The Sight of Life

1. Look

It's unreasonably hot for an English summer. Moving through the humid chambers of the Victoria and Albert Museum feels like trudging through a steamed treacle pudding, an Edwardian nightmare. I am only here to see one thing, but I am overexcited and the heat has made me stupid, so finding it proves difficult. I drag my companion, N., through gallery after gallery, looking down from the Ceramic Staircase to wonder briefly if this is a particular line of sight I've read about (it's not). We make a mystifying lap, somehow moving directly from the first floor to the third and down again, ending up right back in front of the door we entered. The bemused docent who watched us come in ten minutes ago gently redirects us towards the correct lift. Finally, after an unplanned visit to the sixth floor and stops at every floor as we descend, we escape to the dry coolness of Floor Zero. Yet more galleries lie ahead, and my impatience stirs. Still, I feel like N. deserves some small pleasure in reward for this unplanned whirl through the labyrinth, so we pause to marvel at some truly amazing things along the way: a ghastly waxwork apocalypse, a lumpen colossus of Delft chinoiserie, a terrifying plaster ox head containing an actual growth from the brain of a long-dead bovine that sends me into a fit of hysterics.

With every stop we make, I feel the delicate thread of intent that ties me to the object of my desire wind shorter and shorter, a tug of anticipation at a tender place somewhere behind my sternum. We pass case after case of the wrong things. Up and down the squat marble staircases at the Cromwell Road entrance. Then — finally — we are in elusive Room 8, the room I looked up obsessively on the internet that morning to make absolutely sure the thing itself would be here on this day, the thing I have been tracing with my mind's eye for the last many years.

The Gloucester Candlestick is smaller than I'd pictured it. It's also wilder and weirder and wrigglier than I could have imagined. I've read more about this one thing than any other in any museum anywhere, but my indirect examinations of it on Google Images, in books, and on the V&A website did not tell me how I would feel when actually in its presence. I creep around its glass pillar, hunching at various angles, several times: many clockwise laps, then a couple of halting counterclockwise ones. I must look, to whoever's manning the cameras in the inner sanctum of the V&A's security office, like I'm casing the joint. In a way, I am. I want to see every part of it, to re-photograph it with my mind's eye, but also somehow to capture what it feels like to look at it, the experience of its form working on me. I want to absorb its Benjaminian aura so I can later summon up both its fine variegations of goldenness, visible only through a sustained, slowly attuned gaze, as well as the tingle of creepy recognition I feel on the nape of my neck when gazing into the crazy, dilated eyes of all the tiny monsters and maybe-men that make up its frame. "It's so pagan!" exclaims N. before leaving me to my unsteady revolutions, and I have nothing intelligent to say in response. I am forcefully attracted to this thing, beyond my intellectual interest in it. It is magic. It writhes with its own, unthinking object-life. I lean closer and closer until I'm jolted by the bump of my nose against the clear, cool glass — I leap back in surprise, breaking out in a sweat with a feeling of absolute, childish mortification, like I've set off an alarm. I notice that my nose has left an embarrassing smudge. A little chill runs up my spine. I am at the limit of closeness. I will never see it as closely or as clearly as I want to. To touch it is unbearably desirable, and unbearably impossible.

My desire to see the Gloucester Candlestick with my own eyes came from reading a description of seeing it through someone else's eyes — or rather, many others' eyes. The Candlestick is a central figure (a character, almost) in The Children's Book (2009), A.S. Byatt's weighty historical novel-cum-discourse-on-everything, including but not limited to: the making and reception of art; global, national, and local history; methods of historiography; sex; gender; parents; children; anarchist and socialist movements of England and the Continent; marionette theatre; labor; the Arts and Crafts movement; the creation of the V&A; women's suffrage; trench warfare; the end of the Condition of England novel; the end of England; maybe the end of the novel. The novel opens with a scene of multiplied gazes, as we find three of its children, Tom Wellwood, Julian Cain, and Philip Warren, intently regarding each other in the museum, as they contemplate the Candlestick in its vitrine: "Two boys stood in the Prince Consort Gallery, and looked down on a third."1 This brief introductory scene seems at first to be arbitrary and has the feel of a boys' adventure story, rather than a discourse on art. And in fact, following this reflective moment, Julian and Tom (the two boys watching from the Gallery) dash after Philip and discover his secret hideout in the Museum's fantastical jumbled storeroom of unused artifacts.Yet despite its cavalier tone, this opening scene forecasts the novel's overriding aesthetic, historical, and ethical interest in how to look at people and things. Byatt's intent gaze at these gazers demands that her readers consider the different ways of seeing proposed by each character, and to respond to the novel's pedagogical imperatives on how to encounter both human and non-human worlds. The Candlestick is the first of many centers of refracted focus in the novel's expanding collection of objects and onlookers. It is a magical, eerily energetic thing, one that takes on life with depth of description, here in the interested but impartial voice of the third person narrator:

It was dully gold. It seemed heavy. It stood on three feet, each of which was a long-eared dragon, grasping a bone with grim claws, gnawing with sharp teeth. The rim of the spiked cup that held the candle was also supported by open-jawed dragons with wings and snaking tails. The whole of its thick stem was wrought of fantastic foliage, amongst which men and monsters, centaurs and monkeys, writhed, grinned, grimaced, grasped and stabbed at each other. A helmeted, gnome-like being, with huge eyes, grappled the sinuous tail of a reptile. There were other human or kobold figures, one in particular with long draggling hair and a mournful gaze.2

This passage of ekphrasis, the first of many in the book, quickly rolls from the inert regard of an encased, inanimate thing into a frenzied mêlée of activity. It is first seen at a distance as "The lump of gold, in the centre of that case," then, in the passage above, as "dully gold" and "heavy."3 Immediately, however, the tiny figures that make up its structure seem as though they can barely be contained by static description, and break out into a violent jumble of verbiage ("writhed, grinned, grimaced, grasped... stabbed... grappled"). This frenetic struggle contrasts dramatically with the "mournful gaze" of the lonely figure at the end, a contrast that highlights the Candlestick's containment of a whole tiny world of affect and action. This detailed conjuration of the Candlestick emphasizes its uncanny material liveliness; its multiform figures are both fixed and constantly shifting, and this compelling sensation of visual uncertainty prickles the eye and troubles the mind. The immediate development of a sense of momentum — the quick succession from "lump of gold" to the hectic almost-narrative, complete with miniature characters, that emerges by the end — is our first of many practical lessons in the novel about how to look for the secret life of an object (or later, a person, an event, or a period): a showy performance of how to look more and more attentively until the thing comes alive.

This passage of intensely detailed, vivid description might feel both exceptional and familiar to the habitual Byatt reader. Passages like this one abound in her fiction from her earliest work to the present.4 Jennifer Schuessler notes this tendency in her New York Times review of the novel, stating that "Byatt has an almost hallucinatory gift for physical description, and there's something bracingly old-fashioned in her insistence that encounters with works of art can transform experience as powerfully as the making of them can deform the lives of their creators."5 Schuessler is right to pinpoint the "hallucinatory" quality of Byatt's descriptive style in tandem with her thematic emphasis on the potentially transformative and deforming effects of art. Throughout The Children's Book, Byatt makes us party to different characters' close encounters with works of art, which evoke the most visceral emotional responses we see in the book, and often offers a multiplicity of reactions to the same work. To this end, the narrator's detailed description of the Candlestick is not the only, or even primary, one given here. Distinct ways of interpreting the Candlestick's strange liveliness are implicit in how each of the boys encounters it, as well as through the narrator's prose. Julian, the son of the museum's Special Keeper of Precious Metals, situates the Candlestick as an item on the move, offering a brief but vivid précis of its historical lifespan from its mysterious eleventh-century origins to its current resting place in the Museum's collection:

It had an interesting history, he said. No one knew exactly what it was made of. It was some kind of gilt alloy. It was probable that it had been made in Canterbury — modelled in wax and cast — but apart from the symbols of the evangelists on the knop it appeared not to be made for a religious use. It had turned up in the cathedral in Le Mans, from where it had disappeared at the French Revolution. A French antiquary had sold it to the Russian Prince Soltikoff. The South Kensington Museum had acquired it from his collection in 1861. There was nothing, anywhere, like it.6

Philip, a homeless runaway and fledgling potter, studies the Candlestick with an obsessive craftsman's eye, imagining the vivid moment of its birth, rather than its historical life. By sketching its details in his notebook, he replicates the act of its making over and over again, and generates some of its savage life force on the page, with "all the intricacies of the writhing and biting and stabbing."7 Finally Tom, the son of two writers, reads it as a potential story, imagining its own secret, shadowy myth-world. His sympathy for "the little man . . . the elderly one with the thin hair and the sad look" suggests that the thing itself contains not a kind of object-life, but a social world of characters and relations.8 These by turns ekphrastic, historical, craft-focused, and readerly renderings of the Candlestick are characterized by different but equally evocative senses of energetic movement and liveliness, offering varied interpretations that agree on a fundamental point, one that its readers come to agree with as well: "There was nothing, anywhere, like it."

The Candlestick, which we see replicated and multiplied here in exacting yet suggestive prose, acts powerfully on its viewers. This moment of vivid encounter is one of simultaneous figuration and transfiguration: Julian's, Philip's, and Tom's innate responses both reveal and transform their characters, as well as our readerly renderings of them. Looking outward from this opening tableau, I wonder how the novel's succession of mediated and removed gazes situates its readers, and in so doing, shapes both our readings and our readerly selves. What does the encounter with the work of art do to the characters we observe, and what does it in turn do to us, observing? Or rather, how does form form us?

2. Don't Touch

Gracefully or not, every text guides its reader into a specific posture and orientation. This balletic disciplining is perhaps the only thing that emerges from the set of mismatched terms and processes we call "form."9 For readers following this historical novel's cast of characters through a quarter-century of both public and private life, certain expectations of understanding and intimacy with both the people and the period come to bear on the text — expectations that are thwarted here, if not flatly rejected, by the shape of readerly experience. By the novel's end, despite the fact that the entire book overflows with information (facts, descriptions, dates), we find ourselves distanced both from a historical moment that has come to a definitive end and from a dramatically reduced set of characters whose relations to each other have been unsettled and reconfigured by war, by time, and by human betrayals. In the intent posture of the fascinated yet frustrated museumgoer, nose-to-glass, we see the world Byatt evokes in both greater and greater detail — the rustling "fantastic foliage" of the period — and from a greater and greater remove. It is simultaneously orienting and disorienting to see so clearly, yet wonder what long perspective we're looking from.

This attitude of simultaneous closeness and distance resonates with T.J. Clark's repeated encounters with art objects in The Sight of Death. Clark quotes Nietzsche's observations on the Apollonian mode in The Birth of Tragedy to highlight the strange tendency of the artwork to both retreat and reveal itself:

The intense clarity of the image failed to satisfy us, for it seemed to hide as much as it revealed; and while it seemed to invite us to pierce the veil and examine the mystery behind it, its luminous concreteness nevertheless held the eye entranced and kept it from probing deeper.10

As Clark comments, "The balance implied here is delicate. Like Nietzsche... I approve of luminous concreteness. And something in me flinches from the glamor of always probing deeper as a looker, piercing the veil, staking emotional ownership of the image."11 The "intense clarity" of the work both invites and resists the viewer, and creates a paradoxical sensation of intimate closeness and necessary distance in the aesthetic encounter, one that we might also identify in Byatt's immersive yet estranging historical fiction.

The curious sensation of flinching desire and yearning withdrawal that Clark describes here flares up in my reading of Byatt's multiply mediated ekphrases in The Children's Book. In "Ekphrasis and Representation" (1991), James Heffernan claims that ekphrasis is a shockingly undertheorized phenomenon, a claim that is only slightly less true almost thirty years later. Heffernan offers a brief account of past theories of ekphrasis — as a kind of stilling or freezing mechanism, or as a way of reading a text as a visual art object, or vice versa — before arriving at his own claim that ekphrasis is the verbal representation of a graphic representation, a genre wherein one medium is used to portray another. Heffernan emphasizes the persistent narrative gesture that leads out from ekphrasis and keeps it from being "still" or "frozen," commenting on the "tendency to translate graphic art into narrative" that he says "persists in the ekphrastic literature of every period" (as in Homer's description of the scene on Achilles' shield, or Dante's animation of the sculpted wall of the First Terrace in Purgatorio, or the love story contained in Keats' Grecian Urn).12 Heffernan's account suggests that ekphrasis is a kind of translation that gives voice to the unvoiced stories waiting to be told by or in objects.

Byatt, on the other hand, seems to want to teach us a way of seeing that involves narrative, but is not exactly narrative itself. Instead, she wants us to somehow experience the accrued vitality of an object — to use an almost-word that a character coins in the novel, its lifeliness, its form and the vivid traces of its formation. If Byatt describes an object — say, a pot — she emphasizes not only its visual details, but a kind of textural depth of feeling that it contains: of the clay's wet slip and mineral grit, of the smudged print of the potter's thumb, of the tremble in the hand of the person who holds the fragile, finished pot. This is at once a condensation of narratives of craft and reception and a profoundly non-narrative felt experience. Ekphrasis, for Byatt, seems to teach a way of looking that is not simply looking, feeling that is not simply feeling, and in this pedagogical mission, it seems to turn upon the reader, rather than the object or the artist. Ekphrasis for Byatt seems to be not the well-wrought urn itself, but the wrighting, as it were, of the urn in the mind's eye and mind's hand of the reader. Description thus does far more than shape the image of its object — it also shapes the reader's imaginary posture and angle of approach, demanding an active receptiveness to the text that verges on the physical.

This activity reminds us, as I have written elsewhere, that form is a verb, not just a noun.13 More than wanting to communicate the technical aspects of the visual, or even to represent the object faithfully, Byatt seems to emphasize more and more the role of the receiver of these layered representations — a role that itself seems to demand the cultivation of its own kind of art, one that goes hand in hand with the work of the actual artist. This art of reading description requires the development of a dynamic orientation towards the perception, description, and interpretation of form: an orientation that gives in to the fluid and unsteady nature of form and the process of being formed.14 The reader, in a distant collaboration with the writer, follows the lead of the text, peering and bending to seek out the details drawn to their attention, just as I circled that museum case, looking through the writhing figures for the little man with the mournful gaze. In this dynamic valence, form is both a positive and negative action: it is the shaping of the thing by means of the imagination, as well the limitation of the imagination.Thinking back to my museum encounter with the Candlestick, form is both the revelatory light that shines through the clearest of archival glass, and the pane that separates us forever from the thing itself, a paradox of approachability. I can only get so close to the work of art, but in so doing, I can perhaps torque myself to see it from all sides. Looking at it this way, form is not static, immutable structure, but rather the unpredictable confluence of the beholder and the beheld. The point of a truly "formalist" reading, then, is not to define or persuade, but rather, as readers oriented towards form, to remain vulnerably open to being formed (transformed, deformed) by our encounter with the text.

 

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Sarah Chihaya is an assistant professor of English at Princeton University. She is one of four authors of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia University Press, 2020).

 

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In This Issue

Part 1

Introduction: Formalism Unbound
Timothy Aubry and Florence Dore

Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore's Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
Florence Dore

On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
Yi-Ping Ong

"Now can you see the monument?" Some notes on reading for "form"
Gillian White

Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
Francisco Robles

The Sight of Life
Sarah Chihaya

Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form
Amber Jamilla Musser

Part 2

Form contra Aesthetics
Timothy Aubry

Zadie Smith's Style of Thinking
David James

Queer Formula
Joan Lubin

Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account
Danielle Christmas

Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Benjamin Widiss

Notes on Shade
C. Namwali Serpell

Afterword: Form Now: as Limit and Beyond
Dorothy J. Hale

 

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Banner image: "Detail of the base of the Gloucester Candlestick" by johnbod is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Image has been cropped.

 

 

References