What We See When We Read

CO-CREATION

Ernst Gombrich tells us that, in viewing art, there is no “innocent eye.” There is no such thing in art as the naïve reception of imagery. This is true of reading as well. Like painters, or writers, or even participants in a video game, we make choices—we have agency.

When we want to co-create, we read. We want to participate; and we want ownership. We would rather have sketches than verisimilitude—because the sketches, at least, are ours.^*

^*And yet, readers still contend that they want to “lose themselves” in a story…

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“Indeed, it is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books,” Proust remarks, in his book on reading (or, more properly, his book on Ruskin on reading) “… that … for the author they may be called ‘conclusions’ but for the reader ‘Incitements.’ ”

Good books incite us to imagine—to fill in an author’s suggestions. Without this co-creative act, without personalization, what you are left with is this…

Here is your Anna.

(This—the picture—is a form of robbery.)

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We desire the fluidity and vagary that books grant us when we imagine their content. Some things we do not wish to be shown.

Kafka wrote to the publisher of his Metamorphosis, afraid the cover designer might attempt a likeness of his ungeziefer:

Not that, please not that! The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance.

The prohibition is rather frantic. Was Kafka trying to preserve his readers’ imaginative acts? One translator of Kafka suggested to me that maybe Kafka wanted his insect seen, by the reader, only from within—looking out.

There is another option: visualizing may demand effort on the part of readers, but readers may also choose to resist the pictorial in favor of the conceptual.

The more I know of the world (its history, its geography), the closer I get to achieving what we think of as “the author’s view of things.” I might have visited the Hebrides or read other books that describe the islands. I might have seen illustrations and photographs of period dress, interior décor, and perhaps have learned something of Victorian mores … Knowing these things helps me to imagine Mrs. Ramsay’s drawing room, dining room, with some degree of verisimilitude.

Perhaps the author’s image of this setting is based on some real-world locale that we ourselves can simply see in a photograph or painting? Is this house, the setting for To the Lighthouse, based on one of the Woolfs’? I am tempted to look up this information (as another friend of mine did when he read To the Lighthouse). It would be a simple matter to find a picture of the Isle of Skye lighthouse. But would this deprive me of something? My vision of the book would gain in authenticity what it would lose in intimacy. (For me, the Ramsays’ summer house, filled with guests, is like the rough-and-tumble, rowdy houses my family rents during summers on Cape Cod. This image of the Cape is a grounding image for me. It allows me to relate to the book.) My friend was going to describe the Woolfs’ Hebridean house to me and I stopped him. My Ramsay house is a feeling, not a picture. And I wish to preserve this feeling. I do not want it supplanted by facts.

Well, maybe the house is not only a feeling … but the feeling has primacy over the image.

The idea of the house, and the emotions it evokes in me, are the nucleus of a complex atom, around which orbit various sounds, fleeting images, and an entire spectrum of personal associations.

These images we “see” when we read are personal: What we do not see is what the author pictured when writing a particular book. That is to say: Every narrative is meant to be transposed; imaginatively translated. Associatively translated. It is ours.

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A friend grew up in suburban Albany. He’s always been an avid reader, even as a child, and whenever he read, he tells me, he mentally situated the stories in the backyards and side streets of his native blocks, because he had no other frame of reference. I did this too. For me, the settings for most books I read was Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I grew up. So the stage for all of these epic encounters—for Jean-Christophe, and, say, Anna Karenina, or Moby-Dick—was a local public school, my neighbor’s backyard … It seems strange, funny even, to think of these grand sagas recast in this prosaic light. These various far-flung adventures, press-ganged, by force of will, onto such blasé and unromantic settings. Yet my personal readings of these books were undiminished by radical changes of milieu—by this personalizing of the reading experience. And my friend and I were doing, to some extent, what we all do when we sit down to read a work of fiction.

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We colonize books with our familiars; and we exile, repatriate the characters to lands we are more acquainted with.

We transpose works of nonfiction to similar effect.

When I read a book on the battle of Stalingrad, in my imagination the bombardment, occupation, encirclement, and liberation all took place in Manhattan. Or they took place in an alternate Manhattan; a through-the-looking-glass Manhattan; a counterfactual-history Manhattan; a Manhattangrad, consisting of Soviet-mandated architectural adjustments.

The difference here is that, unlike with fictional settings based on real locales, I feel a strange moral obligation to seek out more information about the real Stalingrad. My customized Stalingrad is a false idea. And however my personalizing of the scene helps me identify with the victims of this outsized drama—the actual victims of the actual tragic events—the act of visual substitution seems somehow disrespectful, wrong.^*

^*Yet I still graft myself into a narrative every time I read nonfiction. How could I not?

When we see plays performed on the stage, we work with a different set of standards. Hamlet is ours to picture as we’d like, as he might be played by a different actor in every new production produced. We do not refer to Hamlet as a character as much as a role. He is clearly meant to be inhabited: played. And Denmark is a set. It can be anywhere the director and stage designer imagine it to be.

(Perhaps these terms—role and set—should be used when describing novels?)

Doesn’t reading a novel mean producing a private play of sorts? Reading is casting, set decoration, direction, makeup, blocking, stage management…

Though books do not imply enactment in quite the same way that plays do.

A novelist’s objects, places, characters: we want ours to be his, and his to be ours. This desire is paradoxical. It is a desire for privileged access, and thus a type of greed. But it is also a hedge against loneliness—the vision is shared…

(Though perhaps it’s better to say that the vision is borrowed? Or even plagiarized?)

Of course, we also cherish the notion that books hold secrets; that books are reticent. (As I’ve mentioned: books safeguard mysteries.)

Can we picture whatever we’d like when we read? What is the author’s role in hemming in the boundaries of our imaginations?

Co-creation and Barthes’s “removal of the author”:

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.

The reader is … simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.

The author’s “removal” describes not only the passing of one paradigm (of the passive reception of “meaning”) but also naturally entails the end of another—the reader’s submissive reception of imagery. After all—if we posit the removal of the author—from whom would we be receiving imagery?

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