It took me 60 years to realize this, although I could have seen it all along. I presume other readers have the same experience, but I’m posting this to see if that’s true.
When I read any kind of book with a plot, be it a novel (my latest was All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski; highly recommended) or a non-scholarly book that has locations (the one I’m reading now is Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis), I immediately begin forming images of the scenes. In the case of Davis’s book, he describes scenery in great detail, and I’ve also seen some of the places he mentions, like the Everest region and Darjeeling, so it’s not hard to fill in the details in my head.
But in the case of novels, I realize that from the moment I begin reading one, I form mental images of the landscape, houses, or other places described in the book. When I read Gatsby, for instance, I can see the curtained living room of Tom and Daisy’s home, even though it’s not described in detail. And when I say “see”, I envision where all the chairs, tables, and sofas are located. When Bloom feeds his cat (mrgnkao!) and makes breakfast for Molly at the beginning of Ulysses, I have an image in my head of what his kitchen looks like, even though it’s not described.
And this persists all the way through a novel. Undoubtedly my imaginings have no relationship to what the author imagined, but I find I cannot read a book without doing this.
The curious thing is that my imaginings of what people look like are far less vivid, even if they’re described by the author. As my father used to tell me as a brain teaser, “Jerry, imagine a face you haven’t seen before.” I couldn’t do it! And I can’t imagine a face very well when it’s described in a novel. I can imagine Tom and Daisy’s house and living room, but I can’t clearly imagine what Tom or Daisy look like. I know that Anna Karenina is beautiful and Vronsky is handsome, but all I can imagine is a dress and a uniform.
This also goes for voices. And yet, when I see a movie made from a book, if there’s a big incongruity between what I hear on the screen and what I imagine the voices should sound like, it can be so jarring that I don’t want to watch the movie. (For years I followed Peanuts in the papers and kept a scrapbook with every Sunday comic strip. When they turned it into a cartoon show, the characters’ voices sounded so different from the ones I had imagined, though not consciously, that I could never watch the cartoon.)
Of course this doesn’t cause a problem when I watch a movie before I read the book (The Last Picture Show is one example), because I automatically translate the movie voices into the voices of the characters in the novel.
This is all very strange to me. Yet sometimes I think it’s impossible to read a novel without at the same time running a kind of movie through your head. Is this the case for other people?
p.s. This is NOT what Charlie Brown would sound like. (And what’s weirder is that I have no idea what he should sound like.)
Whenever I read a Sherlock Holmes story, I hear Basil Rathbone’s voice. Oddly, I don’t hear Nigel Bruce as Watson, probably because his absent-minded character is nothing like the Watson of the books. I also hear Robert Morley as Sherlock’s obese brother, Mycroft.
When I started reading Sherlock Holmes, I had not watched any on television. Now images of Jeremy Brett pop into my mind from time to time.
Pretty much unavoidable, given the frequency that he (Brett) is on the box.
See also : Poirot and … [brain fade] … David Suchet.
There is definitely diversity here. I visualize almost nothing when I’m reading (or for that matter in any case). Sometimes, it makes reading fiction difficult, if the author is writing in such a way that they assume I am able to visualize what is happening. Other things I’m fine reading.
There are some people that visualize nothing, ever, known as aphantasia. I guess I’m fortunately that I can visualize a little, even if it isn’t much.
Yes; I only recently learned the terminology for my visualization deficiency. It hasn’t been too much of a handicap – except when collecting things
“It hasn’t been too much of a handicap” I did recently make the connection between lack of visualization and being terrible at chess. I’ve never really understood when people talk about being able to think some number of moves ahead. I can’t really think about moves other than the direct moves on the board I’m looking at.
When collecting things, I think the pyschobabblologists call it a “search image”. It’s certainly something that I see at work – having looked at O(million) rock samples, I’ve got a wider search image library to draw on, and the braincell can lock onto them and call a “hold on, back up” to the fingers scanning the slide in a couple of seconds. Then I need to spend 15 minutes talking about it to the trainee(s), getting them to draw it, manipulate it and understand it, so that they now have a search image in their heads.
I worked with a bug-watcher once (a micropalaeontologist) who was renowned in his labs for having a gamut of search images covering most of the marine micropalaeontology of the Cenozoic, the Permo-Triassic, and chunks of the Cambrian and Ordovician. That’s a remarkable range – most people specialise on one of the Series or transitions. Getting him on board cost over $5000/day but ended up saving the client several tens of M$ by calling the well early. Worth the investment in the right person for the job. His first trip to a rig too – which was “interesting” for him.
This might not be super on topic, but when I was doing preliminary archaeology on battlefields, my ability to recognize patterns of artifacts increased tremendously over the period of a couple of years,
In some cases, I went back over sites that I had carefully and fruitlessly scoured early on, but later it seemed that there were artifacts everywhere. And those artifacts were arrayed in obvious patterns that made locating the fighting positions and timeline of battle fairly simple.
It absolutely takes practice.
Having the confidence to let your eyes scan, and the back end of the brain do it’s pattern-matching jazz without the front of the brain tripping it up is a learned skill too. Hearing the mental “bing”, learning to stop and re-trace your search steps until the “bing” goes off again is a third skill – really, be systematic in your search.
Who was it that said that, if it’s not physics, it’s stamp collecting? In which case, the stamp collecting parts of the natural sciences, (botany, biology, geology, astronomy) all benefit from training that skill set.
Me too. I can visualise some scenes but only as far as they support the action or movement I imagine. Kinetic ‘images’ if you will.
On the other hand I can easily recall/reconstruct noteworthy meals I have eaten (for instance on holiday).
There was a teaching fashion a little while ago to identify the learning methods of children – auditory, visual or kinetic. As far as I know this was debunked, although I wonder if this correlates with cognitive differences in the general population.
Yes – generally, although it is inconsistent.
I think before cinema, this would be significantly different. I feel cinema has messed up this process of literary imaging (?).
I bet it is also correlated with brain structure or “wiring”… etc.
I dunno. Some novels seem so plainly cinematic as written that I’m casting the characters as I read. Some aren’t, so I don’t (although I still see whatever action there is in my mind’s eye).
Let me add that, when I’m casting the movie playing in my head while reading a novel, I’m unconstrained by the limits imposed on actual casting directors — I’m free to cast any actor or actress, living or dead, at any point in their career, be it a young Bette Davis or Meryl Streep in her twenties or Jack Nicholson circa The Last Detail. Sam Shepard and Harry Dean Stanton and Anne Bancroft (among many others) are still getting juicy roles on the big silver screen in my noggin.
I experience books the same way. Obviously, it is the author’s goal, in part, to make you see what they are imagining as they write. When I see a movie based on a novel I’ve read, and they depart too far from the author’s vision, I find it particularly jarring. By the same token, if the movie fits my mental images, it makes me think it’s a good movie. Of course, it’s possible my imaginings match those of the movie’s creators and both are not what the book author had in mind.
“Undoubtedly my imaginings have no relationship to what the author imagined, but I find I cannot read a book without doing this.”
Perhaps you are just being modest here. Hopefully your imaginings do match what the author imagined, to a first approximation at least.
The issue of not being able to imagine certain things is mentioned in Steven Pinker’s 2007 book, “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature” which I am now reading. As he mentions, the breakdown of things we can or can’t imagine tells us a lot about how the brain works, giving us clues as to what innate mechanisms our brain contains. Although we think of the brain as being very flexible, its low-level sensory processing appears to be mostly hardwired. Our higher-level processing has all the flexibility, allowing us only to suppress one lower-level source of information in favor of another but to still be bound to the limitations of those sources.
I have known Tom West for many years – he has researched the phenomenon of visual thinking and has some fascinating and illuminating insights. His latest book is: Seeing What Others Cannot See: The Hidden Advantages of Visual Thinkers and Differently Wired Brains. https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-What-Others-Cannot-See/dp/1633883019/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&qid=1625335252&refinements=p_27%3AThomas+G.+West&s=books&sr=1-2&text=Thomas+G.+West
I can most readily identify with the inability to visualize faces. And for me, there is a seemingly unconscious construction of settings which are usually very vague, with maybe a few details in sharper relief. I imagine people have had different responses through history. At one time few people read books, and may have listened to stories with vivid descriptions. Then, there were paintings, drawings and sculpture competing with imagined settings. Religious painting was once a way to help people visualize bible verses. When film and TV came along, there must have been a dramatic change in how we think about settings. Perhaps it led to the atrophy of the skill.
It’s quite jarring to me to have an image in my brain of what the environment looks like in a book… then the author says something that is completely different. Like I’m imaging the bedroom on the right, but it’s really on the left.
Same here.
Depends a great deal on the author. I’m a fan of the Spenser novels by the late Robert Parker. Parker always went to great lengths to describe scenes, especially the clothing worn by the various characters. There’s no doubt in my mind he was helping the reader visualize the scene as he did.
I would hypothesize, or suspect, or whatever, that the difference in visualizing faces (or not doing it, rather) has to do with the fact that we are SO tightly wired to see and interpret faces, and it’s much more automatic and irresistible than the rest of our visual processing. If I remember correctly, it happens in slightly different regions of the nervous system. The very fact that it is so easy to see faces where they are not (e.g. tree bark, clouds, the surface of Mars), may ironically be directly related to the difficulty imagining a face that has merely been described but never seen.
Try to imagine a smell you’ve never smelled before, just by someone else’s description. Faces aren’t quite that abstract, but their hard-wiredess could very well make them similarly difficult to visualize de novo.
Yes, I too visualise the scenarios in novels etc but I also become “tainted” by cinematic visuals of novels I have seen on the screen. Lizzie Bennett for me will forever be Jennifer Ehle, for instance. It also applies to poetry – “My last duchess” is absolutely filled with opportunities to set to set the scene.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I also become fixated on the first person I hear singing a song. Anyone else really has to go miles to do better than the first one I hear. For me no one will ever better Lucia Popp at “Four Last songs” or Jessye Norman at the Liebestod.
I tend to agree. I have read ‘Ulysses’ a number of times, and my mental image of Leopold Bloom is always that of Milo O’Shea in Joseph Strick’s 1967 film. I even see Stephen Dedalus as Maurice Roeves, although the character is largely a self-portrait of Joyce. I should add that, like PCC(E), I have more difficulty in visualising characters who are not fully defined by the author; and sometimes even if they are.
Occasionally it works the other way: I have followed John Le Carré’s writing since near its beginning. Loved the novels. Yet since I first saw the tv series that began with ‘Tinker, Tailor. . .’ Alec Guinness has been George Smiley, whether I read the stories or watch them again.
Gary Oldman seemed to agree with you, when he pulled on the Smiley harness.
Funny thing about novels & movies made from them.
Even as a teenager [class of 1957] it hit me: How inferior even fine movies are to the books that birthed them.
Partly it’s the fault of the movie medium: a multi-hour novel must be trimmed ruthlessly to fit the 2-hour movie.
But the larger issue, for me, is the expansive & nuanced & richly-detailed beings of the characters in the novel.
If I read the novel first, & then saw the movie, I was astonished at—
1] how much good stuff had been left out, &
2] how the hero of the movie did NOT fit the person delivered thru the pages of the novel, &
3] how the movie was unforgiving: if you missed anything, it was gone; but the book allowed you to backtrack.
But that was all OK — if I had read the novel first.
But I discovered it was just awful if I saw the movie first, then read the book.
That done, I could not get the movie character out of my head.
And that movie hero indeed somehow tinged & corrupted the essence the character in the book.
Isn’t that Jerry’s point — how the actor did not fit the character delivered by the novelist?
Partly, that’s becuz the actor in the movie is known to us from several previous incarnations.
And that I suspect is just too heavy of a lift for Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” to get past those earlier roles of the actor.
Interesting question. I too paint a picture in my mind of scenes that i am reading. This may be why i am such a slow reader. I take the descriptions that the author gives, set them as a physical outline in my mind, and then fill in details from my experiences in places that I must think are similar. It is fairly easy to do this when the story takes place in an environment with which i have experience such as many areas of the U.S. and U.K. And in time periods when the architecture is that which i have actually experienced. If i have been to an area, i also often attach smells or environmental cues i can recall and associate with that place such as flowers and vegetation of the tropics and lush dampness of some areas of England and Scotland. I think that I do not dwell on color, but more on brown or grey tones but want the scale and shapes to be right. The images i create for people follow the author’s descriptions, but always seem to dissolve to simpler or coarser details such as female or male, fair, pretty, blond, petite, willowy, or portly, strong, sickly, etc. The details of people seem to evaporate as I get more comfortable with the character as the story develops…unless a feature is important to a scene such as strength, speed, size … or their opposites… which are then drawn out and emphasized in my visual. My formal education and vocation was in physics and engineering where visualization was very important to me. I was never strong in math theory as i always felt more comfortable visualizing a physical incarnation of an equation. “Visualize a face that you haven’t seen”….Your father asked many wise questions it seems.
It’s certainly the case for me. I’m rereading Conspiracy of Dunces right now, and I can see (and smell) Ignatius Riley pushing the hot dog cart around the Quarter and imagine that musky little minx Mirna Minkoff in my head from her correspondence alone.
I generally have the same problem with movies — although, when they’re particularly well-cast, I sometimes see the characters from the movie when I reread the novel. That’s been the case with Catch 22, which as a film couldn’t do justice to the novel, but I’ve reread the novel several times now since seeing the movie, and every time, I see the actors Mike Nichols cast in the movie in my head — from Alan Arkin as Yossarian to Bob Newhart as Major Major to Jon Voigt as Milo Minderbinder to all the other characters, in roles large and small. I had cause to reread Chapter 21 just a couple days ago and couldn’t help but see Orson Welles as Gen. Dreedle.
A Confederacy of Dunces — I had the radio on while writing the comment above, and someone was rattling on about the Trump Org conspiracy case.
I need my edit function back!
Highly recommended. An excellent book, with an interesting story behind it.
Yes, a true classic and the tragic story behind its publication adds another whole element. So sad that Toole didn’t live to see its Pulitzer prize and commercial success.
Or to write others.
It takes a special talent to write dialogue in dialect, and he had it — capturing the numerous subtle distinctions in New Orleans dialects seemingly effortlessly (but which must’ve been anything but).
Have you seen the much more recent Hulu series “Catch 22”? If you do, you may end up with three sets of visual images for the characters. It’s not too bad though I wonder if it was really worth making. Perhaps it sticks to the book more than the Nichols movie, though I don’t know. I always liked the movie but I probably watched it before I read the book.
Yes, Confederacy of Dunces is fun to read, having been to New Orleans. Also, the dialect in New Orleans is not southern, it’s a mish-mash that until you get used to it sounds like a derivative of French-Canadian Brooklynese. I hear it in Ignatius’ mother’s dialogue, much moreso than in his. I can visualize the neighborhoods and the bars that I’ve been to when I read this book (some of them in the 9th ward that were probably flooded out due to Katrina.) It’s a great book. I hope you enjoy it all the way through.
I cannot read a novel without constructing its “world” in my head – not that I am consciously doing it: it just happens as I read. I also visualise the characters and their voices – but the amount of detail depends on the writer’s depiction of the people.
Yes. It is an automatic process with me too, most of the time. However, on occasion, an incongruity creeps into the picture. Then I’ve had to go back a few pages to read again. On at least one occasion, I’ve drawn a diagram. That, of course, was a conscious process.
I don’t seem to have a visual mind’s eye. I don’t “see” anything, but mainly think in terms of plot points. So how movie versions of novels never bother me in terms of what it looks like, but when they change the plot or the characters around, that does.
Richard Dawkins, in one of his books (The Greatest Show on Earth maybe), described how weird it must have been for our early ancestors to ascend into consciousness and speech. I’m sure I’m inserting something here, but the general idea is that here we were, looking out from a vantage point at the level of our fore-heads, seeing the world as if from a great cyclopian eye. And then… there arrives this voice in our heads, and it was speaking to us as if unbidden. No wonder we fell into a religion that claimed there was this being who is commanding and guiding us.
I wonder if not being able to imagine faces well is b/c that involves a visual association center for faces, and that is not accessed thru the imagination.
Based on my own introspection, I believe we can imagine faces but that any face we imagine will be so close to one we already know that it is hard to maintain the imagined one in short-term memory.
I mostly see things sketchily like in a not very lucid dream – they seem to be on the periphery of my vision, but if I try to focus on them I can’t see the details. Then I get thrown by a description that adds something I hadn’t envisaged and I have to make a mental effort to reimagine whatever is being described (although the original imagery is involuntary). I “see” places and objects, but not people so much – the latter are much more shadowy.
This happens with nonfiction narratives too – I’m currently wading through the fascinating (OK, fascinating to a geek like me) 1,200 page Independent Panel report on the murder of Daniel Morgan. (The dude was a private investigator found in a south London car park with an axe in his head – four separate police investigations since 1987 have failed to find the killer or killers because of massive incompetence and alleged police corruption.)
This reminds me of a satirical letter I recently read in the British comic, Viz. The author was explaining how he would imagine scenes in his head when listening to radio dramas. He went on to explain that he was deeply shocked by what he imagined when two characters were kissing and complained that it shouldn’t be broadcast when children were still up!
I also remember reading something by CS Lewis where he commented on the idea of Disney making a version of The Lord of the Rings. Lewis claimed that he could always imagine a better fire-breathing dragon than anything that Disney could conjure up. I wonder what he would have made of the Peter Jackson trilogy?
Lewis’s remark reminds me of a Literature Prof I had who described reading “Cinderella” to his young daughter. The girl was in awe when the story described Cinderella’s gown as “the most beautiful in the world.” Then she saw the illustration and was disappointed. It was just a dress! There was no way an actual illustration could top that vague reference.
George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, said that John Lennon said that the records never sounded like the music he had in his head. Martin said that composers hear pure music in their imaginations, “which we then try to recreate by blowing through metal tubes or dragging horsehair across sheep intestines.” Are there any composers here who can comment?
I wonder what CS Lewis made of the (whoever) film version of Voyage of the Dawn Treader? (Which involved the brat Eustace as a fire-breathing dragon, for those who don’t know.)
I read the screenplay of ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ before I watched the film. The screenplay forced me to visualize the scenes. I watched the film a few months later. But the whole thing was so long ago that I can’t remember if I was surprised by the film scenes. However, I do remember the description of the kick in the balls.
I’m surprised to learn from reading other people’s comments that they don’t visualize novels while they’re reading. I thought everybody did!
I usually visualize the characters based on the book cover illustration (if there is one) or I think of appropriate actors. I first read Kingsley Amis’s novel “Jake’s Thing” over 30 years ago and immediately visualized the character Geoffrey as the actor Geoffrey Palmer (maybe because of his name?) – and now every time I go back and re-read the book, I can’t not “see” him as Geoffrey Palmer.
I read the Stieg Larsson books in Swedish while I was learning the language and the Swedish films pretty much matched what I’d imagined, but I couldn’t watch the English version – it was jarring to me for characters that I’d “heard” speaking Swedish in my head to be speaking English (especially with them still being in Stockholm).
What about color? If the author says that a shirt is blue on one page and then later that it is a sky blue though you had imagined, say, navy, would that be easier to adjust to than a quality not at all described?
I can’t think of any situations like that, though I’m sure I’ve revised my visual images over the course of a novel.
Provided the book really engages me, I’m about the same – I produce basic imagery of settings and not the detailed faces and voices of characters (though I think I do imagine their verbal inflections. And since I started narrating fiction, going further and actively deciding on voices has become one of my routine tasks).
I think this is not a superficial question, but fundamental to learning how to read – how to interpret literature from many angles.
Poetry would serve an important role here – what is true for long form literature would be interesting to consider as manifest in different forms, e.g. poetry.
Another dimension, as suggested by the commentariat, is the expression of sound, and particularly music, through the written word.
Superficially : where’s the damn soundtrack to guide my emotions in literature?! A movie without a soundtrack during e.g. a kiss, or a dark passageway is quite different from one with it… and especially if those scene’s music scores got mixed up!
Imagine E.T. in the bike riding across the moon and all we can hear is the bike chain!… but I digress….
IIRC, Douglas “DNA” Adams wrote an essay (blog post, H2G2 article?) on this topic. I think he was excusing the length and slowness of the process of turning H2G2 into a film (let alone the final result), and commented that when writing the books and scripts, the sound quality was always so much better inside his head than in the radio show. Then, when casting for the TV show, most of the actors were right (indeed, the same ones he’d desperately re-written for in the recording studio – not an accident) but Sandra Dickinson’s “air head blonde” really wasn’t how he’s envisaged Trillian. But the colour balance on the radio shows was always better than on the TV shows. Then he linked to trying to control all those factors in writing the film script.
Does the novel say that Trillian is blonde? For some reason, when I read the book, I pictured her as Black.
I always pictured her as dark (more Mediterranean than Black) but I’m not sure where I got that from. I heard the radio series before I read the book. The TV series was a disappointment.
I’d need to go back and check, but I think she was a brunette in the scripts and books. Sandra Dickenson succeeded in breaking her acting stereotype, but she definitely didn’t fit the bill for me. And the plastic head for Zaphod seemed to be a nod towards the joy of wobbly Dr Who sets.
But compared to the film … mirabile dictu!
This topic reminds me of one of my favorite films, “The Fall” by Tarsem Singh. One of the cool things about the film is that an American tells a series of stories to a Young girl of European origin, and the scenes are shown as she imagines them. Besides being some of the best film visuals ever, it is clear that the storyteller pictures the story in a very different way than the listener.
If an author is very good at descriptive prose, I find that I don’t even realize that I am reading. The images and sounds flow directly to image, or so it seems. I found this happening for the first time on my first pass through the Lord of the Rings. I found myself startled as if from a dream to realize that I had read 30 pages without “seeing” the words. It’s like playing music. When I played trombone and tuba, I often found myself playing the music directly from the sheet, but without “seeing” the staff and notation. It flowed through my brain without stopping to be processed or interpreted, directly to my fingers and my lips.
Absolutely yes, my mind creates a scenario right away I get dissolve into the words.