What We See When We Read

THE PART

& THE WHOLE

I’m reading The Iliad, and I notice (at this point: unsurprisingly) that Homer gives his character Achilles very few physical attributes. Much of what I know of Achilles in my reading is extrapolated.

Luckily (lest I mistake Achilles for someone else; say, Patroclus…), Achilles comes with an epithet attached to him. Achilles is “swift-footed.”

This epithet is like a name tag. (A Homeric epithet is also a mnemonic device for the reader and the poet alike.) The goddess Athena is given an epithet as well: she is “gray-eyed,” glaucopis. (She is also “white-armed.”) The goddess Hera is “Ox-eyed.”

(I’ve always loved the balefulness of this image—it adds a sympathetic psychological depth to a goddess traditionally characterized as a shrill and jealous harridan.)

These various epithets are more formalized than descriptions.

Homeric epithets are more often than not pictorial—moreover, they are also often picturesque. Being picturesque makes them memorable.^*

^*What, for example, does a “wine-dark” sea look like? This has been a subject of much debate. Is a wine-dark sea a green or blue sea touched with the roseate colors of the sunset or sunrise? Is Homer’s ocean blue? Or did it appear red to him? Did the Greeks have the capacity to see blue? Goethe in his Theory of Color mentions that colors were less strictly defined for the ancient Greeks: “Pure red (purpur) fluctuates between warm red and blue, sometimes inclining to scarlet, sometimes to violet.” So was the sea “wine-dark” for Homer because it “looked that way”? Or because “wine-dark” was rythmically helpful to the poet—or because it was a memorable epithet?

***

“Gray-eyed” and “Ox-eyed” are not mere imagistic details. When one hears “Ox-eyed Hera” one does not picture a floating set of heavy-lidded eyes.

Hera’s eyes, to some extent, stand in for the entire character: they are parts of her that are proxies for the totality of her. Hera’s eyes are an instance of what is called metonymy. Metonymy is a figure of speech in which one thing (or idea) is called by the name of another thing (or idea) to which it is related. Generally speaking, this related idea is salient. For instance, the Pentagon…

…refers to a building, but more important, it refers to the United States’ military leadership that is housed in that building. The building is like a synonym; a related, associated concept that becomes a stand-in for the Department of Defense. Similarly, the expression “the White House” refers to the entire presidential staff, and (pulling the lens back farther) “Washington” stands in for the entire U.S. government. Here, concrete facts (geographical locations, buildings) are proxies for more elaborate and convoluted notions.

***

Hera’s eyes are an instance of metonymy…

But more specifically, Hera’s eyes are an instance of synecdoche—a synecdoche is a metonym in which the part refers to the whole.

For instance: Men (sailors) can become “Hands …”

“All hands

on deck!”

Or: “Nice wheels…”

Hera’s eyes are atomic components, which represent and fill in for a greater molecular complexity. (We do not consider characters as assemblages of parts, any more than we conceive of real people as aggregates of separate components. We conceive of people/characters as wholes—monads.)

I conceive of myself as “one,” not “many.”

For Anna Karenina, her “shining gray eyes” are Anna; the piece of her we readers grasp. Her eyes are like Hera’s: they are synecdochic; they are her epithets.

Metonymy, like metaphor, is thought by some to be a part of our innate language faculty—and an even greater foundational aspect of a human being’s natural cognitive abilities. (Our understanding of the part-for-whole relationship is an important tool by which we understand our world and communicate that understanding to others.) As embodied creatures, we consist of corporeal forms, physiques, which are in turn composed of parts. Being born with a body entails being born with some natural abstract sense of this relationship—of synecdoche.

(Look at your fingernail: You are, in some senses, this fingernail, but your fingernail is also part of you.)

This inborn ability to extrapolate a whole from a part is fundamental and reflexive, and understanding the part-whole structure enables us, somehow, to see characters, to see narrative, just as it enables us to function, mentally, physically, in the world.

***

Taking a part for a whole is a kind of substitution.

Metaphors and analogies, like metonymies, are also substitutions.

When Romeo compares Juliet to the sun in Shakespeare’s play, he is making an analogy (Juliet is like the sun) but he is also letting the sun replace Juliet (Juliet is the sun), such that he may use the metaphor to generate further information and understand other relationships, both abstract and concrete. (Rosaline is like the moon, for instance.) The metaphoric Juliet thus supersedes the character “Juliet,” a personified Juliet being too complex to mentally encompass. Juliet being the sun thereby becomes another name tag.

SOME OF

THE METAPHORS

USED IN THIS

BOOK TO

DESCRIBE THE

READING

EXPERIENCE:

Arch

Arrow

Atom

Audience

Aurora

Bathtub

Bridge

Camera

Candle

Cartoon

Car trip

Chair

Clock

Cloister

Coin

Computer program

Conductor

Contest

Dam

Dream

Eye

Eye (inward)

Eyelid

Family tree

Film

Fog

Function

Funnel

Game of chess

Glass of water

Glasses

Hallucination

Knife

Library book

Line

Locked room

Magnifying glass

Map

Maze

Metaphor itself

Microscope

Model-building

Molecule

Music

Orchestra

Psychotherapy

Puzzle

Religious vision

River

Road

Road sign

Role-playing game

Rorschach blot

Rulebook

Sketch

Spotlight

Textbook

Vector

Video game

Walk

Wall

Wine

Epithets and metaphors are not names, but neither are they descriptions. Which aspect of a character an author chooses to represent them with is crucial. This is a method by which the author further defines his characters. If Buck Mulligan is “stately, plump,” it is for an important reason.

As I mentioned, this technique, the use of epithets, may be the method through which we define the (actual) people around us … we push an attribute of theirs to the fore; we “foreground” a piece of them and then let that piece suffice. (I have a friend, and when I think of him, I see only his glasses.)

And I wonder…

How could we do otherwise?

Without such tools, the world would be presenting us, constantly, with occasions so abundantly and elaborately informative as to be crippling.