There is a photograph, somewhere, of an older woman standing in a park. Puddles form on the ground, the pavement shiny with fresh rain. Feet pressed together and hands clasped, she turns towards the camera as if she is looking for the answer to the question, is this what you need from me? In Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, the woman who takes the picture is displeased with it. She thinks that the figure within the image, her mother, has assumed the stock pose of a tourist. Her intent was to catch her mother in an unguarded moment, tangled up in ordinary time. Instead of intimacy she captures artifice, or something close to it. The photographer has made an image that does not draw her own eye to it in pleasure, rather it shows a difficult thing: the looks cast between mother and daughter. This scene hints at the relationship between something real and that which is imagined, the photographic act holding the different looks of private immersion and public presentation in the balance.
In The Sight of Death, art historian T. J. Clark describes his daily visits to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. For many months, he returned to see two paintings by Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (1648) and Landscape with a Calm (1650–51). Clarke turned to his notebook to record the impressions of these visits, under the proposition that “astonishing things happen if one gives oneself over to the process of seeing again and again.”[1] As much as it is a book that considers these paintings, The Sight of Death is also a text about how one might write about the act of looking. Giving oneself over to the work might yield some encounter more strange, lend language to a new interpretation, or resolve this dilemma between word and image. Sight and sense have everything to do with narrative arc—that time spent looking and thinking—no matter how swiftly deployed.
The process of “seeing again and again” threads through the central plot in Cold Enough for Snow, and gradually builds into a narrative stance. At just under a cool hundred pages, however, Cold Enough for Snow is a novel that wears this thematic engagement with “museum literature” lightly. Suffused in afterlives, the fading image, and the abbreviated experience, the book instead ponders how to avail oneself of language when it seems an instrument imperfect. The novel follows an adult daughter, the narrator, as she undertakes a journey with her mother. They travel together throughout Japan. “We did not live in the same city anymore,” she relates, “and had never really been away together as adults, but I was beginning to feel that it was important, for reasons I could not yet name” (2). Japan is selected as she feels “that this would put us on equal footing in some way, to both be made strangers” (2). The pair enact a kind of flâneurie, drifting through art galleries, museums, and temples; visit small restaurants, bookstores, and shops selling tailored clothes. Buoyed by Au’s elliptical and gauzy prose, who we encounter is a narrator that styles an aesthetic engagement with the world, as if meditations on artistic value and beauty can have some clarifying quality or remedial function. Yet all the while, she remains an abstract figure, unfamiliar to herself as well as others.
Dispensing with what Elizabeth Hardwick called “the lumber” of a novelist’s prose—that is, the hard labor of “spelling everything out, plank by plank”—Cold Enough for Snow assembles itself around a structure of reverie, beating forever backwards even as the narrator and her mother step forth.[2] While the pair walk and observe, eat and talk, Au’s narrator casts her eye over their surroundings, catching on images, objects, and rooms. Details snag: a book of myths, a comment on a train, the smell of burnt rice, a square of light on water. These serve as quick reminders for other scenes, and the narrator carefully submerges us into elliptical tales of her late adolescence and early adulthood. Digressions, knotted onto the narrative, present the narrator with a way of offering up a history of herself. They hint at something else. What the narrator sees and perceives become a structuring principle, one which suggests that “form” itself carries within it a certain kind of knowledge. These two narrative impulses—looking at what is in front of her, looking back into the past—signify the disposition of her character, which is structured by some kind of desire (and a structure of desire, according to Susan Stewart, is “a structure that both invents and distances its object and thereby inscribes again and again the gap between signifier and signified”).[3] The narrator is at once her own object of readerly analysis, as she is producer of textual material, a curator in words and images.
In one passage, the narrator does away with the museum guide:
I wanted, somehow, to come to the works naively, to know little about their origin or provenance, to see them only as they were. Various pots and vases were displayed in glass cabinets, with handwritten cards that listed the era in which they were made, and a few other characters that I could not read. Each was somehow roughly formed but spirited. In their irregular shapes, both delicate and thick, it was possible to see that each had been made by hand, and had then been glazed and painted, also by hand, so that once, something as simple as a bowl from which you ate or a vessel from which you drank had been undifferentiated from art. (7–8)
Her impulse here is to see clearly, to respond to these works unhindered by history. The ceramics are beautiful, but everyday, and share a degree of proximity with anyone who sees them: imagined touch makes these refined works seemingly commonplace, public. However, this approach contrasts with the narrator’s recursive impulse when it comes to her own story. She believes in inheritances—the determining nature of history and the private drama of guilt, the daughter’s burden—and she knows the pleasures offered by attention and scrutiny can be fleeting. The narrator seems to curate her journey in Japan, appealing to her mother like a scrupulous dramaturg setting the scene for things to fall neatly in place. She remarks, at one point, that “the trip was nearly ending, and it had not done what I had wanted it to” (88). History unsettles, leaving narrative unbalanced. In his long essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki considers how little pots and vases, perfected through the art of craftsmanship, have a kind of frigid elegance in their simple beauty. Yet it may as well be described as filthy, for its graceful sheen carries with it the “glow of grime.”[4] He describes a “polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling.”[5] In Cold Enough for Snow, the narrator’s history is turned like a vessel between palms, language bound to it like grease to clay.
If the narrator is drawn to form as the vessel of meaning, it is understandable that she reads, and looks, at the surfaces of things for a deeper, hidden, significance. These gentle perambulations have the quality of a series of still lives; objects and settings are rearranged in a changing light. There is also an unbearable sense of longing, and of loss, which murmurs away beneath all this activity. Stained by muddy, familial discomfort, the narrator makes a secret of the stories—turning them inside out like a soiled glove. Early on in the novel, the narrator recalls,
I took out the camera now, adjusted the exposure, and fell back with my eye to the viewfinder. My mother, sensing the change in the distance between us, turned and saw what I was doing. Immediately, she assumed a stock pose: feet together, back straight, hands clasped. Is this all right, she asked me, or should I stand over there, nearer to that tree? Actually, I had wanted to catch something different, to see her face as it was during ordinary time, when she was alone with her thoughts, but I said it looked good and took the photo anyway. (5)
Behind the camera, it is as if the narrator cannot be seen; it furnishes her with a place to hide. This mode of perception is an orchestrating one, whereby the narrator can exercise her control through the framing power of a lens. Yet this gesture is also replicated in the narrative style itself, as the impersonal texture of Au’s prose offers the narrator a form of protection. This is a text which renders language with a soft and smoothing touch, shyly and also slyly. For despite the narrator’s humble glance—always looking out, and around—she maintains a narrative voice that invites authority with one hand whilst seeming to give it away with the other. The narrator is also self-conscious of her manner of speech: as if “applying a kind of firm but gentle pressure” (24). She appears to abdicate the fictive pact that begins with the use of “I,” straying away from proximity, favoring distance. This is not quite a feint at narratorial impersonality, although Au seems enamored of the cooling effect of such a voice. Rather, this textural choice implicates a desire to hew something smooth from what was once rough or uneven. There is an understanding, then, that prose style is a careful mediator of personality. If the text exhibits the narrator’s toil, the deft but difficult work of saying something just so, it arrives at a style through a deliberating effort that conceals its own labor. In this act of regulation, the narration replicates the artistry of ceramics, glazed like eggshells. The voice of this novel tells us something about art and family, that difficult and troubling relationships can ever be smoothed over with the softest touch. “Giv[ing] oneself over,” as Clark puts it, is both the problem and the promise. Fear and trepidation skirt these sentences, about the failures of language and the necessity of restriction and rules. At their center is a narrator who is a reader, and here she sits: confused but calm, ready to see.
This scene of seeing is repeated throughout the novel. The narrator moves through gallery spaces, studios, and shrines, coming to stand in front of sculptures, paintings, and gardens. The posture is one of a complete and private immersion, an absorbed inwardness. Here, a fine and well-lit room prompts a moment for reflection, a pause to catch some stray thought. There, a sculpted head invites a consideration of skilled craftsmanship and the private pleasures. Artworks, design objects, and architectural spaces are considered with equal degrees of scrutiny as the narrator’s past. The relationship between life and art seems like a window burst open to offer breeze passage between a garden and a room. The watchful appreciation stages a kind of defeat of these things themselves—a custodial gesture, whereby the recasting of the visual seems to retract some of the very conditions of display. Rendered in spare, descriptive terms, these works of cloth, clay, and paint are shed of their authorial stamp and point of origin. Long weavings in a gallery have tails which loop and crest over the floor “like frozen water,” the translucent and overlapping dyes in the fabric a reminder of “looking upward through a canopy of leaves” (8). An unnamed artist, best known for his works “of dancers, or women in baths,” appears here as a painter of “formless, or ghostlike” landscapes made by smearing “clouded patches of color and ink” on paper is yet discernible for his works “of dancers, or women in baths.” (20). For the narrator, it seems that it is her encounter with the form of the object or space at hand which is most significant. It takes a certain kind of authority to strip away the expected coordinates of understanding. At the same time, there is a modesty to this occupation. Roving over surfaces and textures, the eye educates itself; seeing things is not just a matter of pleasure, but a lesson in looking and living. It probes and ponders, but the problem remains: easier, always, to understand a painting than a person.
§
Across the frame a shadow falls. The narrator must turn an eye, at last, to her mother. Ever there, on nearly every page, the mother is nevertheless a spectral presence. Much harder, this task of making one’s way across the difficult terrain of familial love, bound up in its resentments and concessions. Mother, daughter: steadied by these terms, they are nevertheless strangers too, bound together like weights in a clock. There are minor labors in this relationship, brought to light in the startling and strange scene of visitation. They wander through exhibitions, coming to rest in front of some paintings by Monet. Her mother sways tiredly on her feet, quiet. The narrator longs for a conversational proximity with her mother. Their differences are many, but she wants to learn how to speak with her, and how to see her too. That closeness—and pleasure, yes—of sitting in one another’s sentences.
But if textual intimacy becomes the dearest form of love, it’s a private one. There is a sinking feeling that overcomes the narrator when she finds that she cannot speak to her mother.
I wanted for some reason to speak more about the room, and what I had felt in it, that strange keenness. Wasn’t it incredible, I wanted to say, that once there were people who were able to look at the world—leaves, trees, rivers, grass—and see its patterns, and, even more incredible, that they were able to find the essence of those patterns, and put them to cloth? But I found I could not. Instead I said that one of the rooms on the top floor, which looked down into the garden and across into the trees, had been designed for contemplation. (9)
The narrator’s passivity suggests a boundary that cannot be trespassed, a desire halted by the act of speech. Her appreciation of the pattern in the cloth belies some instinctive affinity with objects, carefully made. Au’s impersonal prose gleams with a rigor that works with restriction as its measure, as if a language that stops itself from getting too close can be used to reach further, touch on something more deeply.
There is ruthless shyness here, and it is not just a matter of narratorial language, but the language of the mother-daughter relationship. We might recall how the narrator’s “mother’s first language was Cantonese” and how her own “was English, and how [they] only ever spoke together in one, and not the other” (88). This sense of impersonal distance rests with the slipperiness of verbal and conversational cues. Do the pair speak so often as the text might suggest? Do they see each other so well? A shadowy, ghostly quality to speech and sight cling to the pair. In the same gallery the narrator is “aware of my mother behind me, pausing where I paused, or moving quickly along when I did” (8). Mother and daughter might seem to be cut of the same cloth. It is clear enough that they want something from each other, and from themselves too. That difficult problem of love, for the narrator, should be transformed into something untroubling and honest. The mother however, feels differently about their affection: “My mother looked at me and smiled, as if she was simply happy that we were in each other’s company, and to have no need for words. We had said, it seemed, so little of substance to each other these past weeks” (88).
The narrator’s project has been to look at museums, works of art, beautiful buildings, parklands, and walking paths. In Japan, she wants her mother to see just as she does, to no avail. The narrator is interested in how to know—her mother, her own histories, and perhaps even the world—and this curriculum is one that sets about a lesson in looking. Part of Clark’s project was to track and trace the effects of Poussin’s paintings upon himself, and of all the other private determinants that would impact his way of looking. For the narrator in Cold Enough for Snow, these forays into looking at art rarely leave her unchanged; she is often moved. But they lead her back into her own life, which it seems she is ever trying to escape or shape through her own will.
Sometimes, I looked at a painting, and felt completely nothing. Or if I had a feeling, it was only intuitive, a reaction, nothing that could be expressed in words. It was all right, I said, to simply say if that was so. The main thing was to be open, to listen, to know when and when not to speak. (35)
Perhaps this is the heart of the narrator’s formal preoccupation with silent objects, the gleaming ceramics, watercolors, and weavings. Reticence, that softest of approaches, becomes a way of testing the limits of language and its boundaries. For the narrator, the narrating act is not driven by a confessional impulse, but a desire to handle her life as if it is an object worthy of careful, and restrained contemplation: she considers its shapes and curves. It is an indirect broach into the personal, an underhanded form of appraisal, as if strength in style can lend itself to strength in sight. In this stealthy and quiet book Au stages an encounter between visual and written forms, which bears a correspondence to the real work that the narrator is trying to do within this story. She must work to curb her curating instinct, and bring herself to look at the rustling imperfections of her relationship with her mother.
In the final pages of the novel, the mother and daughter walk together up a mountain. They speak about writing. The narrator says that writing is like “pentimento, an earlier layer of something that the artist had chosen to paint over” (93). Together they look at the woods, blue-gray fern and cedar, and the narrator takes a shaky picture of them both. It is unorchestrated. They look tired, surprised, and alike. They turn to walk down the mountain, and go home.
Notes:
[1] T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 5.
[2] Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Art of Fiction No. 87,” interview by Darryl Pinckney, The Paris Review, no. 96 (Summer 1985): 49.
[3] Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), ix.
[4] Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker (Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), 11.
[5] Tanizaki, 11.