Abraham's Pictures - a novel

This thesis is in two parts. Part A is a novel titled Abraham’s Pictures. It reveals the story of<br>Abraham Rosen, a writer and photographer in current day Melbourne seeking to come to<br>terms with a prediction, made on his fiftieth birthday, that his life will end in three months. He<br>is committed to living his life ‘as normal’ in the shadow of his prediction. He also decides to<br>shoot photographs for an exhibition he calls Just in Time. He schedules the exhibition for the<br>very day of his predicted demise.<br><br> As he sits at his regular outdoor table at Café Obscura trying to make sense of the<br>‘ridiculous’ prediction, he is approached by a disheveled young man who seems to want<br>money. He tries to engage with the young man but an out-of-control car skids on the wet tram<br>tracks, killing its two occupants and knocking the young man into a coma.<br> The following day Abraham learns that he has won a competition to photograph the<br>prototype of the Clock of the Long Now in London and to address the annual dinner of the<br>Long Now Foundation.<br><br> The prediction and the accident set Abraham on a quest that takes him from<br>Melbourne to London via Mumbai and Colombo before returning to Melbourne for his<br>exhibition. Along the way he confronts issues of memory and denial as he is forced to<br>question his life as a photographer. In the end it is the photographer who dies but Abraham<br>survives as man who has learnt to live without being shackled to his past.<br>This novel sets out to explore the relationships between time, memory and photography. It<br>becomes a meditation on the nature of lost time and on the power of the image.<br>Part B is the exegesis titled: Double Gazing and Novel Spaces: An examination of the role of<br>photographs in novels, using W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz as a case study and Roland Barthes’s<br>interrogations of photography as an underlying context. This exegetical work investigates the<br>question of what happens to a photograph when it becomes manifest in an imaginative<br>narrative. The exegesis surveys the manifestations of photographs in contemporary novels<br>and engages in semiotic and intertextual analysis to interrogate the indexical nature of the<br>photograph.<br><br>Combined – Parts A and B show how photographs form a mnemonic discourse that can<br>propel imaginative narratives into new and speculative realms.