Seeing and Seeing Again: Close Reading in the Gallery

Abstract

This article, taking its title from T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death, forges connections between Clark's diaristic, close reading of visual artworks and Ali Smith’s 2014 novel How to be both. Reading their shared interest in the possibilities of re-reading, close reading, or what Clark calls ‘seeing and seeing again,’ I draw on theories of reading, particularly those of Paul Ricoeur, to argue that Smith not only writes a version of Clark's repeated looking—she also produces the conditions within How to be both for her reader to draw out a series of observations which mimic and reward Clark's discourse of detail-orientated and ‘ludicrous’ close attention. Smith's novel, filled with a playful attention to the unit of the letter and the word, does not just pore over questions of artistic and critical practice but invites its own method of close reading too.

Keywords:

• Ali Smith
• T. J. Clark
• art
• reading
• detail
• attention
• the novel

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As told by the author to my PhD supervisor, Peter Boxall. Thank you to Peter for passing this onto me in conversation, and for all the discussion of How to be both back in 2016.

2 The National Gallery is the second location in which George has seen del Cossa's work in the flesh. Her mother had previously taken George and her brother to Ferrara, Italy to see del Cossa's frescos in the Palazzo Schifanoia after seeing them in a magazine—an event borrowed almost exactly from Smith's own life (see Smith, ‘He Looked Like’).

3 Smith has imagined as Francescho rather than Francesco, a painter born female but who, at the suggestion of their father, dresses in men's clothing and binds their chest in order to present as male and work as a painter. Because Smith does not assign any particular pronouns to Francescho in this section I am using they/their to reflect Francescho's embodiment of the novel's both-ness. In references to Francesco del Cossa in George's section I will follow the characters’ use of he/his.

4 See, for example, Anker and Felski (2017), Critique and Postcritique; Best and Marcus (2009), ‘Surface Reading’; Marcus, Love, and Best (2016), ‘Building a Better Description’; Bewes (2010), ‘Reading with the Grain’; Chow (2011), ‘When Reflexivity Becomes Porn’; Felski (2008), The Uses of Literature and The Limits of Critique; Kelly (2010), ‘New Sincerity’; Love (2010), ‘Close but not Deep’; Sedgwick (2003), ‘Paranoid Reading’; and the ‘We, Reading, Now’ (2020) cluster at ARCADE.

5 In one entry, Clark notes with distress that he has arrived to the room ‘with an idea what I should try to write about – the first time this has happened, and not a good sign. I want this book to be about what occurs in front of paintings more or less involuntarily, not what I think ought to occur.’ (Clark 2006: 133)

6 While Clark steers clear of premeditated critique, at times he tends toward what Felski calls genuflection, as when he pronounces that ‘Scholarship – maybe I’m falling into writing this way because at present I am plowing through WB's Arcades Project in the afternoons – is always a matter of skirting round a black hole of the unknown, the impenetrable, the centrally mysterious (Clark 2006: 164). Revelling in the impenetrability of the artwork, too, bears limits as a critical sensibility. Felski concisely expresses the difference: ‘If critique is too punitive, this alternative stance seems too pious – genuflecting before the radical alterity and undecidability of texts.’ (Felski 2015: 29)

7 This language of breathlessness and awe is also a feature of Smith's writing about and beyond How to be both. In an article for The Guardian, Smith writes that del Cossa's frescos—which she sees in the pages of a magazine—appeared ‘so beautiful that it did something to my breathing and I nearly choked.’ (Smith 2014c)

8 Miller characterizes too-close reading as ‘an almost infantile desire to be close, period, as one can get, without literal plagiarism, to merging with the mother-text’ (Miller 2003: 58). It is the competing urge to master and to merge with the artwork. Ferguson casts Miller's closeness as a rendering of how art objects are sometimes ‘spoken of as friends. The friend doesn't merely recognize a friend at his or her most characteristic. The friend finishes a friend's sentences when he or she trails off.’ (Ferguson 2015: 540)

9 See n2 and n7.

10 Smith recycles this engagement with Cézanne almost verbatim in her popular ficto-critical work Artful.

11 This is not, to be sure, singular to Smith's work in How to be both. A version of this reading could be enacted in relation to the names of Smith's characters, how they enjoin in a logic of the overwrought unit, across many of her fictions but there is not room in this essay for that reading. I explore this in an upcoming piece focused on Smith's anagrams and the work of authorship, which builds on Rebecca Pohl's compelling work on Smith's authorial ‘enthusiasm’ (Pohl 2017).

12 The protagonist of the 2011 novel There but for the, for example, features characters whose names are anagrams and portmanteaus: ‘Gen’ and ‘Eric Lee’ aka a Generic middle-class couple (Smith 2011).