James Wood's Puzzling Use of "Re-description"

James Wood (Photo by David Levenson)

What does James Wood mean by “re-description”? He mentions it at least six times in the Introduction to his Serious Noticing (2019):

1. “After all, the review-essay involves not just pointing at something, but pointing at it while re-describing it.”

2. “But quotation and re-description are at the heart of the book review and at the heart of that experience that Cavell calls ‘creative.’ ”

3. “This passionate re-description is, in fact, pedagogical in nature. It happens in classrooms whenever the teacher stops to read out, to re-voice, the passage under scrutiny.”

4. “All the critic can hope to do is, by drawing attention to certain elements of the artwork – by re-describing that artwork – induce in his or her audience a similar view of that work.”

5. “It is all here, in this beautiful passage: criticism as passionate ‘creation’ (‘as if for the first time’); criticism as modesty, as the mind putting the ‘understanding’ into abeyance (‘he was baffled’); criticism as simplicity and near-silence (‘It went, he said, far beyond any analysis of which he was capable’); criticism as sameness of vision and re-description (‘was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there’).”

6. "And let Brendel’s performance on the piano, his inability to quote without also recreating, stand for the kind of criticism that is writing through a text, the kind of criticism that is at once critique and re-description: sameness.” 

Why is the “re” necessary? Why not just “description”? “Re-description” implies do-over – rewriting a previous description. But that isn’t what Wood does in his own work. Take, for example, his review of Tan Twan Eng’s novel The House of Doors, in this week’s New Yorker. He calls it “an assemblage, a house of curiosities.” He refers to its “manner of layering the narratives.” He says,

Eng can write with lyrical generosity and beautiful tact: moths are seen at night “flaking around the lamps”; elsewhere, also at nighttime, “a weak spill of light drew me to the sitting room.” Shadowy emotions are delicately figured: “His eyes, so blue and penetrating, were dusked by some emotion I could not decipher.” Lesley’s account of her affair with Arthur has a lovely, drifting, dreamlike quality—the adulterers almost afloat on their new passion, watched over by the hanging painted doors of Arthur’s house on Armenian Street.

That’s primary description, is it not? Nothing is being re-described or re-voiced. Maybe Wood considers use of quotation a form of re-description. But that doesn’t make sense. Pointing out felicitous passages in a work is a form of descriptive analysis, is it not? How is it re-description? It seems to me Wood’s “re” is redundant. Earlier in his Introduction to Serious Noticing, he does omit the “re”: “Describing one’s experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it” (my emphasis). Maybe he sees the book as description, and his review of it as a form of re-description. In his essay on Virginia Woolf (included in Serious Noticing), he comes close to saying that. He writes, “If the artwork describes itself, then criticism’s purpose is to re-describe the artwork in its own, different language.” That’s a big “if.” Helen Vendler, in the concluding paragraph of her “The Function of Criticism” (collected in her The Music of What Happens, 1988), says, “No art work describes itself.” I agree. 

Description or re-description – does it matter? Yes, absolutely. It goes to criticism’s purpose. Vendler, in the Introduction to The Music of What Happens, writes,

The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique confirmation.

Wood might find that statement too simplistic. But, for me, it’s a touchstone. In comparison, Wood’s notion of re-description seems vague.