Dora Zhang - Strange Likeness : Description and the Modernist Novel

Thinking Literature

A series edited by Nan Z. Da and Anahid Nersessian

Dora Zhang

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK HAS BEEN AIDED BY A GRANT FROM THE BEVINGTON FUND .

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72249-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72252-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72266-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226722665.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zhang, Dora, author.

Title: Strange likeness : description and the modernist novel / Dora Zhang.

Other titles: Thinking literature.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Series: Thinking literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004310 | ISBN 9780226722498 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226722528 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226722665 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Woolf, Virginia, 18821941Criticism and interpretation. | James, Henry, 18431916Criticism and interpretation. | Proust, Marcel, 18711922Criticism and interpretation. | FictionHistory and criticism. | Description (Rhetoric)

Classification: LCC PN3365 .Z47 2020 | DDC 808.3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004310

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Ryan and Kai

Specific edition information is given in the bibliography.

D Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf

E Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf

GB Henry James, The Golden Bowl

JR Virginia Woolf, Jacobs Room

LC Henry James, Literary Criticism

MD Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

PP William James, Principles of Psychology

PPH Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy

RTP Marcel Proust, la recherche du temps perdu

SLT Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

TL Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

W Virginia Woolf, The Waves

WD Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

Suppose you are a writer. How do you go about describing a character? If youre Honor de Balzac, introducing a devoted father before he is mercilessly fleeced for money by his unfeeling daughters in Restoration-era Paris, you might say, Usually dressed in a cornflower-blue coat, he changed his white piqu waistcoat every day, and as his massive pearshaped paunch swayed beneath it, a heavy gold chain hung with trinkets bobbed up and down.... He wore his hair in pigeon-wing style, coming down in points over his low forehead and setting off his features to advantage; the barber from the cole Polytechnique came in every morning to powder it. This is how we first meet the unlucky pre Goriot in Balzacs eponymous 1835 novel. If youre Henry James, introducing a different devoted father, an American industrialist turned collector of Old World valuables at the dawn of the twentieth century, you might say of this man, whose singular wealth is oddly belied by a lack of all distinction, His neat colourless face, provided with the merely indispensable features, suggested immediately, for a description, that it was clear, and in this manner somewhat resembled a small decent room, clean-swept and unencumbered with furniture, but drawing a particular advantage, as might presently be noted, from the outlook of a pair of ample and uncurtained windows (GB 161). This is how we meet Adam Verver in The Golden Bowl (1904). The first of these passages follows expected protocols for describing a person, detailing physical features and items of dress and grooming that function recognizably as indexes of socioeconomic position and moral character. But what of the second passage? What does it mean to say that Adam Ververs face resembles a small decent room, clean-swept and unencumbered with furniture? In what way does this work as a description? And what kind of work does such a description do?

These two passages go some way toward indicating the variety and historicity of literary descriptive modes, something that does not always go remarked in discussions of the novel. As one of the most basic elements of bringing the unthought of into awareness and setting it before us, how we describe somethingas a table or as a brown oblong mass, to take a simple exampledetermines in crucial ways how that thing is subsequently understood. Once certain features no longer determined how an organism was understood, there was no thought of including them in a description of that organism. Foucaults remarks make clear 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; in short, what is able to emerge into visibility at all.

This is no less true in novels. At least since the rise of realism in the nineteenth century, description has been an indispensable means of world making: sketching in settings, painting figures, materializing objects, and generally establishing the parameters of a novelistic universe. This also means that, as Susan Stewart writes, It is not lived experience which literature describes, but the conventions for organizing and interpreting that experience, conventions which are modified and informed by each instance of the genre., James inherits the Balzacian social hermeneutic descriptive project, but it is keyed to a different aspect of the real and a more elusive dimension of social experience. Moreover, the likening of Adam Ververs face to a small decent room also alerts us to the fact that the very standard of likeness has changed. Although description has long been understood as a form of textual visualizing, the vivid images conjured up in modernist descriptions direct us to see something other than how the world looks.

Before going on, I want to pause over the status of description in studies of the novel. It is a thoroughly familiar term, one that is usually taken for granted as a central feature of the novel, yet it has received surprisingly little critical attention. Because of its very ubiquity and its unobtrusiveness, description tends to recede into the background, if readers do not skip over it entirely in order to get to the action. From another angle, even as we use the term without hesitation, it can be hard to circumscribe description and to say exactly what it is. After all, what piece of text doesnt in some way contain a descriptive element? Even as scholars have subjected a variety of narrative elements to critical scrutiny, description has largely been treated as incidental or ancillary, often invoked but usually taken for granted and rarely discussed as a subject in its own right. So it is that Michel Beaujour calls its history that of a continuous and seemingly undeserved misfortune.