WRB—Aug. 12, 2026
“reversible cube”
The Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books have always had a hard time of it in the Republic. It has ever been their endemic luck to starve, become a Harvard professor, commit suicide, lose their reading glasses before an audience of sophomores, go upon the people à la Barnum, and serve as homework in state universities, where they could in nowise get a position and where their presence usually scatters the English faculty like a truant officer among the Amish.
Links:
In our sister publication on the sweet Thames, T. J. Clark on the Chauvet caves:
Here is the moment, I’m saying, at which the masters luxuriate—almost pedagogically—in the very nature of depiction. Their delight in convergence and overlap of shapes; the set-piece discontinuities of viewpoint; the mad multiplication of rhyming lines; the “reversible cube” switching between positive and negative, black and white, solid and space; the field filled to bursting with figures jostling for room; and the lordly toying with the idea of reversal become escape from the crush, disappearance from the scene . . . This is an art of high abstraction, but in the service of a shameless “reality effect.” “Disappearance from the scene” equals entry on stage, in front of the torches, here where we are.
I want, to repeat, to think of the depictions on the cave walls as an answer to language, and of the line of escaping bison as a demonstration of depiction’s ability to twist and reframe the illusion at will, and in doing so reveal its machinery—its syntax, if you like. Here’s what depiction is! The force of that demonstration derives in great part, I’m convinced, from its implied negative: Here’s what language is not. To justify that conviction I have to say more about what these image-makers—these users of language 37,000 years ago—may have thought and felt language was. What was using language like for them? How did speakers, in the first heydays of speech, conceive of language’s limits? What was their notion of “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should be silent”? And in the silence, what “things more apparent than words” did they see as depictable?
[I had some notes on cave art last week in which I quoted Guy Davenport, and here’s even more Davenport, this from “The Symbol of the Archaic”:
Picasso liked to say that modern art is what we have kept. To his eyes Brancusi was Cycladic; Stravinsky in the Sacre du printemps was a primitive Russian. Conversely, the bisque-colored, black-maned prancing tarpan of Lascaux, the very definition of archaic painting, is one of the most characteristic works of twentieth-century art, for quite literally ours are the first eyes to see it ever. It was painted in the deep dark of a cave by torchlight, an uncertainty to the man or woman who painted it. The best way to see it has always been as a color reproduction in a book; and now this is the only way to see it; twenty years of tourists’ breaths caused bacteria to grow in the paint, and Lascaux, the most beautiful of the prehistoric caves, has been closed forever.
The pieces of Clark’s essay describing the intent of the art (elsewhere: “Excursion (depiction) raises the pen from the paper. It reaches out, it does not return to itself all the time, its aim is a kind of discourse that is interrupted—touched—by the objects it describes”) could very well be about sculptures by Giacometti. The second sentence in the chunk I excerpted is about Cubism. And Cubism itself, with its desire to present multiple perspectives at the same time, is one of the things language is not: non-linear. You hear one word at a time; you read one word at a time. And you almost certainly read them, and hear them, in the order the user of language intended. To use language effectively requires, on some level, knowledge of this fact, and demands an awareness of how an audience, whether present or imagined, will respond to each new word, phrase, sentence.
But the world is not like this. It is experienced, if not quite all at once, then at least with more freedom than language is, and capturing the world in a depiction requires capturing that aspect of it. —Steve]
In Commonweal, an excerpt from Terry Eagleton’s upcoming book about death (A Death of One’s Own: Reflections on Mortality, September 22):
All the same, it is true that once you are dead you are free to be defamed, in reality if not in law. Public figures with unpopular political views tend to be particularly vulnerable in this respect, though that, too, is an extension of what may happen to them on this side of the grave. I have heard, for example, that I died of AIDS in China some years ago. Indeed, I have heard this story so often, along with other more unsavory tales about myself, that I am convinced there must be something in it. A surprisingly large number of people have fond or embarrassing memories of me playing a guitar at my lectures, though I have never played a guitar in my life. It has been reported that I have three houses (I have the conventional one), that I own two Porsches (that was Stanley Fish), stay when in London at the upmarket Brown’s hotel (that was Edward Said), and insist that everything in my hotel room should be white (that was Luce Irigaray). It seems that I also conducted a long-term relationship in an overseas city, though I have never visited the city in question long enough to have to change my socks, let alone have a relationship. Even so, there is some foundation to this story, as I am not the only Terry Eagleton on the planet, and the activities of my namesake have sometimes been attributed to me. Perhaps he in turn has been berated for corrupting the youth with his Stalinist garbage.
[A few years ago the Boston Globe ran a piece on the less-famous men who are also named “Tom Brady”; one of them says that it’s good for getting dinner reservations. Poor old “Terry Eagleton”—can’t even get dinner reservations as he goes around getting yelled at for corrupting the youth with his Stalinist garbage. Or maybe “Terry Eagleton” does get you dinner reservations. (I’m now hearing that that, too, was “Stanley Fish.”) —Steve]
In New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry, Steve Knepper on narrative poetry:
Narrative verse is an art of elision and excision as well as of compression. This, too, is part of its intrigue. In Carter’s poem, we might wonder about the daughter’s mother, about the farmer’s relationship with his daughter, about her attitudes toward the farm. Had he visited her in Florida before? Why does he shoot the dogs? Was the “man from the courthouse” who informs him about the eminent domain order kind or callous? Did he get right to business or did he delay the hard news with chummy small talk about crops or weather? A short story would probably answer some of these questions. It would probably at least name the characters. That’s not necessarily a weakness. Elaboration and development are narrative virtues in their own right. But there is also power in leaving these questions unanswered. They make Carter’s poem more archetypal, metaphorical, symbolic.
[Ezra Pound, in ABC of Reading:
Dichten = condensare.
I begin with poetry because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expression. Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary, found that this idea of poetry as concentration is as old almost as the German language. Dichten is the German verb corresponding to the noun Dichtung meaning poetry, and the lexicographer has rendered it by the Italian verb meaning “to condense.”
(“To condense” is about as close as language can get to Clark’s “excursion (depiction)” above.) Anyway, we are devoting insufficient attention to E. A. Robinson. When Robert Frost met Pound, Robinson was the first poet they talked about. Take that, New Hampshire! —Steve]
[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:
Television, the great villain
I improve on an eighteenth-century harpsichord that replaces sounds with colors
A Poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and shifts in perspective
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]
