The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

Photographie Mixtures
Keith Maillard
Light in the Company of Women. Harper Collins
$24-95
Reviewed by Lorraine M. York
It is no coincidence that Sarsfield
Middleton, the central character of Keith
Maillard's Light in the Company of Women,
is a turn-of-the-century pioneer of colour
photography's mixture of primary hues, for
the novel itself meditates on mixtures of
various kinds. Indeed, it challenges the very
notion of non-mixture, of detachment, and
so when the novel opens with a view of
Sarsfield "look[ing] down from the rooftop
of the building that housed his father's
photography business," wishing he could
capture the sight of an odd man in the
street, he appears to embody Olympian
photographic detachment. As the events of
this compelling family story unfold, however,
this visual and philosophical stance
undergoes a remarkable—and twentiethcentury—revolution.
That Sarsfield should cultivate detachment
is not surprising; the father-photographer
mentioned in the opening paragraph
of the novel has a habit of bestowing
unwanted children on his wife—by means
of rape. As a young child, Sarsfield has no
vocabulary to describe the act which he has
overheard and barely understood; in this
sense he stands in for a whole society which
had no vocabulary, no legal understanding
of rape within marriage. And so, we hear,
"Sarsfield resolved to detach himself, so far
as was humanly possible, from the life of
the family," and the instrument of severance
which he adopts is the in-humanly
possible technology of the camera. But one
of the richest philosophical debates associated
with photography concerns the viability
of detachment: Does the camera offer
separation from the viewed object or an
inevitable connection? Maillard's sympathies
lie with the latter proposition, and so
Sarsfield's programmatic detachment is
doomed to crumble. Indeed, his initial
practise of photographing women as an
aesthetic act alone dangerously parallels, in
its philosophy, therape of the female by the
Patriarchal Photographer. And so, on the
day on which the novel opens, Sarsfield
tries to take another of those photographs
of women—only this time he will step away
from his photographic and emotional
viewfinder and marry the subject (object)
of that photograph.
This eventual, hard-won alliance between
Sarsfield and his photographic working
subject, Emma, associates the mixing of
subject-object relations which I have just
discussed with the mixing of social classes.
To marry Emma Rossiter is, in Sarsfield's
propertied-class West-Virginian system, to
fall prey to a dangerous class heterogeneity.
At the same time, Maillard does not fall
prey to an easy fictional cliche: rebellious
son and imperious blocking elders.
Sarsfield himself is ambiguously mixed in
class terms; though he often wishes to be
free of the monied and propertied ancestors,
he also yearns after his cousin Julia
Eberhardt—an up-and-coming society
queen. This yearning is, to Maillard's
credit, never transcended or cancelled out;
it remains, like so much else in this novel,
what E.M. Forster would have called a
"muddle."
One of the most intriguing muddles in
Light in the Company of Women is, as the
title suggests, gender ambiguity. We hear
that, as a young boy, Sarsfield prefers, by
far, "the company of women," and his
father takes steps to remove him from that
dangerously feminizing company and to
place him in a boy's school. There, of
course, gender-crossing is decidedly outlawed;
Sarsfield's first fight results from a
cross-dressing insult: "We've got some fine
new muslin, Miss Middleton...want to
make yourself a petticoat?" Here gender