Toward My Own Theory of Description: Gooseneck Lamp

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Much of description’s pleasure is in its details. Take John Updike’s description of Norman Rockwell’s great Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950), for example: 

The boots and rubbers, for instance, in front of the stove, with its red-hot coals, and, in the diagonally opposite corner, the ghostly row of old shaving mugs in the top cells of the obsolete cabinet, between the ceiling fixture of frosted glass and the little gooseneck lamp. One’s eye, traveling around the edge of the painting, encounters a whisk broom, an Indian-shuttered window frame, a porcelain basin, a rack of comic books, two knobbed chairs, a mullion with parched putty, a carved crack in the corner of a window pane, a spindleback settee, shelves holding old magazines, a gun, fishing tackle, and all along the top, the gilt appliqué letters spelling BARBER. The eye naturally swoops through the front window to the luminous, man-crammed rectangle of the back room, skimming through the shadows of the closed shop, past the listening cat, the magnificent old barber chair, the hairy broom, the little cracked mirror, the wartime poster of a torn flag, into the bright chaste chamber where music is made. The most brilliant passages of painting, perhaps, depict the standing violinist, all but dissolved in light, and the reflections on the foreshortened piece of stove pipe leading into the wall. But the illustration is saturated in every corner with an avid particularizing that allows us to forgive the cuteness of the cat and the stagey quaintness of the whole, the idealization of small-town life. (“Acts of Seeing,” More Matter, 1999)

Overrepresentation? Not in the eyes of this beholder. I relish every detail. Updike has been criticized for his “slather of detail” (see James Wood, “John Updike’s Complacent God”). But in this case, he’s in his element; he’s describing a slather of detail. Updike has found his ideal subject. Or, put it the other way around, Rockwell has found his ideal critic. Updike creates a verbal reproduction of Rockwell’s painting right down to that “little cracked mirror.” And, at the same time, he provides insight into Rockwell’s (and his own) governing aesthetic. That “avid particularizing” is inspired! 

In my next post in this series, I’ll consider another form of avid particularizing – lists.