What We See When We Read

What We See When We Read, more aptly titled What I See When I Read, is a collection of Peter Mendelsund's musings over the imagery and consciousness conjured by some of his favorite writing, mainly the canon.

The book is divided into a series of themes (Picturing “Picturing”, Co-Creation, Synesthesia, etc). Each theme starts off with an excerpt followed by exposition about the writing's significance and a few illustrations. Mendelsund's insights are incredibly thoughtful and beg for more in-depth exploration. Sadly, he spent more time on kitsch illustrations (which account for the bulk of the 425 pages) than extruding his ideas into essay-length literary criticism.

The illustrations felt clever at first, but then became an annoyance as they continually interrupted latent insights. With such a staccato rhythm, each new chapter felt like it started without a proper segue or a meaningful development having arisen from the previous chapter. Despite the inclusive title, the writing felt warm with conceit. “Hey, check this out! I thought of this! ...And then I thought of this! Which could mean, but this! I also think of this! Did you ever—Hey! I'm over here now...”

Even so, there are a fair share of gems. I especially enjoyed:

“Often, when I ask someone to describe the physical appearance of a key character from their favorite book they will tell me how this character moves through space. (Much of what takes place in fiction is choreographic.) ... It is how characters behave, in relation to everyone and everything in their fictional, delineated world, that ultimately matters. (“Lumbering, uncoordinated ...”) Though we may think of characters as visible, they are more like a set of rules that determines a particular outcome. ...Aristotle claimed that Self is an action, and that we discover something's nature through knowing its telos (its goals). A knife becomes a knife through cutting...”

“A thing that is ‘captured' by an author is taken from its context in the real world, where this event or thing may exist in a state of flux. An author might notice a wave in the ocean (or a “silvery pool”), and merely by remarking upon this wave, the author stabilizes it. It is now removed from the indiscriminate mass of water that surrounds it. By taking this wave and holding it fast in language, it ceases to be fluid. It is now an immobile wave.”

“Maybe elaborate descriptions, like colorful descriptions, are misdirection. They seem to tell us something specific and meaningful (about a character, a setting, the world itself), but perhaps such description delights in inverse proportion to what it reveals. The writer Gilbert Sorrentino takes John Updike's A Month of Sundays to task: When the aim is ‘vivid' writing, it seems that anything goes as long as the surface dances ... The work buckles and falls apart time after time under the weight of this concatenation of images, often linked together by comparisons that work to conceal the reality they are supposedly revealing: ‘... newsletters and quarterlies that pour through a minister's letter slot like urine from a cow's vulva.' Such writing is, Sorrentino tells us, ‘Shiny and meaningless.' The relationship between a mail slot and a cow's vulva is confusing. Two objects are compared in order to help focus our mind's eye, while in fact just the opposite happens—we focus only on the bolder (or in this case more grotesque) of the two images. By contrast, Jean Giono writes: ‘Look up there, Orion–Queen Anne's lace, a little bunch of stars.' I see the flower, then I see the flowering of stars in the night sky. The flower itself doesn't appear in the night sky of my mind, but the flower determines how the stars are arrayed. Giono's stars are clearer to me than Updike's mail slot. Maybe that is because Giono would like me to see his stars, whereas Updike would like me to see—what? His prose? Giono's flower and his stars are held in balance. One image assists the other. (Giono could have written: “a little cluster of white stars.” But this description doesn't bloom in quite the same way.)”

“There is no real unity without incorporeality.” Moses Maimonides ... Maimonides subscribed to an approach known as “negative theology” in which one comes closer to God by enumerating the things he is not. Characters have only implied corporeality. And our imaginations grant them unity. But characters are also defined by what they are not. By asserting that Vronsky was a squarely built, dark man, not very tall... ...Tolstoy informs us that Vronsky is neither blond, nor short.”

“Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader.”