Semiotics of Exile in Photography

Abstract

Photography, according to Pirandello, is linked with the motif of exile—first and foremost, it is the estrangement between self and image under the spotlight, then the daily enlarged disparity between the perennial life preserved by the photograph and the reality of the corporeal being subject to the erosion of time. According to both Lu Xun¹ and Roland Barthes,² the spectacle of photography is tied with the “specter,” the theater of the dead. In its insistence on the living reality of what has been dead, photography flouts the division of reality and illusion, death and living. Thus, in my view, this emblemizes the wedding of Eros and Mourning in the novel of nostalgia for a dying culture. Therefore, the semiotics of photography has its characteristic tropes of exile, mourning, cultural nostalgia, and loss of reality. In the two novels studied in this chapter, Wang Anyi’s Melody of Everlasting Regret³ features a protagonist who is a plaintive Shang Hai beauty in the 1930s that lost gradually her contact with reality in the contemporary world, when her accustomed cultural milieu faded away. In the other novel, Peter Handke’s Der kurze brief zum langen Abschied,⁴ the protagonist is a German exile in the United States, whose personal vision and family relationship are constantly distorted and harassed by the memory of the past—the images of explosion, fragmentation and death in the World War II.