***
What do we see
when we read? (Other than words on a page.) What do we picture in our minds?
***
Strangely, when we remember the experience of reading a book, we imagine a continuous unfolding of
images. We imagine, in essence, that the experience of reading was like that of
watching a film. For instance I remember reading Anna Karenina: “I saw Oblonsky, and then I saw Oblonsky’s house,
and then I saw this, and then that…”
But this is not what actually
happens.
If I said to you “Describe Anna Karenina,” perhaps you’d
mention her beauty … if you were reading closely you’d mention her weight, or
maybe even her little mustache (yes. It’s there). Mathew Arnold remarks upon “Anna’s shoulders, and masses
of hair, and half-shut eyes…” But what does Anna Karenina look
like? You may feel intimate with a character (people like to say of a
brilliantly limned character: “it’s like I know
her) but this doesn’t mean you are actually picturing a person. Nothing so
fixed—nothing so choate.
***
Real visualizing requires will.
Most authors (wittingly, unwittingly), provide us, readers,
with more behavior for their characters than character description. Even if an
author excels at physical description, we are left with shambling concoctions
of stray body parts and random detail (author’s can’t tell us everything). We fill in lacunae. We
shade them. We gloss over them. We elide. . . . Anna: her hair, her weight:
These are facets only, and do not make up a true image of a person. They make up
a body type, a hair color … But what does
she look like? We don’t know. (Our mental sketches of characters are worse
than police composites.)
***
When I ask people if they can clearly imagine their favorite
characters, they say that, yes, of course they can. These characters are, in
the minds of these readers: “bodied
forth” (to borrow
Shakespeare’s phrase). Some readers go
further, and suggest that the only
way they can enjoy a novel is if the main players are easily visible:
“Can
you picture, in your mind, what she looks like now for me,” I ask.
“Sure,” they say, “As if she was standing here in front of me.”
“What
does her nose look like?”
“I hadn’t thought it
out; but now that I think of it, this would be the kind of person who would
have a nose like…”
“But
wait–How did you picture her before I asked? Nose-less?”
“Well…”
“Does
she have a heavy brow; what kind of hair cut does she have; where does she hold
her body fat; does she slouch; does she have laugh-lines…”
(Only a very tedious writer would tell you this much about a
character.)
Some readers swear to me they can picture these characters
perfectly while they are reading. I
doubt this, but I wonder now if our images of characters are vague because our
visual memories are vague in general.
A thought experiment: Picture your mother; now picture your
favorite literary character. (Or: picture your home. Then picture Howard’s End.)
The difference between your mother’s after-image and that of a literary
character you love, is that the more you concentrate, the more your mother might
come into focus. A character will not reveal herself. In fact the closer you
look, the farther away she gets.
(This is a relief, actually. When I impose a real visage on
a fictional character, the effect isn’t one of recognition, but dissonance. I
end up imagining someone I know. And then I think: that isn’t Anna!)
***
Often, when readers are asked to describe what the key
characters from their favorite books look like; they describe how a character moves
through space.
One reader, on Benjy Compson from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
“Lumbering, uncoordinated…”
But what does he look like?
***
Literary characters are physically vague—they have only a
few features, and these features don’t matter. Or, these features only matter
in that they help narrow a character’s meaning.
But these features don’t help us picture a character. Characters are ciphers.
And narratives are made richer by omission.
William Gass, on Mr. Cashmore from Henry James’s The
Awkward Age:
“We can imagine any number of
other sentences about Mr. Cashmore added… now the question is: what is Mr.
Cashmore? Here is the answer I shall give: Mr. Cashmore is (1) a noise, (2) a
proper name, (3) a complex system of ideas, (4) a controlling perception, (5)
an instrument of verbal organization, (6) a pretended mode of referring, and
(7) a source of verbal energy. He is not an object of perception, and nothing
whatever that is appropriate to persons can be correctly said of him.”
The same could be said of any character- of Nanda, from the
same book, or of Anna Karenina. Of course—isn’t it more important that Anna
loves Vronsky and feels trapped in her marriage? Isn’t more important that
Nanda recognizes the corruption of her mother’s social circle? It is how
characters are, in relation to
everyone and everything in their fictional, circumscribed world, that
ultimately matters. (“Lumbering, uncoordinated…”)
Characters are like a set of
rules which determine a particular outcome.
(((Anna & Young/Pretty) & (Karenin & Old/Ugly))➝ Vronksy) ∧ (Vronsky➝ Train) ¬ (Anna
& Karenin➝ Train)))
***
But if you indeed took the trouble to summon an image of
Ishmael what did you come up with? A sea-faring man of some sort? Is this a
picture or a category? Do you picture Richard Basehart, the actor in the John Huston adaptation? How
disappointing.
(One
should only watch a film adaptation of a favorite book after considering, very carefully, that the casting of the
film may very well become the permanent casting of the book in one’s mind. This
is a very real hazard.)
***
What
color is your Ishmael’s hair? Is it
curly or straight? Is he taller than you? If you don’t picture him clearly, do
you merely set aside a chit, a placeholder, that says on it “Protagonist,
narrator—first person?” Maybe this is enough. Ishamel probably evokes a feeling
in you—but this is not the same as seeing him.
Maybe Melville had a specific image in mind for his Ishmael.
Maybe Ishmael looked like someone he knew from his years at sea. Melville’s
image is not ours though. And no matter how well illustrated Ishmael may be (I
can’t remember if Melville describes Ishmael’s physical attributes and I’ve
read the book three times) chances are we will have to be constantly revising
our image of him as the book progresses. He is not one picture but many. We are ever reviewing and
reconsidering our mental portraits of characters in novels: amending them, backtracking
to check on them, updating them when new information arises…
What
kind of face you assign to Ishmael might depend upon what mood you are in on a
particular day. Ishmael might look as different from one chapter to the
next as, say, Tashtego does from Stubb.
(Sometimes,
in a play, several actors might play a single role. When we sit in an audience
watching such a play, the cognitive dissonance the multiple actors arouse is
evident to us. But not when we are reading. We still think back on the
experience as featuring a single actor.)
***
Emma
Bovary’s eye color, famously, changes during the course of the novel, Madame Bovary. Blue, brown, deep black… Does
this matter? How?
***
***
I read aloud (Harry Potter) to my youngest daughter. I read
this passage to her the other night:
Then Harry
heard a scream…
“…aaaaargh!”
The noise was coming from a
corridor nearby.
When
I performed that scream for my daughter, it was in an uninflected, neutral voice—Not
because I can’t act (I can’t), but because I didn’t yet know which character was screaming. When I
learned, further down the page, that the screamer was dotty Professor Trewlawny,
my daughter made me go back and read the passage again—this time with a high, loopy,
female voice appropriate to the character…
This
is the process through which we visualize characters. We start thinking of them
one way—and then lo, fifty pages later we find out they are different from our
mental placeholder in some crucial way.
***
I am just finishing Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse—a masterpiece of
literary phenomenology that is exemplary for, among other merits, its close descriptions
of sensory and psychological experience. The raw material of this book isn’t as
much character, place, and plot, as sense-data.
The book opens thus:
“’Yes, or course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsey.”
I imagine these words echoing in a void. Who is Mrs. Ramsey?
Where is she? She is speaking to
someone. Two faceless people in a void. As I read on she becomes a collage,
composed of clippings, like the clippings in her son James’ book.
She is also:
{Mother[Female(Human character)]}
She is all of these things. She
is compound.
***
Mrs. Ramsey is speaking to her son, we are told. Is she,
perhaps, seventy—and he fifty? No, we learn that he is only six. Revisions are
made. And so on. Fiction is linear (even non-linear fiction) so we must learn
to wait, if we are to picture correctly. But we don’t wait. We believe that we
are imaging accurately from the get-go: immediately upon beginning a book.
(When
we remember reading books, we don’t
remember having made these constant little adjustments. We remember watching the movie)
***
When we read, it is important that we believe that we are
seeing everything.
When I play the piano (as opposed to when I am listening to
piano music) I don’t hear my mistakes. My mind is too busy idealizing the music
to heed to the moment; to hear what is actually emanating from the instrument.
In this sense, the performative aspects of playing the piano inhibit my ability
to hear. Similarly, when we read, we
imagine that we see.
***
The
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical
Grammar, writes:
“…We
do sometimes see memory pictures in our minds: but commonly they are only
scattered through the memory like illustrations in a story book.”
This
sounds right to me, and can apply to imaging whilst reading as well—though I
have two questions:
What
do these “illustrations” look like?
And
also:
What
do we see during the un-illustrated part of the story?
***
To
say fiction is linear is not to say we read in a straight line. "The frantic career of the eyes,” is how
Proust described reading. The eye jumps around. If you are a fast reader, and
therefore comfortable recognizing where, in a block of text, the information
you are looking for lives, you hop backwards and forwards through books. If you
are scanning, you can scan for characters and their physical attributes. You
could read a book for only these
things. (If we read this way, if we excised all but the corporeal details,
wouldn’t we miss everything?)
***
Some
people actually sketch as they read in an attempt to clarify, stabilize and make
fast what they know about the appearances of people or places in a book.
Nabokov did this. Here’s his Gregor Samsa:
Does
sketching help us picture? The leap from sketch to focused image is an enormous leap. Perhaps what we see
when we read are, in fact, sketches. Perhaps
sketchiness is a crucial component of why we love written stories.
***
Do stories and their native inhabitants seem sketchy because we are bad at imagining?
Maybe the muscles we use to imagine are growing weaker as our culture ages. Before
the age of photography and film did we picture better, more clearly, than we do now? I know our mnemonic skills
are atrophying (we in the developed world: drowning in The Image, as we are)—our
visual creativity might be as well. The fact of 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 may be, we (technologically over-stimulated
children and adults alike) still read. The rapid proliferation of the image in
our lives has not kept us from the written word. On the contrary- we turn to
books in record number. And we read because books bestow upon us unique
pleasures; pleasures which films, television etc. cannot proffer.
To whit: books allow us certain freedoms—we are free to be
mentally active when we read as we are full participants in the making of
(imagining of) a narrative.
We desire the fluidity, and vagary that books grant
us when imagining their content. Some things we do not wish to be shown.
***
We want ownership; and we want to participate.
"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 towards imagining- towards filling in an author’s suggestions. Without this co-creative
act; without personalization, what you are left with is:
Here is
your Anna—Happy?
This—the
above— is a form of robbery.
***
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. What we see is our own pre-dispositions. This is
obviously true of reading as well.
Co-creation and Barthes’ “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 end of the author describes not only the end of the
hegemony of authorial “meaning,” but also an end to the passive imagination,
and the paradigm of the reader’s submissive reception of imagery.
***
To go further: every human sensory event is reception and generation.
***
Mise en scene: To The
Lighthouse takes place at a house in the Hebrides. If you asked me to
describe the house, I could tell you some of its features. But much like my
mental picture of Anna Karenina, the house is a shutter here, a dormer there.
(There’s nothing to keep the rain out! Now I picture a roof.
I still don’t know if it’s slate or shingle. Shingle. I’ve decided.)
I know that, on the Ramsey’s property there is a garden, and
a hedge. A view of the ocean; the lighthouse… I know the rough placements of
the characters on this stage. I have mapped the surroundings, but mapping isn’t
exactly picturing—not in the sense of recreating the world, as it appears to
us, visually.
(Nabokov also used to map
novels)
I do this too on occasion. I’ve
mapped To the Lighthouse.
But I can’t describe the Ramseys’
house.
Like maps, our visions of fictional settings are there to
perform a function. A map that guides us to a wedding reception is not a
picture—a picture of what the wedding reception will look like—it is a set of
rules, governing our actions. And the Ramsey house is no different. It governs
the actions of its occupants. William Gass again:
“We do visualize, I suppose. Where did I leave my gloves? And then I
ransack the room in my mind until I find them. But the room I ransack is
abstract—a simple schema…and I think of the room as a set of likely glove
locations…”
The Ramsey house is a set of likely Ramsey locations.
***
Of course, 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.”
The more I know, the more I am able to image Mrs. Ramsey’s drawing room, dining
room, with some degree of verisimilitude. 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…
Perhaps the author’s image of this setting is based on some
real-world locale that we ourselves can simply look at a photograph or painting
of? Is this house, the setting for TTLH
based on one of the Woolf’s? I am tempted to look up this information (like
another friend of mine did when he read TTLH).
It would be a simple matter to find a picture of the Isle of Skye lighthouse. But
would this deprive me of something? I would gain in authenticity what I’d lose
in personal intimacy. (For me, the Ramsey’s summerhouse, 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 grounding image for me. It allows me to relate
to the book.) My friend was going to describe the Woolf’s Hebridean House to me
and I stopped him. My Ramsey house,
is a feeling, not a picture. And I wish to preserve this feeling.
Well maybe the house is not only a feeling, but the feeling has primacy over the image.
(The idea of the house, and the feelings it evokes in me are
the nucleus of a complex atom, around which orbit various sounds, fleeting
images and an entire ecology 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; visually translated. It is ours.
A friend grew up in suburban Albany. He’s always been an
avid reader, even as a child, and whenever he would read he tells me he would
mentally situate the stories in the backyards and side streets of his native blocks—having
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. My mental images of
other locations, when I was young, were always a bit hazy by virtue of my youth
and lack of experience and travel. So the stage, in my mind’s eye, 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 re-cast in this prosaic light. These various far-flung adventures, press-ganged,
by force of will, onto such blasé and un-romantic settings. Yet, my personal
readings of these books were undiminished by radical changes of milieu—by this
personalizing of the reading experience. My friend and I were doing, to some
extent, what we all do when we sit down to read a work of fiction.
We colonize books with our familiars, and we exile, repatriate
the characters to lands we are more acquainted with.
***
As I’ve mentioned, the assumption that we are seeing what
an author intended us to, is a weaker assumption when reading plays. 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.)
(I remember once seeing Hamlet performed by teens in a high
school gymnasium.)
Why are novels or short stories any different? Reading means producing a private play of sorts. Reading is casting, set decoration, direction, stage management…
Importantly: all of these choices—these transpositions we
choose when reading— work. They work for us because books do not tender precise
images, sounds or smells. Books, like plays, present ideas, and the
juxtaposition of ideas. It is the interaction of ideas that catalyzes feeling
in us readers.
***
It
should be mentioned that there are moments, when we read, when all we see are words. What we are
looking at when we read are words,
made up of letterforms, but we are trained to see past them—at what the words
and letterforms point towards. Words are like arrows—they are something, and they point towards
something.
Words
are transparent to us because of their structure and purpose (they are
signifiers) but also because the practice of reading is habitual. We have seen the “arrow” enough that we only look in the
direction indicated.
***
A
point of interest: the books that make the act of reading feel foreign, and
non-habitual, are not the books in
which imaging is most difficult. Or, that is, when we read difficult books,
with non-traditional narrative structures, we still imagine that we see.
***
Arrows:
It is not only the letterforms which are arrows when we read. Sentences are
also arrows, and paragraphs and chapters are arrows. Whole novels are arrows.
To
read is to:
Look through; Look past; and to look, myopically, hopefully, towards…
There
is, in fact, very little looking
at.
***
More often than not we don’t have any pictures in our minds at
all when we read. Sometimes when we
read, though we may think we are picturing things, we are, in fact experiencing
the play of abstract relationships. (This sounds like a fairly un-enjoyable
experience, but, in truth, this is also what we do when we listen to music.
This relational, non-representational calculus is where some of the deepest
beauty in art is found. Not in mental pictures of things—but in the play of
elements…)
When you listen to music, non-programmatic music—Bach say—is
what you feel lessened in any way by the lack of imagery put forward? You may
imagine anything when listening to Bach: a stream, a tree, a sewing machine,
your spouse…but there is nothing in the music that demands those specific
images. (it is far better without them!)
Disney's Fantasia
Why is it different when we read a novel? Because some
detail, some specific imagery is called out? This specificity changes things, but,
I think, only superficially.
***
When reading To the
Lighthouse you 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 passaged 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”:
I have not met the person who can
convincingly tell you that they can recreate 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 that they can imagine smells
perfectly; viscerally. Or, while they are reading, they tell themselves that they have smelled something. (Like my idealized
piano playing, there are no wrong notes. We have read a book—that is to say: imagined it—perfectly).
The smell of “salt and weeds:”
I am
not smelling them: I am performing a synesthetic transformation. From the words
“smell of salt and weeds” I am calling up an idea of that Cape Cod house I rent.
The experience does not contain any true recall of an odor. It is a flash, which
leaves a slight after-image. It is spectral and mutating. An aurora. A nebula
of illusory material.
***
We
refer to our imaginations as our “inner eye.” Wordsworth’s daffodils appeared
to his inward eye, though these
daffodils, pointedly, only flash…
***
A sticking point: if I tell someone that I do not believe
they can (viscerally) conjure a smell from memory they are affronted. I think
the fact that we can’t recapitulate the world in perfect facsimile is
terrifying and disorienting. 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.
***
Returning to audition for a moment: when I imagine music, what
tends to get lost in my mental recreation of a piece or song, is timbral color;
orchestration. I recall most music with a very clear sense of, say, intervallic
relationships, or harmonic progression. I can hear the melody, or the descant. What
I tend not to hear are the instruments—the sensuous specifics. Aaron Copeland
suggested that, when we listen to music, we are listening on three “levels:”
The sensuous, the expressive, and the semantic/musical. The sensuous, is for
me, the easiest to forget and the hardest to conjure. If I imaginatively “hear” the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, I recall
that insistent, downward-thrusting figuration. I don’t hear the “tutti,” or the
individual instruments that make up the orchestra. I hear the shape of the
notes, and their expressive quality. Strangely, I can recall the voices of
singers. Is this because we can, ourselves, from our bodies, produce, voice?
Do we hear characters voices? This seems less far-fetched
than imagining their (or any) smell; or seeing them...
To complete the Proust quote about reading I cited earlier:
“The frantic career of the
eyes…”
“…and…my
voice, which had been following, noiselessly."
***
Someone might say, “well perhaps you can’t summon a smell by memory, (or the sound of instrumental
color, or a vision of Anna Karenina) but maybe your senses aren't acute- maybe your sense of smell is poor.” (fair enough) “But someone with
a highly developed sense of smell can summon a scent viscerally—a sommelier
say, or a perfumer…” (and perhaps a portrait painter can summon up a more convincing image of Anna Karenina?)
True— 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
only familiar 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.
But these vines don’t flower or bear fruit. Not in our minds.
***
I am a visual person (so I am told). My livelihood, as a book
designer, 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 imaging
characters, 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?
***
I’ve informally questioned many people I know about the books
they love. I ask them to describe a central character in one of these books
(making sure to only discuss books they’ve only recently just finished reading,
or have re-read several times; so that whatever imagery they conjured when
reading would still be fresh in their minds). My subjects respond by offering
up one or two physical characteristics of a character (for instance “He’s short,
and bald—I know that much”); followed
by a lengthy disquisition on the character’s persona (“He’s a coward,
unfulfilled, regretful, etc.). I generally have to stop them at some point in
order to remind them that I was asking only for physical description.
That is to say, we confuse what a character looks like with who a character,
putatively, is.
In this way we are backwards phrenologists, we readers.
Extrapolating physiques from minds.
***
When we read about something—a place, a person—we separate
it out from the mass of entities which surround it. We distinguish it. We
excise it from the undifferentiated. Think of Stubb’s pipe. Or Achilles’
shield. (This thing is different from all other things: this thing is not Ahab’s
peg leg, or Hector’s helmet.) We then form some kind of mental representation
of it. It is a pipe: like this, and not like that. We form representations, so
we can remember, and manipulate the memory of this pipe, so the information can
be re-used. This representation is a model of some sort. We are also model
builders, we readers.
Piaget
tells us that “mental representation,” model-building, is what thought consists of.
But
what kind of representation? Codes? Symbols? Words? Propositions? Pictures?
***
To know what
reading is, we must know what reading
is like. We thus examine the feeling
of reading itself—the subjective state of awareness.
The psychological experience…
Can we do this: examine our own
minds while we read?
The insurmountable obstacle here is that the more we focus
on the experience we are having when we read, the less we are reading with any
degree of concentration. The more we are immersed, the less we are conscious of
the feeling we are participating in. Thus, when we discuss the feeling of reading we are really talking
about the memory of having read.
And this memory of reading is a
false memory. (There are no wrong notes…)
***
To the Lighthouse
again:
There is a character, Lily Briscoe (“With her little Chinese
eyes and her puckered up face…”) who is a painter. She is, I think, Virginia
Woolf’s avatar—the writer’s means of entering into her own novel. Lily Briscoe
is painting a picture throughout the course of the narrative—a painting of Mrs.
Ramsey sitting by the window reading to her son James (those amorphous
characters from the book’s opening lines). Lily has set up her easel outside on
the lawns, and paints while various players flit and charge around the
property.
She is nervous about being interrupted, about someone
breaking her concentration whilst engaged in this act of creation. And the idea
that someone would interrogate her about this painting is intolerable.
But kind, acceptable Mr. Bankes wanders up and asks “What
did she mean to indicate by the triangular purple shape, ‘just there’?”
(This painting of Lily Briscoe’s, with its abstractions, is
Woolf’s central metaphor for the act of creation in general—a writer or poet or
composer’s reconstruction of this slippery world of ours—more specifically, the
painting is a proxy for the book To the
Lighthouse, by Virgina Woolf.
How does Lily Briscoe’s painting reproduce the scene? Mrs.
Ramsey, James, the house, the window?
“But the picture was not of them, she said. Or not in his
sense. There are other senses too in which one might reverence them. By a
shadow here and a light there, for instance. Her tribute took that form if, as
she vaguely supposed, a picture must be a tribute. A mother and child might be
reduced to a shadow without irreverence.”
We reduce.
Writers reduce when they write, and readers reduce when they
read. The brain itself is built to reduce. Verisimilitude is not only a false
idol, but also an unattainable goal. So we reduce. And it is not without
reverence that we reduce. This is how we apprehend our world. This is what
humans do.
Picturing stories is making
reductions.
What these reductions look like
is anyone’s guess. (if they look like anything at all).
***
Lily painting:
“And she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and
her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or
not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings,
and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously
difficult white space…But this is one way of knowing people, she thought: to
know the outline, not the detail.”
The outline. Not the detail.
“There it was, her picture. Yes, with all its greens and
blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something… She looked at
the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred.”
***
It was blurred.
***
