Writers often give us the impression that they have described the faces of their characters, when in fact they have simply given you an outline to fill in. Of Esch, the most important character in Hermann Broch’s masterpiece The Sleepwalkers, we learn only that he has big teeth. Even so, we don’t feel as if his face is a dentate blankness. Most often, we mistake being told what effect someone’s appearance has for an account of that appearance. The poet Mallarmé’s advice ― Peindre non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit (‘Paint not the thing itself but the effect it produces’) sounds like a self-denying ordinance. Actually it is a rather clever way out of an intractable problem. When, in one of his novels, Evelyn Waugh says of a new character, that ‘he had just the kind of appearance one would expect a young man of his type to have’ and nothing else, you still feel as if you ______________________________________________.
* dentate: 이가 있는 ** ordinance: 법령 *** intractable: 다루기 힘든