What We See When We Read (9780804171649)

by Mendelsund, Peter

  …Tolstoy informs us that Vronsky is neither blond, nor short.

  ***

  If we don’t have pictures in our minds when we read, then it is the interaction of ideas—the intermingling of abstract relationships—that catalyzes feeling in us readers. This sounds like a fairly unenjoyable experience, but, in truth, this is also what happens when we listen to music. This relational, nonrepresentational calculus is where some of the deepest beauty in art is found. Not in mental pictures of things, but in the play of elements…

  When you listen to music (nonprogrammatic music), is what you feel lessened in any way by the lack of imagery put forward? You may imagine anything when listening to an instrumental fugue by Bach: a stream, a tree, a sewing machine, your spouse … but there is nothing in the music that demands those specific images. (I believe that it is far better without them.)

  Why is it different when we read a novel? Because some detail, some specific imagery, is called out? This specificity changes things, but, I think, only superficially.

  ***

  Do we visualize anything when we read? Of course, we must visualize something … Not all reading is merely abstract, the interplay of theoretical notions. Some of our mental content seems to be pictorial.

  Try this thought experiment:

  1. Think of the capital letter D.

  2. Now imagine it turning ninety degrees counterclockwise.

  3. Now take it and mentally place it on top of the capital letter J.

  (We think “rainy” because we successfully construct and manipulate mental pictures—and here we’ve demonstrated the fact that we have done so.)

  (We made a picture in our minds.)

  Of course, the picture we made is a picture of two symbols; letterforms. An actual picture of an umbrella is much harder to see…

  When we are seeing while reading, we are seeing what we are prompted to see.

  Though…

  As John Locke puts it: “Every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand for what ideas he pleases, that no one hath the power to make others have the same ideas in their minds that he has …”

  Yet…

  This isn’t entirely true either, is it?

  I can, actually, violate this liberty of yours, and force an image, of a kind, to appear to you—just as an author does—as Tolstoy does with Anna and her “masses of hair.”

  If I say the words:

  “Sea horse”

  Did you see it? Or imagine that you did? Even for a moment?

  Every imagined sea horse will be different, one from the next.

  But each of these imagined sea horses will share overlapping series of characteristics; they will share a family resemblance (Wittgenstein’s phrase)…

  This is likely true of all our imagined Anna Kareninas, or Madame Bovarys (or Ishmaels) as well. They are not the same, but they are related.

  (If we averaged all our Annas, would we at last see Tolstoy’s Anna? I suspect not.)

  EYES,

  OCULAR VISION,

  & MEDIA

  John Milton was blind, as was, supposedly, the poet Homer. So too was the fictional prophet Tiresias. Though imagination and insight (in-sight) differ from ocular vision, we accept the metaphor of the imagination as a turning inward. Imagination is a turning-away from the mind-independent world.*

  *See also Beethoven: deaf

  We further surmise that outward sight only inhibits inward sight (Homer; Tiresias).

  Charlotte Brontë writes, “I feel now as if I had been walking blindfold—this book seems to give me eyes …”

  Imagination, you could say, is like an “inward eye.”

  Though, as a friend suggests, this implies that the contents of the mind are there to be seen—as if ideas were tiny objects. But we don’t see “meaning.” Not in the same way that we see horses, or apples, or this page that you are looking at now.

  William Wordsworth (famously) recounts how he and his sister, Dorothy, saw a stretch of yellow flowers by a lake.

  Later (and often) these flowers reappear to him:

  For oft, when on my couch I lie

  In vacant or in pensive mood

  They flash upon that inward eye

  Which is the bliss of solitude…

  My father encouraged me to memorize this poem as a child and I’ve thought about it often since—its representation of percepts; their afterimage; their transmutation into memory, and then art.

  Wordsworth’s daffodils are remembered, rather than imagined. The flowers, their golden hue and lazy movement, come to the poet at first as sensory information. He receives them (supposedly) passively. Only later do these flowers become fodder for reflection and for his active imagination.

  By which point Wordsworth has internalized these flowers. But the raw material of the memory is, purportedly, these actual daffodils.

  (The very ones Wordsworth saw.)

  We have not seen Wordsworth’s daffodils “fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” We may have seen other daffodils—but we haven’t seen his. So we must imagine them, spurred by the poet’s words—his mimesis.

  But: notice how well the last stanza of this poem describes our acts of imagination as we read Wordsworth’s poem—the nebulous yellow of the flowers “flashes” before our own “inward eyes.”

  ***

  Novels (and stories) implicitly argue in favor of philosophical versions of the world. They assume, or set forth, an ontology, an epistemology, a metaphysics … Some fictions assume that the world is as it seems; other fictions tease and worry at the threads of the known. But it is in a novel’s phenomenology, the way in which a piece of fiction treats perception (sight, say), that a reader finds a writer’s true philosophy.

  ***

  What of a literature that presents us with a nondramatic, optical view of the world, a literature of surfaces?

  …We no longer look at the world with the eyes of a confessor, of a doctor, or of God himself (all significant hypostases of the classical novelist), but with the eyes of a man walking in his city with no other horizon than the scene before him, no other power than that of his own eyes.

  (This is Roland Barthes describing the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet.)

  In the works of Robbe-Grillet, objects are shorn of allegorical meaning. They are not symbols, nor are they way stations along an associative chain. They do not mean; nor do they mean nothing.

  For Robbe-Grillet, they simply are.

  A quarter tomato that is quite faultless, cut up by the machine into a perfectly symmetrical fruit. The peripheral flesh, compact, homogeneous, and a splendid chemical red, is of an even thickness between a strip of gleaming skin and the hollow where the yellow, graduated seeds appear in a row, kept in place by a thin layer of greenish jelly along a swelling of the heart. This heart, of a slightly grainy, faint pink, begins—towards the inner hollow—with a cluster of white veins, one of which extends towards the seeds—somewhat uncertainly. Above, a scarcely perceptible accident has occurred: a corner of the skin, stripped back from the flesh for a fraction of an inch, is slightly raised.

  I have had the experience of looking at the world in a nonallusive manner. This state of mind comes on me suddenly, and I’m aware of my topographic position, and am newly alert to geometry. Suddenly the world seems a purely optical phenomenon—it is reduced to light and its vectors—and I have become the camera, rather than the photographer. Chronology is rendered moot, and the constituent fragments of the world are no longer subservient to my psychology, and self-consciousness, but are startlingly present at hand. There is nothing cold or unnatural in this state of being, but rather something strangely preconscious.

  Do these states and their fictions compel our imaginative mind to see more, or to see better? (Do we see Robbe-Grillet’s tomato with more clarity and richness than we do, say, Eve’s apple?)

  I don’t.

  ***

  When we imagine something from a book, where are we situated? Where is (as it
were) the camera?

  Does the angle of observation depend solely upon the voice in which a narrative is cast? For instance, if a story is cast in the first person—and especially if a story is set in the present tense—then we readers will naturally see the action “through the eyes” of the narrator. (“My consciousness behaves as though it were the consciousness of another,” writes Georges Poulet in his Phenomenology of Reading. “I read, I mentally pronounce an I … which is not myself.”) This is similar with a second-person narration (in which a “you” is directly addressed) and even a first- or second-person plural narration (a “we,” or a plural “you.”)

  With a narrative voice in the third person, or even a first-person narrative set in the past tense (as if a friend were recounting a tale), we are naturally “above” or “beside” the action. Our vantage point, like the narrative vantage point, is “godlike.”* Perhaps in these cases, we jump from from “camera” to “camera,” capturing reactions in close-up, and then pull back to see larger “shots,” crowd scenes, skylines: the dolly pulls back … and even here, despite the omniscient narrative mode, we occasionally slip into the first person (like a god assuming a human avatar) and we see through the eyes of a single character.

  *As it is referred to in game design.

  But of course, once again, we are speaking of attending the theater, and of watching movies, not reading books. We don’t see nearly this much, and an author’s choice of narrative person changes nothing visually. (The narrative mode changes meaning, but not angle. It doesn’t change the way we see…)

  Ishmael addresses me directly* (“Call me Ishmael”), and though I am sometimes at Ishmael’s side, at other points I am high above him, gull-like, watching him stroll the streets of New Bedford. Or I may be seeing, as if through Ishmael’s eyes, the shocking first glimpses of his roommate, Queequeg. This is to say: Our vantage point for seeing a narrative is as fluid and unconstrained as the author’s imagination in creating it. Our imaginations will roam where they will.

  *Or he addresses a generalized “me”; i.e., readers.

  The more we are exposed to film, TV, and video games, the more those types of media infect our readerly perspective. We begin to make films and video games of our readings.

  (Video games, I find, are especially potent with regard to this leakage, in that, like reading, they provide the participant with agency…)

  There is no such thing as a “close-up” in prose. A detail may be called out in a narrative, but the effect is not the

  same as that of a camera, zooming in. In books, when a detail (Oblonsky’s slippers, for instance) is remarked

  upon, the observer does not have the sensation of moving closer, or even of a different vantage point.

  These events in fiction are not spatial, but semantic. When a camera

  zooms in, the relationship of the camera to the object changes and thus

  our relationship (as viewers) to the object has changed. But not in novels.

  As Calvino puts it: “The distance between language

  and image is always

  the same.”*

  *Italo Calvino, Cahiers du Cinema, October 1966

  This raises an interesting question: Aside from the difficulty of picturing things, can we picture a medium or set of dimensions in which things reside, and through which things (and we readers ourselves) imaginatively move? Do we imagine space? “Zooming” implies a context for movement—not only does the object of our scrutiny become larger, but a previous scene and its contents must also become diminished…

  When a work of fiction is adapted for the screen, the film will powerfully suppress our own readerly visions of the text … but what else can we learn?

  Seeing the film of a book is a wonderful test case for exploring our reading imaginations. The contrast in the experiences is revelatory. (Neurologists similarly learn brain function through the study of brain dysfunction.)

  When I’m reading a novel or story, the contents—places, people, things—of the drama recede and are supplanted by significance. The vision of a flowerpot, say, is replaced by my readerly calculation of the meaning and importance of this flowerpot.

  We are ever gauging these significances in texts, and much of what we “see” when we read is this “significance.” All this changes when a book is adapted…

  Robbe-Grillet describes the transformation:

  …The empty chair became only absence or expectation, the hand placed on a shoulder became only the impossibility of leaving … But in the cinema, one sees the chair, the movement of the hand, the shape of the bars. What they signify remains obvious, but instead of monopolizing our attention, it becomes something added, even something in excess, because what affects us, what persists in our memory, what appears as essential and irreducible to vague intellectual concepts are the gestures themselves, the objects, the movements, and the outlines, to which the image has suddenly (and unintentionally) restored their reality.*

  *For a New Novel, translated by Richard Howard

  “Flowerpot”

  Are novels more like cartoons or comic books than films?

  The animated cartoon has a lot to teach the writer, above all how to define characters and objects with a few strokes.*

  Not only are characters in novels composed, generally speaking, of “a few strokes,” but also, like comic characters, they perform in panels—scenes—which, though not encapsulated by visual frames, are delineated verbally. These scenes/panels are then strung together by the reader, who renders the passages into a plausible narrative whole.

  (The void between frames is one of the comic strip’s defining characteristics. These fissures serve as a constant reminder of what the comic artist leaves out, while simultaneously drawing attention to the creator’s framing power. In fiction, the frames, and thus gaps between frames, are not quite so obvious.)

  Authors might draw our attention to the limitations of text—its inability to allow readers simultaneous views of multiple actions, players, and so on.

  In the epilogue to Moby-Dick, for instance, Ishmael tells us he is:

  …floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it…

  (Notice how “the margin” here becomes like the gap between frames in a comic strip.)

  ***

  MEMORY

  & FANTASY

  Much of our reading imagination comprises visual free association. Much of our reading imagination is untethered from the author’s text.

  (We daydream while reading.)

  A novel invites our interpretive skills, but it also invites our minds to wander.

  The reading imagination is loosely associative—but it is not random.

  (Our reading imaginations may not be overtly coherent, but they are still meaningful.)

  So, it occurs to me that perhaps memory—being the fodder of the imagination, and being intermingled with imagination—feels like imagination; and imagination feels like memory, being constructed of it as well.

  Memory is made of the imaginary; the imaginary made of memory.

  I am reading Dickens again (Our Mutual Friend), and I’m imagining something from the book—an industrial harbor: a river, boats, wharves, warehouses…

  From where is the material for my picturing this scene derived? I search my memory to find a similar place, with similar docks. It takes a while.

  But then I remember a trip I took with my family when I was a child. There was a river, and a dock—it’s the same dock as the dock I just imagined.

  I realize later that, when a new friend described to me his home in Spain, with its “docks,” I was picturing this same dock—the dock I saw on my childhood vacation; the dock I “used” already in imagining the novel I am reading.

  (How many times have I used this dock?)

  The act of picturing the events and trappings of fiction delivers unintentional glimpses into our pasts.

  (And we may search our imaginings, as we search our dreams, for hint
s and fragments of our lost experience.)

  Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words “contain” meanings, but, more important, words potentiate meaning…

  ***

  River, the word, contains within it all rivers, which flow like tributaries into it. And this word contains not only all rivers, but more important all my rivers: every accessible experience of every river I’ve seen, swum in, fished, heard, heard about, felt directly or been affected by in any other manner oblique, secondhand or otherwise. These “rivers” are infinitely tessellating rills and affluents that feed fiction’s ability to spur the imagination. I read the word river and, with or without context, I’ll dip beneath its surface. (I’m a child wading in the moil and suck, my feet cut on a river’s rock-bottom; or the gray river just out the window, now, just to my right, over the trees of the park—spackled with ice. Or—the almost seismic eroticism of a memory from my teens—of the shift of a skirt on a girl in spring, on a quai by an arabesque of a river, in a foreign city…)

  This is a word’s dormant power, brimming with pertinence. So little is needed from the author, when you think of it.

  (We are already flooded by river water, and only need the author to tap this reservoir.)

  SYNESTHESIA

  …this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble.