Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Galchen, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #1

This is the first post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his wonderful “Aboutness: Bosch in Paradise” (London Review of Books, April 1, 2021). It’s a description of Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools (c. 1505-15):

Look at the jester on the branch in the Louvre Ship of Fools: he is one of Bosch’s prime inventions. The pink, grey and white of the young man’s rags, dazzling as they are, don’t seem to be deployed just to dazzle. I think they’re meant to float the figure into a realm of fragility, vulnerability, perhaps even pathos – anyway, somewhere different from the idiocy below. The jester’s smallness is calculated: it moves him away from the group. The wandering lines of white on his costume, delicate even by Bosch’s standards, and dramatized by little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces – what do they do? What are they meant to suggest? Maybe that the costume is threadbare. Maybe that it’s flimsy and transparent. Jesters are beggars, after all. Burghers are not amused by them. Somehow the nature of the grey material draws the young man closer to the natural world (further from the nudities in the foreground). He fits into the frame of leaves; he grows out of the grey tree. The dialogue between his profile and the face on the wand is infinitely touching. 

This gorgeous passage contains at least five key elements of Clark’s style:

1. The “Look at” in the first sentence is classic Clark: “Look at the jester on the branch in the Louvre Ship of Fools: he is one of Bosch’s prime inventions.” That’s a great sentence! Reading it, my eyes focus. I’m ready to see what Clark is going to show me. And every time, he shows me something new, something I wouldn’t notice on my own. His “look at” is a cue: sharpen your focus, get ready, here comes something you haven’t seen or thought of before. Here comes a revelation!

2. Clark relishes details: “The wandering lines of white on his costume, delicate even by Bosch’s standards, and dramatized by little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces – what do they do? What are they meant to suggest?” I love that sentence. It actually combines two of Clark’s signature moves – description of detail and quest for meaning. 

3. Clark is always asking questions. It’s one of his favorite ways of advancing his examination. In the Bosch passage, above, he poses two questions: what do the “wandering lines of white” and the “little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces” on the jester’s costume do? And what are they meant to suggest? He posits a couple of interesting answers: “Maybe that the costume is threadbare. Maybe that it’s flimsy and transparent. Jesters are beggars, after all. Burghers are not amused by them.”

4. Clark is a superb noticer and interpreter of color. In the Bosch passage, the grey of the jester’s costume catches his attention. He writes, “Somehow the nature of the grey material draws the young man closer to the natural world (further from the nudities in the foreground). He fits into the frame of leaves; he grows out of the grey tree.” 

He fits into the frame of leaves; he grows out of the grey tree – how fine that is!

5. Clark’s descriptions move exquisitely toward perception. At the end of the Bosch passage, he’s still looking closely at the jester. He concludes, “The dialogue between his profile and the face on the wand is infinitely touching.” It’s an inspired observation – beautiful, luminous, epiphanic. Who else would think of it? No one. Clark is a genius.

Credit: The above illustration is Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools (c. 1505-15). 

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