“The past is a place full of energy and imagination”: Photographic Seeing and Memory in Colum McCann’s Songdogs
Author : Chi-min Chang
Keywords : Colum McCann, Songdogs, photographic seeing, memory
Songdogs, Colum McCann’s first novel, is a remarkable depiction of
how photography re-conceptualizes and reconfigures memory. This novel
tells the story of how the protagonist, Conor, retraces his parents’ past
experiences and relationships through the photographs taken by his father.
In Conor’s connection to and recollection of the past, McCann highlights the
mechanical intervention of photography and the visual codes of its images
in reconstructing the past, recreating memories, and entangling past-present
relation. The exploration of the mechanical intervention unveils social
replacement or displacement as photography repositions the photographer,
the photographed, and the viewer in relationships. The intervention takes
place between Conor and his parents, since the subject of most of his father’s
photographs is his mother. But, as the viewer, Conor feels embarrassed and
bewildered and does not know how to situate himself while looking at the
sexy or nude images of his mother. Moreover, these photos trigger Conor’s
memory of his mother’s stress and suffering after his father publishes these
photos. The interrogation of the visual codes of photographs reveals that there are two features of photographic seeing: one is metaphoric and the
other, metonymic. In addition, it is owing to photographic seeing that the
past is re-imagined and memory, revamped. Prominently, the reconfigured
memory does not merely refashion the past-present relation but demonstrates
Conor’s negotiation and reconciliation with the past. Photographic
seeing in Songdogs thus brings forth a vision of memory which is less a
representation of the past than a place full of energy and imagination.