RAYMOND CARNEY
monstrosity in the region of the mother's forehead .. . [don't
mean to suggest that the mother's features are imagined by
Eakins as literally monstrous , only that it is impossible for the
viewer to make sense of what is depicted of her profile and that
this is nearly as disturbing as the clawlike hand itself.)
467
This passage can stand as a summary of many of the essential
qualities of Fried's writing. On the positive side, one wants
to
acknowledge how lively his prose is. But the thrills and chills of
Fried's writing are also the problem with it. Every page, practically
every paragraph, is as overwrought in its diction as this one. This is
more than a stylistic quibble. Fried is committed in advance to a
thematics of violence and disfiguration in the works he discusses (in
his larger argumentative project, he is committed to maintaining
that painting and writing in general enact a scene of violent and ag–
gressive disfigurement that repels and confounds vision), and his
language throughout the book merely plays out the consequences of
the general conclusions at which he has obviously already arrived by
the time he approaches the specific works in question. The result is a
case study in argumentative tendentiousness and the loading of
terms .
In this linguistic hothouse, everything is extraordinary and
bizarre . Nothing is in the midrange of human experience.
If
a figure
is turned or bent, it is "monstrous."
If
a fist is tensed, it is "clawlike."
If
an aspect of a painting is complexly visuall y presented, it is "a
threat to vision," or it is what Fried, in a discussion of
Will Schuster
and Blackman Going Shooting for Rail,
calls "explosive" of vision:
The distancing called for by "pictorial" seeing is further en–
cOUl'aged by the most remarkable feature of
Will Schuster,
the in–
candescent red of Schuster's long- sleeved shirt, which by virtue
of its coloristic explosiveness repels the
viewer
from the painting
as with the force of a blast. Insofar as it also explodes the unity
that "pictorial" seeing characteristically seeks to confirm, it
recalls the pecu liar , anarchic intensity of the reds not only in
The
Cross Clinic
but in the ea rly domestic interior scenes as well.
We have seen a comparable melodramatization of the process
of artistic unde rstanding in literary criticism most notoriously in
what has come
to
be called reader-res ponse analysis - though I think
that Fried's viewer-response theatrics can be traced back before
Stanley Fish to the art-apprec iative onanism of Pater, Fry , or Bell.
