Toward My Own Theory of Description: Incision-Slashed Torso

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Ekphrasis – sounds like a skin condition. I prefer the plainer “description of art.” It's one of my favorite forms of representation. Example:

The enormously enlarged photograph of the incision-slashed torso was the pivotal image of the show; it compelled immediate, stunned attention, and its presence invaded one’s perception of the other, less overtly horrifying images. Its horror comes from the fact it is not a clinical study of a body on an operating table, or a medical-textbook illustration showing a person enduring photography as he does treatment, but a picture of a beautiful young woman posed in a graceful, even slightly vain attitude. She has put a silver necklace around her neck and a bracelet on one wrist. (The other wrist is encircled by a plastic hospital tag.) Her body has the delicate slenderness of a boy’s, and the photograph subtly evokes Edward Weston’s lovely study of his son Neil’s nude torso – it is similarly cropped at the neck and at the pubes. The two savage arcs of messy black surgical stitches that rip into the right breast and tear down the abdomen are like obscene marks made on a statue by a vandal. The tense clash of imagery – the brutal yoking of the emblems of pain, pathology, mutilation, and inanition with the attributes of health, wholeness, volition, and grace – is paralleled by a conflict of feeling within the viewer, who is both repelled by and drawn to the image: appalled by the way the woman is exposing what it is “normal” to keep out of sight, and yet fascinated by the details thereby revealed. And, oddly, the closer the viewer looks at the incisions, the less distress he feels; finally, his repugnance recedes and is replaced by something akin to awe for the work of the anonymous surgeon, for the neat and clean way the body has been closed, for the small outward signs of damage. 

That’s from Janet Malcolm’s great “The View from Plato’s Cave” (The New Yorker, October 18, 1976; included in her 1980 collection Diana & Nikon). It’s a description of Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein’s photograph Toni, October (1975). I first read it when it appeared in The New Yorker; I’ve never forgotten it. (It clinched my decision to subscribe to the magazine.) It’s both description and analysis. Note three things: (1) the transfixing specificity of Malcolm’s description (“The two savage arcs of messy black surgical stitches that rip into the right breast and tear down the abdomen are like obscene marks made on a statue by a vandal”); (2) the comparative analysis (“Her body has the delicate slenderness of a boy’s, and the photograph subtly evokes Edward Weston’s lovely study of his son Neil’s nude torso – it is similarly cropped at the neck and at the pubes”); and (3), the assessment of why the picture is so “stunning” (“Its horror comes from the fact it is not a clinical study of a body on an operating table, or a medical-textbook illustration showing a person enduring photography as he does treatment, but a picture of a beautiful young woman posed in a graceful, even slightly vain attitude”). 

In my next post, I want to consider description in terms of its closely observed detail. Can there ever be “too much”?