What We See When We Read

VIVIDNESS

In his Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov notes: “The first thing that we notice about the style of Dickens [in Bleak House] is his intensely sensuous imagery …”

When the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea…

Nabokov writes:

Let us pause: can we visualize that? Of course we can, and we do so with a greater thrill of recognition because in comparison to the conventional blue sea of literary tradition these silvery pools in the dark sea offer something that Dickens noted for the very first time with the innocent and sensuous eye of the true artist, saw and immediately put into words.

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Another passage from Dickens:

The welcome light soon shines upon the wall, as Krook … comes up slowly with his green-eyed cat following at his heels.

Nabokov, again:

All cats have green eyes—but notice how green these eyes are owing to the lighted candle…

Nabokov seems to be making the point that the greater the specificity and context for an image, the more evocative it is.

(I’m not so sure.)

Specificity and context add to the meaning and perhaps to the expressiveness of an image, but do not seem to add to the vividness of my experience of an image—that is, all this authorial care, the author’s observation and transcription of the world, does not help me to see. They help me to understand—but not to see. (At least, when I examine my responses to these types of descriptions, I do not perform any better in my attempts to envision the author’s world.)

As a reader I am delighted by the candlelit eyes of the cat; their specificity. But my delight is not due to some more vivid seeing. My delight is my tribute to the author’s having paid close attention to the world.

It is easy to confuse these two sensations.

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Dickens:

The person … receives his twopence … tosses the money in the air, catches it over-handed, and retires.

Nabokov:

This gesture, this one gesture, with its epithet “over-handed”—a trifle—but the man is alive forever in a good reader’s mind.

But is the character alive? Or is only his hand alive?

Dickens has conveyed something apparently true about the world, and the feeling of “truth” in this description derives from the description’s specificity.

Writers closely observe the world and record their observations. When we remark that a novel is “finely observed,” we are praising the writer’s ability to bear witness. This bearing witness is composed of two acts: the author’s initial observation in the real world, and then the translation of that observation into prose. The more “finely observed” the text, the better we readers recognize the thing or event in question. (Again—seeing and acknowledging are different activities.)

The author’s specificity allows me, the reader, to acknowledge a dual achievement of my own: 1) I’ve scrutinized the world closely enough to notice such details (silvery pools) myself (I remember them), and 2) I am astute enough to recognize the author’s art in calling out such a finely turned detail. I feel the thrill of recognition, but also the pleasure of self-satisfaction. (It’s buried, but it’s there.) Notice how Nabokov refers to a “good reader” in the previous passage?

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A thing that is “captured” by an author is taken from its context in the real world, where this event or thing may exist in a state of flux. An author might notice a wave in the ocean (or a “silvery pool”), and merely by remarking upon this wave, the author stabilizes it. It is now removed from the indiscriminate mass of water that surrounds it. By taking this wave and holding it fast in language, it ceases to be fluid. It is now an immobile wave.

We examine Dickens’s “silvery pools” through his microscope. Dickens has taken this event and placed it, contained, as if a solution on a slide, and enlarged it for us. What we are seeing is, at best, a distortion through that microscope’s lens, and at worst, we are seeing only the microscope’s lens itself. (To borrow a line of reasoning from the philosophy of science: What we are observing is not the thing itself, but the tools we have constructed to observe that thing.)

So when we praise “finely observed” prose, are we praising the evocative efficacy of the ideas, or the beauty of the equipment?

We imagine that it is both.

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Descriptions that are more elaborate and read with greater attention and deliberation are not necessarily more vivid. They may be more explanatory, but they don’t add up to a gestalt—a complete and simultaneous vision.

Read this long passage of Mark Twain’s:

The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side—you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black any more, but gray;…sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in the swift current which breaks on it and makes the streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river…

Did you see it all? I read this passage and I saw the dull line, and then the spreading paleness, and then I heard a screaking, and then voices, and then I saw the current…

How much detail an author supplies when describing the appearance of a character or a place will not improve a reader’s mental pictures (it will not bring these pictures into focus); however, the level of detail provided by a writer does determine what kind of reading experience a reader might have. In other words, lists of attributes, in literature, may have rhetorical power, but lack combinatorial power.

We have the idea that a long descriptive passage adds up to something. For example, the city of Zenobia, from Calvino’s Invisible Cities, is described in detail, therefore:

“For me, the main thing in a narrative is … the order of things … the pattern; the symmetry; the network of images deposited around it …”

—Italo Calvino, Le Monde, August 15, 1970

But description is not additive. Twain’s mist on the water does not carry over while I am seeing the log cabin. By the time I reach the words log cabin, I have forgotten about the mist entirely.^*

^* Jorge Luis Borges refers to the disparate elements listed in literary description as disjecta membra, which translates from the Latin as either “scattered (or dismembered) remains,” or “broken pottery shards.”

Vision, however, is additive, and simultaneous.

(We don’t see a chair, and then hang around in order to find out what color it is…)

(Perhaps if I’m told the chair is red, and then the chair is mentioned again, I’ll think: Oh, the red chair…)

Calvino’s city of Zenobia is detailed. His city of Chloe lacks detail. Here, the author allows—even invites—fantasy.

In this case we experience the power of the unsaid.

Invisible Cities again:

We may not see every image (or every word) in a long description…

…but each word (or each image) may be a load-bearing word (or image).

Maybe elaborate descriptions, like colorful descriptions, are misdirection. They seem to tell us something specific and meaningful (about a character, a setting, the world itself), but perhaps such description delights in inverse proportion to what it reveals.

More Colorful

Equals

Less Authentic

The writer Gilbert Sorrentino takes John Updike’s A Month of Sundays to task:

When the aim is “vivid” writing, it seems that anything goes as long as the surface dances … The work buckles and falls apart time after time under the weight of this concatenation of images, often linked together by comparisons that work to conceal the reality they are supposedly revealing: “… newsletters and quarterlies that pour through a minister’s letter slot like urine from a cow’s vulva.”

Such writing is, Sorrentino tells us, “Shiny and meaningless.”

The relationship between a mail slot and a cow’s vulva is confusing. Two objects are compared in order to help focus our mind’s eye, while in fact just the opposite happens—we focus only on the bolder (or in this case more grotesque) of the two images.

By contrast, Jean Giono writes: “Look up there, Orion–Queen Anne’s lace, a little bunch of stars.”

I see the flower, then I see the flowering of stars in the night sky. The flower itself doesn’t appear in the night sky of my mind, but the flower determines how the stars are arrayed.^*

^*Giono’s stars are clearer to me than Updike’s mail slot. Maybe that is because Giono would like me to see his stars, whereas Updike would like me to see—what? His prose? Giono’s flower and his stars are held in balance. One image assists the other.

(Giono could have written: “a little cluster of white stars.” But this description doesn’t bloom in quite the same way.)

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