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.

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Boogie Time

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

For me, description is the life-blood of writing. I can’t imagine how writing would work without it. It would certainly be a poor, lifeless thing. Zhang seems to think it takes a backseat to narrative. I can’t see it taking a backseat to anything. To me, narrative is just another way of saying description of action. That’s what we’re focusing on today – textual kinesis. My example is from Anthony Bourdain’s riveting “Hell’s Kitchen” (The New Yorker, April 17, 2000):

It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.

This isn’t Bourdain describing what he’s seeing. This is Bourdain describing what he’s doing – in detail after glorious detail – first person, present tense. Description doesn’t get more immediate or intense than that. Or does it? In my next post, my example comes from war.

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.

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Refrigerant and Relieving

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

Dora Zhang’s absorbing Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (2020) inspires me to formulate my own theory of description – one that applies to factual writing. Over the next couple of months, I’ll post a series of notes, in which I’ll analyze a particular passage of description that I relish. What are its elements? How does it work? Why am I drawn to it? These are the some of the questions I’ll address. In the process, I’m hoping that my own theory of description will emerge. 

Today, I’ll start with one of my favorite passages of description – the opening paragraph of John McPhee’s great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977; included in his 1977 masterwork Coming into the Country): 

My bandanna is rolled on the diagonal and retains water fairly well. I keep it knotted around my head and now and again dip it into the river. The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving. This has done away with the headaches that the sun caused in days before. The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good. Meanwhile, the river – the clearest, purest water I have ever seen flowing over rocks – breaks the light into flashes and sends them upward into my eyes. The headaches have reminded me of the kind that are sometimes caused by altitude, but for all the fact that we have come down through mountains, we have not been higher than a few hundred feet above the level of the sea. Drifting now – a canoe, two kayaks – and thanking God it is not my turn in either of the kayaks, I lift my fish rod from the tines of a caribou rack (lashed there in mid-canoe to the duffel) and send a line flying toward a wall of bedrock by the edge of the stream. A grayling comes up and, after some hesitation, takes the lure and runs with it for a time. I disengage the lure and let the grayling go, being mindful not to wipe my hands on my shirt. Several days in use, the shirt is approaching filthy, but here among grizzly bears, I would prefer to stink of humanity than of fish.

Note the use of the present tense. Note the first-person perspective. Note the extraordinary specificity – bandanna “rolled on the diagonal,” the water “refrigerant and relieving,” the sun, “penetrating, intense,” the fishing rod, lifted “from the tines of a caribou rack (lashed there in mid-canoe to the duffel),” the filthy shirt, stinking of humanity. We are there with McPhee, in that canoe, paddling through grizzly bear country, the Arctic light striking our eyes. This is total immersion. And I am hooked (just like that grayling). 

I love the way temperature in this passage is tangibly indicated. McPhee not only tells us the river is cold (“The water is forty-six degrees”); he puts us in physical contact with it (“Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving.... Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good”). We feel its coldness. This is what I call sensory description. The most common form of it is visual. Zhang, in her Strange Likeness, defines description as “a form of textual visualizing.” But it’s more than just visual, as the above passage shows. It’s also textual touching, smelling, hearing, and tasting. In my next post in this series, I’ll look at a wonderful description of aroma. 

Dora Zhang's "Strange Likeness"

This year my summer read is Dora Zhang’s Strange Likeness: Description and the Modern Novel (2020). Although abstruse in content, it turns out to be the perfect beach book – resistant to water, sand, and sunscreen oil. The University of Chicago Press makes physically durable paperbacks.  

The book is about literary description – a subject I’m keenly interested in. Zhang focuses on three kinds of literary description, all of them strange: atmospheric (exemplified by the work of Henry James); analogical (exemplified by the work of Marcel Proust); and affective (exemplified by the work of Virginia Woolf). 

Zhang’s identification and analysis of these three categories is ingenious. Here’s a sample of her commentary on James: 

If we understand James’s likenesses to be about something other than how things look, they turn out to be in fact quite precise, hardly underdescribed at all. In the case of Lancaster Gates, he does not give us an inventory or spatial plan of sideboards, tables, or footstools, but we know that whatever is there is made of gilt, glass, satin, plush, rosewood, marble, and malachite and that it is scalloped, fringed, buttoned, corded, gilded, drawn, and curled. James’s descriptive mode remains indefinite with respect to individual objects, but it is quite specific with respect to qualities and effects. The general impression of luxurious materials and ornate aesthetics are clear even if the Balzacian inventory has disappeared. The descriptive referent has become an impression on a perceiver that is irreducible to any one of its component parts. Insofar as they issue instructions for imagining acts of perception, I propose that James’s descriptions instruct us above all to imagine what it is like to feel an atmosphere.

That’s the most creative defense of underdescription that I’ve ever read. I’m not convinced. Zhang admits that James’s descriptions “block visualization.” What kind of description is that? To me, the whole point of description is to call up pictures. Description that blocks visualization seems to me pointless.

Zhang is very good on a number of aspects of description. On the classic dichotomy of narrate versus describe, she dissents, arguing that “at the level of the sentence, it is difficult to find anything that is not in some way descriptive, since even verbs – words of action, that preeminent concern of narrative – inevitably contain descriptive connotations.” I agree. I go further: narrative is a subcategory of description; it's the description of action. 

On the possibility of too much description, Zhang says (speaking of Balzac), 

This drive toward descriptive comprehensiveness may be attributed partly to his intention to be the natural historian of French society, but it also stems from something inescapable about description itself: the inability to determine with any intrinsic necessity where to start and where to stop.

Reading this, I recall John McPhee’s “Writing is selection.” What to include, what to leave out? McPhee, in his Draft No. 4 (2017), says,

It’s an utterly subjective situation. I include what interests me and exclude what doesn’t interest me. That may be a crude tool but it’s the only one I have. Broadly speaking, the word “interests” in this context has subdivisions of appeal, among them the ways in which choices help to set the scene, the ways in which choices suggest some undercurrent about the people or places being described, and, not least, the sheer sound of the words that bring forth the detail. It is of course possible to choose too much costume jewelry and diminish the description, the fact notwithstanding that, by definition in nonfiction writing, all the chosen items were of course observed.  

On the pleasure of description, Zhang writes, 

Needless to say, the pleasure of description can take many forms: it can appeal to our appetites and our senses, it can produce the thrill of recognition, and it can lead to the shock of discovery, to name just a few.

I would add another: the bliss of precision in a sentence like “On the stove is a tin can full of simmering tea, under a sheet-metal lid that is a piece of a fuel can with a scorched clothespin clipped to it as a handle” [from John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977)]. To me, that description is worth a hundred of Zhang’s vague, ethereal, nonmimetic, nonrepresentational specimens.

I wish Zhang had more to say on two of my favorite kinds of description – ekphrasis and catalogue. But Zhang’s purpose in Strange Likeness isn’t to survey the art of description in its entirety. Her focus is trained on three esoteric forms of it. I’d welcome a much broader study, one that includes nonfiction description.