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.
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