hand, noticeably longer than his left, customarily rests on his hip (48). But Proctor's imitation of Lawrence's Whitman is initially more literary than physical. When Proctor's novel, based on Lawrence's life, awaits only a final chapter, a fiction which the author can't create until his model has determined it, Dickie Livingston prints ten copies of Proctor's unfinished manuscript without the author's name on the cover or the title page: “It was in the book, rather than on it, turning up in the dedication, which read: For Jesse Proctor / Without whom this book / would not have been / written” (19). We are reminded of Whitman's conspicuous omission of his own name from the frontispiece of the 1855 Leaves as well as its unorthodox appearance in a verse of “Song of Myself.” Later, serving as a campus guru spinning themes and variations on the word disinherited, Proctor, having taught “his educated feet … to walk in his proletarian shoes,” dons the Whitmanesque role for himself as he poses for snapshots “in his homespun beard, crouched on his haunches like a hillbilly, photogenically dangling or chewing on a spear of long-stemmed grass” (52). Images of Whitman serve as currency for immediate authentication of Proctor's political agenda. The familiar poses of one of America's most recognizable writers enable the aspiring dissident to tap into unlimited political connotations. Though photographs are obviously not responsible for imitation (after all, Foley sees Proctor as Hamlet and himself as Horatio; Lawrence is Jake Barnes and Jay Gatsby commingled), they have made replication easier and more efficient. While Lawrence has to perform to resemble literary characters, Proctor merely has to pose to resemble the good gray poet.

Peter Foley, the novel's narrator, however, is haunted by more than the ghosts of film and literature. Having followed in his father's footsteps as a classics scholar and gained renown on his college campus for “lifelike impersonations of Buster Keaton,” Foley is terrified by his redundancy (16). As early as 1927, before he had even begun college, Foley, “the rubber stamp of some Viking,” assumed that his father's past had determined his own future (287). His boss urges Foley to choose his own path, citing Charles Lindbergh as a model of originality and independence, a man planning to do “something that had never been done” (32). Noting Foley's strong physical resemblance to the aviator, Mr. Conklin barrages him with newspaper clippings of Lindbergh and purchases a large signed photograph for his employee, ironically supposing that originality is contagious. Even Foley's chance at an unpredestined future is sapped by the current Lindbergh fad. No such thing as untapped possibilities exists.

The search for “the real thing” thus becomes the mythical quest in the novel, a quest not easily fulfilled because of the proliferation of lies, mostly in the form of advertisements, in twentieth-century America. Advertising has homogenized American culture, selling the same dream to all its citizens. Foley watches a stranger in a park whose “animated face [reveals] well advertised concern and security for loved ones, long vacations with pay, carefree old age in ranch-style home, … [collecting] Rock of Ages monthly insurance check,” in other words, a man living the proverbial American Dream (188).

One fine day—as advertised in Life—that brook too broad for leaping would be lapping at the door. A heartbreak dream, with the soundtrack by Chaplin, full of young men still fighting Hemingway's war, still loving and seducing Fitzgerald's women, and believing in perfection—a machine-made perfection—if anything at all. A witness to the power, the glory, and the terrible risks of art.

(189)

The collusion between the bromides of American culture and merchandising make it nearly impossible to distinguish which came first. In fact, Lou Baker suggests that “all the raw material … that was needed to write the great American novel” could be found in the 1921 Sears, Roebuck catalogue, which supposes that even if literary influences can be ignored in artistic creation, cultural ones cannot (210). What is clear, however, is that advertising taps into all of the culture's sentimental visions of itself, typified by an ad for hand-crafted shoes so trite that it mesmerizes Foley:

Bench-made by old cobbler in mural-size photo, flashbulb shining on his mussy white hair, honest sweat on his forehead from honest toil, tight-lipped smile due to nails in his mouth, and frank, folksy glint in his steel-rimmed eyes, old Yankee stock, sleeves rolled on white arms showing sailing ship, a clipper, leaving ever-snug harbor.

(106-7)

In a world of imitation, even the real thing seems counterfeit. Foley describes a “small flock, a covey of water birds, unidentified … looking like freshly painted decoys” (13). Colton resembles a college movie of the twenties; even the mountains and the superfluity of blackbirds seem like props. California, however, disappoints Foley because it does not adhere to the image with which he is familiar. The California of Foley's expectations is born of a photograph: “The barren desert that glared in my father's photographs had disappeared” (33).

California initially seems an incongruous setting for a novel about the literary legacy of the lost generation writers, a group who favored New York and Europe; however, the culmination of the nation's westward expansion and the home of Hollywood suits the characters who congregate there, men who willingly exchange reality for its heightened equivalent. The instability of California—one minute a desert, the next a paradise—makes it the ideal setting for a novel about imitation and duplication. California, with its superabundance of wax museums, ostentatious art collections, and theme parks, is clearly America's testament to illusion, a site of unlimited possibility because of its brief history: “The frantic desire for the Almost Real arises only as a neurotic reaction to the vacuum of memories,” observes Umberto Eco (30).

Ultimately, the ads that assault Foley and the illusions that define California raise the stakes of reality, demanding that experience conform to images. More than other visual arts, photography provides a heightened equivalent of reality because it captures a moment that has occurred. Beyond representation, photography repeats an instant, an action, a gesture. It offers the seemingly impossible pairing of the transience of life and the permanence of art; in the midst of a palpable world, people move like ghosts, leaving blurred traces of their temporary presence. Foley's ambivalence toward photographs finds a parallel in his confused relationship with time. For him, time, which flowed easily and naturally for his father, is marked by irregularity: “Time, for my father, seemed to be contained in the watch. It did not skip a beat, fly away, or merely vanish, as it does for me. So long as he remembered to wind the watch Time would not run out” (3). The watch, given by grandfather to father to son, ironically bears the inscription Incipit Vita Nova, but how does one begin a new life when the same old time passes from generation to generation? Though the watch “still keep[s] very good time” in Foley's day, “the times are out of joint” (3).

The photograph, like a watch, contains within itself the conflict between stability and fluctuation, permanence and ephemerality. Photographs simultaneously locate their subjects in time and remove them from it. Like so many of Morris's characters, Foley's susceptibility to the concept of the “still point,” “a timeless tempest in an ever-threatening sea,” a moment provided by memory and art, initially disables him from reconciling fixity and flux (161). Foley recalls the other Peter Foley: “Unfaded, on the flyleaf of the Latin books on his shelves, … [he] did not change, grow up or grow old, marry the right or wrong girl, come to a good or bad end, or merely peter out, as most men seemed destined to do” (185).

But while photographs rescue subjects from change and disappointment, they concomitantly embalm them. In a Manhattan art shop, Foley is arrested by photographs, clearly taken before fast-lens cameras, which juxtapose blurred passersby against a sharply focused background and leave Foley with a

curious feeling … that these people existed, that they were really there, but by now, as was clear from their clothes, short of some unusual miracle, some freak of longevity, they would be gone. … Two blurred shadows, caught by the camera, moving in a scene that was itself immortal, or looked immortal, like beetles in amber, in that scene so full of so many timeless objects, the trees and the river, the history-haunted towers, the bookstalls with their freight of what was still surviving—a seemingly permanent scene with these impermanent shadows crossing it. … All around them was Paris, the immortal city; the delicate trees cast their permanent shadows, but the feet of this woman—like the wings of time—were blurred.

(161-62)

The postcard image is later resurrected in Foley's recollection of a scene from the twenties: Lawrence, standing, with his hand in a smoking smudgepot.

Into the flame Lawrence dipped his hand, and with the sightless smile of an antique statue he turned and gazed into Foley's face. The lips silent, the gaze already remote, he peered toward Foley from a sacred wood that slowly receded into the changeless past. A blurred, shadowy figure, caught by the camera, nameless in a scene that seemed immortal, like that woman of mystery in the postcard view of the Seine. Suspended in time, like the ball that forever awaited the blow from the racket, or the upraised foot that would never reach the curb. A permanent scene, made up of frail, impermanent things. … But in the burning they gave off something less perishable.

(305-6)

Lawrence himself is a stillpoint, the space of art which offers something that a fleeting life cannot by making the material immaterial. Describing the essence of that space, Morris remarks, “It is the nature of art to be immaterial, the conceptual act must be grasped by the mind: what appears to be solid is transformed into a vapor thinner than air. That, indeed, is its very indestructibility” (Territory Ahead 28).¹⁴ As attractive as that space may be, however, it is essential to remember that it is a space inimical to life. The blur of moving figures implies the dynamics of life but ineluctably suggests the ghostliness of death. One of the century's most famous images of death, the mushroom cloud above Hiroshima, provides the ultimate example of the transformation of the material into the immaterial in The Huge Season:

The camera swept around it, saw that it was bare, that nothing made by man remained in it, then returned to focus on several faint shadows on the asphalt slab. And these? These were the shadows of men—the shadows cast by the blast itself. The shadows of men in the light of their own man-made sun.

(170)

The shadows of atom-bomb victims bear an uncanny likeness to photographic images made immaterial by another man-made sun which casts shadows on paper and metal. Like the bomb, the camera is indifferent to, even exploitative of, the suffering around it. And the final image is the photographic shadow of the shadow produced by the bomb.

Foley, unlike Will Brady and Charles Lawrence, recognizes that immortality is stultifying and thus learns how to maintain immortal moments while living a mortal existence. Lawrence's inability to exist in real time is evinced by the photograph of Lawrence above Foley's bed, which provides the model that its subject must follow. Depicting Lawrence in the middle of a tennis serve, the portrait captures all the promise and potential of a young, talented athlete. But by the end of the novel, Lawrence is dead, having committed suicide because he cannot exist outside of perfection, beyond the frame of the photograph. He never learns what Foley does: that one can encapsulate the past without becoming captive to it.

The ability to live both in and out of time, to remember the past and exist in the present, is central to The Field of Vision (1956). That ability requires a recognition of the vagaries of vision, an understanding of the conflict between what one sees and what is there. Five characters, witnessing the same bullfight in Mexico, see entirely different events.¹⁵ Ironically, Walter McKee, one of the most obtuse characters, observes the universal phenomenon early in the novel when he notes that Mrs. Kahler, “a woman whose eyes were as good as [his], if not better,” sees only what she wants to see because of “some mental trouble” (14). What he doesn't realize is that is all any of them see. As Gordon Boyd, the most perspicacious of the viewers, notes: “Each man had the eyes to see only himself. This crisp sabbath afternoon forty thousand pairs of eyes would gaze down on forty thousand separate bullfights, seeing it all very clearly, missing only the one that was said to take place” (59). Ruminating on what a photograph of the episode would reveal, Boyd claims, “The camera did not lie. A pity, since the lie mirrored the truth. The camera would report what no pair of eyes present had seen” (154). Gordon Boyd learns that material things pass, and one is left with memories: “it was the unreal thing that lasted, the red-brick phantasm in Boyd's mind, complete with fire escape, erasers, and the listening dog in the Victrola horn” (232).

As Foley apprehends the dangers of absolute immateriality, Boyd grasps the hazards of excessive materiality, which lends itself to the reduction of photographs and souvenirs. Gordon Boyd learns that the importance of his boyhood encounter with Ty Cobb in The Field of Vision is not inherent in the pocket ripped from the celebrated baseball player's pants, which he discovers is merely a trophy that stultifies the original transformative experience. Though Boyd, for a time, relies on the relic to conjure a sense of his own heroism, eventually he realizes that the power of the moment lies in the story he tells about it, and that story's potential transformative powers, a lesson he teaches to his friend's grandson, who rejects his grandfather's offer to buy him a paper bull after watching a bullfight in Mexico: “‘It's not a bull if you buy it,’ said the boy” (249). Souvenirs promote America's backward-looking tendency, avowing a temptation to venerate the old because it is old. Their sheer numbers have caused artifacts to lose their meaning. The superfluity of fake coonskin hats in the 1950s worn by both adults and children who have become versions of “Disney's rubber-stamp midgets” are symptoms of an age of artifacts whose mystical dimensions have been effaced by excess and nostalgia (Field of Vision 194). Having removed the risks of the frontier, the only danger is “a national shortage of coonskin hats” (Territory Ahead 195).

Like relics, photographs tend to idolize the referent while eliding its significance. In the process of ensuring that the masses get a look at paintings and sculptures previously available only to wealthy travelers, photography has diminished modern art to “vest-pocket reminders of reproductions that hung in bus stations, lounge cars, bedrooms for guests, … bathrooms with color matching shower curtains” (Huge Season 160). The vulnerability of the image to be clichéd is nowhere more evident than in The Field of Vision, where a photograph of Boyd in a camera magazine convinces the subject that even his failure is hackneyed:

The camera had caught every memorable cliché: the coat fastened with a pin, the cut suggesting better days, the sock there to call attention to the calloused heel, in one soiled hand a paper bag, now empty, and in the other a crust. This crust he shared—the autumn sun shining on it—with his sole companion, a moth-eaten squirrel who had plainly suffered the same misfortunes at the hand of life.

(69-70)

Photographs prescribe possibility, presenting “culture as … [a] photographer's salon where ready-made frames, hung on the walls of rustically historical gardens, lacked only the faces of succeeding generations in the ready-made holes. This hand-me-down world defined the realm of the possible” (70-71).¹⁶ Appearing in the same novel, a photograph of Tom Scanlon provides evidence that the realm of the possible is only stocked with the prefabricated: described as “looking frozen to death, his feet in the oven, wrapped up in buffalo robes and wearing his cane-sided draymen's hat” with a photo caption claiming “Man Who Knew Buffalo Bill Spends Lonely Xmas,” Scanlon, a ninety-year-old man, born and raised in Lone Tree, is fraudulently placed by the image and caption into the prescribed role of frontiersman (48, 217). By reducing multiple perceptions to one perception, the photograph standardizes vision. As advertisements create an American dream, documentaries create American icons. Intention cannot immunize a photograph against the medium's capacity for cliché.

The disparity between Morris's actual and fictional photographs underscores the dual tendency of photography to salvage or corrupt, to represent or manipulate, to suggest or supplant. Morris's own photographs attempt to rescue those icons and artifacts that are passing away, replaced by machine-made objects that roll off assembly lines. His intimate portraits, straightforward frontal views of buildings, rooms, pieces of furniture leave little room for the construction of cultural myths. His photographs evoke a sense of place, intimate spaces which suggest human presence despite the absence of humans: “In all my life I've never been in anything so crowded, so full of something, as the rooms of a vacant house. Sometimes I think only vacant houses are occupied. … An inhabitant is what you can't take away from a house” (Inhabitants n.p.). Close-up images of tattered clothes on hooks, a newspaper-lined drawer filled with silverware, and a battered comb on a linen-topped dresser allude to nearby inhabitants that rarely appear in Morris's photographs. When they do appear, their faces are turned from the camera; we know them only from their surroundings and their postures.

Human presence is particularly palpable in his landscapes, where an expansive vacuity conveys overwhelming isolation. A school outhouse circumscribed by a fence sits alone on a flat plain. As if to remind us that human engineering is no match for geography and cosmology, a dead-center horizon line cuts through the puny building and its frame, a fence made absurd by its seemingly senseless delimitation in a void. Two lonely mailboxes stand side by side, dwarfed by an enormous tree while distant telephone poles are swallowed by the sky. Here, as in many of Morris's images, vertical objects battle the imposing horizontality of the plains. The erection of barns, windmills, fences, lampposts, grain elevators, mailboxes, homes, and churches seems a defiance of a flat land. In an essay written forty years after most of the images were taken, Morris confesses, “I saw, but did not fully sense, that these constructions were pathetically temporary on the vast exposed landscape” (Time Pieces 124). He describes his aim in The Inhabitants as accruing “evidence of humankind in the artifacts that revealed individuals' passing. … Nothing will compare with the photograph to register what is going, going, but not yet gone. The pathos of this moment, the reluctance of parting, we feel intensely” (Time Pieces 112).

Morris's photo-texts predate the typical postmodern predilection for multimedia projects, what Linda Hutcheon has called “border tensions” and Douglas Crimp has termed “hybridization.”¹⁷ His first photo-text, The Inhabitants (1946), published in a large format, paired two different narrative styles: brief, somewhat aphoristic first-person commentaries on inhabitants and slightly longer narratives given in dialect, seemingly the voices of inhabitants whose vacant dwellings are pictured alongside the text. Full-page photographs, bleeding off the edges of the paper, reject the traditional framing device that generally circumscribes works of art from the rest of the world.¹⁸ For Morris, who dislikes illustrated novels, the photographs do not illustrate the words; both media remain independent.¹⁹ The language does, however, provide a key to a successful understanding of the images, which should be read not as statements of social realism, like the documentary photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, but as remnants of passing objects whose “mystic meaning” would be missed.²⁰ His second photo-text, The Home Place (1948), offers a narration of a single day as told by a returning native. As in The Inhabitants, each page of text faces a photograph, which is cropped to fit a smaller format. “These mutilations removed them, as a group, from the context of artworks, as ‘images,’ and presented them as ‘things’ and artifacts” (Time Pieces 137). Clearly, for Morris, the term mutilations does not connote disintegration. His cropped images force us to see “the thing itself,” a phrase, probably borrowed from Edward Weston, that Morris has used to signify the historical artifact, and not the aestheticized image. Indeed, in the context of writing, Morris has relied on the word mutilations to express the imperative of each generation to reconsider and transform the literary object, to demystify it so that it ceases to be a burden and instead becomes a path to creativity:

To make new we must reconstruct, as well as resurrect. The destructive element in this reconstruction is to remove from the object the encrusted cliché. … The fragment means more to us—since it demands more of us—than the whole. The mutilations are what we find the most provocative and beautiful.

(Territory Ahead xv)

Morris's desire to see the image rather than its manufacturer in no way suggests that he is naive to the photographer's “inscrutable presence” in every photograph:

Would that image restore my original impressions, or would they be replaced by others? To what extent would this new image, cut off from its surroundings, constitute a new structure? How much of the “reality” had it captured? How much had it ignored? Whether or not it had been my intent, I would end up with something other than what was here. It would be a new likeness, a remarkable approximation, a ponderable resemblance, but not a copy. This new image would testify to the photographer's inscrutable presence.

(Time Pieces 116)

However ingenuous these images may at first appear, evidence of a postmodernist impulse pervades these testimonials to the past. Images of and through doors and windows suggest a self-consciousness about the act of photography. We look over Morris's shoulder into the camera lens, which itself looks out through a lighted window, or we peer through lace curtains into a parlor or gaze into an oval mirror which reflects photographs of faces beside an unhinged door. But windows don't always allow the voyeur visual access; sometimes they merely reflect the external, as in Model T in Shed, or more dramatically, Tombstone, Arizona, an image of an abandoned, dilapidated building whose intact windows reflect and whose missing window panes reveal a stunning triptych of clouds and mountains. Here, at least, nature has reclaimed the territory, and the taming of the West seems a slight exaggeration. Many of Morris's photographs include other photographs, allowing us to look, obliquely, through two lenses at once: Morris's own and his predecessor's. Time continuously recedes—as the mirror's reflection suggests. Linking time and vision, another photograph juxtaposes a pocket watch, a trio of photographs, two flashlights, and eyeglasses among the myriad contents of a dresser drawer. Like Hawthorne, Morris rarely lets us forget the inherent voyeurism in any gaze, and the reader/viewer is no less incriminated in the spectatorship than the narrator, the writer, or the photographer. Moreover, we are reminded that the photographer's presence unavoidably alters the situation. Attempting to photograph a vacant space, Morris provides a presence, throws a shadow on a wall or floor, or fills a mirror with his reflection, thus reminding the viewer that representations are never transparent or authorless.²¹

An augmented self-consciousness pervades Morris's third photo-text, published in 1968. In God's Country and My People, Morris revisits photographs from The Inhabitants and The Home Place and thus “reconsider[s] … material from a later point in time, using essentially the same techniques and the same body of photographs. It was the quality of the repetition that was necessary to this book” (Time Pieces 90). A decade later, postmodern photographers would begin recycling images to convey their senses that since the culture was surfeited with images, new ones were unnecessary. Repetition is a critical tool in postmodernism, forcing viewers to examine images which have become cultural icons. Though his agenda is personal rather than social and political, Morris's act of recycling and reviewing his own images raises some of the same issues as postmodern art: how one sees is inevitably a function of one's historical and social context, which invariably mandates a refocusing of old images. In this regard, God's Country and My People recalls one of the central issues in The Field of Vision: perception is contingent. Morris does not offer slices of life so much as fragments of his own changing vision, for as Gordon Boyd realizes in The Field of Vision, objective reality doesn't exist; all we can ever know is what we see, which is later processed through memory. If as Morris notes, “we continue to see what we will, rather than what is there,” then his photo-texts document the shift in personal and cultural influences (Time Pieces 4).

But recycling his own photographs does more than note the fluxity of vision; it points toward the artifice of all images. The original version of Model T with California Top, Ed's Place shows no traces of the photographer's presence, whose shadow had left its mark on the negative's foreground; Morris cropped out the evidence of his presence. Years later, however, he printed the full negative, acknowledging in visible terms his own presence. By foregrounding the darkroom work, the cropping, editing, burning, and dodging that alters the already personal view, Morris reminds us that photographs are anything but innocent, disinterested reflections of reality.

In contrast to his actual photographs, which suggest that the best portraits omit people, Morris's fictional images are crowded with people. Perhaps for that very reason they aren't particularly useful in depicting their subjects. Much of the plot of The Deep Sleep pivots around an unflattering obituary photograph that so distorts the essence of its subject that the deceased's family considers the previously anathematic alternative of waking him in an open casket just to dispel the photograph's residue. The centerpiece of The Man Who Was There is a description of a family photograph album which defies representation. Ironically, the best portraits are those whose faces have been blurred by time:

And yet it is clear that even without faces these figures are good portraits—the absence of the face is not a great loss. Uncle Harry Ward, third from the right, discovered this for himself. When he was a very young man and most of the figures still had faces, the only one he was sure about was himself. Himself and the two girls, that is. But when his eyes weren't so good and all he could see was how they were standing—why, it seemed that he knew them right off. As soon as their faces were gone he knew them right away.

(64)

Agee Ward, the novel's largely missing central character, is indistinguishable in photographs. His face is blurred in one school photo and blocked in another. An unwound shutter and poor aim foil several attempted shots of the character. Even when successfully photographed, his face is covered by a cap, a pith helmet, or racing goggles. Yet the novel's title, like Agee's facelessness, suggests that he is present despite his physical absence as other characters are rejuvenated by his memory and artifacts. Like people in Morris's photographs, Agee Ward is more present for being absent, more real because he is not literally depicted by photographs.²²

Morris lambastes a demand for the literal in American culture that has endangered everyone's, including writers', more speculative and figurative tendencies: “Obsessed with what is real, … [writers] are skeptical of the imagination, idolatrous of the facts” (Time Pieces 69).²³ Artists, like Morris's characters, must learn to find a middle ground between the world of facts and the realm of imagination: an artist “must become that paradox, both a visionary and a realist” (Territory Ahead 218). His recipe for literary and cultural survival seems to be what Hawthorne called the romancer's “neutral territory, … where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet” (Hawthorne 28): “Life, raw life, the kind we lead every day … has the curious property of not seeming real enough” (Territory Ahead 228). Morris's solution is to process raw life through the imagination in order to make it real. Similarly, to gain an authentic and original relationship to the world, we do not need to reject our national and literary past but need to “reconstruct, as well as resurrect” it because art can only survive through transformation: “I seek to make my own what I have inherited as clichés” (Territory Ahead xiv).²⁴

In The Huge Season, Peter Foley gradually realizes that as the flaw of the 1950s is an excessive reliance on a material world, the inverse flaw of the 1920s is an inability to deal with the material world:

Did they lack conviction? No, they had conviction. What they lacked was intention. They could shoot off guns, at themselves, leap from upper-floor windows, by themselves, or take sleeping pills to quiet the bloody cries of the interior. But they would not carry this war to the enemy. That led to action, action to evil, blood on the escutcheon of lily-white Goodness, and to the temporal kingdom rather than the eternal heavenly one. That led, in short, where they had no intention of ending up. The world of men here below. The godawful mess men had made of it.

(299-300)

Foley finds a livable space between the material and the immaterial, reality and imagination.²⁵ Though he is tempted to burn his manuscript, a narrative of the 1920s, at the beginning of the novel, he realizes the need to join reality and imagination and thus to free himself from the past. The final pages of the novel suggest that Foley, by becoming a willing witness in Proctor's trial, will fully enter the real world. Foley's newfound vitality is inspired by the generative boldness of a local chipmunk, “a cat charmer, a lion tamer, a prophet for a new and holy order of chipmunks,” who repeatedly escapes death by mesmerizing Foley's cat with a frantic dance (168). The chipmunk exemplifies a “creative evolution … founded on audacity [, t]he unpredictable behavior that [lights] up the darkness with something new” (167). Such audacity, which lights up the darkness, is linked both to a camera's flash in a dark space and an enlarger's streak of light in a darkroom. Photography's heretofore destructive elements, akin to the blast of the atomic bomb, are transformed into a productive aesthetic, a magical realm which combines the seen and the imagined:

What I saw in the darkroom often took precedence over what I saw on the ground glass. For me, the “picture” emerges in the developing solution, and it is the magic of this moment that I find most exciting. I see my subject through the lens, but I conceive the picture in the darkroom. Photography is camera obscura.

(Time Pieces 143)

The darkroom, the space of imagination and possibility, contains its own alternative to the stifling, hackneyed images produced in unimaginative minds. In their finest capacity, photographs reveal “fissures in time's narrative flow … [which leave] expanding and disquieting gaps in our perceived notions of reality, of a familiar and stable world” (Time Pieces 11). Like fiction, photographs can provide a link between life and art, reality and imagination, the material and immaterial worlds. For Morris, the medium that proliferates hyperreality can also subvert it.

Notes

1. Andy Grundberg argues that “photography suggests that our image of reality is made up of images. It makes explicit the dominion of mediation” (15). Linda Hutcheon posits that postmodernism's “study of representation becomes, not a study of mimetic mirroring or subjective projecting, but an exploration of the way in which narratives and images structure how we see ourselves and how we construct our notions of self, in the present and in the past” (7).

2. As Morris writes, “The Great Depression was real enough in itself, but the hold it still has on our imagination is largely a photographic triumph. … The photographs of Walker Evans have helped shape our image of what is real, and as its image hardens to a cliché, it now obstructs the emergence of what is actually there” (Time Pieces 62). For many, the depression is epitomized by Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, a photograph which evokes all the sentiment, politics, and civic responsibility of that time and hence has effectively displaced the actual tragedy, not to mention the fact that the photograph erased the actual family by making its members symbolic.

3. Critics have categorized a variety of Morris's themes in terms of binaries: real/phony, actual/ideal, hero/witness, moment of truth/cliché, material/imaginary.

4. In Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco argues that “Disneyland not only produces illusion, but—in confessing it—stimulates the desire for it. … Imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it” (44-46). The preference for representations is pointed, for Eco, in a wax reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, touted as better because the “original fresco is by now ruined, almost invisible, unable to give you the emotion you have received from the three-dimensional, which is more real, and there is more of it” (18). Even American museums, which don't simply display historical and artistic artifacts but recreate original spaces, offer “absolute unreality … as real presence. … The sign aims to be the thing” (7). Holography, also developed in the fifties, succeeds in America because it is “a country obsessed with realism, where, if a reconstruction is to be credible, it must be absolutely iconic, a perfect likeness, a ‘real’ copy of the reality being represented” (4).

5. Joseph J. Wydeven compares the novel's form, particularly the “interpretive difficulties” of its slippery narrative voice, to family photograph albums, “with their frustrating gaps in the chronology of weeks, months, or years; tantalizingly unexplained costumes, gestures, and facial expressions; and maddening silences about all those strange pictured incidents” (“Focus and Frame” 102).

6. Later in the novel, when answering an advertisement to act as Montgomery Ward's Santa Claus, Brady believes he is prepared “to live in this world, so to speak, and yet somehow be out of it … to be mortal and immortal, at the same time” (265).

7. Numerous references to mirrors occur in the novel, as well as at least three references to three-way mirrors. See pp. 148, 151, 171.

8. In “Focus and Frame in Wright Morris's The Works of Love,” Wydeven argues that the novel's “chief irony is how little knowledge Brady achieves from so many detailed acts of perception. … Brady is like a camera without a motivating human agent as operator” (100, 107).

9. Baudrillard argues that “Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country. … [It] is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (12).

10. The caption read: “Communist leader Earl Browder, shown at left in this composite picture, was the star witness at the Tydings Committee hearings, and was cajoled into saying Owen Lattimore and others accused of disloyalty were not Communists. Tydings (right) answered, ‘Oh, thank you, sir.’ Browder testified in the best interests of the accused, naturally” (qtd. in Goldberg 92).

11. The sense of exhaustion that permeates postmodern theory, the notion that images, concepts and ideas have been depleted, is pervasive in Morris. For years, he argues, art has been shaping life so that we no longer know if we are responding to the raw material of our culture or merely to previous interpretations of it: “What was once raw about American life has now been dealt with so many times that the material we begin with is itself a fiction, one created by Twain, Eliot, or Fitzgerald. … The imagination has now left its stamp on all of [America]” (Territory Ahead 13, 21).

12. The crossover between the real and the fictional runs throughout the novel. Morris is writing a novel in which people are affected by literary history while his character, Proctor, attempts to write a novel in which characters are based on actual people: “It just so happened, naturally, that there was a mention of an Indiana family, and certain Indiana families might mistakenly think they were the family he meant. And there was also the mention, at considerable length, of a small, swanky college in southern California, but not in just the terms that might please somebody like the dean of men” (229). The interconnection between life and art becomes pathological for Proctor, who gives Foley a speech about the distinction between real experiences and phony simulations, which has clearly come, word for word, from his book. Moreover, Proctor cannot finish his novel, so clearly based on Lawrence's life, until Lawrence acts.

13. Whitman suggested that written historical records of important leaders and thinkers be replaced by “three or four or half a dozen portraits—very accurate—of the men: that would be history—the best history—a history from which there would be no appeal.” In his own review of Leaves of Grass, placed anonymously in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Whitman explained the peculiar replacement of the author's name with his likeness. “The book itself is a reproduction of the author. His name is not on the frontispiece but his portrait, half length, is. The contents of the book form a daguerreotype of his inner being” (both qtd. in Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs 60, 65).

14. Wayne C. Booth and Richard Daverman perceive the material world as one that must be overcome in order to achieve a world that is more real. I, however, agree with J. C. Wilson and G. B. Crump, who argue that physical reality is as important as imagination in Morris's novels.

15. Morris observes: “The multifaceted aspect of reality has been commonplace since cubism, but we continue to see what we will, rather than what is there” (Time Pieces 4).

16. A photograph of Lone Tree taken from a balloon on July 4, 1901, reveals the banal limitations of photographs: “The century had just turned. The locomotive in the picture was headed East. It had come from the East—as a matter of fact, it had backed in from the East since there was no local roundhouse” (45). Despite the primitive railroad facilities, the picture had been taken to impress eastern businessmen of Lone Tree's economic future. However, fifty years later “not much had changed—in so far as you could tell from the photograph” (47). Intended as an instrument to inspire progress, the image is transformed over time into a historical artifact documenting stasis.

17. Linda Hutcheon cites “border tensions” as the transgression of boundaries between genres, disciplines, discourses, high and mass culture, practice and theory. Douglas Crimp notes that “hybridization,” the mixing of heterogeneous media, genres, projects, and materials, violates the purity of modernist art (77), and Andy Grundberg observes that postmodernism's intermingling of media “dispel[s] modernism's fetishistic concentration on the medium as message” (6).

18. According to David E. Nye, “A frame around an image announces its completeness. In the conventions of art, a white border says that the picture is a self-contained statement. Morris's un-named and un-framed images fill the book with glimpses that cannot be illustrations, stills from a film, or autonomous works of art. By releasing these photographs from definition through language and from closure through framing, he makes them problematic, without a fixed meaning or stabilized relation to the text” (164).

19. For Morris's comments on the combination of photographs and text, see Time Pieces 89.

20. Morris's photographic debt to Henry James may even exceed his literary one. Many of his essays refer to the passage in The American Scene where James attributes “mystic meaning” to “objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it” (qtd. in Territory Ahead 58–59). Morris maintains that such significance no longer inheres in contemporary artifacts. He considers photography's primary function the salvaging of those objects which still contain it.

21. Roy K. Bird argues that Morris's novels, like his photographs, call attention to their fictional status via authorial intrusions and contemplations (2). “Because of the inevitable subjectivity of memory, he sees all history as a fiction imposed by memory on the past” (36).

22. Roy Stryker of the Farm Security Administration was perplexed by the absence of people in Morris's images. The latter, unsuccessfully angling for an assignment, “tried to explain that the presence of people in the houses and barns was enhanced by their absence in the photographs. [Stryker] had heard many things, but nothing so far-fetched as that” (Photographs and Words 20).

23. Morris notes a similar defect haunting photographers, who are “obsessed with some concept of actuality” (Time Pieces 88).

24. In an unpublished lecture delivered at Amherst College in 1958, Morris states: “From My Uncle Dudley to the Cannibals, the author's real and imagined commitments to the past, and his gradual escape from its captivity, is recorded, as in a graph, in the various transformations of The Kid. This does not imply a rejection of the Past but an escape from its crippling enthralldom, such as Peter Foley believes he has experienced in his escape from the captivity of Lawrence” (qtd. in Hunt 59).

25. Wayne Booth and David Madden discuss the concept of imaginative transformation as a redeeming force in Morris's fiction.

Selected Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. 1981. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Bird, Roy K. Wright Morris: Memory and Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 1985.

Booth, Wayne C. “The Shaping of Prophecy: Craft and Idea in the Novels of Wright Morris.” American Scholar 31 (1962): 608-26.

———. “The Two Worlds in the Fiction of Wright Morris.” Sewanee Review 65.3 (1957); 375-99.

Crimp, Douglas. “Pictures.” Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984. 175-88.

Crump, G. B. The Novels of Wright Morris: A Critical Interpretation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.

Daverman, Richard. “The Evanescence of Wright Morris's The Huge Season.” MidAmerica 8 (1981): 79-91.

Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

Goldberg, Vicki. The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives. New York: Abbeville, 1991.

Grundberg, Andy. Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography, 1974-1989. New York: Aperture, 1990.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850. New York: Norton, 1988.

Hunt, John W., Jr. “The Journey Back: The Early Novels of Wright Morris.” Critique 5.1 (1962): 41-60.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Lyons, Nathan, ed. Photographers on Photography. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

Madden, David. Wright Morris. New York: Twayne, 1964.

Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

McGrath, Nancy. Frommer's Dollarwise Guide to California and Las Vegas. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.

Morris, Wright. The Deep Sleep. 1953. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.

———. The Field of Vision. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.

———. God's Country and My People. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.

———. The Home Place. 1948. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968.

———. The Huge Season. 1954. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.

———. The Inhabitants. 1946. New York: Da Capo, 1972.

———. The Man Who Was There. 1945. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977.

———. Photographs and Words. Carmel, California: Friends of Photography, 1982.

———. The Territory Ahead. 1957. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.

———. Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing, and Memory. New York: Aperture, 1989.

———. The Works of Love. 1952. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972.

Nye, David E. “‘Negative Capability’ in Wright Morris' The Home Place.” Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal-Visual Enquiry 4.1 (1988): 163-69.

Trachtenberg, Alan. “The Craft of Vision.” Critique 4.3 (1962): 41-55.

———. Reading American Photographs. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989.

Wilson, J. C. “Wright Morris and the Search for the ‘Still Point.’” Prairie Schooner 49 (1975): 154-63.

Wydeven, Joseph J. “Focus and Frame in Wright Morris's The Works of Love.” Western American Literature 23.2 (1988): 99-112.

———. “Images and Icons: The Fiction and Photography of Wright Morris.” Under the Sun: Myth and Realism in Western American Literature. Ed. Barbara Howard Meldrum. Troy, New York: Whitson, 1985. 177-97.