The Luminous Wheel
What remains of a novel after we’ve read it? There are likely as many answers to this question as there are readers. When I call to mind my own experience of a novel after having read it, I often find myself thinking in terms of images rather than words or sentences. These images — by which I mean mental pictures drawn from the world of the novel — become a kind of personal shorthand for the fiction I’m considering. Pulling a book from my shelf, it isn’t the flow or obstruction of its plot that comes to mind, but rather a representative image that has somehow absorbed the mysterious energies of that particular novel. (A serious reader submits to synecdoche. No one can remember everything.) This image I’m describing seems to float free of the novel that contains it. It becomes the novel, at least insofar as one’s private experience is concerned. It persists as an abiding impression in the way of one’s own memories: Mr. Ramsay striding through dusk in the Hebrides; the luminous wheel beneath Popocatépetl; Nedra’s Easter table; the black and white clothes of Lars Hertervig; Murnane’s fractal paddock.
Images are one of the possible afterlives of reading. When you ask me if I’ve read a particular book, you could as well be asking me whether or not I have a well-formed image drawn from the experience of reading it. Coiled within such an image is the compressed energy of many pages. It is a mysteriously powerful abbreviation. The specifics of a novel’s characters, its dialogue, even its so-called moral or framework, are often beyond me unless I’ve read the novel many times. This no longer bothers me. (It did as a younger reader.) These aspects of the novel are in the end unimportant to what I’m after. The scaffolding of fiction is only interesting to me insofar as it is conducive to the conjuration particular to literature, that moment of transformation in which a lasting image is arrested within commensurate prose.
These images are not always the most beautiful, poetic, or notably symbolic elements of a novel, though of course they can be. This is another way of saying that the lasting image is often somewhat unexpected. Sublime descriptions of rivers, or birds, or flowers, or snowy fields, or women’s faces in city windows can and do vanish as I read them, while John Hawkes’s description of a common housefly (“as large as his own thumb and molded of shiny blue wax”) snags in the silk of the mind. What does this fly have to do with me? Why does it trace its senseless path, even now, through some part of my brain? This is what I mean to say about these images: that they are absolutely inexplicable to me; that I have no understanding as to why they come or why they stay, and even less understanding of my absolute certainty as to their value.
When one reads enough novels, reality is revealed to be in league with these enigmatic pictures. They begin to impinge upon various aspects of the visible. (I readily admit that these images can come from many sources — advertisements, films, dreams, and much else besides — though it is the image derived from literature that haunts me most persistently.) To read seriously and deeply is to be forever at the whim of the unbidden. The people one meets, the places to which one travels, the natural phenomena one experiences, the technology one uses, the states of mind one inhabits, the people one desires, one’s memories and dreams — nothing is insulated from the effects of fiction and its attendant images. Like dye released into a glass of water, they suffuse the life of the reader. They are modes of legibility, forever interpreting us to ourselves.
In novels like W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2002) or Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose (2016), pictures are integrated directly into the text itself. In these instances the reader isn’t compelled to imagine the image, having been offered it in the visual immediacy of a photograph. The difference between the two modes is profound. In the former, image-making occurs spontaneously and fluidly, as one is reading. One collaborates in the image’s formation. This is a personal and idiosyncratic process. (My conception of Peter Walsh’s knife, say, is likely very different from yours.) But when the novelist elects to offer images to the reader in pictorial form — be it as evidence or atmosphere — we are briefly estranged from the text. We stop looking at the words and let our eyes wander over the image. Even after we stop looking, it lingers at the periphery of the page. We are never less than aware of it. Such images, then, are necessarily more communal than those stored in one’s private archive. Meanings accrete upon the hardness of their visible surfaces, or pool in banks of shadow and light. We move among them in shared hypnosis. We dream the given dream.
The Australian novelist Gerald Murnane has written at length about the image in fiction. (In addition to being a theorist of the fictive image, his own novels and stories showcase a remarkably consistent pantheon of personal images: grass, stone, women, horses, libraries, glass.) In his essay “The Typescript Stops Here: Or, Who Does the Consultant Consult?” he describes his method of reading:
I read slowly the first sentence of each story. I hear in my mind the sound of the words and I feel in my mind the rhythms of the sentence as a whole. While I read the first sentence, images appear in my mind. Most of the images have to do with the words of the sentence, but one image seems to lie on the far side of the other images. The far image is at first more a ghostly outline than a clear image. The far image is the outline in my mind of the person who is the source of the sentence in front of my eyes.
If the first sentence of the text has been a clear and honest sentence, if the sentence has persuaded me that the writer wrote the sentence in order to describe simply and honestly an image or a cluster of images in his or her mind with the aim of learning in due course the meaning of the image or images, then I begin to believe that the image of the person forming behind the other images in my mind will be an image of the better self of the person. In that case also, I begin to feel towards the better self whose image has begun to form in my mind an attitude of trust.
What is this “attitude of trust” that Murnane mentions and what does it have to do with the images he describes? It is perhaps a kind of submission to artistic authority. Reading the first page of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), or António Lobo Antunes’s The Inquisitors’ Manual (1996), or Daša Drndić’s Belladonna (2012), we perceive, almost immediately, that we are in very good hands. (The hands of Murnane’s “better self.”) There are of course many ways to recognize this — syntax, attunement to ambiguity, poetic facility, etc. — though for a certain kind of Murnanian reader, this trust is cemented with a powerful, talismanic image. Whether a canopied bed (Nightwood), or the smashed statues of a dilapidated farm (The Inquisitors’ Manual), or the sewn-together lips of immigrants (Belladonna), the meditative image suggests a structure of nested meanings. It prepares us to read further. Other images will join or supersede this initial image, though the first offering is essential. Its presence is a hallmark of many of my favorite novels, from the sodden estate of László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango (1985) to the peacock feather in Henry Green’s Loving (1945), buried in Edith’s “dark-folded” hair.
Realist fiction is by nature hostile to the image, or at least to the forms of narrative that allow it to flourish. The uncanny image is kept at bay by design. If such an image isn’t smothered by the formal strictures of the realist novel’s admittedly elegant plotting, it is bleached in the crisp and aseptic language of the reigning House Style. The realist mode reinscribes the values that imaginatively and spiritually constrain it. What images do remain are anemic, as if denied some essential nutrition during the drafting process. It isn’t that they are poorly constructed, per se, only that they seem tethered to narrative exigency. They are surfaces without depths. I suspect the kinds of images I’m after are somehow displaced by the energy required of a rigorous adherence to the tensions and resolutions of plot. There are of course counter-examples. (Mavis Gallant and John Cheever come to mind.) These outliers notwithstanding, I’m left with the sense that lasting images cannot withstand the withering force of contemporary realism’s therapeutic epiphanies.
That freedom from narrative exigency seems important to me. Nothing is entirely free of such exigency in fiction, not even the most avant-garde of novels. Something is always being told, or shown, or exposed, or destroyed. But my favorite images tend to resist the structures meant to contain them. They emit a radiation, the mind’s Geiger counter ticking furiously in their presence. They are too heavy, or too bright, or too annihilating — too much themselves — to exist meekly in the fictions with which they are involved. There is always something improvisational about these images, as if the move toward them was partially unconscious, the divining rod of intuition drawing the novelist toward some powerful, subterranean source. Just what are these things anyway: the “lamp,” the “wood,” the “sea”? Great spaces rush around and through such words. Something opens in the reader’s mind — something shared with the author — a secret fascination she herself is perhaps only dimly aware of. This is finally a very intimate thing. I’m tempted to say that the image is lasting only insofar as it contains this element of intimacy, as of a secret transmitted unwillingly.
That felicitous intersection between the poem and the novel — when the novel seems almost a failed poem, a poem taken to absurd or consuming extremes — is where my favorite fictions tend to constellate. I don’t mean that the novel need use purplish prose or surprising metaphor, but only that it possess the self-contained strangeness of a poem. (I consider the lapidary remoteness of Emmanuel Bove’s My Friends (1924) and the humor-horror of Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana (2001) to be poetic, for instance.) Such formal resistance is essential. Put simply, I don’t want to “understand” images any more than I want to “understand” the fictions I read. I don’t want a lesson or a moral. I don’t want to heal or be healed. I want to circle mysterious signals. I want to smell the smoke, even if I can’t yet see the fire. I want to flee technical hygiene and mere proficiency. I want to eat the bread that defines the trail. Speaking only for myself, the ritual of mystery represented by the image-novel is as good a definition as any for the kind of reading I aspire to. I want to see, not to know.
Loved this, Dustin. So interesting. Wonder about your use of realism, though: I think you have a particular idea of realism in mind, yet that terms feels more capacious to me than your suggestion. (Balzac is different than, say, Richard Ford.) And the images you list are so concrete--more metonymy than metaphor, Jakobson would say--exactly the form realism has been so associated with.
Well-framed.