Afterimage : loss as a form of enquiry in the work of Mary Jo Bang, M.D. Coverley and Joan Retallack

An afterimage is an image that continues to appear in one's vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased. The afterimage may be identical to the image, when it is known as a positive afterimage, or transposed in terms of brightness and colours, when it becomes a negative afterimage. Either way the afterimage is an overhang or delay, an involuntary trace from the past that nevertheless presents the possibility of transformation in the present. When the afterimage appears as a metaphor in poetry, it is usually as a residue of, or trace from, the past. The implications of the afterimage are also highly paradoxical: fleeting but lasting; visual but open to synaesthetic transference; to do with individual perception but possessing social/historical resonance" pleasurable but seen as depressing or unnerving. The concept of the afterimage is still pervasive in contemporary literature. Here my focus is on three North American works which engage with it: Mary Jo Bang's "The Role of Elegy" from her volume Elegy, M.D. Coverley's multimedia work Afterimage, and Joan Retallack's Afterrimages. In all three cases the afterimage connects with loss and the complex problem of commemoration. Consequently, I want to suggest that the afterimage in these works triggers an act of afterimagining, the active rearranging of the past through memory, the interconnection and reinterpretation of a multiplicity of traces.