What We See When We Read (9780804171649)

MEMORY

& FANTASY

Much of our reading imagination comprises visual free association. Much of our reading imagination is untethered from the author’s text.

(We daydream while reading.)

A novel invites our interpretive skills, but it also invites our minds to wander.

The reading imagination is loosely associative—but it is not random.

(Our reading imaginations may not be overtly coherent, but they are still meaningful.)

So, it occurs to me that perhaps memory—being the fodder of the imagination, and being intermingled with imagination—feels like imagination; and imagination feels like memory, being constructed of it as well.

Memory is made of the imaginary; the imaginary made of memory.

I am reading Dickens again (Our Mutual Friend), and I’m imagining something from the book—an industrial harbor: a river, boats, wharves, warehouses…

From where is the material for my picturing this scene derived? I search my memory to find a similar place, with similar docks. It takes a while.

But then I remember a trip I took with my family when I was a child. There was a river, and a dock—it’s the same dock as the dock I just imagined.

I realize later that, when a new friend described to me his home in Spain, with its “docks,” I was picturing this same dock—the dock I saw on my childhood vacation; the dock I “used” already in imagining the novel I am reading.

(How many times have I used this dock?)

The act of picturing the events and trappings of fiction delivers unintentional glimpses into our pasts.

(And we may search our imaginings, as we search our dreams, for hints and fragments of our lost experience.)

Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words “contain” meanings, but, more important, words potentiate meaning…

***

River, the word, contains within it all rivers, which flow like tributaries into it. And this word contains not only all rivers, but more important all my rivers: every accessible experience of every river I’ve seen, swum in, fished, heard, heard about, felt directly or been affected by in any other manner oblique, secondhand or otherwise. These “rivers” are infinitely tessellating rills and affluents that feed fiction’s ability to spur the imagination. I read the word river and, with or without context, I’ll dip beneath its surface. (I’m a child wading in the moil and suck, my feet cut on a river’s rock-bottom; or the gray river just out the window, now, just to my right, over the trees of the park—spackled with ice. Or—the almost seismic eroticism of a memory from my teens—of the shift of a skirt on a girl in spring, on a quai by an arabesque of a river, in a foreign city…)

This is a word’s dormant power, brimming with pertinence. So little is needed from the author, when you think of it.

(We are already flooded by river water, and only need the author to tap this reservoir.)