Surface and Depth: Reading Photographs in Obasan and The Invention of Solitude

Since its invention, photography has been imbued with the promise of providing a sense of fullness and has been believed to possess the unique capacity to capture the entirety of a moment. On the other hand, such assumed potentiality to capture all is yet found subject to the surface, and photography turns out to be a sort of art that lacks depth. This paper intends to focus on the tension between surface and depth in the representation of photographs in literature, a topic that is often neglected in literary studies. Through the theoretical lens of Walter Benjamin’s and Roland Barthes’s discourses on photography, this paper examines Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, both of which expose the discrepancy between what is visible on the surface and what lies beneath, as well as between what is within the frame and what exists beyond it. This paper is divided into two parts. The first part discusses how Benjamin’s and Barthes’s discourses on photography lead to the discussion of the surface and depth issues. The second part deals with the photographs in the two literary works, exploring how theoretical concepts of photography, including Benjamin’s “the optical unconscious” and Barthes’s “punctum,” will help shed light on them. By juxtaposing critical discourses on photography with these literary works, this paper concludes that their representation of photographs grapples with the tension between surface and depth and resonates with Benjamin’s and Barthes’s notions on photography.