What We See When We Read (9780804171649) Read online

  The book opens like this:

  “ ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay.”

  I imagine these words echoing in a void. Who is Mrs. Ramsay? Where is she? She is speaking to someone. Two faceless people in a void—inchoate and unconstituted.

  As we read on, Mrs. Ramsay becomes a collage, composed of clippings, like the ones in her son James’s book.

  ***

  Mrs. Ramsay is speaking to her son, we are told. Is she, perhaps, seventy—and he fifty? No, we learn that he is only six. Revisions are made. And so on. If fiction were linear we would learn to wait, in order to picture. But we don’t wait. We begin imaging right out of the gate, immediately upon beginning a book.

  When we remember reading books, we don’t remember having made these constant little adjustments.

  Once again: We simply remember it as if we had watched the movie…

  OPENINGS

  When I read, I withdraw from the phenomenal world. I turn my attention “inward.” Paradoxically, I turn outward toward the book I am holding, and, as if the book were a mirror, I feel as though I am looking inward. (This idea of a mirror is an analogy for the act of reading. And I can imagine other analogies as well: For instance, I can imagine reading is like withdrawing to a cloister behind my eyes—an open court, hemmed by a covered path; a fountain, a tree—a place of contemplation. But this is not what I see when I read. I don’t see a cloister, or a mirror. What I see when I’m reading is not the act of reading itself, nor do I see analogies for the act of reading.)

  When I read, my retirement from the phenomenal world is undertaken too quickly to notice. The world in front of me and the world “inside” me are not merely adjacent, but overlapping; superimposed. A book feels like the intersection of these two domains—or like a conduit; a bridge; a passage between them.

  When my eyes are closed, the seen (the aurora borealis of my inner lids) and the imagined (say, an image of Anna Karenina) are never more than a volitional flick away from each other. Reading is like this closed-eye world—and reading takes place behind lids of a sort. An open book acts as a blind—its boards and pages shut out the world’s clamorous stimuli and encourage the imagination.

  The openings of To the Lighthouse and Moby-Dick are confusing for the reader—we haven’t yet been given sufficient information to begin processing the narrative and its imagery.

  But we are used to such confusion. All books open in doubt and dislocation.

  When you first open a book, you enter a liminal space. You are neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book (say, this book), nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward). To some extent this polydimensionality describes the feeling of reading in general—one is in

  Italo Calvino describes this intermediacy…

  The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.

  Bleak House opens in fog—and this fog is a component part of the world Charles Dickens has written into being.

  The fog is also a reference to the “actual” fog of London.

  This fog is also a metaphor for the English chancery court system.

  I just used this same fog as a visual metaphor for the openings of books in general.

  The only one of these fogs that is completely indecipherable to me is the visual effect, in fiction, of fog.

  TIME

  I read a book aloud to my daughter. I read this passage to her:

  When I performed that scream for my daughter, it was in an uninflected, neutral voice—not because I can’t act (although I can’t), but because I didn’t yet know which character was screaming. When I learned, farther down the page, who the screaming character was, my daughter made me go back and read the passage again—this time with a high, girlish voice appropriate to that particular character…

  This is the process through which we visualize characters. We start thinking of them one way—and then lo, fifty pages later, we find out they are different from our mental placeholder in some crucial way, and we readjust.

  ***

  James Joyce’s Ulysses opens like so:

  “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan …”

  When Buck Mulligan appears, he comes at us adjectives first. His adjectives precede him.

  A first reading of Ulysses might generate a series of static images in the reader’s mind; each picture relating to Buck’s descriptors, one by one, as they appear.

  These adjectives are asynchronous; they may appear out of time.

  The reading imagination reveals our own dispositions. The book has drawn them out of us.

  (Our dispositions are strange…)

  The book might later eliminate these in favor of others.

  But (of course) we do not apprehend words as we are reading them…

  When we read, we take in whole eyefuls of words. We gulp them like water.

  ***

  A word’s context matters. The significance of a word is contingent on the words that surround it. In this way, words are like musical notes. Imagine a single tone…

  It is like a word out of context. You might consider such a single pitch as one might consider a noise (especially if the note is produced by, say, a car horn)—i.e., devoid of meaning.

  Add another note and there is now some context with which to consider the first. A chord is now heard, even if one wasn’t intended.

  Add a third note and meaning becomes further narrowed. Mood is changed utterly by virtue of context. So it is with words.

  Context—not just semantic but narrative context—accumulates only as one reads deeper and deeper into a text.

  Despite this fact—that our understanding of a narrative develops throughout the course of a story—I’ve noticed that the intensity of my imagination does not increase, as a result, toward the end of a book. The final pages of books are not full of spectacle, but rather, more pregnant with significance.

  (I only want to underscore, again, the difference between seeing and understanding.)

  ***

  In order to make sense of a book’s words and phrases we must think ahead when we read—we must anticipate. This is how we readers contend with the cul-de-sacs, hiccups, gaps, and enjambments of our linear, written language.

  We are picturing what we are told to see, but also we are picturing what we imagine we will be told to see, farther down the page. If a character rounds a corner, we predict what’s around the bend (even if the author refuses to tell us).

  We gulp words and phrases when we read quickly, but we also may choose to savor some texts, and roll them on our tongues.

  (Does the speed at which we read affect the vividness of our imagination?)

  ***

  Have you ever walked along the shoulder of a road upon which you normally drive? Details you hadn’t seen at high speed are suddenly revealed. You learn that a road is really two different roads—one for pedestrians and another for passengers. These roads bear only a thin, cartographical relationship to each other. The experiences of these roads are utterly distinct.

  If books were roads, some would be made for driving quickly—details are scant, and what details there are appear drab—but the velocity and torque of the narrative is exhilarating. Some books, if seen as roads, would be made for walking—the trajectory of the road mattering far less than the vistas these roads might afford. The best book for me: I drive through it quickly but am forced to stop on occasion, to pull over and marvel. These books are books meant to be reread. (The first time through, I can tear along, as fast as possible, and then later, I’ll enjoy a leisurely stroll—so that I can see what I’ve missed.)

  I’m reading aloud to my daughter again. (I do this every night.)

  I notice that I still read words from the end of a previous page after I’ve already turned to a new page.

  Our eyes and our minds, as I’ve mentioned, read ahead.
r />   I am picturing something from one part of the page as I am gathering information from another.

  At once (at a gulp) we readers:

  1. Read a sentence…

  2. Read several sentences ahead…

  3. Maintain consciousness of the content of sentences we have already read…

  4. Imagine events down the line.

  The “eye-voice span” is the distance between where one’s eyes are looking on a page and where, on the page, one’s (inner) voice is reading.

  Reading is not a sequence of experienced “now”s…

  Past, present, and future are interwoven in each conscious moment—and in the performative reading moment as well. Each fluid interval comprises an admixture of: the memory of things read (past), the experience of a consciousness “now” (present), and the anticipation of things to be read (future).

  ***

  “I do not pass through a series of instances of now, the images of which I preserve and which, placed end to end, make a line. With the arrival of every moment, its predecessor undergoes a change: I still have it in hand and it is still there, but already it is sinking away below the level of presents; in order to retain it, I need to reach through a thin layer of time.” —Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Fictional characters do not appear to us all at once; they do not immediately materialize in our imaginations.

  James Joyce’s character Buck Mulligan is merely a cipher at the opening of Ulysses, but he becomes more nuanced over time—once we are witness to his interactions with the other actors in Joyce’s novel. Through his dealings with the population of Dublin, Buck’s other facets emerge. Slowly, he becomes complex.

  …he says to his roommate Stephen.

  (He is a sponger.)

  …he says of their absent third roommate, Haines.

  (He is disloyal.)

  (And so on.)

  Buck’s character, like the character of any literary figure, is an emergent phenomenon of action and interaction.

  Action: Aristotle claimed that Self is an action, and that we discover something’s nature through knowing its telos (its goals).

  A knife becomes a knife through cutting…

  An actor friend tells me that, for him, the creation of a character is “more about the adverbs than the adjectives.” I think what he means is that the (necessarily) insufficient facts about a character (provided by the author) don’t matter as much as what a character does, and how that character does it. “Anyway,” my friend continues, playwrights “don’t supply that many adjectives.”

  (Are we better at imagining actions than we are at picturing things?)

  ***

  “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks … figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that …”

  —John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday

  What would an action look like if it didn’t have a clear subject and object?

  Can an image be composed solely of actions?

  This is no more a possibility than that of building a sentence solely from verbs…

  Opening sentences; only the verbs…

  “Slandered arrested.” —The Trial

  “Came bearing crossed.” —Ulysses

  “See.” —The Sound and the Fury

  “Call.” —Moby-Dick

  “Are is.” —Anna Karenina

  Not long ago, I was reading a book when, suddenly, I jumped to attention—startled and embarrassed, like a tired driver drifting out of his lane. I had become conscious of the fact that I had no idea who a particular character I had been reading about was.

  Had I not been reading carefully enough?

  When a story reaches a confusing juncture—where there is a dislocation in time or space; when an unknown character appears in the text; if we begin to sense that we are ignorant of some seemingly crucial narrative fact—we are then faced with a dilemma: to go backwards and revisit earlier passages, or to press on.

  (We make choices about how we choose to imagine, and we make choices about how we choose to read.)

  In these cases, we may decide that we missed some key element, an event or explanation that came earlier in the book. And then we turn back the pages in an attempt to find the components of the story we’ve been missing.

  Other times, however, it seems better to just continue reading, bracketing our ignorance and suspending resolution. We may wonder if it is the author’s intention to reveal things slowly, and then we will be patient, as we tell ourselves a good reader should be. Or if we have indeed accidentally glossed over some crucial fact earlier in the book, we will decide that it is more important to continue, to remain in the moment, not to take ourselves out of the dramatic flow of the story. We decide that drama takes precedence over information. Especially if we deem that information unimportant.

  It requires so little to plow ahead.

  Characters can move through empty, undifferentiated spaces; rooms may contain unnamed, faceless, meaningless characters; seemingly purposeless subplots are endured as if read in a foreign language … we read on until we are, once again, oriented.

  We can read without seeing, and we can also read without understanding. What happens to our imaginations when we have lost the narrative thread in a story, when we breeze past words we don’t understand, when we read words without knowing to what they refer?

  When I am reading a sentence in a book that references something unknown to me (as when I have inadvertently skipped a passage), I feel as though I am reading a syntactically correct but semantically meaningless “nonsense” sentence. The sentence feels meaningful—it has the flavor of meaning—and the structure of its grammar thrusts me forward through the sentence and on to the next, though in truth I understand (and picture) nothing.

  How much of our reading takes place in such a suspension of meaning? How much time do we spend reading seemingly meaningful sentences without knowing their referrents? How much of our reading takes place in such a void—propelled by mere syntax?

  All good books are, at heart, mysteries. (Authors withhold information. This information may be revealed over time. This is one reason we bother to turn a book’s pages.) A book may be a literal mystery (Murder on the Orient Express, The Brothers Karamazov) or a metaphysical mystery (Moby-Dick, Doctor Faustus) or a mystery of a purely architectonic kind—a chronotopic mystery (Emma, The Odyssey).

  These mysteries are narrative mysteries—but books also defend their pictorial secrets…

  ***

  “Call me Ishmael …”

  This statement invites more questions than it answers. We desire that Ishmael’s face be, like the identity of one of Agatha Christie’s murderers:

  Writers of fiction tell us stories, and they also tell us how to read these stories. From a novel I assemble a series of rules—not only a methodology for reading (a suggested hermeneutics) but a manner of cognition, all of which carries me through the text (and sometimes lingers after a book ends). The author teaches me how to imagine, as well as when to imagine, and how much.

  ***

  In a detective mystery I’m reading, a principal character is introduced as “sulky and heavy featured.”

  Does this description, “sulky and heavy featured,” add to my sense of this character’s appearance? The author does not seem to set down this picture for such a purpose. Instead of offering a portrayal, she offers up another kind of signification.

  In the beginning of a classic detective novel we are introduced (as to a game board) to a bounded location containing limited players. The players correspond roughly to archetypes, which make them easier to remember, as well as easier to use for our mental mystery-solving calculations. Their names will be repeated often, as will a peculiar character trait. A seasoned reader of detective novels will recognize that character description is used here to signify
guilt or innocence.

  A mustache can be a clue, or even a motive. But more important, it can be a rank and purpose—and it tells the readers whether they are dealing with a pawn, a rook, a bishop, et cetera.

  ***

  In the game that is “reading detective novels,” the rules are codified—but also occasionally counterintuitive to the inexperienced. Such a character who is “sulky and heavy featured,” or “dark,” or “wildly unkempt,” or who is in possession of a “shifting gaze” or a “vulpine mouth,” will certainly, when all is said and done, be revealed to be innocent—a classic red herring. Occasionally, an author will be artless enough to genuinely telegraph a character’s guilt through their appearance; and sometimes, an author will be so artful as to set up a false red herring: the shifty-eyed stranger really is the killer. In these cases, adjectives are feints, parries, moves, and countermoves.

  ***

  (Character traits are also instructions for use.)

  ***

  In Jane Eyre, the tyrannical Mrs. Reed, a character introduced on page 1, is not fully (physically) described until page 43. When we are finally granted a descriptive account of her, she appears like so:

  Mrs. Reed might be at the time some six or seven and thirty; she was a woman of robust frame, square-shouldered and strong-limbed, not tall and, though stout, not obese; she had a somewhat large face, the under-jaw being much developed and very solid; her brow was low, her chin large and prominent, mouth and nose sufficiently regular; under her light eyebrows glimmered an eye devoid of ruth; her skin was dark and opaque, her hair nearly flaxen; her constitution was sound as a bell … she dressed well and had a presence and port calculated to set off handsome attire.