jeremy's Reviews > What We See When We Read

once a reading of a book is under way, and we sink into the experience, a performance of a sort begins...

we perform a book - we perform a reading of a book. we perform a book, and we attend the performance.

(as readers, we are both the conductor and the orchestra, as well as the audience)

jacket designer (and knopf associate art director) peter mendelsund has produced some of the most iconic cover art of recent years (a quick google image search is revealing). what we see when we read is an examination of the seemingly simple act of reading - a "phenomenology with illustrations". mendelsund explores what happens in the mind of the reader as they interpret and visualize a text-based story.

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...

with chapters covering an array of subjects (picturing "picturing," time, vividness, co-creation, abstractions, memory & fantasy, synesthesia, belief, the part & the whole, et al.), mendelsund deftly reflects upon reading as a complex process that is far less passive than commonly presumed. contemplative and personal, what we see when we read anatomizes reading - but does so with the familiar eye and knowing hand of an admirer.

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?)...

perhaps the very notion that readers are "see-ers" and the conventions we use to describe the reading experience derive from his tradition - the tradition of visitation, annunciation, dream vision, prophecy, and other manifestations of religious or mystical epiphany...

one of the many charms of mendelsund's book (one that begs to be reread and mused upon) is that his style of writing is marked by an easy, intimate quality - as if the two of you were sharing in a casual conversation or thought experiment with no real aim save for a free exchange of ideas or the satisfaction of stirring another's imagination for the sake of it. mendelsund has clearly pondered the act/art of reading for some time and what we see when we read appears as a textual/graphic summation of his elucidations. a light fog gently blown away, but with enough atmosphere retained to preserve the intrigue.

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. this is true of reading as well. like painters, or writers, or even participants in a video game, we make choices - we have agency.

when we want to co-create, we read. we want to participate; and we want ownership. we would rather have sketches than verisimilitude - becuase the sketches, at least, are ours. (and yet, readers still contend that they want to "lose themselves" in a story...)

visiting (and lingering within) the works of woolf, tolstoy, melville, dickens, calvino, nabokov, kafka, and others, mendelsund's book hovers near the realm of cognitive psychology - but strays no further than its event horizon. free from pedantic grandstanding or academical self-pleasuring, what we see when we read is sharp and perceptive, yet also humble and unassuming. it is, most of all, a stimulating and pleasurable rumination on an act so many of us could never do without.

authors are curators of experience. they filter the world's noise, and out of that noise they make the purest signal they can - out of disorder they create narrative. they administer this narrative in the form of a book, and preside, in some ineffable way, over the reading experience. yet no matter how pure the data set that authors provide to readers - no matter how diligently prefiltered and tightly reconstructed - readers' brains will continue in their prescribed assignment: to analyze, screen, and sort. our brains will treat a book as if it were any other of the world's many unfiltered, encrypted signals. that is, the author's book, for readers, reverts to a species of noise. we take in as much of the author's world as we can, and mix this material with our own in the alembic of our reading minds, combining them to alchemize something unique. i would propose that this is why reading "works": reading mirrors the procedure by which we acquaint ourselves with the world. it is not that our narratives necessarily tell us something true about the world (though they might), but rather that the practice of reading feels like, and is like, consciousness itself: imperfect; partial; hazy; co-creative.

*while i'm typically not overly fond of blurbs penned by fellow authors, chris ware's bears special mention: "it reads as if the ghost of italo calvino audited vladimir nabokov's literature class and wrote his final paper with the help of alvin lustig and the radiolab guys."

**speaking of calvino, mendelsund is currently at work on a project to repackage twenty of the late italian master's backlist titles - the first few of which are due this fall (see the 8/5 new yorker interview for the exciting details).