Jameson acknowledges that the individual is a creature of time and society, a being living in history.  Her definition of documentary, however, requires that the individual divest himself of his own self; the individual should record history without being a part of or analyzing his place in it.  Shared experience, and the objective representation of shared experience, is more real than individual experience.  This is why she had a problem with The Road to Wigan Pier.  She continues:  "Writers should be willing . . . to go, if you like, into exile.  Without feeling heroic, or even adventurous, or curious about their own spiritual reactions.  Willing to sink themselves for the time, so that they become conduits for a feeling which is not personal, nor static" (314).  She compares this act of writing to taking a photograph or making a film, "the literary equivalent of the documentary film" (318):  the I becomes the eye.  Here, the individual ceases to be a historical being, neither writing himself into history nor creating history.  Rather, he becomes a 'conduit' for history, his text a site in which history as an impersonal force is expressed, his writing an objective instrument with which he examines his historical moment.

As a conception of either history or documentary, though, Jameson's idea fails to take into account the slippage between language and reality.  They do not "meet," as Hynes would have it; instead, they interrogate and disturb each other.  Documentary texts serve as recordings of historical moments, not only through an "eye," as Jameson would have it, but through an "I".  History is created, recorded, and interrogated by subjects.  Documentary can never be as objective as some of its theorists might argue.  One theorist who acknowledges the subjective underpinnings of the documentary project, Paula Rabinowitz, writes, "Documentary circulates between the public and private, personal and political spheres by becoming simultaneously an aesthetic and archival object" (6).  A documentary text does not exist in a vacuum; it does not even exist by acknowledging that it does not live in a vacuum.  It is always already framed by the purpose of its author, by that author’s subjectivity, perception of the world, and place in history.  It is an archival object – an artifact, a moment from a personal archive.

In placing themselves within their texts, and within their own historical moment, Woolf and Orwell interrogate the very idea of an objective history.  The photographs themselves are framed by rhetorical purpose, purpose which at times seems at odds with the very existence of the photographs.  The photographs in Three Guineas are used by Woolf to make a point about fascism and patriarchy.  The photographs in The Road to Wigan Pier were included, perhaps by Orwell but more likely by the Left Book Club editors, to create a documentary text to expose the horrors of poverty and to be used to persuade people to join the socialist cause – not the text or purpose Orwell had in mind, as we shall see.  The photographs are not included to provide a "slice of life", to offer the reader an objective, accurate portrayal of a social moment.  Rather, they are joined with the text to perform a rhetorical function.

These two texts – joining word and image – are meant to serve similar functions, yet go about it in two different ways.  Both are meant to be polemics, and both were controversial for the views they espoused.  Woolf used photographs to make her point.  However, Orwell's point was entirely at cross-purposes with those of the Left Book Club.  The Left Book Club wanted to create a documentary text, and commissioned Orwell to do so.  Orwell wanted to compose a personal examination through experience of his own political beliefs, interrogating those beliefs and in the process his own subjectivity.  What I would like to argue is that Woolf chose to use photographs in Three Guineas to make her argument.  They are an integral part of her project.  The photographs included in The Road to Wigan Pier, however, were not intended to be included by Orwell.  He never intended to create a documentary text except insofar as such an examination of 'reality' would further his own project:  a personal exploration of his political development.  He sought to render the personal political in ways that went against the agenda of the Left Book Club.  The insertion of the photographs by the Left Book Club while Orwell was in Spain results in the effacement of the author and the subversion of authorial intention – the death of the author.  The question remains:  should we then read The Road to Wigan Pier with the photographs?  How is our reading changed?  And does the author really matter?

Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas makes the public eye a key component of her argument.  She writes, "Photographs, of course, are not arguments addressed to the reason; they are simply statements of fact addressed to the eye.  But in that very simplicity there may be some help" (Three 14).  She begins with photographs of corpses, victims of the Spanish Civil War.  Yet we do not see these photographs.  She selects photographs that make a rhetorical point, that speak to another purpose; Woolf wants the photographs she chooses to be "arguments."  She proposes to create a documentary text to explain the relationship between patriarchy and fascism.  However, it is not only documentary.  The photographs show the reality of patriarchy, but they also show what will never be reality for women.  They document particular social signifiers – the medals, the ermine robes, the scepters – while demonstrating how empty those signifiers are.  In presenting them as evidence to authenticate certain social codes and practices, Woolf questions the authenticity of the society that produces them.

The Spanish Civil War, the unseen photographs, serve as a frame for the pictures she does choose.  She withholds these pictures of war, merely describing, gesturing:

She writes that these photographs cause violent sensations of "horror and disgust" (Three 15), but this does not take the place of argument.  The photographs of common spectacle, special in their ritual but quotidian in the reader's recognition of them, make her argument.  They take the place of the photographs that are only gestured towards.  The pictures of "dead bodies and ruined houses" in Spain become the "dead bodies"of white men clothed in uniforms, robes, and ceremony, the "ruined houses" are the patriarchal institutions upon which a threatened society is founded.

Descriptions of the clothes and ceremonies metonymized by photographs emphasize the detail, the "splendour", the baroque symbolical significance: "Some have the right to wear plain buttons only; others rosettes; some may wear a single stripe; others three, four or five.  And each curl or stripe is sewn on at precisely the right distance apart – it may be one inch, one inch and a quarter for another" (Three 28).  The purpose of these descriptions – and of the photos themselves – is not only to instruct but to ridicule.  Three Guineas serves as a site where Woolf's personal history as the daughter of an eminent Victorian, and the public, political history that created these men, intersect, giving lie to the notion that documentary is meant to be objective.  Woolf makes her history all history, and vice versa.  The pictures provide the evidence; her ridicule explicit in their presentation makes the warrant.

Her choice to present the photographs with no distinguishing captions in the list of illustrations at the start of the book renders the men anonymous.  They become "A General," "Heralds," "A University Procession," "A Judge," "An Archbishop".  They are empty spectacle.  By removing the subjects of the photographs, by reducing them to titles and types, we are left with the subjectivity of the author, not with an objective presentation of fact.  Naomi Black, who, in the process of editing Three Guineas uncovered the identities of the men in the photographs [1] , notes that the photographs lose their significance outside of the context of the text, and that, likewise, the text loses its significance without the photographs:

Woolf received many letters after the publication of Three Guineas; a great deal of those letters came from women expressing their appreciation, and Harold Laski thought it "the greatest book since Mill" (Letters 383).  An unsigned review in Time and Tide, however, called the book "a terrible sight.  Indecent, almost obscene" (Letters 251).  Interestingly, the review described the book as a "terrible sight," making reference to the particularly visual nature of Woolf's project.  Among the "Bloomsbury men," for example, John Maynard Keynes was very negative about Woolf's project, especially about the use of the images, for he saw her as being hostile to institutions – those represented by the pictures – for which he held great regard (Black, Introduction: lviii).  This is precisely true.  She was hostile towards them, and Keynes and other reviewers were correct to pinpoint the photographs as metonyms of that hostility, as exemplars of what not to be. 

In her use of photographs, Woolf takes public images and invests them with private meaning, creating a dialectic between self and society; the photographic image functions as the site of that dialectic.  She rereads and revises the images' significance, and uses them to critique the patriarchal public sphere, a world of "dead bodies and ruined houses."  The photos of the men of ceremony stand in for the photos of Spain; they are a different form of persuasion.  To remove the photographs – as so many publishers of editions of Three Guineas since the first have done – is to divest the argument of meaning, to leave gaps which cannot be filled.  The gesture towards the unseen pictures of war is fulfilled by the pictures of the men.  The removal of the pictures results in an empty gesture, a space where Woolf's point should be made real.  Without them, the dialectic between self and society is effaced, and with it Woolf's historical subjectivity.

In George Orwell's writings, the historical subjectivity is paramount.  Orwell's authorship extended to his authorship of himself as an individual writing himself into history.  The Road to Wigan Pier is meant to document not only the sufferings of the mining poor, but also the process whereby Orwell constructs a historical identity and situates himself in his own moment.  Orwell acknowledges a political purpose in his writings and the necessity of having such a purpose.  However, when his political purpose as a persona, an individual in his own text, comes into conflict with the political expectations placed upon him as an author, as a member of the nexus between author, publisher, and audience, his own authorship, his own existence as an author, is effaced.  Orwell sought to turn the documentary lens on himself as well as on his surroundings, hence the filmic descriptions of Wigan and the rigorously detailed examinations of his own political conscience/consciousness.  He thus highlights his own authorship and his own subjectivity.  Through the introduction of photographs into the publication, in addition to the famous (infamous?) Foreword by Victor Gollancz, the Left Book Club effaces the author Orwell, and as a result effaces the dialectic Orwell sought to establish between his own self and society. 

The brochure to enroll as a member of the Left Book Club states its aim thus:              

The LBC was founded in 1936 and run by Victor Gollancz, Harold Laski, and John Strachey.  Its ideology and purpose are clear.  When Gollancz commissioned Orwell to write The Road to Wigan Pier, the expectation that Orwell would fulfill the purpose of educating the members of the LBC and stirring them to action was probably clear, too.  Yet Orwell was not concerned with "efficiency" nor with "playing a part".  His Wigan diary shows his impulse and plan to document life in the Midlands, but in the process of translating this work into the finished book, Orwell's purpose changed.

It might seem old-fashioned to speak of authorial purpose and intention.  Yet the publication history of The Road to Wigan Pier – as well as as that of Three Guineas – illustrates the consequences of neglecting authorial intention.  The book as artifact, as communication to the reader, as product of commerce and expectations, must be examined in order to consider the ways in which Woolf's and Orwell's intentions were subverted, and the very message of their texts altered.  The omission of the photographs in the first case, and the addition of photographs in the second, transform the medium and the message of the two books.  In the instance of Woolf, a radical and threatening point is silenced; in that of Orwell,the carefully constructed authorial presence and perspective, again in service of a politically threatening argument, is effaced.  Text and image are meant to function in dialogue, but each are being made to say something that was never intended.

Storm Jameson, in a review of The Road to Wigan Pier, praised Orwell's book as a model of the documentary mode – the first half of the book, that is.  The first half of The Road to Wigan Pier details Orwell's travels among and observations of the mining community at Wigan, a town especially devastated by the depression.  The second half details Orwell's personal intellectual and political development, specifically how he came to reject the orthodoxy of socialism, yet realize that as a decent person committed to justice there is really no other option.  This bifurcation sparked a great deal of criticism, and continues to lead many critics to label The Road to Wigan Pier as Orwell's least successful book.  In her review of the book, Jameson wrote, "The first part . . . is a social document as vivid, bitter, and telling as one could have asked.  The second part is a document of another kind, much less interesting and less valuable, but more curious" (qtd. in Hynes 272).  Critics have continued to echo this sentiment; in a recent essay, Keith Williams describes the book as "notoriously broken-backed" (164).  Orwell himself wrote to Jack Common in October of 1936, "It [The Road to Wigan Pier] is not a novel this time but a sort of book of essays, but I am afraid I have made rather a muck of parts of it" (Collected 233). 

However, what must be recognized is that the two parts of The Road to Wigan Pier are necessary each to the other.  One cannot understand how Orwell arrived at the place he did in Part I without the background of Part II.  In the book he describes a backwards journey:  on the way to Wigan Pier he meets himself.  Wigan Pier has ceased to exist, but in that space he sees himself, who he was, who he has become, and who he needs to become.  Wigan becomes a symbol, a heterotopia where Orwell's past and future intersect with the past and future of the society he so desperately wants to change.  It is a place of process, of coming to consciousness.  It is also, crucially, a place of tension, where the private self and the public self meet, the subjective and the objective.

Wigan is a place, a physical real town in England.  Yet, through the text, Orwell consciously constructs Wigan as a symbol.  Wigan Pier does not exist anywhere but in the collective imagination of the town, and in Orwell's text.  Wigan Pier becomes a symbol of the space where the private and the public meet yet do not meet.  It is a symbol of public, social suffering.  On a BBC program called "Your Questions Answered" broadcast on 2 Dec. 1943, Orwell was asked "How long is the Wigan Pier and what is the Wigan Pier?".  He responded:

Wigan, and the pier that doesn't exist, becomes a symbol of everything that has gone wrong with contemporary society and the suffering it has engendered.  Yet it is more than a symbol of social injustice.  In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell writes, "Mr. Orwell was 'set down' in Wigan for quite a while . . .   He has only one fault to find with it, and that is in respect of the celebrated Wigan Pier, which he had set his heart on seeing.  Alas!  Wigan Pier has been demolished, and even the spot where it used to stand is no longer certain” (Road 74).  This place that doesn't exist is also the place where Orwell becomes a construction in his own text, a person in process.  It is a never-ending process, however, destined to continue into infinity, like the road itself, leading to no foreseeable endpoint. 

Thus, each part of Orwell's text is necessary; the tension between them, and among the varying discourses employed by Orwell, reflect the struggle of the individual to situate himself in the world and to construct a vocabulary of understanding.  Alex Zwerdling notes, "One has a sense of fragmentation within the sections…of starts and stops, mysterious shifts from description to narration, from narration to tangentially relevant analytic essays, from essays to confession, from confession to exhortation.  The very multiplicity of elements compounds the problem of coherence" (167).  While Zwerdling is correct to point out the "sense of fragmentation" within The Road to Wigan Pier, it is important to note that this "fragmentation" is carefully constructed.  Orwell kept a diary during his time in Wigan; a comparison of the diary with the finished text reveals Orwell’s self-conscious process of creating a literary text.  This process ultimately shows the boundary between "documentary" and "literature," between "objective" and "subjective," to be a fiction.  It is impossible to have a completely objective document, when the individual creating the document has a past and a project – the past and project revealed in Part II.  John Mander writes,

A significant part of understanding the world and one's place in it is to know that the construction of the self plays a large role in that understanding, and that the two processes feed into one another endlessly without ever being completely reconciled.

Orwell's commission to write an objective document was "quickly transgressed" (Williams 164); Orwell's project and its presentation, in turn, was transgressed by his publishers.  Orwell sent the manuscript to Gollancz and left shortly after for Spain.  The LBC found many of Orwell's conclusions about the poor, and about Socialists, deeply problematic, and to combat this Gollancz quickly erected an entire apparatus around Orwell's text. The LBC-only edition of The Road to Wigan Pier contains a Foreword by Gollancz, offering a disclaimer to what lies inside and attempting to argue that the book upholds the mission of the club.  He emphasizes the quality of the book, its "positive value" (xiii), but criticizes the autobiographical perspective of Part II.  Gollancz notes that Orwell is critical of "us", meaning the socialists, and aligns himself – Gollancz – clearly on their side (xxi).  Interestingly, this perpetuates Orwell's own purpose.  He notes his own outsider status throughout his journey through Wigan; he makes his outsider status clear in relation to political dogma; and he here has that outsider status upheld by his publisher.  Yet Gollancz perpetuates Orwell's project to maintain outsider status specifically to show how Orwell is outside true socialism, and as a result his text must be taken with reservations.  Thus Gollancz misses the point:  Orwell is an outsider, and has constructed himself as such, while at the same time maintaining that it is this status that makes the true objectivity of documentary – of any documentary – impossible.  

Just before Orwell's departure, a meeting took place in Gollancz's office where the decision was reached to include photographs:  "The intention was 'to make the book fully documentary'" (Complete 5:228-29).  It is possible that Gollancz discussed this move with Orwell, but the records are uncertain (Davison xxxv).  As we can see from the diary, however, Orwell had already created the text as a documentary, albeit a literary one.  Apparently the work was too "literary", too autobiographical – too dangerously subjective – because the publisher made the decision to include images to render the text more "fully documentary".   Thirty-two plates were included in the original edition of The Road to Wigan Pier.  They have never been reprinted until the recent publication of the Complete Works, and the originals have never been found.   

The text of Part I is documentary in its use of primary materials and testimony, much of it taken from his diary:  tenants' opinions of their homes (Road 67), a budget for the average unemployed family living on thirty shillings a week (Road 92).  The more 'literary' material was recorded in the diary as notes, and then reworked into thick description in order to provide an almost filmic depiction of life in the mining towns.  The photographs are included near the end of Part I, images of coal searches, of a strike in South Wales, of miners' cottages near Newcastle and Swansea.  The pictures are haunting.  One, captioned "Overcrowding", shows seven people in a tiny room, three of them children.  Another shows a house in a slum with broken windows and doors, crumbling walls, wash strung in the sooty yard.  Orwell describes in his words a scene similar to the one in the picture added by Gollancz:

A third depicts a miner, stripped to the waist, his face black, kneeling over a washtub filled with dirty water as his wife scrubs his back. Orwell writes: