Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb "New Yorker" Essayists (Part I)

This is the first post in my series “Thurman and Lepore: Two Superb New Yorker Essayists,” a celebration of Judith Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman (2022) and Jill Lepore’s The Deadline (2023), in which I’ll select four of my favorite pieces from each collection (one per month) and try to say why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Thurman’s wonderful “First Impressions” (June 23, 2008). 

In this piece, Thurman explores the fascinating world of cave paintings. In the Ardèche region of south-central France, she visits the base camp of a group of researchers dedicated to the study of the Chauvet Cave. She describes the layout and contents of the Chauvet Cave. She says of its stunning End Chamber,

A great frieze covers the back left wall: a pride of lions with Pointillist whiskers seems to be hunting a herd of bison, which appear to have stampeded a troop of rhinos, one of which looks as if it had fallen into, or is climbing out of, a cavity in the rock. As at many sites, the scratches made by a standing bear have been overlaid with a palimpsest of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition that bear claws were an expressive tool for engraving a record—poignant and indelible—of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.

Thurman discusses the meaning of cave art. She considers several scenarios, including Jean Clottes’ controversial theory on shamanism. She writes,

When Clottes joined forces with Lewis-Williams, he had come to believe that cave painting largely represents the experiences of shamans or initiates on a vision quest to the underworld, where spirits gathered. The caves served as a gateway, and their walls were considered porous. Where the artists or their entourage left handprints, they were palping a living rock in the hopes of reaching or summoning a force beyond it. They typically incorporated the rock’s contours and fissures into the outlines of their drawings—as a horn, a hump, or a haunch—so that a frieze becomes a bas-relief. But, in doing so, they were also locating the dwelling place of an animal from their visions, and bodying it forth.

In my favorite part, she goes with a guide inside the Niaux Cave and describes her experience:

The floor near the mouth was fairly flat, but as we went deeper it listed and swelled unpredictably. Water was dripping, and sometimes it sounded like a sinister whispered conversation. The caves are full of eerie noises that gurgle up from the bowels of the earth, yet I had a feeling of traversing a space that wasn’t terrestrial. We were, in fact, walking on the bed of a primordial river. Where the passage narrowed, we squeezed between two rocks, like a turnstile, marked with four lines. They were swipes of a finger dipped in red pigment that resembled a bar code, or symbolic flames. Further along, there was a large panel of dots, lines, and arrows, some red, some black. I felt their power without understanding it until I recalled what Norbert Aujoulat had told me about the signs at Cussac. He was the second modern human to explore the cave, in 2000, the year it was unearthed, some twenty-two thousand years after the painters had departed. (The first was Cussac’s discoverer, Marc Delluc.) “As we trailed the artists deeper and deeper, noting where they’d broken off stalagmites to mark their path, we found signs that seemed to say, ‘We’re sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.’ ”

They make their way to “one of the grandest bestiaries in Paleolithic art” – the Black Salon, a rotunda a hundred and thirty feet in diameter:

Scores of animals were painted in sheltered spots on the floor, or etched in charcoal on the soaring walls: bison, stags, ibex, aurochs, and, what is rarer, fish (salmon), and Niaux’s famous “bearded horses”—a shaggy, short-legged species that, Clottes writes in his new book, has been reintroduced from their native habitat, in Central Asia, to French wildlife parks. All these creatures are drawn in profile with a fine point, and some of their silhouettes have been filled in with a brush or a stumping cloth. I looked for a little ibex, twenty-one inches long, that Clottes had described to me as the work of a perfectionist, and one of the most beautiful animals in a cave. When I found him, he looked so perky that I couldn’t help laughing. Alard was patient, and, since time loses its contours underground, I didn’t know how long we had spent there. “I imagine that you want to see more,” he said after a while, so we moved along.

“First Impressions” is an absorbing tour of some of the world’s most spectacular prehistoric art. I enjoyed it immensely.