What We See When We Read

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.

—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.)