Beholding Paul West and The Women of Whitechapel

Abstract

To his painting The Treason of Images (1928-1929), one of his most infamous weddings of cheek and dread, Rene Magritte assigns warning Ceci n'est pas une pipe. The joke, of course, that indeed picture of pipe, but consequences may be more profound for ekphrastic presumptions. As Murray Krieger defines it, ekphrasis miracle and mirage together: miracle in that dream of a tangible verbal seems be attained and temporal curse of narrative lifted; mirage because more effective suggestion of an image, more apparent illusionary strategies and motives of author (xvi-xvii). In other words, whereas art and writing share creative and parasitical penchants, those penchants finally run parallel. Joseph Conrad's announced goal of doing justice visible universe--before all, make you see (147)--must be understood in light of failure equate two distinct mediations of vision, as well as two separate, however comparable, kinds of imaginative distillate. The concept of enargeia, whereby one uses words try yield description so vivid as represent Ruskin's apprehension of the very pain and leafy fact (168) of precedent world before reader's eye, or inner eye, if you will, seems imply that language somehow disadvantaged medium of expression which approaches legitimacy principally in emulation (however futile) of spatial arts.(1) Toward end, too, we may recall Joyce Cary's Gully Jimson, for whom painting substantial while talk lies. The only satisfactory form of communication good picture. Neither true nor false. But created (95). However, it might just as readily be argued that language privileged by its very intelligibility (Krieger 12), and approximating role of reality's squire matter of insufficient or misdirected ambition. In her book The Search for Synthesis in Literature and Art, Ann Colley deems it matter of integrity of each mode of expression that convergences not become victimizations (66). Irving Massey voices similar concerns in Find You Virtue when he variously suspects images of suppression, coercion, and self-idolatry; accordingly, it becomes an ethical priority introduce instabilities into one's inventions--to show their tumult intact--so as preserve this errant quality of language, its redeeming elusiveness against pictorial impingements (3). Paradoxically, commentators regularly assign such adjectives as vital and intense compliment given painting's transcendence of fixity, as if hue were coaxed cry, while texts continue labor under stolid terminology of arrest--structure, form, image--and modernist myths of condensed gestures and visionary instants. But stubborn truth remains that painting can imply but never reclaim performance of which it but trace; and no exercise of framing, no iconic clutch, can truly control dynamic properties of so restless an aesthetic as words produce. (If Magritte's painting tells us it not pipe, verbal depiction may be called upon testify that it not even picture of pipe, so that space it articulates still further removed from any model.)(2) Its solid-seeming deposits notwithstanding, narrative respects predicate that icons disguise. The writer's treadmill fate is keep on finishing thing that can never reliably be called a finished thing (Stein 93-94). Paul West one writer who continually risks vanity of setting up shop in that divide between plastic being and verbal becoming, sustaining both in an open-ended correlation. Not for him stolid docks of convention. As West explains, novel's novelty depends upon the elasticity of consciousness counterpointed by as-is-ness of nature (qtd. in Mooney 267). Stylistically, West follows Thoreau's counsel to cut broad swath and shave close (91) in that he combines unbridled imaginative premises with unmatched depth of verbal focus. …