What We See When We Read

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.)

…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…

…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.)