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Going to Heaven·. A Missing Link in the History of Photonarrative? )an Baetens To David Berona, who discovered it for me . . . The Return of the Narrative In contemporary theory, the study of the image-as-narrative is no longer restricted to the domain of moving images (as analyzed in film studies, media studies, or communication studies). There has been recently a global rediscovery of the narrativity of the fixed image (although sometimes in a rather empirical, slightly undertheorized way). After a long period in which (fixed) images were mainly assimilated to snapshots, to single moments, to representations whose content and meaning could be caught in one single glance, those same images may and can now tell stories again, as they have always done. We are better able now to see what obstacles had been blocking the narrative interpretation of fixed images: for instance the prestige of the Lessing-Greenberg paradigm, with its overemphasis on the ontologically non-temporal dimension of the image, and of course also the influence of the photographic model, regrettably restricted to the model of snapshot photography. And we also have now a lot of seminal studies which contest the illusion of the glance as an a-temporal single-moment-ness, such as the philosophical work by Jonathan Crary on the temporal dimension of looking and the temporal underpinnings of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 31.1 (Winter 2001 ): 87-105. Copyright © 2001 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 88 JNT optical machines (Crary 1991), the art-historical studies by Lew Andrews on the long-time occulted tradition of narrative painting before and after monocular perspectivism (Andrews 1995), or the semiotical and cognitivo-semiotical studies gathered by Julie Leblanc in a special issue of the journal Texte (1998). Yet this renewed interest in the image's narrativehood remains very incomplete . Much scholarship has now being devoted to the narrative revalorization of philosophical and art-historical topics such as the spectator's gaze or the temporal impact of the compositional devices, etc. (see Mitchell's Picture Theory), but other fields are curiously neglected. The best example of such an overlook is photonarrative, a domain suffering cruelly from a lack of academic and social distinction. How to Read a Photonarrative? When examining the history of photonarrative—probably too broad a term, but still preferable to the over-connoted 'photo-novella' or 'photoromance '—one often fails to escape from all sorts of dichotomies. Indeed, the opposition between the traditional photonarrative (with its sentimental storylines and dull, repetitive lay-out) on the one hand and the experimental , even avant-gardistic photonarrative (more varied re themes and layout ) on the other, is generally accompanied by a still sharper opposition between a type of photonarrative where the verbal elements paradoxically dominate the proper visual elements (this is almost systematically the case for the traditional photonarrative) and a type of photonarrative where the relationship between the verbal and the visual is reversed (this is or should be the case in experimental photonarrative, a good example of it being Plissart (1998), which has been published in English thanks to the seminal afterword by Jacques Derrida). A crucial feature in this latter type of photonarrative is the influence exerted by literary models. Experimental photonarratives are often based on "New Novel"—like scripts (Baetens 1993), with very sophisticated narrations, or they borrow from the "combinatorics"—aesthetics one finds often in the work of the Oulipo authors such as Queneau, Calvino or Roubaud, who like to build a fiction by the combination of a small set of predefined elements (Baetens 1999/2000). The bad reputation of traditional photonarrative and the controversial Going to Heaven 89 status of experimental photonarrative are universally acknowledged. The paraliterary subgenre is considered too inherently dumb and unavoidably monotonous to merit any critical attention whatsoever (an interesting exception is the Bourdieu-inspired study by Sylvette Giet [1997]), whereas the experimental photonovella is seen as a Fremdkörper in most theories of photography. Just as "serious" scholarship does not want to commit (and to compromise) itself with an object which is even more despicable than the most tedious and meaningless throw-away products of consumer society, "serious" photography has a visceral fear of the return...
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