What We See When We Read (9780804171649)

SKILL

A sketch may be judged according to how closely it cleaves to its subject, or it might be judged according to its relative degree of fantasy. But the quality of a sketch will depend most of all upon the skill of the draftsman. Is this true of the images our imaginations construct from narratives as well—our mental sketches? Do some readers have more vivid imaginations than others? Or is the reading imagination a resource with which we are universally, uniformly endowed?

I think of imagination as being like sight—a faculty most people possess. Though, of course, not everyone who is sighted sees with the same visual acuity…

We will sometimes say of someone, “What an amazing imagination they have,” by which we mean to say either “How creative they are!” or worse, “How insane or duplicitous they are!” Though in both cases, we are remarking upon a person’s ability to conjure something. When we praise an author’s imagination, I believe that what we are praising is his ability to transcribe his visions. (It’s not that this author’s mind is freer than ours—perhaps it is the opposite: his mind is less wild, and therefore it is easier for him to subdue his thoughts, tame them, and corrall them onto the page.)

Do stories and their inhabitants seem sketchy only at those moments in which we are imagining poorly?

Children read picture books; preteens read chapter books with pictures; eventually young adults graduate to books made up entirely of words. This process exists because we learn to read a language slowly, in stages, though I wonder if we also need, over time, to learn how to picture narratives unassisted. (The implication being that our imaginations can, and do, improve over time.)

So can we practice imagining—as we practice drawing—in order to imagine better?

If one reader might imagine better or worse than another reader, then can one culture be better at imagining than another?

Are the muscles we use to imagine growing weaker as our culture ages? Before the age of photography and film did we picture better, more clearly, than we do now? Our mnemonic skills are atrophying and I wonder if our visual creativity might be as well. Our culture’s visual overstimulation is widely discussed, and the conclusions drawn from the fact of this overstimulation are alarming. (Our imaginations are dying, some say.) Whatever the relative health of our imaginations, we still read. The rapid proliferation of the image has not kept us from the written word. And we read because books bestow upon us unique pleasures; pleasures that films, television, and so on cannot proffer.

Books allow us certain freedoms—we are free to be mentally active when we read; we are full participants in the making (the imagining) of a narrative.

Or, if it is true that we cannot advance beyond a vague sketchiness in our imaginings, then maybe this is a crucial component of why we love written stories. Which is to say that sometimes we only want to see very little.

“There were no ‘movies’ in those days, and the theatre was only occasionally permitted; but on long afternoons, after you had learned to read, you might lose yourself in ‘The Scottish Chiefs’ to your heart’s content. It seems to me that the beauty of this fashion of leisurely reading was that you had time to visualize everything. It was not necessary for you to be told that Helen Mar was beautiful. It was only necessary for her to say, in tones so entrancing that you heard them, ‘My Wallace!’ to know that she was the loveliest person in all Scotland.” —Maurice Francis Egan, Confessions of a Book-Lover