The Quiet Power of a Pensive Image: Anita Desai’s “Winterscape”

“Winterscape” invites us to an encounter between two continents centered around two different approaches to motherhood. The story explores the possibility of accepting what seemed at first alien or “outlandish” to a future mother who is having to make room in her Canadian home not just to one, but two, mothers-in-law, determined to travel all the way from India. In a text that revolves around hospitality, transmission, and adoption and that, crucially, involves the ability to see and see differently, the photographic moment takes centerstage. Besides, the contemplation of the winterscape, later displayed on the family fridge, frames the entire tale and generates a circular reading which stresses the importance of pausing and looking again. To the young woman who photographed the two women in white, mesmerized by the fall of the first Canadian snow, the picture sums up “everything”—although she would not want to say what “everything” is. As she dwells on the threshold between the sayable and the unsayable, Desai also explores, through a landscape that gives her story its title, the limit between the visual and the textual. One can read “Winterscape” in the light of Roland Barthes’s puncturing and poignant effect, but it is Jacques Rancière’s “pensive image” and the way he rethinks the studium/punctum opposition that find a particular resonance here.