Toward My Own Theory of Description: Horseshoe Crab Carnage

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Five senses. So far I’ve done four. May as well complete the set. Sight – this is the one Zhang privileges, defining description in terms of its “visualizing imperative.” Her interest is in the way James, Proust, and Woolf describe what “hovers on the edge of visibility.” Mine is in description that calls up a vivid picture in the mind’s eye. This one, for example:

The crumbling brittle of horseshoe-crab parts under the car wheels now became so thick it was unnerving, with uncrushed, whole horseshoe crabs all over the road as well. I pulled onto the left-hand berm to investigate. When I climbed up on the riprap wall, I saw throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks. The carnage stretched into the distance and had a major-battlefield air, reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg. Some of the horseshoe crabs seemed to be moving feebly. The ones on the road had evidently managed to make it past the rocks.

That’s from Ian Frazier’s great “Blue Bloods” (The New Yorker, April 14, 2014; included in his 2016 Hogs Wild). I read that description when it first appeared in the magazine; I’ve never forgotten it. Two elements stand out: (1) the auditory “crumbling brittle of horseshoe-crab parts under the car wheels”; and (2) that incredible visual of the horseshoe crab carnage “reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg.” 

There’s action in that passage, too: Frazier pulling “onto the left-hand berm to investigate,” climbing “up on the riprap wall,” seeing “throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks.” And, of course, there’s the horrific sight of some of the horseshoe crabs seemingly still alive, “moving feebly.”

Description of action is a major form of literary description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.