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Why “White On White” Needs To Be Your Next Read
“We form ourselves through our doubles… We make ghostly twins to carry the weight of our desires.” from White on White by Ayşegül Savaş.
The inherent dichotomy between being and seeing, between who we are and who we seem to be, and between being a human and making art is always ripe for literary exploration. White on White does this with spareness and skill, creating a creepy, atmospheric little novel that’ll leave you questioning things long after the final page.
The Novel Sparks Important Questions
Told by an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, the reader is left with little concrete to grip on to. Until that is, we meet the mysterious Agnes, arguably the real protagonist of White on White. Our narrator is renting a city apartment from her professor, Pascal. This is as she studies for her thesis on the use of nudes in ancient architecture. When Agnes, Pascal’s wife, shows up to stay in the apartment’s upper studio, the two form an uneasy bond. What transpires between the two brings up questions of the very nature of personhood and artistry.
Agnes is shockingly candid with our narrator. She shares the most intimate details of her life as a daughter, wife, mother, and artist. She draws the narrator in, almost against her will, hypnotizing her with her seeming forthrightness. “It wasn’t often, she went on, that we could present ourselves to others, like a self-portrait. More often, we made portraits of the people around us, guessing at their features from occasional glimpses”. But does this self-portrait we present for the world to appreciate and critique actually bear relevance to the authentic personhood that’s inside us?
White on White Studies the Idea of Perception
The fact that Agnes is a painter, while our narrator is a student of art, gives both a pertinent interest in the idea of perception. Our narrator’s investigation into the nude, supposedly the most vulnerable and natural of all artistic depictions, leads her to more philosophical questions about whether our outer can, in any way at all, represent our inner. “If I wanted to study attitudes towards nakedness, I would be better off focusing my attention on all the ways that the body was hidden from sight rather than revealed.”
Our narrator becomes interested, too, in the idea of our skin as a barrier between the ‘real’ interior and the ‘false’ exterior. “The skin was a blanket, stretched to cover a secret inner life.” Inside our bodies, the working of our organs is depicted as just as grotesque and impenetrable as our thoughts and emotions. This skin metaphorically links to the stretched canvases onto which Agnes turns her own innermost turmoils into curated pieces of art once more.
The Conclusions
As the novel progresses, we begin to see the danger of learning about someone solely through what they tell us. We meet Pascal and are given a glimpse at a different perspective on the Agnes story. We learn the importance of perception when looking at a situation – and thus, perspective’s inherent impact on how we understand art. Ayşegül Savaş offers a rather equitable perspective on the making vs critiquing art debate. After all, neither can exist without the other.
“The simplest acts, Agnes thought, the very fabric of life had spun out of proportion, expanded to grotesque magnitudes of egocentricity, just like old paintings, restored with too bright colours, that los the subtleties of their initial expressions.”
You can pick up your copy of White on White by Ayşegül Savaş at Waterstones.
