What We See When We Read (9780804171649)

by Mendelsund, Peter

  —Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

  This passage, above, is not so much an evocation of a vision of a river* as much as it is an evocation of a feeling: the feeling of being-happy-beside-a-river. (A feeling we all might remember.)

  *One of the common metaphors we use when describing the immersive drift of reading is that of floating on a river: we are carried along by a narrative, as if we were in an oarless boat. This metaphor implies a passivity that belies the vested involvement of our reading minds. Sometimes we must row hard against the current, or steer around a jutting rock. And even when we are coasting, the boat that is carrying us is: our own minds.

  Much of what we experience when we read is an overlapping of, or replacement by, one kind of sensation over another—a synesthetic event. A sound is seen; a color is heard; a sight is smelled; etc. When I mention wading through a river, the “moil and suck” of it, what I mean—and perhaps what you, reading it, might feel—is its eddy, a cool quadrant beneath your knees, and a heaviness of foot…

  Here is a wonderful character description from Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth:

  As she moved beside him, with her long light step, Selden was conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness: in the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair—was it ever so slightly brightened by art?—and the thick planting of her straight black lashes.

  It is helpful that we are told about the shape of this character’s hair, and the thickness of her lashes, but what is truly being communicated to us is a rhythm. This rhythm, in turn, conveys a young man’s elation at walking alongside a young woman. His growing happiness is communicated not semantically, but sonically—just listen:

  “Long light step … luxurious pleasure … black lashes …”

  The alliteration of the paragraph practically sings.

  (Which is to say that sometimes we confuse seeing and feeling.)

  As any poet will tell you, the rhythms, registers, and onomatopoeic sounds of words build a synesthetic transfer in listeners and readers (silent listeners).

  From a text arises music.

  Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,

  And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;

  But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,

  The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.

  When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,

  The line too labours, and the words move slow;

  Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,

  Flies o’er th’ unbending corn, and skims along the main.*

  *Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

  (Another verse I had to memorize in school.)

  So we also believe that we hear books; and that we hear them perfectly…

  Aaron Copland suggested that when we listen to music, we are listening on three “levels”: the sensuous, the expressive, and the semantic/musical. The sensuous is, for me, the easiest to forget and the hardest to conjure. If I imaginatively “hear” the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, I recall that insistent, downward-thrusting figuration. I don’t hear the “tutti,” or the individual instruments that make up the orchestra. I hear the shape of the notes, and their expressive quality. Strangely, I can recall the voices of singers. Is this because we can, ourselves, from our bodies, produce voice?

  Do we hear characters’ voices? (This seems less far-fetched than seeing their faces.) We certainly imagine that we can mentally “hear” our own voices when we aren’t speaking.

  “Reading in the third millennium BC may … have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture-symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.” —Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

  Earlier we read Proust describing the reading experience as “The frantic career of the eyes …”

  The quote ends: “… and…my voice, which had been following, noiselessly.”

  We grope our way through the world with the use of cross-sensory analogies—one sense describing another—though most of our analogies are spatial (such that the future is “forward” and quickly vibrating notes are “high”; happy is “up” and sad is “down”). We imagine that stories have “lines,” and we coordinate values, valleys, climaxes, as if plotting them on a graph, from one inchoate sense to another.

  Kurt Vonnegut proposed such a graph, showing the basic contours of plot, in his lecture “The Simple Shapes of Stories.” I’ve made such graphs myself…

  Laurence Sterne proposed the idea even earlier:

  Plotlines from, of, Tristram Shandy

  When I am immersed in a book, my mind begins to formulate corresponding visual patterns…

  The vectors in Kafka’s vision of New York City, from Amerika:

  or the mazes of Borges…

  or some other or overlapping or undulant thing for Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris…

  (Though it’s hard to say if these shapes are seen, felt, or—merely—understood.)

  SIGNIFIERS

  It should be mentioned that there are moments, when we read, when all we see are words. What we are looking at when we read are words, made up of letterforms, but we are trained to see past them—to look at what the words and letterforms point toward. Words are like arrows—they are something, and they also point toward something.

  ***

  Beckett remarked, of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, “it is not written at all. It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something, it is that something itself.”

  Words seem transparent to us because of their structure and purpose (they are signifiers) but also because the practice of reading is habitual. We have seen the “arrow” enough that we look only in the direction indicated.

  ***

  Though there are, in fact, languages that contain pictorial representations of the signified: pictograms; hieroglyphics. In these language systems, the signifier is not arbitrary—the sign shares visual characteristics with its referent. It is a picture of the thing it refers to.

  When I see the Chinese character that indicates “tree,” for example, I notice the shape of the character, and this shape encourages me to picture a certain kind of tree—of a certain thickness and shape. Similarly, when I see the Chinese character for “forest,” the configuration of characters puts me in mind of a certain size of wood—a copse, perhaps. I am responding to the character as a picture.

  (But this is only because I do not speak Chinese.)

  Chinese readers may not “see” the pictures that are constituent parts of their language, because reading Chinese, for them, is habitual (or so I’m told).

  A point of interest: The books that make the act of reading feel foreign and nonhabitual are not the books in which imaging is most difficult. Or, that is, when we read difficult books, with nontraditional narrative structures, we still imagine that we see.

  ***

  Tristram Shandy

  It is not only the letterforms that are like arrows when we read…

  …and paragraphs and chapters are arrows. Whole novels, plays, and stories are arrows.

  Oedipus, the play, to me, points downward.

  To read is: to look through; to look past…though also, to look, myopically, hopefully, toward…

  There is very little looking at.

  ***

  BELIEF

  When reading To the Lighthouse, we come across this sentence:

  “While it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds …”

  Can you smell this odor? When I read this passage I imagined I did. Of course, what I was “smelling” was the idea of a smell. Not something visceral like a real smell. Can we imagine smells? I posed this question to a neuroscientist, an expert in how the brain constructs “smell.”

  He
said:

  I have not met the person who can convincingly tell you that they can re-create peppermint or lilac at will and with … immediacy. I myself cannot, but can force a small fragment of the experience in an almost intellectual way—not the visceral experience … Why is this? I think that smell … has a more primitive, somatic nature: you cannot create the qualities of intense pain or itch in your mind and feel them with any intensity either. Perhaps this is because smell is a primitive stimulus … in some ways, the more primitive sensations are more important to survival. The body does not want you to create the experience of smelling danger or food or a mate ex nihilo unless they are actually present—it costs to act, and false alarms can lead to problems.

  When we imagine, our experiences of sensations are dulled, so as to distinguish these imagined senses from real cues. We “force” an experience in “an almost intellectual way.”

  What interests me here is that most people believe they can imagine smells perfectly; viscerally. Or, while they are reading, they tell themselves that they have smelled something.

  (We have read a book—that is to say: imagined it—perfectly.)

  The smell of “salt and weeds”:

  I am not smelling them as such. I am performing a synesthetic transformation. From the words “smell of salt and weeds” I am calling up an idea of a summer house by the sea, where I’ve stayed. The experience does not contain any true recall of an odor. It is a flash, which leaves a slight afterimage. It is spectral and mutating. An aurora.

  A nebula of illusory material.

  ***

  A sticking point—if I tell someone that I do not believe they can (viscerally) conjure a smell from memory, they are affronted. It is terrifying and disorienting that we can’t recapitulate the world in perfect facsimile. The metaphors we use to describe our minds, our memories, our very consciousness, are hard to relinquish. Reading a novel, we tell ourselves, is like watching a movie. Remembering a song is like sitting in an audience. If I say the word onion you are transported—as if smelling an onion all over again. It bothers people to suggest that this isn’t the case.

  ***

  Someone might say, “Well, perhaps you can’t summon a smell (or sound) by memory, but maybe your sense of smell (or hearing) is poor.” (Fair enough.) “But maybe someone with a highly developed sense of smell can summon a scent viscerally—a sommelier, say, or a perfumer …”

  A sommelier will have more responsive, complex olfactory responses than I do. As a result, a sommelier will have a better, more complete intellectual armature for his recall of scent—he will have a rich taxonomy of smells upon which to draw, and many metrics with which to judge and categorize. One scent may be acrid and lightly fruity. Another spicy and sour, lying upon a spectrum familiar only to experts. This knowledge, though, is no more than a mental trellis upon which to hang the vines of one’s olfactory memories.

  But these vines don’t flower or bear fruit. Not in our minds.

  ***

  I am a visual person (so I am told). I am a book designer, and my livelihood depends not only on my visual acuity in general, but on my ability to recognize the visual cues and prompts in texts. But when it comes to imagining characters, daffodils, lighthouses, or fog: I am as blind as the next person.

  ***

  Perhaps our ability to picture, smell, hear clearly while we read depends on the strength of our faith in our ability to do so? Thinking we can picture, for all intents and purposes, is the same as picturing.

  We subscribe to the belief (we have faith) that when we read we are, passively, receiving visions…

  And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber.

  Maybe the reading imagination is a fundamentally mystical experience—irreducible by logic. These visions are like revelations. They hail from transcendental sources, and are not of us—they are visited upon us. Perhaps the visions are due to a metaphysical union of reader and author. Perhaps the author taps the universal, and becomes a medium for it. (Perhaps the process is supernatural?)

  And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone like a son of man, dressed in a robe … The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire.

  Perhaps the very notion that readers are “see-ers” and the conventions we use to describe the reading experience derive from this tradition—the tradition of visitation, annunciation, dream vision, prophecy, and other manifestations of religious or mystical epiphany…

  Angels, demons, burning bushes, muses, dreams, seizures, drug-induced reveries…

  Dream vision (Geoffrey Chaucer):

  And in my slepe I mette, as I lay,

  How African, right in that selfe aray

  That Scipioun him saw before that tyde,

  Was comen, and stood right at my beddes syde

  Poetic vision (Blake):

  And by came an angel, who had a bright key, And he opened the coffins, and set them all free

  Narcotic vision (Thomas De Quincey):

  “A theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.”

  Hallucination (Shakespeare):

  Is this a dagger which I see before me,

  The handle toward my hand?

  Epileptic vision (Dostoyevsky):

  His brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments … His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light.

  Can the visions of literature claim to be, like religious epiphanies, or platonic verities, more real than phenomenal reality itself? Do they point toward some deeper manner of authenticity? (Or: by mimicking the real world, do they point toward its inauthenticity?)

  MODELS

  When we read about something—a place, a person—we separate it from the mass of entities that surround it. We distinguish it. We excise it from the undifferentiated. Think of Stubb’s pipe. Or Achilles’s shield. (This thing is different from all other things: this thing is not Ahab’s peg leg, or Hector’s helmet.) We then form some kind of mental representation of it. It is a pipe: like this, and not like that. We form representations, so we can remember, and manipulate the memory of this pipe, so the information can be reused. This representation is a model of some sort. So we readers are also model builders.

  Jean Piaget tells us that thought is “mental representation.”

  But what kind of representation? Codes? Symbols? Words? Propositions? Pictures?

  ***

  What are we modeling when we make mental representations of literary characters? Souls?

  I continue to interrogate readers … I ask them to describe a central fictional character (making sure to only discuss books they’ve just recently finished reading, or have reread several times, so that whatever imagery they conjured when reading would still be fresh in their minds). My subjects respond by offering up one or two physical characteristics of a character (for instance, “He’s short and bald—I know that much”), followed by a longer disquisition on the character’s persona (“He’s a coward, unfulfilled, regretful,” et cetera). I generally have to stop them at some point in order to remind them that I was asking only for physical description.

  That is to say, we confuse what a character looks like with who a character, putatively, is.

  In this way we are backward phrenologists, we readers. We extrapolate physiques from minds.

  ***

  “A great nose may be an index of a great soul.”

  —Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac

  Buck Mulligan (remember him? He is the character who appears at the opening of Joyce’s Ulysses)…

  Other things we know about him…

  He is, variously:

  “Equine” f
aced; “sullen” of jowl; “strong” and “well-knit”; light haired; white-toothed; “smokeblue” eyed; “Impatient”; older than his occasional flush makes him appear; gowned; waist-coated; panama-hatted; frowning; “wheedling”; “coarsely vigorous”; “broadly smiling”; “erect”; “ribald”; “solemn as a dean”; “heavy”; “gleeful”; “pious”; “grave”; full of “honeyed malice …”

  None of these descriptors helps me to picture Buck (some of them seem downright contradictory: his being “plump” and his “equine” face, for instance).

  And these depictions of Buck could portray practically anyone. But it is Buck’s introductory epithet—stately, plump—that defines him. But not as a picture. That description becomes, for me, a designation of type.

  (This “stately” and this “plump” are like categories, in that they don’t describe so much as they characterize.)

  The novel is, among other things, a typology…

  I notice that we don’t praise the descriptive richness of fables (in direct contrast to what many readers find commendable in novels and stories). Here, characters are the transparently generalized types.

  The flatness of characters and settings in fables and parables—their purposefully two-dimensional, cartoonish aspect—allows such literary systems to function properly. What is important in these cases is universal applicability—as opposed to, say, psychological detail. This is true to the extent that we readers, when we read such tales, might become: a fox; a hawk; a grasshopper; a satyr; a stag.