Some shadows engulf and some shadows suggest. Some are acts of diffusion, blending into the eaves of a house, say, or into the leaves of a tree, murky and amorphous, unwilling to offer up definition yet capable of playing tricks on the mind. Fairy tales and ghost stories lurk in such shadows—in forests and creaky homes, where shapes become particulate matter and material forms lose their particularity.
Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki laments the loss of shadows when he writes of modern electrical illumination and Japanese architecture: “[O]ur ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.” We are quite a distance from Hemingway’s clean, well-lighted place, here, even though these two writers were near contemporaries. But the difference is perhaps only a matter of metaphorical temperament—for at the beginning of Hemingway’s famous short story, we are introduced to “an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light.”
“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is but one example of Hemingway’s iceberg view of writing in which only an eighth of a story—like the Titanic’s nemesis—is seen. So, too, are shadows, which obscure space and leave much unseen. Or untold.
Interesting that one of the waiters in Hemingway’s story proclaims the goodness of the light after pondering the reportedly suicidal old man (implying that the reason why the old man hangs out there is because of the cleanliness of the café and its illumination), yet the old man choses to sit in the shadow, not entirely exposed to the brightness.
Interesting, too, that it often takes a bright light to cast a shadow with any definition. From these kinds of shadows, we get more information, we see outlines, we cast puppets onto walls and profiles of loved ones onto paper. We put hands (a rabbit, a bird) into relief, noses and chins and Regency hairstyles. We make silhouettes.
The word silhouette comes from the 18th-century French finance minister Etienne de Silhouette, who was known for being cheap. He also liked to cut portraits out of paper. Compared to the more time-consuming and pricier option of commissioning a painting, silhouette profiles could be traced and rendered quickly with little expense.
Two-dimensional figurative outlines go back at least as far as Paleolithic handprints on cave walls. And, though many succeeding schools of painting have helped change the way we look at the world, we still seem to have an affinity for these images. Go to Instagram, for instance, and type silhouette into the search option and you’ll get more than 7 million posts—half a million if the word is plural. That might not be as impressive as cat (50 million) or love (1 billion and counting), but it’s something.
I think it’s safe to suggest that people are enamored of silhouettes much in the way they are enamored of sunsets, and often the two go together on Instagram. By themselves, sunset photos typically don’t live up to the original, unmediated experience that makes you gasp in delight. How many times have I taken a picture of a sunset over the ocean and looked at it later, only to go, “Meh, let’s drag that one into the trash bin”? But sometimes, when the sky glows yellow or red, a shape appears—a boat near the horizon, a figure on the beach, a lone tree in the desert—that is especially compelling for its sharpened outline and black interiority. We see, in an odd sort of way, the categorical thingness of this figure because we can’t see it fully. We see “sailboat” or “dog” much in the way we see street signs of walking people and crossing deer and rows of ducks. We see, perhaps in a Jungian sense, an archetypal representation.
I once took a picture of a man standing by a chain-link fence. The light was strong behind him, and when I looked at the photo and made a few adjustments for contrast I had a pretty nifty silhouette. I liked the graphic boldness of the image and the angular composition. But what I liked most about it was that you couldn’t tell if the man was leaning back against the fence or standing behind it like a parent at a Little League baseball game. Three dimensions became two, and my view of the world became simultaneously less complicated and more complicated.
Rorschach inkblot tests are often silhouettes (though not always), which serve as purposeful abstractions seeking interpretation. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave posits a thought experiment about what we would believe if all we saw were shadows cast on a wall. With the exception of a prisoner who escapes, Plato’s shackled inmates are not in a position to interpret these shadows because they do not think of them as shadows. But for the rest of us, what we know of shadows is possible because of what we know about light.
Silhouettes and shadows invite interpretation. They ask us to fill in the dark spaces, and when we do that we bring with us all the darkness and light we’ve borne throughout our lives as material for consideration.
For some reason, I find that appealing.