What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Heavenly Conspiracy

Here’s the truth that few want to recognise: Most of what we read (or for that matter hear) is made up, not by the writer but by ourselves. Forget about what words on the page refer to. Mendelsund is not interested in the classical problem of epistemology. We add immense amounts of descriptive and contextual material to what’s on the page without being aware of our doing so. According to Peter Mendelsund, “... the idea of a mirror is an analogy for the act of reading.” What emerges from a book is largely our own imaginations reflected back. The more the author withholds, and this is usually a great deal, the more imagination we supply, right from the first words. As he says, “All books open in doubt and dislocation.” We are thrown in to the sea of reading every time we open a new book; and we have to learn how to swim all over again in that particular place with its unique character, dangers, and surprises.

While psychologists have known that people are not the best witnesses to any of their experiences (including, presumably, their experience of reading), they really haven’t described the phenomenology of this fictionalisation of fiction. Philosophers since Kant have realised that what we see is a function of our human sensory apparatus. But they haven’t had much to say about how human language ability isn’t like other human ‘senses.’ Mendelsund has an interesting suggestion. Reading, and by implication all language-using, he suspects, is really an act of transcendence, not only transcendence of the text but also transcendence of the other immediate aspects of life including much sensory input. “You are neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book (say, this book), nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward),” he speculates.

I think Mendelsund is on to something. I agree with his assessment that “A book feels like the intersection of these two domains—or like a conduit; a bridge; a passage between them... An open book acts as a blind—its boards and pages shut out the world’s clamorous stimuli and encourage the imagination.” While reading we take on an entirely distinct existential condition for which we don’t have an articulate description, not even a name. By its very nature, reading is an escape - but not onto the text. The act of reading is a kind of transformation, not just a fleeting intimation, but another mode of being.

Mendelsund makes the further interesting observation that this transformation is the same phenomenon that we experience while listening to music. This suggests that we may hear much more of what we read than we are conscious of. The parallels between composition in both modes provokes some intriguing aesthetic insights: “In music, notes and chords define ideas, but so do rests.” This I find particularly exciting. Perhaps there really are books written in different keys, just as there are symphonies telling their own genres of stories. And perhaps the conspiracy between reader and writer that produces this other world of literature and music is the source of our idea of... well, of heaven.

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