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. 

Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady": Lane v. Wood

It’s interesting to compare Anthony Lane’s "Out of the Frame" (The New Yorker, September 3, 2012) with James Wood’s "Perfuming the Money Issue" (London Review of Books, October 11, 2012). Both reviews give Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1880) a startlingly fresh reading by exploring its sexual implications. But what I find even more interesting is the way Lane’s and Wood’s sexual views differ. Both critics see Portrait’s villain, Gilbert Osmond, as sexually creepy. Regarding James’s description of Osmond’s relationship with his daughter Pansy (“If he wished to make himself felt, there was soft and supple little Pansy, who would evidently respond to the slightest pressure”), Lane writes:

James omitted the line, and its surrounding passage, when he thoroughly revised the novel, in 1906, for the New York edition of his works (and thereby hangs another tale), yet the jolt of that earlier, unrefined image feels dreadfully suited to Osmond, for whom Humbertism, actual or threatened, would make a pleasing addition to his secret stash of sins.

Note that “pleasing.” Lane enjoys fictional evil. In his review of Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, he says, “When evil can do what it wants, the edge is taken off our fear and our sneaky sense of fun” (“Renaissance Man,” The New Yorker, February 12, 2001; included in his great Nobody’s Perfect, 2002). 

In contrast, Wood is less playful. He calls Osmond “the most frightening character in fiction.” He further says:

What makes The Portrait of a Lady such a strange book is its strongly felt attraction towards sex and its strongly felt recoil from it. Osmond’s seductive diabolism is surely, in large part erotic. The very structure of the novel is sickly and voyeuristic; a group of gazers, each with an erotic interest in her, circulates around Isabel. If you were to read the plot through the pornographic optic that it seems almost to dare, you would notice that some of them, like Caspar Goodwood and Lord Warburton, imagine themselves with her. Others, like Madam Merle and Henrietta, would like to watch her with someone else (Madame Merle wants to watch Osmond and Isabel, Henrietta wants to watch Caspar and Isabel).

Wood seems almost repelled by the sex he sees in Portrait through his “pornographic optic.” There’s certainly no “sneaky sense of fun” in his description of Osmond’s “seductive diabolism.”

Wood’s emphasis on Portrait’s sexual aspect appears to stem from his reading of Michael Gorra’s new study Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece. In his review, he mentions “Gorra, noting the sexual charge that frequently inhabits the prose.” On the other hand, Lane’s notion of a parallel between Osmond and Humbert Humbert is his own. Fourteen years ago, in his review of Adrian Lyne’s movie of Vladimir Nabokov’s splendid Lolita, he wrote, “One of Humbert’s more insidious crimes is to make you wonder what his gentlemanly forefathers may have done to their daughters; with Isabel out of the way, for instance, what cracks might Gilbert Osmond have inflicted on the porcelain virtue of Pansy?” (“Lo and Behold,” The New Yorker, February 23, 1998; collected in Nobody’s Perfect). 

Credit: The above artwork is John Singer Sargent's "Portrait of Henry James" (1913).