“Distance Lends Enchantment”: Photography and The Dialectics of Space and Time in Graham Swift’s Out of this World (1988)

Résumé

Out of this World. It specifically addresses the relationship between Harry Beech, one of the main
characters, and his relatives, namely his daughter and his father, Sophie and Robert, respectively.
As a photojournalist, Harry travels around the world; he seldom stays at home. The close
proximity he enjoys with the victims of war he photographs, in defiance to his father who is an
arm manufacturer, ironically entails a distancing whose effects are often perverse. This results in
a paradigmatic pattern in which distance generates transient proximity and proximity reflects
distance.
Keywords: Graham Swift, Out of this World, photography, postmodernism, distance, proximity