What We See When We Read (9780804171649)

by Mendelsund, Peter

  ***

  I find that when I’m reading a book with illustrations, the book’s pictures will shape my mental visions—but only while I am looking at these illustrations. After a period (which varies in length according to how often the illustrations appear in a text), the particular mental image of that illustration fades.*

  *Unless, that is, you are reading a book that has illustrations on every page. In which case there is simply no escaping the imposition of another’s imagination. Ahem.

  Wittgenstein (this time in his Philosophical Grammar) writes:

  “We do sometimes see memory pictures in our minds: but commonly they are only scattered through the memory like illustrations in a story book.”

  This sounds right to me, and can apply to imaging while reading as well—though the question remains:

  What do we see during the unillustrated part of the story?

  SKILL

  A sketch may be judged according to how closely it cleaves to its subject, or it might be judged according to its relative degree of fantasy. But the quality of a sketch will depend most of all upon the skill of the draftsman. Is this true of the images our imaginations construct from narratives as well—our mental sketches? Do some readers have more vivid imaginations than others? Or is the reading imagination a resource with which we are universally, uniformly endowed?

  I think of imagination as being like sight—a faculty most people possess. Though, of course, not everyone who is sighted sees with the same visual acuity…

  We will sometimes say of someone, “What an amazing imagination they have,” by which we mean to say either “How creative they are!” or worse, “How insane or duplicitous they are!” Though in both cases, we are remarking upon a person’s ability to conjure something. When we praise an author’s imagination, I believe that what we are praising is his ability to transcribe his visions. (It’s not that this author’s mind is freer than ours—perhaps it is the opposite: his mind is less wild, and therefore it is easier for him to subdue his thoughts, tame them, and corrall them onto the page.)

  Do stories and their inhabitants seem sketchy only at those moments in which we are imagining poorly?

  Children read picture books; preteens read chapter books with pictures; eventually young adults graduate to books made up entirely of words. This process exists because we learn to read a language slowly, in stages, though I wonder if we also need, over time, to learn how to picture narratives unassisted. (The implication being that our imaginations can, and do, improve over time.)

  So can we practice imagining—as we practice drawing—in order to imagine better?

  If one reader might imagine better or worse than another reader, then can one culture be better at imagining than another?

  Are the muscles we use to imagine growing weaker as our culture ages? Before the age of photography and film did we picture better, more clearly, than we do now? Our mnemonic skills are atrophying and I wonder if our visual creativity might be as well. Our culture’s visual overstimulation is widely discussed, and the conclusions drawn from the fact of this overstimulation are alarming. (Our imaginations are dying, some say.) Whatever the relative health of our imaginations, we still read. The rapid proliferation of the image has not kept us from the written word. And we read because books bestow upon us unique pleasures; pleasures that films, television, and so on cannot proffer.

  Books allow us certain freedoms—we are free to be mentally active when we read; we are full participants in the making (the imagining) of a narrative.

  Or, if it is true that we cannot advance beyond a vague sketchiness in our imaginings, then maybe this is a crucial component of why we love written stories. Which is to say that sometimes we only want to see very little.

  “There were no ‘movies’ in those days, and the theatre was only occasionally permitted; but on long afternoons, after you had learned to read, you might lose yourself in ‘The Scottish Chiefs’ to your heart’s content. It seems to me that the beauty of this fashion of leisurely reading was that you had time to visualize everything. It was not necessary for you to be told that Helen Mar was beautiful. It was only necessary for her to say, in tones so entrancing that you heard them, ‘My Wallace!’ to know that she was the loveliest person in all Scotland.” —Maurice Francis Egan, Confessions of a Book-Lover

  CO-CREATION

  Ernst Gombrich tells us that, in viewing art, there is no “innocent eye.” There is no such thing in art as the naïve reception of imagery. This is true of reading as well. Like painters, or writers, or even participants in a video game, we make choices—we have agency.

  When we want to co-create, we read. We want to participate; and we want ownership. We would rather have sketches than verisimilitude—because the sketches, at least, are ours.*

  *And yet, readers still contend that they want to “lose themselves” in a story…

  ***

  “Indeed, it is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books,” Proust remarks, in his book on reading (or, more properly, his book on Ruskin on reading) “… that … for the author they may be called ‘conclusions’ but for the reader ‘Incitements.’ ”

  Good books incite us to imagine—to fill in an author’s suggestions. Without this co-creative act, without personalization, what you are left with is this…

  Here is your Anna.

  (This—the picture—is a form of robbery.)

  ***

  We desire the fluidity and vagary that books grant us when we imagine their content. Some things we do not wish to be shown.

  Kafka wrote to the publisher of his Metamorphosis, afraid the cover designer might attempt a likeness of his ungeziefer:

  Not that, please not that! The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance.

  The prohibition is rather frantic. Was Kafka trying to preserve his readers’ imaginative acts? One translator of Kafka suggested to me that maybe Kafka wanted his insect seen, by the reader, only from within—looking out.

  There is another option: visualizing may demand effort on the part of readers, but readers may also choose to resist the pictorial in favor of the conceptual.

  The more I know of the world (its history, its geography), the closer I get to achieving what we think of as “the author’s view of things.” I might have visited the Hebrides or read other books that describe the islands. I might have seen illustrations and photographs of period dress, interior décor, and perhaps have learned something of Victorian mores … Knowing these things helps me to imagine Mrs. Ramsay’s drawing room, dining room, with some degree of verisimilitude.

  Perhaps the author’s image of this setting is based on some real-world locale that we ourselves can simply see in a photograph or painting? Is this house, the setting for To the Lighthouse, based on one of the Woolfs’? I am tempted to look up this information (as another friend of mine did when he read To the Lighthouse). It would be a simple matter to find a picture of the Isle of Skye lighthouse. But would this deprive me of something? My vision of the book would gain in authenticity what it would lose in intimacy. (For me, the Ramsays’ summer house, filled with guests, is like the rough-and-tumble, rowdy houses my family rents during summers on Cape Cod. This image of the Cape is a grounding image for me. It allows me to relate to the book.) My friend was going to describe the Woolfs’ Hebridean house to me and I stopped him. My Ramsay house is a feeling, not a picture. And I wish to preserve this feeling. I do not want it supplanted by facts.

  Well, maybe the house is not only a feeling … but the feeling has primacy over the image.

  The idea of the house, and the emotions it evokes in me, are the nucleus of a complex atom, around which orbit various sounds, fleeting images, and an entire spectrum of personal associations.

  These images we “see” when we read are personal: What we do not see is what the author pictured when writing a particular book. That is to say: Every narrative is meant to be transposed; imaginatively tra
nslated. Associatively translated. It is ours.

  ***

  A friend grew up in suburban Albany. He’s always been an avid reader, even as a child, and whenever he read, he tells me, he mentally situated the stories in the backyards and side streets of his native blocks, because he had no other frame of reference. I did this too. For me, the settings for most books I read was Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I grew up. So the stage for all of these epic encounters—for Jean-Christophe, and, say, Anna Karenina, or Moby-Dick—was a local public school, my neighbor’s backyard … It seems strange, funny even, to think of these grand sagas recast in this prosaic light. These various far-flung adventures, press-ganged, by force of will, onto such blasé and unromantic settings. Yet my personal readings of these books were undiminished by radical changes of milieu—by this personalizing of the reading experience. And my friend and I were doing, to some extent, what we all do when we sit down to read a work of fiction.

  ***

  We colonize books with our familiars; and we exile, repatriate the characters to lands we are more acquainted with.

  We transpose works of nonfiction to similar effect.

  When I read a book on the battle of Stalingrad, in my imagination the bombardment, occupation, encirclement, and liberation all took place in Manhattan. Or they took place in an alternate Manhattan; a through-the-looking-glass Manhattan; a counterfactual-history Manhattan; a Manhattangrad, consisting of Soviet-mandated architectural adjustments.

  The difference here is that, unlike with fictional settings based on real locales, I feel a strange moral obligation to seek out more information about the real Stalingrad. My customized Stalingrad is a false idea. And however my personalizing of the scene helps me identify with the victims of this outsized drama—the actual victims of the actual tragic events—the act of visual substitution seems somehow disrespectful, wrong.*

  *Yet I still graft myself into a narrative every time I read nonfiction. How could I not?

  When we see plays performed on the stage, we work with a different set of standards. Hamlet is ours to picture as we’d like, as he might be played by a different actor in every new production produced. We do not refer to Hamlet as a character as much as a role. He is clearly meant to be inhabited: played. And Denmark is a set. It can be anywhere the director and stage designer imagine it to be.

  (Perhaps these terms—role and set—should be used when describing novels?)

  Doesn’t reading a novel mean producing a private play of sorts? Reading is casting, set decoration, direction, makeup, blocking, stage management…

  Though books do not imply enactment in quite the same way that plays do.

  A novelist’s objects, places, characters: we want ours to be his, and his to be ours. This desire is paradoxical. It is a desire for privileged access, and thus a type of greed. But it is also a hedge against loneliness—the vision is shared…

  (Though perhaps it’s better to say that the vision is borrowed? Or even plagiarized?)

  Of course, we also cherish the notion that books hold secrets; that books are reticent. (As I’ve mentioned: books safeguard mysteries.)

  Can we picture whatever we’d like when we read? What is the author’s role in hemming in the boundaries of our imaginations?

  Co-creation and Barthes’s “removal of the author”:

  Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.

  The reader is … simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.

  The author’s “removal” describes not only the passing of one paradigm (of the passive reception of “meaning”) but also naturally entails the end of another—the reader’s submissive reception of imagery. After all—if we posit the removal of the author—from whom would we be receiving imagery?

  ***

  MAPS

  & RULES

  The action in To the Lighthouse unfolds at a house in the Hebrides. If you asked me to describe the house, I could tell you some of its features. But much like my mental picture of Anna Karenina, the house is a shutter here, a dormer there.

  There’s nothing to keep the rain out! Now I picture a roof. I still don’t know if it’s slate or shingle. Shingle. I’ve decided. (Sometimes our choices are significant—sometimes not.)

  I know that on the Ramsays’ property there is a garden, and a hedge. A view of the ocean and the lighthouse. I know the rough placements of the characters on this stage. I have mapped the surroundings, but mapping isn’t exactly picturing—not in the sense of re-creating the world, as it appears to us, visually.

  (Nabokov also used to map novels.)

  I do this too on occasion. I’ve mapped To the Lighthouse.

  But I still can’t describe the Ramsays’ house.

  Our maps of fictional settings, like our maps of real settings, perform a function. A map that guides us to a wedding reception is not a picture—a picture of what the wedding reception will look like—but rather, it is a set of guidelines. And our mental maps of the Ramsay house are no different—they govern the actions of its occupants.

  William Gass (again):

  We do visualize, I suppose. Where did I leave my gloves? And then I ransack the room in my mind until I find them. But the room I ransack is abstract—a simple schema … and I think of the room as a set of likely glove locations…

  The Ramsay house is a set of likely Ramsay locations.

  Visibility can be confused with credibility. Some books seem as though they are presenting us with imagery, but are actually presenting us with fictional facts. Or rather, these books predicate their plausibility, and for the reader, their conceivability, on an accretion of detail and lore. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is one such text. The endpapers tell the readers that they might like to know the location of Rivendell, and the appendix suggests that it might be prudent to learn Elvish. (Endpaper maps are always tip-offs that one is entering just such a book/compendium-of-knowledge.)

  These books demand scholarship. (The scholarship demanded is a large part of the appeal of such books.) One can learn about the myths and legends of Middle Earth as one can acquaint oneself with its flora and fauna. (One can similarly investigate the fictional worlds of non-fantasy-genre novels—for instance, the “Organization of North American Nations” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.)

  Simulacrum worlds such as these require that their constituent parts, their contents, seem endless. The authors lead us down a narrative path, but we always have the impression that we could leave that trail and bushwhack, and at the end of our wanderings, we’d find the unlit parts of these worlds intact and replete with nuance.

  However: an author does not need to stockpile detail in order to create a credible world (or character).

  A shape may be defined by a set of points that lie on its perimeter—nothing more is needed. Or: a rule can be determined.

  W. H. Auden writes of The Lord of the Rings: “It is a world of intelligible law.”

  What is crucial in the formulation of a rule or function is its applicability. The user must possess the ability to apply the rule forward. (The function, and those who apply it, must be able to “go on.”)

  The same can be said of, say, a character. Anna can be defined by several discrete points (her hands are small; her hair is dark and curly) or through a function (Anna is graceful*).

  *Unlike how she appears in earlier drafts of the novel, wherein (as Richard Pevear tells us in the introduction to his new translation of the book) Anna is portrayed as “graceless” and rude.

  ABSTRACTIONS

  I was reading a book by H. P. Lovecraft when I reached a passage describing “impossible geometries …” and “Terrors unutterable and unimaginable.”

  (Sometimes, when we are reading, we are asked explicitly to imagine the unimaginable.)<
br />
  …but in my imagination it was a morbid echo winging its way across unimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer hells.

  Are we being asked not to see?

  Certain genres are predicated on this convention: science fiction, horror…*

  *or contemporary theoretical physics.

  In these instances I have a sensation of alienation and eerie astonishment—this is how I perform this act of “not seeing.”

  Though when I am told I can’t imagine, I still imagine. And the content of my imagination in these cases is no more or less clear, or apt, than my visions of Anna Karenina.

  ***

  “There is no real unity without incorporeality.”

  Moses Maimonides writes, in his Guide for the Perplexed, that imagining God as “having a body possessed of face and limbs” is impossible. Imagining or describing such a God would entail raising intractable paradoxes and other philosophical and theological difficulties.

  Many medieval scholars struggled with this idea—that a “unified” God could not be predicated.

  Maimonides subscribed to an approach known as “negative theology” in which one comes closer to God by enumerating the things he is not.

  Characters have only implied corporeality. And our imaginations grant them unity. But characters are also defined by what they are not.

  By asserting that Vronsky

  was a squarely built, dark man, not very tall…