1Photographs and short stories could be considered siblings in a number of ways. Each can be seen as the compression of information; as a slice or fragment with the potential to reveal something essential about the wider whole; as a moment that is bounded, framed, isolated, enclosed; and, as inherently observational. This essay reflects on how the duration, or shortness, of short stories might be contemplated in light of photography.

2One place to start is perhaps with the question of what photography is, as a way of watching the world, and the extent to which photographs encompass it, or vice versa. In Kaja Silverman’s The Miracle of Analogy (2015), photography is encountered less as a concrete medium, and more as the world’s disclosure of itself (to us) through images. This disclosure is marked by duration (or the drawing out of time) rather than instantaneity, by the gradual emergence of images rather than their taking or capturing, by resemblance rather than sameness, and by fluidity rather than fixity. This explication of photography is, in some ways, expansive, in that the shadows thrown against a wall, or the crescent shapes cast upon the ground during an eclipse, might all belong to photography. As such, photography, as it is related in The Miracle of Analogy, finds an intuitive home in early and experimental chemical development, when liquid processing and longer spans of time were required for images to appear, and when photographic development arguably embodied the chaos, coincidence, and animation of the world.

3In The Miracle of Analogy, therefore, industrialisation is not seen as the next logical step for photography, but rather as a slip between photography (in spirit), and photographic images, which were to become increasingly defined by (and described in terms of) frozenness, capture, proof, precision. In Silverman’s book, industrialisation might be seen to deny the degrees of reciprocity, exchange, duration, and temporal flexibility that pre-industrialised photography still held potential for (122). The exposure and development times of earlier photographic practices are significant in this sense, because the breach that opened up in front of the camera during long exposures is understood to allow for a different set of events and relationships to occur, resulting in a different kind of presence-ing (or being) within the photograph. With this, comes the potential for a more intrinsic connection between the time of the photograph’s exposure, and all the subsequent moments from which the photograph will be viewed, allowing for, or at least intimating, a movement both back and forward in time. This can perhaps also be thought of in terms of imagination; of who is imaging whom, and from when and where. In other words, photography’s propensity for connection and communication can be understood as inherently bound up with duration—with that which unfolds, impresses, develops or discloses itself over time.

4Longer exposure times could also mean disappearance, as much as appearance, rendering quick-moving objects unseen, or, perhaps more unnervingly, only “partially present” (Miracle 47). Chemical photography’s slow time meant bustling city streets might appear deserted, or passers-by might appear translucent, intangible, as though caught between worlds. In this way, early chemical photography can perhaps be seen to hold onto that which is most constant (trees, buildings), while, at the same time, exposing a certain kind of emptiness in the modernising city. From this point of view, the standardisation and stabilisation that came with the industrialisation of the medium resolved some of the uncertainty that had been intrinsic to what photography was, and so effectively loosened photography from photographic image making, with photographs becoming increasingly identified with dislocation, fragmentation, and distance, where they had once held the potential to bridge between, or move across, times. The speed and consistency of a more solidified medium meant that the rush of modern life could be stilled—city streets would no longer appear empty, sitters for portraits would be less at risk of fading into a backdrop—but the result was arguably another kind of absence that permeated photographs—and this absence might, counterintuitively, be the absence of photography, and the absence of a potential fluidity in time.

5Photography, since its iteration in chemical development, can, however, perhaps be seen to keep a slightly different time to that of the world around both before and after industrialisation, because it is always looking for that which is just outside the register of perception. Not unlike the time that seems to disappear when searching for something that has been misplaced, photographic time is perhaps unruly; it is a kind of free-fall in time—a fall that is, in one way, broken by the closing of the shutter, and, in another way, continues indefinitely for as long into the future as the photograph might, potentially, be viewed. The spaces of photographic development can perhaps be seen to share this sense of containment, wherein time appears to lag, slow, lull, or vanish: in the chamber of the camera, between the opening and closing of the shutter, in the darkroom; and perhaps also in the image-space of the photograph itself.

7Before the title character, Bartleby, enters the story, Melville’s narrator, a lawyer, describes the office within which the majority of the story will unfold. Told in retrospect, from a time perhaps distant enough for the events of the story to be considered “a history” (“Bartleby” 614), it is perhaps the extended duration of the story itself that renders the events historical. The time lags or inches by within the walls of the office, which is pictured as almost completely enclosed by the blocking out of a view through any window:

At one end [the law chambers] looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom. This view might have been considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient in what landscape painters call “life.” But if so, the view from the other end of my chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if nothing more. In that direction my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade; which wall required no spy-glass to bring out its lurking beauties, but for the benefit of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed up to within ten feet of my window panes. Owing to the great height of the surrounding buildings, and my chambers being on the second floor, the interval between this wall and mine not a little resembled a huge square cistern. (547)

8These chambers really are a chamber, sealed off, closing out the view from within, and, by extension, the intimation of that which is in the distance, or on the horizon. I wonder if this is somewhat analogous to what photographs do to space, in isolating or apportioning the visually available world endlessly into cells, relatively independent, free-standing images. If space is enclosed within the image, what happens to time (or duration) within this new image-space? Time (in the opening and closing of the shutter) seals off the image-space, but I am not sure if the image-space can seal off time in quite the same way, depending on how time is believed to move. In the theory of duration proposed by Henri Bergson in Matter and Memory (1896) and “Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903), the practice of measuring time in blocks or units (comparable to measuring distance) is considered somewhat erroneous for the purpose of describing lived duration, because duration is understood to be inherently continuous. As such, the division of time into intervals ceases to describe duration, or even the present moment, which cannot be disentangled from the near past, nor the anticipation of an imminent future.

9In response to Bergson’s writings, Gaston Bachelard’s The Dialectic of Duration (1936) insists that time is, in fact, experienced precisely as intervals between action and rest; filled with lulls, delays, breaks, and gaps which are only accounted for retrospectively, through reason, as though unfolding in continuous duration, so that it is logic, rather than continuity, that gives the impression of an apparently continuous flow of time. Bachelard’s notion of duration might be quite straightforwardly applied to storytelling, where narration constructs the story’s duration, and any sense of continuity in hearing or reading or retelling the story is due to a sequence of events having been ordered according to reason. Bergson’s theory might suggest, however, that there is no story if duration is not continuous—that the story relies on a movement (and an integrity) that supersedes any of the ways in which it can be broken into constituent parts. I wonder if these two theories, while presented as opposed, cannot in fact concur on a certain level. Together, I think of them as addressing another question about distance and perspective in duration; is it possible to see or hear the same thing as both a pattern composed of individual parts, and also, from another distance, as something more chaotic and continuous? Like many things, the way in which time passes might look or sound different depending on where I am in relation to it. If Bergson’s continuous duration is, for example, the more faithful description of duration in the present moment, this perhaps does not exclude Bachelard’s theory from being a more accurate account of time that has passed into the near or distant past.

10Returning to the question of what a photograph’s relationship to duration might be, I speculate that this depends, in part, on the length of time that elapses between the photograph’s taking and its viewing. When a photograph is still recent (and perhaps even the idea of recency itself shifts with expectations of how soon photographic technologies allow a viewer to see an image after it has been taken), it can perhaps be integrated into a sense of the present, or else expand an awareness of the present duration to someone or something elsewhere (i.e., to show what someone else, somewhere else, is doing “now”). In this sense, the “now” is elongated; the moment of the photograph’s taking has technically passed, but is still recent enough for the image to describe a situation—or duration—that might be ongoing, or continuous. Still, as the lapse of time between the taking and viewing of the photograph increases, perhaps so too does the degree of uncertainty about the stretch of time a photograph can be seen to encompass, or speak for. As the moment of the photograph recedes definitively into the past, perhaps its potential to accrue duration expands, so that, upon viewing, a photograph might be said to revive a single instance, or the entirety of an event, or a phase in someone’s life, or an entire era. In this way, the sense of a span of time to which the photograph belongs might be seen to become less stable, increasingly uncertain, unfixed, fluid. What is perhaps confounding about photographic time (over that of other objects or souvenirs), is that photographs reveal an image-space that, for the most part, does not appear to change; and yet the duration that a photograph appears to indicate, or belong to, might.

11It is possible that the potential porousness—or fluidity—that constitutes a photograph’s intimation of duration is what might also obfuscate its otherwise more concrete attributes. In Camera Lucida (1981), for example, Roland Barthes writes,

If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. What am I doing, during the whole time I remain with it? I look at it, I scrutinize it. . . . [T]o scrutinize means to turn the photograph over, to enter into the paper’s depth, to reach its other side. . . . Alas, however hard I look, I discover nothing. . . . Such is the Photograph: it cannot say what it lets us see. (99-100; italics in original)

12The photograph’s surface-ness, its silence, are perhaps vexing; but why so more than any other image? I am curious whether this disenchantment is due, in part, to the contrast between the seeming fluidity of a photograph’s time, and the boundaries of it as a finite material object and image. Barthes perhaps directly addresses this question when describing photography as, “a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination . . . a temporal hallucination” (115; italics in original), and early photographs as, “neither image nor reality, a new being, really: a reality one can no longer touch” (87). In the context of the essay’s contemplation on loss and grief, the evocation of photography as a temporal hallucination is perhaps more accurately a reference to the photograph as the presentation of absence—as that which can only appear as a kind of afterimage; as an inherently “late” image. Yet I wonder if the withholding nature of photographs is fostered not so much by their fixedness, but rather by their seeming mutability in relation to duration, which, in turn, makes their more fixed characteristics felt all the more harshly (i.e., the material of the photographic print, the surface—or limit—of the image).

13Barthes is confronted over and again with the obstinance of photographs in the essay’s attempt to discern what it is that distinguishes them from other kinds of images. In fact, this confrontation with the impenetrability of photographs is so much a part of the experience of the book that it might be possible to conclude that this is, in part, what differentiates photographs from other images: their withholding, and, perhaps more crucially, the particular type of longing that this withholding provokes. About a photograph of a house, taken in 1854, for example, Barthes writes:

[T]his old photograph . . . touches me: it is quite simply there that I should like to live. . . . This longing to inhabit, if I observe it clearly in myself . . . is fantasmatic, deriving from a kind of second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time, or to carry me back to somewhere in myself: a double movement. . . . (38-40)

14In this passage, I read a knowing conflation between the object in the photograph and the object of the photograph. Is the desire that to inhabit the house, or the photograph? What most interests me is the movement between place (“there”), and time. The house itself outlasts the time in which it was photographed; it exists before, and, presumably, after the photographer has come and gone. Inhabiting a house from a photograph is not rendered impossible by its having been photographed. Inhabiting a photograph, however, is—both because the photograph has translated the inhabitable house into an (uninhabitable) image, and, because inhabiting the photograph (in terms of appearing within the image) would require a literal movement back in time, into the past. This sense of unreachability permeates photography, and yet, for Barthes, not all photographs stay locked beneath a surface—some hold the power to puncture or wound, some are considered true. And just as Barthes might come to acknowledge the impermeability of a given photograph, it reaches him, like the answer to a question that has been asked of every photograph before. But what is the question that photographs decline to answer? Or rather, why might the limits of a photograph evade us?

15I wonder if this is a question that can be thought through in Melville’s short story. While the narrating character could, ostensibly, reveal a world beyond that of his newest employee, it is on Bartleby that he trains his—as well as his addressee’s—attention. Bartleby is, in some ways, unyielding to the point of distraction, but is also, at least to begin with, exceptionally productive:

At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. . . . He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically. (“Bartleby” 550)

16Here, the narrator confesses something of his own disillusionment with Bartleby, even when Bartleby excels at the task set. This could be read to reveal a kind of second layer in the lawyer’s contract of labour. Even when Bartleby exceeds the employer’s expectations in terms of the work assigned, thereby fulfilling his side of an explicit contract, he is still seen to break some unspoken or tacit tier of the agreement which seemingly attends to an employee’s disposition, or perhaps more precisely, the availability of the employee’s self, to his employer. As such, Bartleby’s repeated refusal to disclose any personal information when asked to might be seen to provoke an uneven response from the lawyer, who himself appears uncertain of what Bartleby’s perceived transgression actually is:

“Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?”
“I would prefer not to.”
“Will you tell me any thing about yourself?”
“I would prefer not to.”
“But what reasonable objection can you have to speak to me? I feel friendly towards you.”
He did not look at me while I spoke, but kept his glance fixed upon my bust of Cicero, which as I then sat, was directly behind me, some six inches above my head.
“What is your answer, Bartleby?” said I, after waiting a considerable time for a reply, during which his countenance remained immovable, only there was the faintest conceivable tremor of the white attenuated mouth. (555; italics in original)

17The lawyer wants something from Bartleby that is not available; an exchange, a correspondence, some sense that the boundaries between Bartleby and himself can be negotiated, and this unmet desire for something unspecified from his employee perhaps fuels the lawyer’s fixation upon, or psychic entanglement with, Bartleby, who remains relatively unknowable in any way other than as an image that is only ever shown from without.

18The narrator’s preoccupation with a character who is seemingly both passive and unyielding leaves the narration to orbit Bartleby without really ever approaching him–and, perhaps by extension, we are rarely aware of him in motion; he is described as “a motionless young man” (549), and often he simply appears before the narrator, phantom-like, or else his movements are deduced, rather than observed: Bartleby’s desk, for example, is hidden from view of his employer by a screen, and, on several occasions, when Bartleby is seen or imagined by the narrator, he is pictured “standing in one of those dead-wall reveries of his” (554). Bartleby is evoked as both an otherworldly apparition, and as a kind of unwanted double for the narrating character: an unsettling twin on the other side of the screen.

19References to doubling thread throughout the story; in Bartleby’s job as a copyist, in the closing scenes of the story in which a minor character says of Bartleby, “I thought [he] was a gentleman forger; they are always pale and genteel-like, them forgers” (614). Bartleby is once again associated with the work of imitation, duplication, reproduction. The work of copying by light (“sunlight or candlelight”) perhaps hints specifically at photography. But most significantly, I think, the space of the story is continually closed out, not only by the inertia (or lifelessness) of the title character, or by the narrator’s fixation on Bartleby, but also through the scarcity of any horizon that stretches beyond the walls of the office. It is a closed room. And there is a perpetual closing down of the field of view in the story, which is mirrored in the closing off of the avenues the storytelling can take, partly because of its focus on a character who falls out of sync with the flow of life that presumably rushes by outside the walled windows of the office. Yet within the sealed-off chambers of the setting, and the storytelling, time (or duration) can perhaps be seen to thicken; to accrue a density—or viscosity—which is further intensified by the friction that the narrator perceives in himself, and ascribes to Bartleby.

20It is uncertain whether the narrator ever comes to understand the implicit contract by which he considers Bartleby’s reticence a violation, despite the narrator’s lingering sense of obligation on the side of both parties—whether moral, social, or contractual. Ultimately, he is unable to frame his own frustration with Bartleby. Paradoxically, it is perhaps because of the lawyer’s own withdrawal (from the workings of the state) that Bartleby is eventually detained within the criminal justice system. In the closing scenes of the story, Bartleby is pictured in two otherwise unseen spaces—that of the jail, as well as (in the narrator’s final relation of a fragment of Bartleby’s backstory) that of the dead letter office, where Bartleby was previously employed to sort through the letters that the postal service was unable to deliver or return. The space of the dead letter is also, therefore, a space that might be seen to intimate the indefinite past of Bartleby’s life. This particular movement back in time as a way to close the story is somewhat curious, in that it is presented in the narration as something of a postscript: “I hardly know whether I should divulge one little item of rumor, which came to my ear a few months after” (614). And yet, if the story is understood as one of a search for missing information, the details of this postscript are framed as a rare find, and, as such, indicate that some key to understanding Bartleby’s resistance can be located within this relatively self-contained (and temporally unmoored) final report—or rumour.

21The doubt the narrator casts over the reliability of this last segment of the story might otherwise render it somewhat insignificant, but, in the void of any other information about Bartleby, even hearsay is admitted into the lawyer’s narration. With this closing anecdotal detail of Bartleby’s days in the dead letter office, there is the intimation that he has been overwhelmed by lost and late things; of life and death in suspense; of the indefinite delay that is made tangible within the walls of the sorting office. Having had access to correspondence that was perhaps only ever intended for the unfindable addressees of dead letters, Bartleby has possibly also been on the other side of the desire to know more; he has perhaps known more than he wanted to of other people’s lives. Still, what this otherwise slightly discordant addition to the story also means, is that the last image of Bartleby (in the sequence of the narration) is not of him lying motionless in the prison yard, but of him working as a clerk in a sorting office, before ever encountering the lawyer, or writing copy, so that Bartleby’s life is extended backwards, into an indefinite past duration, not unlike a photograph, albeit one in which any imaginable future for Bartleby’s life has already been and gone.

22In Camera Lucida, the disturbance that a photograph might make in an otherwise unremarkable (or continuous) present is resolved, in some ways, through the awareness of one’s own future past-ness. Photographs remind us of a future that will outlast us. This can perhaps be seen as part of the essay’s mourning—for Barthes’s late mother, and for the last photo in which he will find her both anew, and as she really always was, as well as for Barthes’s own life without her. Camera Lucida also mourns for the then-burgeoning time in which Barthes suggests we are “no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically” (93). For Barthes, “the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything that denies ripening” (93-94), as though photographs themselves were a lament for the modern age. But I wonder if it is Barthes’s description of “an age of impatiences” that more completely describes what it is that photographs confront. Photographs fall out of sync with the flux of life; they can be read as envoys from uncertain stretches of time, and, perhaps because they do not have a playback speed of their own, they might have indefinite durations (and delays) projected onto them. In this way, it is perhaps not so much photography’s gesture to one’s own past-ness that is unnerving, but the unspecified potential of this between-space, with its unknown duration, its congealed time.