The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Objects on a Table by Guy Davenport
Alexander Theroux

Guy Davenport. Objects on a Table. Counterpoint, 1998. 116 pp. $27.00.

Apples and pears, napkins, flowers, busts, bottles of wine—landscapes on a table, as it were—commonly make up the genre of the “still life.” For certain artists (Chardin and Braque come to mind), such silent objects became the subject of their major forms of expression. Polymath Guy Davenport’s wonderfully eclectic book is composed of a series of four meditations explaining why and how painters have employed this form to such vital effect. Finding patterns, he supports his observations with hundreds of wayward facts and original thoughts and superb cultural insights.
Davenport believes that “an utterly primitive and archaic feeling that a picture of food has some sustenance” is “the real root of still life.” Permutations of food pictures, pheasants to peaches to plates to pots, have come down to us from prehistoric times. “Reiteration,” observes Davenport (always a scholar), “is a privilege of still life denied many other modes.”
Literature plays a strong role in these essays. In “The Head as Fate” we are given a brief explanation of the human bust, mostly by way of Poe, as a feature of his subject. Heads—Nefertiti’s, Caesar’s, Beethoven’s, Pallas Athena’s—described as “mankind’s fateful symbol,” come into the category. (The House of Usher is of course allegorically a head to a degree, Davenport isn’t the first to point out.) Davenport sees Keats as fascinated with the motif, along with the likes of Milton, Shelley, and James Joyce. (“The first sentence of Ulysses is one: ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.’ ”) This motif preoccupied Pouissin, Monet, and van Gogh. Picasso painted apples (“the fall”) and pears (“redemption”) for seventy-five years. Objects on a Table is a tidy journal of visual moments memorializing the treatment. As usual, Davenport’s erudition, finding still lifes in unlikely places, is a singular joy. Exactitude and his taste for the kind of outré facts which delights Davenportians like myself, observations on everyone from Xenophanes, Umberto Eco, Charcot, Theocritus, and DeChirico to Nietzsche, William Carlos Williams, and Conan Doyle, are only part of the bouquet Davenport lays on our table. [Alexander Theroux]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Objects on a Table by Guy Davenport Alexander Theroux Guy Davenport. Objects on a Table. Counterpoint, 1998. 116 pp. $27.00. Apples and pears, napkins, flowers, busts, bottles of wine—landscapes on a table, as it were—commonly make up the genre of the “still life.” For certain artists (Chardin and Braque come to mind), such silent objects became the subject of their major forms of expression. Polymath Guy Davenport’s wonderfully eclectic book is composed of a series of four meditations explaining why and how painters have employed this form to such vital effect. Finding patterns, he supports his observations with hundreds of wayward facts and original thoughts and superb cultural insights. Davenport believes that “an utterly primitive and archaic feeling that a picture of food has some sustenance” is “the real root of still life.” Permutations of food pictures, pheasants to peaches to plates to pots, have come down to us from prehistoric times. “Reiteration,” observes Davenport (always a scholar), “is a privilege of still life denied many other modes.” Literature plays a strong role in these essays. In “The Head as Fate” we are given a brief explanation of the human bust, mostly by way of Poe, as a feature of his subject. Heads—Nefertiti’s, Caesar’s, Beethoven’s, Pallas Athena’s—described as “mankind’s fateful symbol,” come into the category. (The House of Usher is of course allegorically a head to a degree, Davenport isn’t the first to point out.) Davenport sees Keats as fascinated with the motif, along with the likes of Milton, Shelley, and James Joyce. (“The first sentence of Ulysses is one: ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.’ ”) This motif preoccupied Pouissin, Monet, and van Gogh. Picasso painted apples (“the fall”) and pears (“redemption”) for seventy-five years. Objects on a Table is a tidy journal of visual moments memorializing the treatment. As usual, Davenport’s erudition, finding still lifes in unlikely places, is a singular joy. Exactitude and his taste for the kind of outré facts which delights Davenportians like myself, observations on everyone from Xenophanes, Umberto Eco, Charcot, Theocritus, and DeChirico to Nietzsche, William Carlos Williams, and Conan Doyle, are only part of the bouquet Davenport lays on our table. [Alexander Theroux]

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