Intermedial Reflections on Analogue Photography and Digital Visuality in Moxyland

This article re-reads Lauren Beukes’s debut novel Moxyland (2008) through an intermedial lens, focusing on the text’s multiple “nested” references to images, as well as techniques of “braiding” where visual effects are woven into the prose itself. The ubiquitous presence of photography in the novel suggests a pervasive thematic and stylistic visuality, which at times mimics ways of seeing through a camera lens. A key structuring binary in the novel concerns the opposition between two fundamentally different forms of image technologies, namely classical analogue photography and digital imagery. These two different visual modes are keyed to two of the main characters, but are also freighted with aesthetic, ethical, and political consequences. Photographs have classically authenticated the existence of the real world in front of the lens, but in a digital world, the direct connection between image and reality is increasingly tenuous, arbitrary and random, opening up the spectre of totalitarian information control, fake news, and media manipulation, a world in which citizens no longer have any access to truth and pictures no longer tell us what really has happened. Beukes’s novel, read through this opposition between analogue photography and digital visuality, is a cautionary tale about a future of images and digital technology, and of the consequences that these shifts in visual media may have on society.