What We See When We Read

BELIEF

When reading To the Lighthouse, we come across this sentence:

“While it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds …”

Can you smell this odor? When I read this passage I imagined I did. Of course, what I was “smelling” was the idea of a smell. Not something visceral like a real smell. Can we imagine smells? I posed this question to a neuroscientist, an expert in how the brain constructs “smell.”

He said:

I have not met the person who can convincingly tell you that they can re-create peppermint or lilac at will and with … immediacy. I myself cannot, but can force a small fragment of the experience in an almost intellectual way—not the visceral experience … Why is this? I think that smell … has a more primitive, somatic nature: you cannot create the qualities of intense pain or itch in your mind and feel them with any intensity either. Perhaps this is because smell is a primitive stimulus … in some ways, the more primitive sensations are more important to survival. The body does not want you to create the experience of smelling danger or food or a mate ex nihilo unless they are actually present—it costs to act, and false alarms can lead to problems.

When we imagine, our experiences of sensations are dulled, so as to distinguish these imagined senses from real cues. We “force” an experience in “an almost intellectual way.”

What interests me here is that most people believe they can imagine smells perfectly; viscerally. Or, while they are reading, they tell themselves that they have smelled something.

(We have read a book—that is to say: imagined it—perfectly.)

The smell of “salt and weeds”:

I am not smelling them as such. I am performing a synesthetic transformation. From the words “smell of salt and weeds” I am calling up an idea of a summer house by the sea, where I’ve stayed. The experience does not contain any true recall of an odor. It is a flash, which leaves a slight afterimage. It is spectral and mutating. An aurora.

A nebula of illusory material.

***

A sticking point—if I tell someone that I do not believe they can (viscerally) conjure a smell from memory, they are affronted. It is terrifying and disorienting that we can’t recapitulate the world in perfect facsimile. The metaphors we use to describe our minds, our memories, our very consciousness, are hard to relinquish. Reading a novel, we tell ourselves, is like watching a movie. Remembering a song is like sitting in an audience. If I say the word onion you are transported—as if smelling an onion all over again. It bothers people to suggest that this isn’t the case.

***

Someone might say, “Well, perhaps you can’t summon a smell (or sound) by memory, but maybe your sense of smell (or hearing) is poor.” (Fair enough.) “But maybe someone with a highly developed sense of smell can summon a scent viscerally—a sommelier, say, or a perfumer …”

A sommelier will have more responsive, complex olfactory responses than I do. As a result, a sommelier will have a better, more complete intellectual armature for his recall of scent—he will have a rich taxonomy of smells upon which to draw, and many metrics with which to judge and categorize. One scent may be acrid and lightly fruity. Another spicy and sour, lying upon a spectrum familiar only to experts. This knowledge, though, is no more than a mental trellis upon which to hang the vines of one’s olfactory memories.

But these vines don’t flower or bear fruit. Not in our minds.

***

I am a visual person (so I am told). I am a book designer, and my livelihood depends not only on my visual acuity in general, but on my ability to recognize the visual cues and prompts in texts. But when it comes to imagining characters, daffodils, lighthouses, or fog: I am as blind as the next person.

***

Perhaps our ability to picture, smell, hear clearly while we read depends on the strength of our faith in our ability to do so? Thinking we can picture, for all intents and purposes, is the same as picturing.

We subscribe to the belief (we have faith) that when we read we are, passively, receiving visions…

And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber.

Maybe the reading imagination is a fundamentally mystical experience—irreducible by logic. These visions are like revelations. They hail from transcendental sources, and are not of us—they are visited upon us. Perhaps the visions are due to a metaphysical union of reader and author. Perhaps the author taps the universal, and becomes a medium for it. (Perhaps the process is supernatural?)

And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone like a son of man, dressed in a robe … The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire.

Perhaps the very notion that readers are “see-ers” and the conventions we use to describe the reading experience derive from this tradition—the tradition of visitation, annunciation, dream vision, prophecy, and other manifestations of religious or mystical epiphany…

Angels, demons, burning bushes, muses, dreams, seizures, drug-induced reveries…

Dream vision (Geoffrey Chaucer):

And in my slepe I mette, as I lay,

How African, right in that selfe aray

That Scipioun him saw before that tyde,

Was comen, and stood right at my beddes syde

Poetic vision (Blake):

And by came an angel, who had a bright key, And he opened the coffins, and set them all free

Narcotic vision (Thomas De Quincey):

“A theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.”

Hallucination (Shakespeare):

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand?

Epileptic vision (Dostoyevsky):

His brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments … His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light.

Can the visions of literature claim to be, like religious epiphanies, or platonic verities, more real than phenomenal reality itself? Do they point toward some deeper manner of authenticity? (Or: by mimicking the real world, do they point toward its inauthenticity?)