Literature Interpretation Theory

ISSN: 1043-6928 (Print) 1545-5866 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/glit20

Romance of a Family or Inverted “Family

Romance”: Familial Gaze and Narratorial Look in
Anita Brookner's Family And Friends

Laurence Petit

To cite this article: Laurence Petit (2006) Romance of a Family or Inverted “Family Romance”:
Familial Gaze and Narratorial Look in Anita Brookner's Family�And�Friends , Literature
Interpretation Theory, 17:3-4, 379-397, DOI: 10.1080/10436920601000385

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10436920601000385

Published online: 29 Mar 2007.

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Literature Interpretation Theory, 17: 379–397, 2006
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1043-6928 print/1545-5866 online
DOI: 10.1080/10436920601000385

ROMANCE OF A FAMILY OR INVERTED ‘‘FAMILY

ROMANCE’’: FAMILIAL GAZE AND NARRATORIAL LOOK
IN ANITA BROOKNER’S FAMILY AND FRIENDS

Laurence Petit

As Marianne Hirsch explains in Family Frames: Photography, Narra-

tive and Postmemory, family pictures, by displaying the cohesion of
the family in conventional postures, perpetuate dominant mytholo-
gies of family life that are often quite remote from its lived reality.
These photographs are therefore the vehicles of an institutional
‘‘familial gaze’’ that reflects the family’s strategies of self-represen-
tation. Meta-photographic texts, which place family photographs
into narrative contexts either by reproducing them or describing
them, can resist and expose these familial ideologies, revealing what
Walter Benjamin in ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’’ calls the ‘‘unconscious optics’’ of family pictures
(237) and bringing to the surface the deceptions and often compli-
cated negotiations of family life. The subversive narrative strategies
that challenge traditional familial self-representations pertain to what
Hirsch calls the ‘‘familial look,’’ which interrogates the photograph
and pierces through its flat surface.
This paper examines how contemporary British writer Anita
Brookner creates such a meta-photographic text in her fifth novel,
Family and Friends, to rewrite and subvert the established genre of
the family chronicle. This novel, which crosses the boundaries
between text and image by pretending to be a photo album, repre-
sents what McLaine calls a ‘‘family album novel,’’ a recognizable
sub-genre of novels combining photography with narrative, or what
Hirsch, who coined the phrase ‘‘prose pictures,’’ would similarly call
a ‘‘prose family album.’’ For McLaine, family album novels, like

Laurence Petit is an assistant professor of contemporary British literature at Central

Connecticut State University. She is the author of several articles on text and image in the
fiction of Anita Brookner and A. S. Byatt.
380 Laurence Petit

most photofictions, ‘‘explore the tension between the simultaneously

factual and interpretative qualities of photographs’’ (131).1 Family
and Friends presents such a tension by staging an anonymous nar-
rator peering at a fictitious album of wedding photographs and
finally exposing a hidden, or at least hushed up, family secret. The
institutional ‘‘familial gaze’’ of the posed photographs is thus gradu-
ally shattered by an investigatory ‘‘narratorial look’’ that pierces
through the family’s flawless veneer and reveals a complex web of
underlying secrets and deceptions. By combining the Freudian
concept of ‘‘family romance’’ (a fantasy in which a child replaces
his parents by others of better birth) and Hirsch’s distinction between
‘‘familial gaze’’ and ‘‘familial look,’’ I propose to show how this fam-
ily saga or ‘‘romance of a family’’ can be read, ironically, as an
inverted Freudian ‘‘family romance’’ as the narrator discovers at
the end of her quest her own real, and not just fantasized, illegit-
imacy, and, in so doing, reveals to the reader her female identity.
Through an original narrative strategy combining the two semiotic
codes of text and image, Family and Friends presents itself in the form
of a fictitious family album of wedding photographs spanning three
consecutive generations, thus chronicling the story of a displaced
Jewish family over the entire twentieth century. The novel starts
and ends with a narrator opening, browsing through, and then clos-
ing the album, which enables him or her to chronicle the saga of the
Dorns, a family of Jewish exiles who fled the Nazi regime in Germany
to find shelter in London and then in Italy and California for two of
its members. As each fictitious photograph is presented through nar-
ratorial injunctions inviting the reader to look at pictures rather than
read words—although those pictures never materialize and have a
purely textual existence—the reader is encouraged to suspend his or
her disbelief and welcome this hybrid literary object as a photo album
and not a novel: ‘‘Here’s Sofka, in a wedding photograph,’’ reads the
first sentence in the novel (7); ‘‘Here they are all, family and friends,
in the wedding photograph,’’ reads the first sentence of the very last
paragraph (187). The visual journey through the photo album is car-
ried out by a narrator, or rather a narrative ‘‘voice,’’ whose repeated
authoritative first-person intrusions remain anonymous, and there-
fore, enigmatic, throughout, despite the narrator’s claim to have, or
have had, special links with the family presented in the album. This
example of what Hirsch calls a delayed, indirect, and secondary
‘‘postmemory,’’2 mediated by an ambivalent narrator who is both
passionately interested in the story of the family and yet some-
what distant at the same time, is, according to Hirsch, characteristic
of the postmodern condition in which family pictures become the
Romance of a Family or Inverted ‘‘Family Romance’’ 381

element that provides an illusion of continuity of time and space

among lives shaped by exile, emigration, and relocation. The four
wedding photographs that punctuate Family and Friends and inter-
mittently ‘‘freeze’’ the narrative flow before releasing it again consti-
tute, as it were, the temporal and structural pillars on which the
narrative stands.
The novel opens with a wedding photograph highlighting the matri-
archal figure of Sofka Dorn, surrounded by her four children—her
two daughters, Mimi and Betty, and her two sons, Alfred and
Frederick. After a first chapter mainly dedicated to the description
of this inaugural photograph, the central character of the mother,
Sofka, and the festivities of the day, the narration takes up again,
one by one, the main characters of the photo and follows their respect-
ive destinies from childhood to middle age through the photographic
or cinematographic technique known as ‘‘zooming’’ or telescopic
movement. This technique enables the shift from the panoramic shot
of the first photograph to the close-up shot of one particular charac-
ter, accompanied each time by a change in the point of view. As a
result, four short chapters go over the four children separately, tracing
the respective points of view of Frederick, Betty, Mimi, and Alfred,
and the following chapters proceed in the same manner to present, this
time, their respective existence, some being now married and exiled
(Frederick in Italy, Betty in California), while the others (Alfred
and Mimi) are single and sedentary. It is the marriage of Frederick,
the marriage, later in her life, of Mimi, as well as the marriage of a cou-
sin, Ursie, which represent, through the photographs that they
occasion, the narrative backbone of the novel as well as the ‘‘punctu-
ation’’ mentioned earlier. Out of a concern for realism, since the
reader is supposed to be leafing through a photo album spanning
some thirty or forty years, each chapter envisages each character at
a period in his or her life which is different from the one chosen for
his or her other brothers and sisters. This device contributes to a large
extent to the striking temporal and linear fluidity of the novel in spite
of the apparent fragmentation that the general structure implies.
With this novel which pretends to be a photo album and these
photographs which pretend to tell a story, we are presented with a
typical example of fiction combining photography and narrative,
following a technique which is widely used in the postmodern novel,
with the use of fictitious or real photographs for various purposes
ranging from the mere illustration of a narrative to the incorporation
of the photographs in a complex narrative framework. Anita
Brookner herself probably drew her inspiration to write Family and
Friends from two very different postmodern novels combining
382 Laurence Petit

photography and narrative. One, with its evocative title A Family

Album, by David Galloway, reproduces real photographs within
the body of the text, the narration stemming from the commentary
of these photographs, while the other, by Paul Theroux, entitled
Picture Palace and focusing on a renowned photographer, Maude
Pratt, uses photography more as a narrative motif or metaphor.
Indeed, Brookner wrote a review of these two novels that was pub-
lished in the Times Literary Supplement with the title ‘‘Sight Unseen’’
on September 8, 1978—that is to say, long before the writing of Fam-
ily and Friends—in which she extols both the narrative technique of A
Family Album, which she describes as ‘‘literally arresting,’’ and the
metaphoric use of photography in Picture Palace, the camera func-
tioning in that novel as a ‘‘Third Eye.’’ One cannot help relating this
article to the publication, seven years later, of Family and Friends, in
which Brookner uses a narrative technique close to that of A Family
Album, with the insertion within the narrative not of real pictures this
time but of fictitious prose pictures, which are also the starting point
for a family chronicle. It is interesting to notice that Brookner’s novel
could well have been entitled A Family Album, too, since this is pre-
cisely the status that it claims to have.
A close examination of the photographs, however, reveals that
such a claim may not be entirely accurate as all these family photo-
graphs can in fact be seen as anamorphic variations of the first semi-
nal picture, which we may call the ‘‘matrix,’’ all the more legitimately
as it epitomizes, through the character of Sofka, the matriarch par
excellence. In such a reading, the inaugural photograph which
appears on the opening page of the novel is forever repeated and tex-
tually reprinted, thus reducing the multiple photographs of this ‘‘fam-
ily album’’ to a single ‘‘family photograph.’’ Before examining this
process, let us first recall what an ‘‘anamorphosis’’ consists of. ‘‘Ana-
morphosis’’ is the term used in the visual arts to describe the reversal
in perspective that occurs when the viewer of a painting starts moving
laterally, a reversal that makes objects or subjects which were, until
then, hidden or deformed, suddenly spring into view. There is, there-
fore, a strong distinction between a frontal, direct vision of the paint-
ing and a lateral, indirect vision, which reveals a new meaning. In
his reference book Anamorphoses, art historian Jurgis Baltrusaitis
describes this illusory, trompe-l’œil technique—of which a famous
example is Holbein’s Ambassadors—in the following terms:

L’anamorphose—le mot fait son apparition au XVIIème siècle mais en

se rapportant à des compositions connues auparavant—procède par
une inversion des éléments et des fonctions. Au lieu d’une réduction
Romance of a Family or Inverted ‘‘Family Romance’’ 383

progressive des formes à leurs limites visibles, c’est une dilatation, une
projection des formes hors d’elles-mêmes, conduite en sorte qu’elles
se redressent à un point de vue déterminé: une destruction pour un
rétablissement, une évasion qui implique un retour. (7)

Anamorphosis—the word appears in the seventeenth century but in

reference to compositions that were already known—proceeds by an
inversion of elements and functions. Instead of a progressive reduc-
tion of forms to their visible limits, we have an expansion, a projection
of forms outside of themselves, conducted so that they will straighten
up again at a pre-determined standpoint: destruction in view of a
re-establishment, an escape which implies a return.3

Moreover, what suddenly springs into view in an anamorphosis is not

something new that would appear as if by magic, but an object or a
character already contained in the image, but unknown to, or rather
unseen by, the viewer. Michel Schneider defines the phenomenon in
the following terms:

Dans l’anamorphose, rien n’est caché, tout est là, visible, mais il faut
regarder de biais, en se détournant, en pervertissant, au sens propre,
le regard. (281)

In an anamorphosis, nothing is hidden, everything is there, visible, but

one has to look askance, by moving to the side, by perverting, in the
proper sense of the term, the gaze.4

Such a process is exactly what is at stake in the opening pages of

Family and Friends. The novel opens, as we saw, with a narrator
examining a photograph, which he or she claims to be a wedding
photograph: ‘‘Here is Sofka, in a wedding photograph’’ (7). This
claim is immediately qualified by the following statement: ‘‘at least,
I assume it is a wedding, although the bride and groom are absent.’’
The concessive clause ‘‘although the bride and groom are absent,’’
which rules out the possibility that Sofka should be the bride, is
peculiar in that it functions with the main clause in a relationship
that we can describe as antinomic, since, by nature, a wedding
photograph presented as such implies the presence of the bride
and bridegroom. The visual ‘‘reliability’’ of the narrator is therefore
shaken straightaway, even though this initial hesitation is rapidly
compensated by the length and precision of the ensuing description
of the picture.
384 Laurence Petit

This description revolves around the central character of Sofka

who, as shown by the narrator, sits in the middle of the group,
surrounded by a first circle formed by her children (before and
behind her) and then by a second circle formed by more distant
relatives (‘‘All around them are lesser members of the cast’’ [7]). It
is stated that Sofka can occupy nothing but a central position
(‘‘Sofka would be at the centre of this group, of any group’’ [9]). This
position is obviously a metaphor for the central role that she plays in
the family, since she is repeatedly presented, right from the start, as
the matriarchal figure par excellence, a ‘‘duenna’’ (17), a ‘‘figure-
head’’ (17), an ‘‘unbending matriarch’’ (12). But above all, Sofka
occupies a central position in the eyes of the narrator who literally
sees no one but her in the picture to the point, as we saw, of almost
invalidating its very nature of ‘‘wedding photograph.’’ It is only after
two pages of a minute description of Sofka and her family that a
reversal takes place in the perception of the narrator, re-establishing
as well as ‘‘re-centering’’ the legitimate protagonists of the wedding
picture, namely the bride and the bridegroom. Through this ‘‘dual
action of creating and erasing’’5 the picture, the image finally acquires
its status of ‘‘wedding photograph’’: ‘‘And now I see that it is in fact a
wedding photograph. The bride and groom were there all the time, in
the centre, as they should be’’ (8). In the reorganization of the picture
which then takes place with the emergence in the center of the newly-
weds, Sofka becomes relegated to the background, behind the bride,
although she continues to dominate the scene both by her slightly
raised physical position and by her panoramic gaze, watching over
the destinies of those dear to her: ‘‘Above the bridegroom’s shoulder,
standing on something perhaps, Sofka gazes ahead, with her family’s
future before her’’ (9). This reorganization of the photograph or ‘‘re-
establishment of the forms,’’ as Baltrusaitis would say, is thus compa-
rable to an anamorphosis in that we do have a reversal in perspective
that occurs after the spectator has moved laterally in front of the
painting, the movement being here the metaphorical visual journey
through the photograph that both the narrator and the reader make
during their simultaneous reading of the picture. The frontal view of
the painting therefore corresponds to the initial perception of the
photograph (with Sofka in its center) by the narrator and, at the same
time, by the reader, while the lateral vision is the second perception of
the same photograph once the eye has traveled through the image for
the narrator and through the page for the reader. Moreover, as
Schneider indicates, nothing in the photograph is hidden, ‘‘everything
is there, visible,’’ since the narrator admits that the bride and bride-
groom ‘‘were there all the time.’’
Romance of a Family or Inverted ‘‘Family Romance’’ 385

However, it must be pointed out that, in the case we are analyzing,

we are not presented with a traditional anamorphosis but, as it were,
with an inverted anamorphosis. Indeed, a classical anamorphosis
(in the manner of Holbein’s Ambassadors, for instance) would have
functioned in the opposite way by setting the newlyweds as the major
signifier for the frontal vision, with an apparently obvious signified,
marriage. In the same way, the couple formed by the two ambassa-
dors, the major signifier in Holbein’s painting, has a signified which,
in appearance, is not problematic, since the couple, at first sight,
exalts the omnipotence of the Arts and Sciences. Then the lateral
or oblique vision would have revealed, after the necessary shift in
space, another major signifier, distinct from the first (which would
have been ‘‘attacked’’ and ‘‘overthrown’’ by the anamorphosis, to
use Lyotard’s own words)6 with a totally discordant correlate signi-
fied, in this case death. Indeed, one must remember that the last
characteristic trait of anamorphoses is the physical presence of death
in the painting, generally through the apparition in the viewer’s
second or lateral vision of a death’s-head springing into view in lieu
of an anodine or deformed object in the first and frontal vision. This
anodine or deformed object is of course the ‘‘floating object,’’
deprived of meaning, which Jacques Lacan describes in his Seminar
XI precisely when talking about Holbein’s Ambassadors. In that sem-
inar, Lacan describes this phenomenon which places the ‘‘truth of
representation’’ (377), to use Lyotard’s terms, precisely in death:
‘‘The secret of this picture is given at the moment when, moving
slightly away, little by little, to the left, then turning around, we see
what the magical floating object signifies. It reflects our own nothing-
ness, in the figure of the death’s head’’ (92).7 These remarks illustrate
perfectly what happens in our wedding photograph, since it is indeed
the presence of the sign of death that is revealed to the spectator after
he or she has accomplished his or her visual journey through the
image. The bride and bridegroom do indeed appear, in the manner
of Lacan’s ‘‘annihilated’’ subjects (88)8 or ‘‘anamorphic ghost’’
(89), as two living dead: ‘‘The bride and groom were there all the
time, in the centre, as they should be. A good-looking couple. But
lifeless, figures from stock’’ (8–9).
Our narrator thus describes a form of inverted anamorphosis. In
traditional or classical anamorphoses, the prime signifier would be
the newlyweds, while the second signifier, bearing the meaning,
would then be Sofka, who would play the role of this ‘‘anamorphic
ghost’’ springing out of the image to fascinate the narrator. But is this
not precisely what happens, in a sense? The term ‘‘ghost’’ to describe
Sofka does not seem incongruous when one realizes to what extent
386 Laurence Petit

she ‘‘haunts’’ the narrator (we shall come back to this), who sees no
one else but her and presents her frozen like a statue in an intemporal
pose, ‘‘straight and stern’’ (7), the expression on her face ‘‘timeless’’
(8), her cheeks of an ‘‘ivory pallor’’ (18). The very fact that Sofka
should appear for the first time in a photograph representing a group
posing for the photographer makes her doubly spectral. The intimate
link between photography and death has often been commented on
by critics who have emphasized the mortiferous, siderating power
of the photographic act and the disincarnation or reification that
follows for the subject who is being photographed. Susan Sontag,
in her seminal work On Photography, evokes ‘‘faces embalmed in a
still’’ (70), which are ‘‘ghostly traces’’ (9) or ‘‘portents of death’’
(70), while Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, declares:

each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer

from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (compara-
ble to certain nightmares). In terms of image-repertoire, the Photo-
graph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when,
to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object, but a subject who
feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of
death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter. (13–14)9

Furthermore, the pose that characterizes group photographs, or

wedding photographs in our case, reinforces this phenomenon since
obliging the subjects who are being photographed to give a certain
image of themselves, a constrained image, turns the photograph into
an image of an image and implies, for the subject being photographed,
a kind of double death to the image. Barthes presents the mechanism
at work in the act of posing in the following terms: ‘‘Now, once I feel
myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in
the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for
myself, I transform myself in advance into an image’’ (10).10
We therefore can see in the description of the first wedding picture
not just an ‘‘inverted’’ anamorphosis as opposed to a traditional ana-
morphosis, but rather a double anamorphosis with, as a result, death
in the center of the photograph as doubly signified. Or perhaps, if we
go further, anamorphosis in this novel can be seen as not merely dou-
ble, but as infinitely multiplied through the constant interplay of the
visual and verbal registers, thereby forever deferring signification.
Anamorphosis as an optical subterfuge celebrating the reign of
deceiving appearances and delusional visions is therefore a concept
which enables us to account for what is at work in the opening pages
Romance of a Family or Inverted ‘‘Family Romance’’ 387

of the novel—or perhaps in all novels for that matter if we consider

that the reading process is by nature anamorphic. It makes us aware
of the flaws in the perception of a consequently unreliable narrator
and perhaps, more generally, of the flaws in all perception. Ana-
morphosis as a concept also, and above all, enables us to question
the problematic relationship between the mysterious narrator and
the central character of Sofka through the medium of the photo album
considered this time in its entirety, beyond the inaugural picture.
Indeed, anamorphosis, with the link that it establishes between the
modification of the angle of vision and the springing into view of sub-
jects hidden in the picture, can account for the general structure of
Family and Friends. Two critics seem to have started to work in this
same direction without, however, identifying the phenomenon or
studying it in depth. In her analysis of the general structure of the
novel, Amina Mettouchi describes the wedding pictures that consti-
tute the framework of the text in the following terms: ‘‘It is the nar-
rator who revolves around them and looks at them from different
angles’’ (102). The second critic, May Dervent, uses the extended
metaphor of the ‘‘picture-novel’’ in a review from The Listener perti-
nently entitled ‘‘Still Life with Elders’’: ‘‘But Family and Friends is
more like some strange painting, with a group of figures who take
on different appearances as you tilt it or rotate it, but are always held
in exactly the same pattern, and only give the faintest impression of
movement of their own’’ (26). In both cases, what is emphasized
are the modifications in the angle of vision that the structure of the
novel suggests: Mettouchi insists on the narrator’s ‘‘revolving’’
around the pictures, whereas Dervent lays the stress on the changing
images which result from such a rotation. We can recognize here two
major aspects of anamorphoses, the lateral movement or rotation
(whether it is that of the spectator or that of the object is irrelevant
since what matters is the change in the angle of vision) and the modi-
fication of the image that such a movement implies. Moreover, Der-
vent’s commentary suggests that in anamorphoses it is indeed the
same objects or the same subjects which take on new appearances
in the course of the rotation and not new objects that would suddenly
spring into view in the image.
A close examination of the photographs thus reveals that they can
all be seen as anamorphic variations of the original matrix forever
repeated and textually reprinted. Indeed, this view of the entire novel
as a vast anamorphic process seems convincing if we cease to consider
that the narrator is presenting us with several photographs, and if we
consider instead that he or she is actually showing only one photo-
graph, always the same one, which opens up like a fan from the first
388 Laurence Petit

page onward and takes on throughout the reading journey new

appearances. For one must admit that these wedding pictures that
the narrator is showing always deal with the same subject matter,
the conventional family portrait, always present the members of the
family in the same position, surrounding the newlyweds, and above
all, always present the same characters, Sofka, her children, and
the rest of the family. Without even mentioning Mimi, Betty, Freder-
ick, and Alfred, whose presence is recurrent, we can remark on the
reiterated presence of the two half-sisters, Dolly and Nettie, who
are explicitly mentioned in the first, third, and fourth pictures (8,
136, 187), and on that of Lilie and Ursie in the last two pictures
(136, 187). The presence of the children in the last row is specified
in the first and last pictures (7, 187), and their interchangeable names
(with their diminutives all ending in ‘‘-ie’’—‘‘Steffie,’’ ‘‘Carrie,’’
‘‘Laurie,’’ or ‘‘Charlie’’) reinforce the impression that they could well
be the same children in all the photographs. Each picture provides the
same details, such as the smile on the face of the newlyweds and their
family, the faces that try to charm the photographer (third and fourth
pictures), and even Sofka’s hats, mentioned on the occasion of each
of the three weddings that she attends (the fourth one taking place
after her death). The absence of Sofka in the last picture does not,
for that matter, contradict what we are saying, for Mimi, her daugh-
ter, replaces her. The resemblance between mother and daughter is
emphasized by the presence of three details characteristic of the
deceased—the upright pose, the lace dress, and the inevitable hat
(‘‘Mimi, upright, in pale lace, with a rather imposing hat, looks very
like her mother’’ [187]). Mimi has taken over the role of the matriarch
(‘‘it is Mimi the matriarch’’ [186]), in the same way Alfred is now
playing the role relinquished by Frederick (‘‘it is . . . Alfred the man
of property’’ [186]). The fundamental, immutable structures of the
first photograph have been respected, and only the faces of the pro-
tagonists change through a sort of internal rotation in which each
character, in turn, comes to occupy the central position of the bride,
the bridegroom, the matriarch, the close relative, etc. But it is always
fundamentally the same picture which is being presented to us, and
the successive photographs are merely ‘‘reproductions,’’ or rather
‘‘re-writings,’’ of the inaugural or seminal picture of the first page.
And the leitmotif that we begin to recognize after each new palimp-
sestic photograph is reinforced by the recurrence within the narration
of the by now familiar refrain: ‘‘Here is. . . . Here they are . . . .’’
This account of the structure of Family and Friends, depending as it
does upon the concept of anamorphosis, raises even more suspicions
as to the purpose of the narrator’s insistence that the reader repeatedly
Romance of a Family or Inverted ‘‘Family Romance’’ 389

visualize what is in fact only one picture. Is this not ample evidence
that this picture calls out to the narrator and in this respect ceases
to be a mere referent, haunts him or her, fascinates him or her, and
functions, as it were, like those ‘‘traps for the gaze’’ (89) described
by Lacan in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, which
are the locus for the expression of desire and fantasies? We are here
at the intersection of what Barthes, in L’Obvie et l’Obtus, calls the
‘‘haptic’’ function of the gaze, that is to say the capacity that the gaze
has to ‘‘capture’’ and be ‘‘captured’’ in return (279); his own theory of
the punctum (Lucida 27), or affective charge of the image; and Lacan’s
famous play-on-words Ca-me-regarde (‘‘That looks at me=That con-
cerns me’’). By scrutinizing the picture, the narrator is trying to cap-
ture its meaning, but it is in fact the photograph which captures him
or her, looks at him or her, and animates his or her subconscious
desires and fantasies.
Sofka and the photographs which conjure her up within the nar-
ration are thus at the heart of what can be seen as a quest on the part
of the narrator, which takes the form of an interpretative reading of
the pictures in the first person, or ‘‘lyrical exegesis’’ (164), as Jefferson
Hunter calls Barthes’s ‘‘reading’’ of his mother’s photograph in Cam-
era Lucida. What begins as a visual encounter with a photograph
enclosed in an album soon transforms itself into a vast process of
reminiscence, of anamnesis, so that the quest which originates in
the gaze gradually becomes discursive, the order of the specular—that
is to say the order of seeing, according to the Latin etymology spec-
ulari meaning ‘‘observing’’—progressively giving way to the order of
the speculative. And yet, throughout the narrator’s quest, it is this
obtrusive narrator’s overt, though never explained, intimacy with
the Dorn family which inevitably arouses the reader’s curiosity. As
Hirsch reminds us in her book The Familial Gaze, ‘‘to look is also
to be seen’’ (xv). The photographs, therefore, become a tool that is
doubly heuristic, as much for the narrator in his or her quest
for the truth behind the past ‘‘reality’’ of the photographs as for
the reader, embarked on a parallel quest to know more about this
mysterious narrator.
The sight of the first photograph in the album provokes a veritable
shock in the narrator, which results, as we saw, in affecting the
reliability of his or her perceptions, as illustrated by his or her mis-
takenly believing the matriarch Sofka to be the primary focus of
the first wedding photograph in lieu of the newlyweds. Soon the nar-
rator’s sight becomes a vision—the narrator being captured by the
image—and Sofka imposes herself on him or her to the point of
eclipsing, in the narrator’s eyes, the newlyweds and, by doing so,
390 Laurence Petit

distorting this wedding picture which no longer serves its purpose.

The photograph, which is gradually ‘‘revealed’’ by the ekphrastic
description, then becomes in turn a ‘‘revelation,’’ and doubly so,
for if it reveals to the narrator a meaning, or the suggestion of a
meaning, which drives him or her to embark upon his or her in-depth
deciphering of the image, it is also the agent that reveals to the reader
the narrator himself or herself. The presence of the narrator becomes
indeed more and more perceptible as he or she intervenes more
obtrusively in the narration with each description of each picture.
Indeed, descriptions are precisely the place, as Philippe Hamon
explains in his book Du Descriptif (On Description), of the ‘‘osten-
tation of a subject through a subject’’ (17) or, should we say rather,
of the ‘‘ostentation of a subject through an object,’’ the object being
in this case the wedding pictures. The desire on the part of the nar-
rator to control, even to manipulate, the mental landscape of the
reader ends up backfiring on him or her, creating in turn in the
intrigued reader a desire to know more about this mysterious nar-
rator who remains elusive despite revealing an ever-increasing
amount of information. There is therefore a constant discrepancy
between what we are told to see and what we want to see, thus show-
ing the limits of the narrator’s strategies of increased visualization.
What the reader desires to see or know or simply what the reader
desires is the narrator’s own secret, hidden desire, and this desire is
inextricately related to Sofka and her family. More than an elegiac
enterprise strongly tinged with nostagia in praise of a leading charac-
ter (here the deceased matriarch), a process which is relatively com-
mon in photofiction according to Brent McLaine,11 the narrator’s
quest seems, in our particular case, to be more closely related to
the writing of a ‘‘Family Romance,’’ as Freud describes this myth
in ‘‘The Family Romance of the Neurotic,’’ and as Marthe Robert
takes up again in her own work Origins of the Novel. The ‘‘family
romance’’ is that particular fantasy in which the subject believes him-
self or herself to have been born from different parents, usually of a
higher social rank. As Robert indicates:

This is why [the child] starts to tell himself stories, or rather a story
which, in fact, is a tendentious version of his life, a biographical fan-
tasy expressly conceived to account for the unaccountable disgrace of
being un-aristocratic, unlucky and unloved. . . . His parents, unrecog-
nizable since he has discovered that they are human, are so different
he cannot accept them as his own and thence assumes that they are
not his true parents but literally strangers, people with whom he has
nothing in common except that they have given him a home and
Romance of a Family or Inverted ‘‘Family Romance’’ 391

brought him up. Once the estrangement he now feels for his idols has
been accounted for in this way, he can henceforth think of himself as a
Foundling, an adopted child to whom his true parents—Royal, need-
less to say, or at least noble and influential—will eventually reveal
themselves and restore him to his rightful status. (24)12

In our novel, the narrator never explicitly designates his or her

approach to the photographs as autobiographical, whether
‘‘real’’—inasmuch as an autobiography can be real—or partially or
totally fictitious, as in the case of the family romance. However, cer-
tain clues suggest that such an enterprise could well be what underlies
this visual journey through the photo album, especially the resolutely
genealogical aspect of the novel, spanning three generations, with the
grandparents, Sofka and her late husband, the parents, Mimi, Betty,
Frederick, and Alfred, and the children, those of Frederick’s, for
instance, or those who appear on the last page of the novel, namely
Laurie, Charlie, and Vicky. In fact, an important paratextual indi-
cation reveals that Brookner drew her inspiration from members of
her own family, from the generation of her parents and grandparents.
On September 4, 1985, Brookner told The Guardian that she had writ-
ten Family and Friends ‘‘with great ease,’’ mainly because the charac-
ters were part of her ‘‘own family’’ (Banner 22), a statement
confirmed by The Listener on September 5, 1985: ‘‘In a Radio 3 talk
last week . . . Miss Brookner acknowledged that she has drawn in this
book on her own family of her parents’ and grandparents’ gener-
ation’’ (Dervent 26). A few years later, in 1989, in an interview with
Olga Kenyon, Brookner revealed that a wedding photograph of her
own grandmother was at the origin of the novel:

‘‘It’s my family. Of course they’re rendered into fiction because

I didn’t know them till I was about seventeen. . . . They are made into
fiction, but the memory of them is mine.’’
‘‘Wasn’t it a family photograph which sparked this novel?’’
‘‘Yes, a cousin showed me a wedding photograph with my grand-
mother dominating the group, as she must have dominated the parti-
cipants, whom I did not recognize. I gave the photograph back, but
the following day, I started to write Family and Friends.’’ (16)

These paratextual comments suggest that the narrator, if we assume

that he or she and Brookner are contemporaries, belongs to the gen-
eration of those whom we have just described as the ‘‘children’’ in the
novel. We have therefore an interesting case of a novel whose genetic
392 Laurence Petit

beginning is faithfully reproduced in the incipit and whose genesis

itself is presented by Brookner as the turning into fiction of a reality
already largely fictitious:

‘‘[T]o a certain extent, the early lives of these uncles and aunts are
fictitious, for I knew nothing of their early lives and was obliged to
invent them. . . . Whether this was an obscure form of unconscious
memory, whether it was intuition, or whether it was the exhilaration
of disposing of these characters whom I had always seen as immensely
powerful, I have no idea.’’ (qtd. in Kenyon 16)

And yet, it is mostly the very ambiguous ending of Family and

Friends which enables us to see the whole novel not just as the saga,
or romance of a family, but rather as a ‘‘family romance’’ in the Freu-
dian sense. This ending, which provides an ekphrasis of the last wed-
ding photograph in the album, is in this respect extremely disturbing,
for if the entire novel, under the pretext of making us see, never
ceases, in fact, to tell us what to see, the final description depends
mainly upon what is not told, while making us see a great deal, in
what strongly looks like a veiled—or perhaps not so veiled—com-
mentary by the narrator to the reader:

Here they all are, family and friends, in the wedding photograph. It is
the last one in the album. George and Ursie stand, politely smiling,
between Lili and Mrs. Beck. Dolly, slightly out of focus, as she was
in reality on that day, appears to lean heavily on Hal. Will smiles,
plump, good-natured, unquestioning as ever. Mimi, upright, in pale
lace, with a rather imposing hat, looks very like her mother. Lautner,
although greatly diminished, still turns to her fondly. Here is Alfred,
tall, stiff, still a handsome man. Here is Nettie, very close to Alfred,
leaving Will almost unattached, unpaired. And in the front row, the
three children: Laurie, Charlie, and Nettie’s child Vicky (Victoria).
See that look on Vicky’s face, that imperious stare, so unlike a child,
so like Sofka. See Alfred’s hand proudly clasping her little shoulder.
See the resemblance. Wait for the dancing to begin. (187)

A close reading of this passage reveals a binary structure in which

the characters appear in pairs, corresponding mostly to married cou-
ples, such as the couple formed by Ursie and George, or Dolly and
Hal, or the one formed by Mimi and Lautner. These pairs conform
to the official pose of the wedding photograph, which falls under
Marianne Hirsh’s category of the institutionalized ‘‘familial gaze.’’13
Romance of a Family or Inverted ‘‘Family Romance’’ 393

As Hirsch explains in Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and

Postmemory, family pictures, by displaying the cohesion of the family
in conventional postures, perpetuate dominant mythologies of family
life that are often quite remote from its lived reality. These photo-
graphs are therefore the vehicles of an institutional ‘‘familial gaze’’14
which reflects the family’s strategies of self-representation.
One ‘‘pair,’’ however, is more problematic: it is that of Alfred and
Nettie, which is suggested by the grammatical anaphoric parallel
‘‘Here is Alfred,’’ ‘‘Here is Nettie,’’ the proximity of these two locu-
tions in two consecutive sentences, and the actual closeness of the two
characters in the picture, Nettie standing ‘‘very close to Alfred.’’
Indeed, the very fact of designating them, at the heart of the descrip-
tion, within two deictic enunciations beginning with ‘‘Here,’’ seems to
highlight them as if they were the newlyweds at the center of the
photograph. But they are not, and we know that: the bride and the
bridegroom happen to be George and Ursie, ‘‘smiling politely,’’ while
Nettie herself is married to Will, and Alfred is a confirmed bachelor.
What the picture suggests, however, is an adulterous relationship
between Nettie and Alfred, the notorious lover of married women
(as shown previously in the novel by his long liaison with his cousin
Dolly). This impression is corroborated by the emphatic insistence of
the narrator upon the unusual solitary status of Will, described as
‘‘almost unattached, unpaired’’ (while he is precisely ‘‘paired’’ with
Nettie by marriage), as well as Nettie’s preference for Alfred through
the use of the rather ambiguous verb ‘‘to leave’’ in the expression
‘‘leaving Will almost unattached.’’ Will himself is described by the
narrator, somewhat ironically, as ‘‘plump, good-natured, unquestion-
ing as ever,’’ which suggests that discretion on his part could well be
either naiveté, or a form of tacit consent.
But what the picture suggests, above all, is that a child is the fruit
of this illegitimate union. This child is Vicky, presented as ‘‘Nettie’s
child’’ (and not as Nettie and Will’s child), and whose father seems
to be no one else but Alfred himself. For why else would his hand
‘‘proudly’’ clasp the little girl’s shoulder? And why would the nar-
rator try, through a new series of phatic anaphoras, to make us see
the ‘‘resemblance’’ between Vicky and Alfred, and Vicky and Sofka,
Alfred’s mother, the grandmother that she will never know?
We can, therefore, put forward the hypothesis that this mysterious
narrator recounting with so much passion the story of Sofka and her
descendants might be precisely little Vicky herself who, having
become an adult, peruses the photo album in search of her roots,
in search of a truth not so much about Sofka and her family as about
herself. In that sense, her perusal of the photographs could very easily
394 Laurence Petit

be likened to what Hirsh calls ‘‘the familial look’’ (Family Frames) or

in this case ‘‘the narratorial look,’’ whose nature is investigatory and
subversive.
The fiction that Family and Friends presents us with would then be
the narrator’s own fiction, that of her origins, and the irony is that,
while writing this ‘‘family romance,’’ meaning a ‘‘romance’’ about
her family, the narrator discovers, at the end of her quest, that it is
also a ‘‘family romance’’ in the Freudian sense, since she is indeed
an illegitimate child. But, in the same way we discover in the structure
of the novel an ‘‘inverted’’ anamorphosis, we have here an ‘‘inverted’’
family romance, since the narrator does not invent for herself a bio-
graphical fable in which she fantasizes herself an illegitimate child,
but inadvertently discovers, at the end of her autobiographical quest,
that she is indeed illegitimate. The parallel between Family and
Friends and the Freudian concept of ‘‘family romance’’ seems legit-
imate considering Brookner’s familiarity with this psychoanalytical
notion, as testified by the subject matter of her thirteenth novel, pre-
cisely entitled A Family Romance. In that novel, Brookner overtly
plays with the two meanings of the phrase while telling the tale of
two characters, an aunt and her niece, who invent for themselves a
fiction in which they become mother and daughter to each other.
At some point in the narrative, the narrator actually discusses the
concept of ‘‘family romance’’ and how it applies to her own child-
hood: ‘‘I never felt excluded from their lives, never witnessed any pri-
mal scene, was not encouraged to formulate any family romance,
although I was to do this later in the books I wrote for children
and for which I became quite well known’’ (44).
The writer is, of course, playing with the words ‘‘family’’ and
‘‘romance.’’ The novel relates the fascination of the narrator, Jane,
for her aunt by marriage, Dolly, and despite what the narrator in
the excerpt above pretends, this family ‘‘romance’’ is soon going to
turn into a Freudian ‘‘family romance,’’ as Jane invents for herself
a second mother, more exciting than her own, in the character of
Dolly, and Dolly ends up considering Jane as her own daughter
and consequently invents for herself the daughter that she never
had. In the case of Family and Friends, however, what makes such
a reading possible is the way in which the conventional, institutional
‘‘familial gaze’’ of these interchangeable wedding photographs
conveying an illusion of cohesion and stability is gradually shatt-
ered by the probing, investigatory ‘‘familial,’’ or, should we say,
‘‘narratorial look’’ of a narrator whose subversive identity is finally
revealed or rather ever so discreetly suggested at the very end of
the text.
Romance of a Family or Inverted ‘‘Family Romance’’ 395

This disjunction between the family’s official strategies of self-

representation as conveyed through the formal and eminently con-
ventional wedding photographs and the hidden, or at least hushed
up, secret contained in the very last picture not only illustrates how
family album photographs both perpetuate and resist familial ideol-
ogy. It also, and more generally, echoes Deborah Bowen’s arguments
regarding Brookner’s ‘‘ironic’’ use of photography, which challenges
the apparent stability of photographs and questions their ‘‘apparent
but deceptive security’’ (139). In this respect, through its original
use of the photographic image, Family and Friends expands postmo-
dern concerns with literary representation and its limits to provide a
reflection on the destabilizing power of images. By challenging read-
ers’ assumptions regarding the immediacy, veracity, transparency,
and evidentiality of the image, Brookner revisits and subverts the
established genre of the family chronicle while offering an interesting
and original perspective on the infinite narrative possibilities created
by the interplay of text and image.

NOTES

1. In this article, McLaine offers a comparative study of three

‘‘family album-novels’’—David Galloway’s A Family Album,
Paul Theroux’s Picture Palace, and Anita Brookner’s Family
and Friends—in which he sees three manifestations of what he
calls ‘‘photofiction.’’
2. Hirsch writes: ‘‘Postmemory is a powerful and very particular
form of memory precisely because its connection to its object
or source is mediated not through recollection but through an
imaginative investment or creation. Photographs in their endur-
ing ‘umbilical’ connection to life are precisely the medium con-
necting first- and second-generation remembrance, memory and
postmemory’’ (Family Frames 22–23).
3. My translation.
4. My translation.
5. I am borrowing the expression from Alain Robbe-Grillet,
who uses it to characterize the way descriptions function in
the ‘‘New Novel,’’ preventing any kind of visualization for the
reader, and by doing so, ‘‘erasing themselves’’ out of an excess
of precision (160).
6. Lyotard writes: ‘‘Through anamorphoses, the signifier itself is
being attacked. It topples under our very eyes’’ (378).
7. The original quotation in French can be found in Lacan’s Les
quatre concepts foundamentaux de la psychanalyse, 107.
396 Laurence Petit

8. The full sentence reads: ‘‘Holbein makes visible for us here

something that is simply the subject as annihilated’’ (Lacan, Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 88).
9. The original quotation in French can be found in Barthes’s La
Chambre Claire, 29–30.
10. The original quotation in French can be found in Barthes’s La
Chambre Claire, 25.
11. McLaine writes: ‘‘While the evidential nature of the photograph
has from the beginning been aligned with its supposed ability to
stabilize the world ‘realistically,’ its destabilizing or transforming
function, as family album novels show, is more variously aligned
with a number of compromising factors: the photographer’s
selection and manipulation of the image, the subject’s posturing,
private or privileged knowledge, context, nostalgia, memory, art-
fulness and elegiac purpose’’ (132).
12. The original quotation in French can be found in Robert’s
Roman des origines, 46.
13. I am referring here to Hirsch’s discussion in Family Frames.
14. I am referring here to Hirsch’s discussion in The Familial Gaze.

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