Toward My Own Theory of Description: Avid Particularizing

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Dora Zhang’s idea of description seems anemic. She says, 

In spite of its wide-ranging forms, our standard conception of description remains quite narrow. Derived from a realist paradigm, it is identified largely with inventories of the material world and often simply synonymous with a “prose of things.” [Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel] 

Well, all I can say is that her conception of description isn’t mine. In this series, I’ve tried to show that description is much more than just inventory. It is sensory, kinetic, analytical, detailed, immersive, and figurative. Even when it is inventory, e.g., Ian Frazier’s marvelous list of contents of the Angler’s Roost (see my previous post), it provides combinational delight. 

But I agree with Zhang on at least one crucial point: description is subjective. She says, “Description is always a form of translation rather than transcription.” She says further that “the seemingly simple, neutral task of describing is determined by a whole host of assumptions about what is worthy of attention, what is relevant and irrelevant, what the salient features are by which objects should be identified and categorized.” I think this is true. We notice and describe in accordance with who we are and what interests us. This, to me, is what makes description fascinating.

For my final example of descriptive art, I want to come full circle (so to speak). I began this series with an excerpt from John McPhee’s magnificent “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2, 1977; Book I of his great Coming into the Country). Today, I’ll finish with another passage from it – the paragraph immediately following the one I quoted earlier:

Paddling again, we move down long pools separated by short white pitches, looking to see whatever might appear in the low hills, in the cottonwood, in the white and black spruce – and in the river, too. Its bed is as distinct as if the water were not there. Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and their dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.

Like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins – what an incredible image! A double simile: river like sky; salmon like zeppelins. Looking over the side of the canoe, we see their oval shapes floating there. The sentence is brilliantly visual – the perfect finish to an extraordinarily evocative paragraph.

Time to sum up. I'm struck by a phrase in John Updike’s virtuoso description of Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barbershop that I quoted previously. Updike wrote, “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.” That, for me, is what description is all about: avid particularizing.