Walking With Shadows – Index, Inscription and Event in Malcolm Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea
In: Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs (Eds) Remaking the Voyage – New Essays on Malcolm Lowry and In Ballast to the White Sea, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press and the Bluecoat.
A book chapter and essay in the form of a ‘photo-text’, which integrates a series of 15 photographs. This chapter sits alongside contributions from world-leading researchers and scholars on Lowry including Professor Sherrill Grace (University of British Columbia), Emeritus Professor Chris Ackerley (University of Otago), and the late Vik Doyen (University of Leeuwen).
Open access: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv13qftxs
- Submitting institution
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University of Chester
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32-22/320002
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Remaking the Voyage: New Essays on Malcolm Lowry and In Ballast to the White Sea
- Publisher
- Liverpool University Press
- ISBN
- 9781789621839
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- A series of 15 black and white photographs and writing authored in response to the publication of a scholarly edition of Malcolm Lowry’s lost novel In Ballast to the White Sea. The photographs are integrated in an essay entitled ‘Walking with Shadows’, a photo-text, indebted to W.G. Sebald’s use of photographs in The Rings of Saturn (1995). A method adopted which fuses ‘fiction, travelogue, history and biography’ where the images offset or displace the narrative, rather than illustrate it, as the psychic and physical journey unfolds from page to page. The text also references Denis Hollier’s essay ‘Surrealist Precipitates Don’t Cast Shadows’, in which the position of the artist /author and the role of the reader highlights the significance of André Breton’s novel and use of photographs in Nadja (1928).
The correlation of these sources includes Michel de Certeau’s ‘Walking in the City’ in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) and Paul Auster’s novella ‘City of Glass’ in New York Trilogy (1987) the notion of the author / protagonist as interchangeable positions, reveals the significance of a method, in which autobiography, fact and fiction coalesce. The photographs which are imbricated within the text function as a series of staging points and motifs, which index the journey undertaken by the novel’s key protagonist. In Lowry’s novel these are uncovered in a series of surreal, psychogeographic encounters across the urban terrain and landscape, and the sonic hum, which imbues his writing. The events and locations which define the novel were rediscovered or otherwise substituted as they are re-inscribed in text and image. The project also integrated archive and vernacular images, which include Edward Chambré Hardman’s photographs of Liverpool and the North West The setting which provides the point of departure for Lowry’s novel and the terrain, which was revisited for this project.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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