Dora Zhang's "Strange Likeness"

This year my summer read is Dora Zhang’s Strange Likeness: Description and the Modern Novel (2020). Although abstruse in content, it turns out to be the perfect beach book – resistant to water, sand, and sunscreen oil. The University of Chicago Press makes physically durable paperbacks.  

The book is about literary description – a subject I’m keenly interested in. Zhang focuses on three kinds of literary description, all of them strange: atmospheric (exemplified by the work of Henry James); analogical (exemplified by the work of Marcel Proust); and affective (exemplified by the work of Virginia Woolf). 

Zhang’s identification and analysis of these three categories is ingenious. Here’s a sample of her commentary on James: 

If we understand James’s likenesses to be about something other than how things look, they turn out to be in fact quite precise, hardly underdescribed at all. In the case of Lancaster Gates, he does not give us an inventory or spatial plan of sideboards, tables, or footstools, but we know that whatever is there is made of gilt, glass, satin, plush, rosewood, marble, and malachite and that it is scalloped, fringed, buttoned, corded, gilded, drawn, and curled. James’s descriptive mode remains indefinite with respect to individual objects, but it is quite specific with respect to qualities and effects. The general impression of luxurious materials and ornate aesthetics are clear even if the Balzacian inventory has disappeared. The descriptive referent has become an impression on a perceiver that is irreducible to any one of its component parts. Insofar as they issue instructions for imagining acts of perception, I propose that James’s descriptions instruct us above all to imagine what it is like to feel an atmosphere.

That’s the most creative defense of underdescription that I’ve ever read. I’m not convinced. Zhang admits that James’s descriptions “block visualization.” What kind of description is that? To me, the whole point of description is to call up pictures. Description that blocks visualization seems to me pointless.

Zhang is very good on a number of aspects of description. On the classic dichotomy of narrate versus describe, she dissents, arguing that “at the level of the sentence, it is difficult to find anything that is not in some way descriptive, since even verbs – words of action, that preeminent concern of narrative – inevitably contain descriptive connotations.” I agree. I go further: narrative is a subcategory of description; it's the description of action. 

On the possibility of too much description, Zhang says (speaking of Balzac), 

This drive toward descriptive comprehensiveness may be attributed partly to his intention to be the natural historian of French society, but it also stems from something inescapable about description itself: the inability to determine with any intrinsic necessity where to start and where to stop.

Reading this, I recall John McPhee’s “Writing is selection.” What to include, what to leave out? McPhee, in his Draft No. 4 (2017), says,

It’s an utterly subjective situation. I include what interests me and exclude what doesn’t interest me. That may be a crude tool but it’s the only one I have. Broadly speaking, the word “interests” in this context has subdivisions of appeal, among them the ways in which choices help to set the scene, the ways in which choices suggest some undercurrent about the people or places being described, and, not least, the sheer sound of the words that bring forth the detail. It is of course possible to choose too much costume jewelry and diminish the description, the fact notwithstanding that, by definition in nonfiction writing, all the chosen items were of course observed.  

On the pleasure of description, Zhang writes, 

Needless to say, the pleasure of description can take many forms: it can appeal to our appetites and our senses, it can produce the thrill of recognition, and it can lead to the shock of discovery, to name just a few.

I would add another: the bliss of precision in a sentence like “On the stove is a tin can full of simmering tea, under a sheet-metal lid that is a piece of a fuel can with a scorched clothespin clipped to it as a handle” [from John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977)]. To me, that description is worth a hundred of Zhang’s vague, ethereal, nonmimetic, nonrepresentational specimens.

I wish Zhang had more to say on two of my favorite kinds of description – ekphrasis and catalogue. But Zhang’s purpose in Strange Likeness isn’t to survey the art of description in its entirety. Her focus is trained on three esoteric forms of it. I’d welcome a much broader study, one that includes nonfiction description.