s.penkevich's Reviews > What We See When We Read

‘We perform a book, and we attend the performance.’

Words have a unique power to impose pictures into the inward eye of the mind¹ In a recent thread, a friend commented on how Homer, despite his supposed blindness, had the ability to create metaphors which were more visual and imaginatively stunning that modern CGI has been able to manage. Words have a power that even visual stimulation cannot capture. It is interesting to consider the cliche that ‘the book is better than the movie’ which—in most cases, though still debatable on many—tends to be true. Consider all the different forms of art that converge onto the silver screen. There is the script and writing, the acting, the directing, editing, sound and musical score, all that work together towards capturing an intended emotional response and resonance. Yet, despite all the efforts of many artists to capture a novel in a more immediate and mulit-sensory way, the words on the page hold more of a grip on our hearts and minds. ‘Books allow us certain freedoms,’ Peter Mendelsund—of whom most of you are familiar with through his art direction of book covers even though you may not yet realize—posits in his book What We See When We Read, ‘we are free to be mentally active when we read; we are full participants in the making (the imagining) of a narrative . In a film, we are shown what to think, not given the agency of reading. Examining the visual aspects of novels and the way that the imagination fills in the gaps, Mendelsund delivers insightful musings alongside the opinions of many brilliant minds and couples this with an artistic flair that makes for an enlightening and stimulating read.

Mendelsund’s book is a visual feast for the eyes and the mind. While it may seem thick, this is actually a quick read as most pages only feature a paragraph of singular idea with a visual representation of the idea on the opposite page. While asking us to explore how we visualize a book, he simultaneously gives us a visual joy to accompany our thoughts or to further elaborate a point. While the major works used as examples for examination are To the Lighthouse, Anna Karenina, Ulysses and Madame Bovary, books from Tolkien to Infinite Jest are discussed and many examples and quotes from bright minds like Roland Barthes, William H. Gass, Franz Kafka, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Italo Calvino among others are utilized for the discussion. While there is nothing particularly new here that will shatter your mind or blow you away, and even many points that you are may disagree with, reading this book feels somehow Socratic in its method of making you realize things that have always gone on in your head, things you knew, but never realized you knew. It is quite enriching while also being extremely entertaining.

‘Characters are ciphers. And narratives are made richer by omission.’

Mendelsund points out that many famous literary characters, such as Bovary, Ishmael and Anna K., are never given much physical description, yet over the course of the novel we visualize them each in our own way. ‘It is precisely what the text does not elucidate that becomes an invitation to our imaginations.’ In Anna Karenina, we are given her weight, her ‘thick lashes’, her ‘little downy mustache’, but Mendelsund asks ‘what does she look like?’. We all have a mental image of her, images with overlapping features, but Mendelsund claims that assuredly none of them are Tolstoy’s Anna. In one page he features a photograph of Keira Knightley as Anna and asserts that ‘this is a theft’ robbing us of our personal images of Anna. However, he states that nobody has a ‘clear’ image of a character, there is no photo-realistic image in our minds. Rather a blurred stand in, we may see hair here or an eye there (particularly in Bovary as her eye color changed throughout the novel), but never a full image. This goes with setting as well. He goes into detail and examples of how literature leaves us with a set of points to describe an object and that our mind fills the gaps in naturally. It is the magic of literature, the power of words and imagination working together to be both an active participant and an audience member when reading a novel. He also examines how when reading we receive information over time, going back and adapting our mental image to new information, and that we do not perceive words ‘ One - At - A - Time’ but instead ‘ we take in whole eyefuls of words. We gulp them like water.’ Mendelsund compares a page in a book to being like a chord in music; each individual idea is like a single note but it is through the combination of the various details that we hear the music of a character or scene. Though we only experience one note at a time, we ‘hear’ them as a chord. Also worth noting is his descriptions on how a character is not made by their descriptions, Mendelsund says, but by their actions. He brings Aristotle to his aid:

Aristotle claimed that Self is an action, and that we discover something’s nature through knowing it telos. A knife becomes a knife through cutting….

‘The distance between language and image is always the same’ - Italo Calvino

Another of the many aspects to the visual nature of literature covered by Mendelsund (in no way can I cover them all here) is the idea of the visual eye being like a film camera of sorts. Visualization is not like film, when an object is described the mind’s eye does not ‘zoom in’, but flashes an expression of the idea in the mind. Mendelsund questions how we perceive a scene in our mind through different P.O.V.’s and wonders how it is from first or third person (I myself tend to visualize all books in a third person perspective, ‘seeing’ the character even if it is told in first person). He also examines how we fill in details in our minds eye with images familiar to us, and asks how often we picture a character as having similar traits to someone we know in our own lives² or may transport the imagery of a Russian battlefield from War and Peace to the familiar setting of a childhood park.

What We See When We Read is a fun and visually impressive investigation into the abstract visualizations we all experience while reading. What I found particularly enjoyable was its insistence on reading as the most engaging of media forms since we as readers have our own agency and ‘As readers, we are the conductor and the orchestra, as well as the audience’. Through a vast assortment of great minds, Mendelsund has created a book that captures the essence of the visual stimulation of great novels and helps remind us of the joys that keep us coming back to books.

3.5/5

¹ The ‘inward eye’ is borrowed from William Wordsworth poem recalling yellow flowers seen by a lake:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood
They flash upon that inward eye
Whis is the bliss of solitude…

² While reading Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks at the same time as a co-worker, we one day realized we had both visualized the character Esther Little as looking like an older woman we worked with. We had many laughs about this for weeks to come.