(In fables, the stylized visual aspect of the players and settings is obvious to us. Yet even the most psychologically rich characters and lushly described locales in naturalistic fiction are, visually: flat.)
Are all characters, in all types of fiction, merely visual types, examplars of particular categories—sizes; body shapes; hair colors …?
This doesn’t feel true to me as I’m reading a novel. Good characters feel unique. But this uniqueness is only a psychological uniqueness. As I’ve mentioned many times, authors relinquish little information concerning a character’s appearance—thus it’s hard to imagine these characters as visually unique, one from the next. It’s hard to imagine them aquiring visual depth.
Yet somehow they seem to.
“The ‘Redskinnery’ was what really mattered … take away the feathers, the high cheek-bones, the whiskered trousers, substitute a pistol for a tomahawk, and what would be left? For I wanted not the momentary suspense but that whole world to which it belonged—the snow and the snow-shoes, beavers and canoes, warpaths and wigwams, and Hiawatha names.”
—C. S. Lewis, On Stories
And how does a character or setting acquire this seeming depth? How does a verbal construction become felt?
How do they emerge as complete in our minds? How do they become, visually
THE PART
& THE WHOLE
I’m reading The Iliad, and I notice (at this point: unsurprisingly) that Homer gives his character Achilles very few physical attributes. Much of what I know of Achilles in my reading is extrapolated.
Luckily (lest I mistake Achilles for someone else; say, Patroclus…), Achilles comes with an epithet attached to him. Achilles is “swift-footed.”
This epithet is like a name tag. (A Homeric epithet is also a mnemonic device for the reader and the poet alike.) The goddess Athena is given an epithet as well: she is “gray-eyed,” glaucopis. (She is also “white-armed.”) The goddess Hera is “Ox-eyed.”
(I’ve always loved the balefulness of this image—it adds a sympathetic psychological depth to a goddess traditionally characterized as a shrill and jealous harridan.)
These various epithets are more formalized than descriptions.
Homeric epithets are more often than not pictorial—moreover, they are also often picturesque. Being picturesque makes them memorable.*
*What, for example, does a “wine-dark” sea look like? This has been a subject of much debate. Is a wine-dark sea a green or blue sea touched with the roseate colors of the sunset or sunrise? Is Homer’s ocean blue? Or did it appear red to him? Did the Greeks have the capacity to see blue? Goethe in his Theory of Color mentions that colors were less strictly defined for the ancient Greeks: “Pure red (purpur) fluctuates between warm red and blue, sometimes inclining to scarlet, sometimes to violet.” So was the sea “wine-dark” for Homer because it “looked that way”? Or because “wine-dark” was rythmically helpful to the poet—or because it was a memorable epithet?
***
“Gray-eyed” and “Ox-eyed” are not mere imagistic details. When one hears “Ox-eyed Hera” one does not picture a floating set of heavy-lidded eyes.
Hera’s eyes, to some extent, stand in for the entire character: they are parts of her that are proxies for the totality of her. Hera’s eyes are an instance of what is called metonymy. Metonymy is a figure of speech in which one thing (or idea) is called by the name of another thing (or idea) to which it is related. Generally speaking, this related idea is salient. For instance, the Pentagon…
…refers to a building, but more important, it refers to the United States’ military leadership that is housed in that building. The building is like a synonym; a related, associated concept that becomes a stand-in for the Department of Defense. Similarly, the expression “the White House” refers to the entire presidential staff, and (pulling the lens back farther) “Washington” stands in for the entire U.S. government. Here, concrete facts (geographical locations, buildings) are proxies for more elaborate and convoluted notions.
***
Hera’s eyes are an instance of metonymy…
But more specifically, Hera’s eyes are an instance of synecdoche—a synecdoche is a metonym in which the part refers to the whole.
For instance: Men (sailors) can become “Hands …”
“All hands
on deck!”
Or: “Nice wheels…”
Hera’s eyes are atomic components, which represent and fill in for a greater molecular complexity. (We do not consider characters as assemblages of parts, any more than we conceive of real people as aggregates of separate components. We conceive of people/characters as wholes—monads.)
I conceive of myself as “one,” not “many.”
For Anna Karenina, her “shining gray eyes” are Anna; the piece of her we readers grasp. Her eyes are like Hera’s: they are synecdochic; they are her epithets.
Metonymy, like metaphor, is thought by some to be a part of our innate language faculty—and an even greater foundational aspect of a human being’s natural cognitive abilities. (Our understanding of the part-for-whole relationship is an important tool by which we understand our world and communicate that understanding to others.) As embodied creatures, we consist of corporeal forms, physiques, which are in turn composed of parts. Being born with a body entails being born with some natural abstract sense of this relationship—of synecdoche.
(Look at your fingernail: You are, in some senses, this fingernail, but your fingernail is also part of you.)
This inborn ability to extrapolate a whole from a part is fundamental and reflexive, and understanding the part-whole structure enables us, somehow, to see characters, to see narrative, just as it enables us to function, mentally, physically, in the world.
***
Taking a part for a whole is a kind of substitution.
Metaphors and analogies, like metonymies, are also substitutions.
When Romeo compares Juliet to the sun in Shakespeare’s play, he is making an analogy (Juliet is like the sun) but he is also letting the sun replace Juliet (Juliet is the sun), such that he may use the metaphor to generate further information and understand other relationships, both abstract and concrete. (Rosaline is like the moon, for instance.) The metaphoric Juliet thus supersedes the character “Juliet,” a personified Juliet being too complex to mentally encompass. Juliet being the sun thereby becomes another name tag.
SOME OF
THE METAPHORS
USED IN THIS
BOOK TO
DESCRIBE THE
READING
EXPERIENCE:
Arch
Arrow
Atom
Audience
Aurora
Bathtub
Bridge
Camera
Candle
Cartoon
Car trip
Chair
Clock
Cloister
Coin
Computer program
Conductor
Contest
Dam
Dream
Eye
Eye (inward)
Eyelid
Family tree
Film
Fog
Function
Funnel
Game of chess
Glass of water
Glasses
Hallucination
Knife
Library book
Line
Locked room
Magnifying glass
Map
Maze
Metaphor itself
Microscope
Model-building
Molecule
Music
Orchestra
Psychotherapy
Puzzle
Religious vision
River
Road
Road sign
Role-playing game
Rorschach blot
Rulebook
Sketch
&
nbsp; Spotlight
Textbook
Vector
Video game
Walk
Wall
Wine
Epithets and metaphors are not names, but neither are they descriptions. Which aspect of a character an author chooses to represent them with is crucial. This is a method by which the author further defines his characters. If Buck Mulligan is “stately, plump,” it is for an important reason.
As I mentioned, this technique, the use of epithets, may be the method through which we define the (actual) people around us … we push an attribute of theirs to the fore; we “foreground” a piece of them and then let that piece suffice. (I have a friend, and when I think of him, I see only his glasses.)
And I wonder…
How could we do otherwise?
Without such tools, the world would be presenting us, constantly, with occasions so abundantly and elaborately informative as to be crippling.
IT IS
BLURRED
The world, as we read it, is made of fragments. Discontinuous points—discrete and dispersed.
(So are we. So too our coworkers; our spouses; parents; children; friends…)
We know ourselves and those around us by our readings of them, by the epithets we have given them, by their metaphors, synecdoches, metonymies. Even those we love most in the world. We read them in their fragments and substitutions.
The world for us is a work in progress. And what we understand of it we understand by cobbling these pieces together—synthesizing them over time.
It is the synthesis that we know. (It is all we know.)
And all the while we are committed to believing in the totality—the fiction of seeing.*
*Vision itself, binocular vision, is a fiction—a synthesis—in which we combine two distinct optical views of the world (while subtracting our noses).
When we apprehend the world (the parts of it that are legible to us), we do so one piece at a time. These single pieces of the world are our conscious perceptions. What these conscious perceptions consist of, we don’t know, though we assume that our experience of the world is an admixture of that which is already present, and that which we ourselves contribute (our selves—our memories, opinions, proclivities, and so on).
Authors are curators of experience. They filter the world’s noise, and out of that noise they make the purest signal they can—out of disorder they create narrative. They administer this narrative in the form of a book, and preside, in some ineffable way, over the reading experience. Yet no matter how pure the data set that authors provide to readers—no matter how diligently prefiltered and tightly reconstructed—readers’ brains will continue in their prescribed assignment: to analyze, screen, and sort. Our brains will treat a book as if it were any other of the world’s many unfiltered, encrypted signals. That is, the author’s book, for readers, reverts to a species of noise. We take in as much of the author’s world as we can, and mix this material with our own in the alembic of our reading minds, combining them to alchemize something unique. I would propose that this is why reading “works”: reading mirrors the procedure by which we acquaint ourselves with the world. It is not that our narratives necessarily tell us something true about the world (though they might), but rather that the practice of reading feels like, and is like, consciousness itself: imperfect; partial; hazy; co-creative.
***
Among the great mysteries of life is this fact: The world presents itself to us, and we take in the world. We don’t see the seams, the cracks, and the imperfections.
To the Lighthouse; again.
Lily Briscoe is painting on the lawn…
This painting of hers, with its abstractions, is Woolf’s central metaphor for the act of creation in general—a writer or poet or composer’s reconstruction of this slippery world of ours. More specifically, the painting is a proxy for the book To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
How does Lily Briscoe’s painting reproduce the scene? Mrs. Ramsay, James, the house, the window?
But the picture was not of them, she said. Or not in his sense. There are other senses too in which one might reverence them. By a shadow here and a light there, for instance. Her tribute took that form if, as she vaguely supposed, a picture must be a tribute. A mother and child might be reduced to a shadow without irreverence.
Writers reduce when they write, and readers reduce when they read. The brain itself is built to reduce, replace, emblemize … Verisimilitude is not only a false idol, but also an unattainable goal. So we reduce. And it is not without reverence that we reduce. This is how we apprehend our world. This is what humans do.
Picturing stories is making reductions. Through reduction, we create meaning.
These reductions are the world as we see it—they are what we see when we read, and they are what we see when we read the world.
They are what reading looks like (if it looks like anything at all).
***
Lily painting:
And she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space … But this is one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail.
The outline. Not the detail.
There it was, her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something … She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred.
***
It was blurred.
***
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to many people, chief among these: Lexy Bloom, Jeff Alexander, Peter Terzian, Anne Messitte, Ben Shykind, Glenn Kurtz, Jenny Pouech, Sonny Mehta, Bridget Carey, Michael Silverberg, Dan Cantor, Peter Pitzele, Russell Perreault, Claudia Martinez, Tom Pold, Dan Frank, Barbara Richard, Roz Parr, Paige Smith, Megan Wilson, Carol Carson, Tony Chirico, Kate Runde, Stephen McNabb, Jaime De Pablos, LuAnn Walther, Quinn O’Neill, Mike Jones, everyone at Vintage Books, Jennifer Olsen, Pablo Delcan, Oliver Munday, Cardon Webb, David Wike, Max Fenton, Arthur Danto, Wallace Gray; my first and best audience: Judy Mendelsund and Lisa Mendelsund, and, always, Karla.
Finally: Thanks to the book cover designers—that loosely federated body of artists, publishing subalterns, and perpetual underclass. I’m proud to be one of your membership.
Permissions
Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg © Alinari Archives/The Image Works; Portrait of a Lady by Franz Xaver Winterhalter/Private Collection/Photo © Christie’s Images/The Bridgeman Art Library; Portrait of an Unknown Woman, 1883 by Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy; Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina © SV Bilderdienst/DIZ Muenchen/The Image Works; Greta Garbo by George Hurrell; Movie star © Ronald Grant Archive/Mary Evans/The Image Works; Man reading icon made by Freepik from Flaticon.com; Dead chicken © mhatzapa/Shutterstock; Gerry Mulligan © Bob Willoughby/Redferns/Getty Images; Carey Mulligan © Tom Belcher/Capital Pictures/Retna Ltd.; A Hubble Space Telescope image of the typical globular cluster Messier 80/NASA; Mona Lisa Paint-by-Numbers courtesy of Don Brand (Mobii); Nabokov Metamorphosis notes © Vladimir Nabokov, courtesy of the Vladimir Nabokov Archive at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC; Joyce drawing courtesy of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University; Drawing of Three Women Boarding a Streetcar While Two Men Watch by William Faulkner, used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.; Lion Tamer by Gibson & Co. courtesy the Library of Congress; Roland Barthes © Ulf Andersen/Getty Images; Nabokov novel map © Vladimir Nabokov, courtesy of the Vladimir Nabokov Archive at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC; The Hobbit © The J R R Tolkien Estate Limited 1937, 1965. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publisher Ltd; William Wordsworth by
Edwin Edwards courtesy of The British Library; scene from Last Year at Marienbad, photo: The Kobal Collection at Art Resource, NY; The Ecstasy of St. Teresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, NY; Pipe by Magritte © VOOK/Shutterstock; Achilles by Ernest Hester © Panagiotis Karapanagiotis/Alamy; Pentagon courtesy of the Library of Congress; Mercury Comet courtesy of Ford Images
“Levin gazed at the portrait, which stood out from the frame in the brilliant light thrown on it, and he could not tear himself away from it … It was not a picture, but a living, charming woman, with black curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; triumphantly and softly she looked at him with eyes that baffled him. She was not living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be.”
—Anna Karenina
What We See When We Read (9780804171649) Page 7
