What We See When We Read (9780804171649)

SKETCHING

Of course, as Oliver Sacks reminds us in his Hallucinations: “One does not see with the eyes; one sees with the mind.”

And our minds are unaware of the trip and flutter of our visual organs.

We fix what is a fragmentary draft—we take the sketch that is reading and fill it in, crosshatch, color in the spaces…

Our minds synthesize the disparate pieces, and create a painting out of a mere outline. (Though I am using a visual metaphor to describe a process that is semantic.)^*

^*“It is no more essential to the understanding of a proposition that one should imagine anything in connection to it, than that one should make a sketch from it.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations

Some people actually sketch as they read in an attempt to clarify, stabilize, and make fast what they know about the appearances of people or places in a book. Nabokov did this. (On the left is his version of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa.)

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Evelyn Waugh was an illustrator. Poe was a deft portraitist. Hermann Hesse was a skilled painter, as was Strindberg. Emily and Charlotte Brontë drew, as did Goethe, Dostoevsky, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Ruskin, Dos Passos, Blake, Pushkin…

Dostoevsky’s sketches for Crime and Punishment

An author might draw for pleasure. But sometimes for an author, drawing is a heuristic tool. An author will sometimes draw a figure or scene in order to better paint its verbal portrait (sketching might help the author describe a character, as the author can describe his sketch, rather than the nebulous contents of his mind).

Joyce’s Leopold Bloom

These drawings are a private matter; they are intended for the author only (as earlier drafts of a novel might be).

Authors can also be idle doodlers. I know Joyce squiggled out a picture of Leopold Bloom but he didn’t intend for readers to see this image.^*

^*Though he did consent to having Henri Matisse illustrate Ulysses. (Matisse clearly never read Joyce’s book, and seemed content to render Homer’s text instead.)

(This doodle of Joyce’s shouldn’t inform our reading of his verbal portrait of Leo Bloom, and it certainly bears no resemblance to my own Leo Bloom. Joyce’s sketch of Bloom is a caricature.)

And on the whole, the enormous disparity between a great author’s verbal talent and his or her artistic efforts renders any effort to find cross-medium meaning futile. For instance, Faulkner’s prose style and his drawing style are utterly distinct.

(Above, a drawing by W. Faulkner. There is nothing to be learned here.)

Kafka drew what seems to be Josef K, or a similar figure (perhaps Kafka himself?):

The Czech poet Gustav Janouch relates this particular incident, involving Kafka drawing:

As I approached him, he laid the pencil down on the paper which was covered with hastily executed sketches of strange figures.

“You’ve been drawing?”

Kafka gave an apologetic smile: “No. These are only doodles.”

“May I look? As you know, I’m interested in drawing.”

“But these aren’t drawings to be shown to anyone. They are purely personal, and therefore illegible hieroglyphs.”

He took the piece of paper and with both hands pressed it into a ball which he tossed into a waste-paper basket beside the desk.

“My figures have no proper spatial proportions. They have no horizon of their own. The perspective of the shapes I try to capture lies outside of the paper, and the other unsharpened end of the pencil—in myself!”

Much of what Kafka says about his sketches could be applied to his fiction as well. I wonder if Kafka gave a similar rationale when he demanded that Max Brod destroy his writings, the horizons of which also stretch beyond the boundaries of “the paper.” This is not to say that Kafka’s sketches are as significant as his writing, but I wonder if these drawings don’t point toward a manner of interpreting Kafka’s prose.

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Some authors make sketches of subject matter from the worlds they’ve created. Sometimes these sketches are illustrations, meant to accompany texts. (These authors are author-illustrators.) William Thackeray, for instance. Here is one of Thackeray’s own illustrations for his Vanity Fair:

We readers are relieved of the onus of creating mental pictures for novels and stories that already include actual pictures (illustrated novels). Henry James, in his preface to The Golden Bowl, has this to say:

Anything that relieves responsible prose of the duty of being, while placed before us, good enough, interesting enough and, if the question be of picture, pictorial enough, above all in itself, does the worst of services…

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I find that when I’m reading a book with illustrations, the book’s pictures will shape my mental visions—but only while I am looking at these illustrations. After a period (which varies in length according to how often the illustrations appear in a text), the particular mental image of that illustration fades.^*

^*Unless, that is, you are reading a book that has illustrations on every page. In which case there is simply no escaping the imposition of another’s imagination. Ahem.

Wittgenstein (this time in his Philosophical Grammar) writes:

“We do sometimes see memory pictures in our minds: but commonly they are only scattered through the memory like illustrations in a story book.”

This sounds right to me, and can apply to imaging while reading as well—though the question remains:

What do we see during the unillustrated part of the story?