![\"AK1\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/ak1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nMost authors (wittingly, unwittingly) provide their fictional characters with more behavioral than physical description. Even if an author excels at physical description, we are left with shambling concoctions of stray body parts and random detail (authors can\u2019t tell us everything<\/em>). We fill in gaps. We shade them in. We gloss over them. We elide. Anna: her hair, her weight\u2014these are only facets, and do not make up a true image of a person. They make up a body type, a hair color \u2026 What does Anna look like? <\/em>We don\u2019t know\u2014our mental sketches of characters are worse than police composites.<\/p>\n Visualizing seems to require will \u2026<\/p>\n \u2026 though at times it may also seem as though an image of a sort appears to us unbidden.<\/p>\n (It is tenuous, and withdraws shyly upon scrutiny.) <\/p>\n I canvass readers. I ask them if they can clearly imagine their favorite characters. To these readers, a beloved character is, to borrow William Shakespeare\u2019s phrase, \u201cbodied forth.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n These readers contend that the success of a work of fiction hinges on the putative authenticity of the characters. Some readers go further and suggest that the only way they can enjoy a novel is if the main characters are easily visible:<\/p>\n \u201cCan you picture, in your mind, what Anna Karenina looks like?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d they say, \u201cas if she were standing here in front of me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat does her nose look like?\u201d\u2028<\/p>\n \u201cI hadn\u2019t thought it out; but now that I think of it, she would be the kind of person who would have a nose like \u2026\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut wait\u2014How did you picture her before I asked? Noseless?\u201d\u2028<\/p>\n \u201cWell \u2026\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDoes she have a heavy brow? Bangs? Where does she hold her weight? Does she slouch? Does she have laugh lines?\u201d<\/p>\n (Only a very tedious writer would tell you this much about a character. Though Tolstoy never tires of mentioning Anna\u2019s slender hands<\/em>. What does this emblematic description signify for Tolstoy?)<\/p>\n Some readers swear they can picture these characters perfectly, but only while they are reading. I doubt this, but I wonder now if our images of characters are vague because our visual memories are vague in general.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n A thought experiment: Picture your mother. Now picture your favorite literary character. (Or: Picture your home. Then picture Howards End.) The difference between your mother\u2019s afterimage and that of a literary character you love is that the more you concentrate, the more your mother might come into focus. A character will not reveal herself so easily. (The closer you look, the farther away she gets.)<\/p>\n (Actually, this is a relief. When I impose a face on a fictional character, the effect isn\u2019t one of recognition, but dissonance. I end up imagining someone I know.* And then I think,\u00a0That isn\u2019t Anna!<\/em>)<\/p>\n Often, when I ask someone to describe the physical appearance of a key character from their favorite book they will tell me how this character moves through space. (Much of what takes place in fiction is choreographic.)<\/p>\n One reader told me Benjy Compson from William Faulkner\u2019s The Sound and the Fury <\/em>was \u201clumbering, uncoordinated \u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n But what does he look <\/em>like?<\/p>\n Literary characters are physically vague\u2014they have only a few features, and these features hardly seem to matter\u2014or, rather, these features matter only in that they help to refine a character\u2019s meaning<\/em>. Character description is a kind of circumscription. A character\u2019s features help to delineate their boundaries\u2014but these features don\u2019t help us truly picture a person.*<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n It is precisely what the text does not elucidate that becomes an invitation to our imaginations. So I ask myself: Is it that we imagine the most, or the most vividly, when an author is at his most elliptical or withholding?<\/p>\n (In music, notes and chords define ideas, but so do rests<\/em>.)<\/p>\n *Or is it that comprehensiveness <\/em>is not an important factor in the identification of anything?<\/small><\/p>\n <\/p>\n William Gass, on Mr. Cashmore from Henry James\u2019s The Awkward Age<\/em>:<\/p>\n We can imagine any number of other sentences about Mr. Cashmore added \u2026 now the question is: what is Mr. Cashmore? Here is the answer I shall give: Mr. Cashmore is (1) a noise, (2) a proper name, (3) a complex system of ideas, (4) a controlling perception, (5) an instrument of verbal organization, (6) a pretended mode of referring, and (7) a source of verbal energy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The same could be said of any character\u2014of Nanda, from the same book, or of Anna Karenina. Of course\u2014isn\u2019t the fact that Anna is ineluctably drawn to Vronsky (and feels trapped in her marriage) more significant than the mere morphological fact of her being, say, \u201cfull-figured\u201d?<\/p>\n It is how characters behave, in relation to everyone and everything in their fictional, delineated world, that ultimately matters. (\u201cLumbering, uncoordinated \u2026\u201d)<\/p>\n Though we may think of characters as visible, they are more like a set of rules that determines a particular outcome. A character\u2019s physical attributes may be ornamental, but their features can also contribute to their meaning.<\/p>\n (What is the difference between seeing and understanding?)<\/p>\n Take Karenin\u2019s ears \u2026 \u2028(Karenin is the cuckolded husband of Anna Karenina.) Are his ears large or small?<\/p>\n At Petersburg, so soon as the train stopped and she got out, the first person that attracted her attention was her husband. \u2018Oh, mercy! Why do his ears look like that?\u2019 she thought, looking at his frigid and imposing figure, and especially the ears that struck her at the moment as propping up the brim of his round hat \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Karenin\u2019s ears grow in proportion to his wife\u2019s disaffection with him. In this way, these ears tell us nothing about how Karenin looks, and a great deal about how Anna feels.<\/p>\n Ishmael.\u201d\u2028 What happens when you read the first line of Herman Melville\u2019s Moby-Dick<\/em>?<\/p>\n You are being addressed, but by whom? Chances are you hear <\/em>the line (in your mind\u2019s ear) before you picture the speaker. I can hear Ishmael\u2019s words more clearly than I can see his face. (Audition requires different neurological processes than vision, or smell. And I would suggest that we hear <\/em>more than we see while we are reading.)<\/p>\n If you did manage to summon an image of Ishmael, what did you come up with? A seafaring man of some sort? (Is this a picture or a category?) Do you picture Richard Basehart, the actor in the John Huston adaptation?<\/p>\n (One should watch a film adaptation of a favorite book only after considering, very carefully<\/em>, the fact that the casting of the film may very well become the permanent casting of the book in one\u2019s mind. This is a very real hazard<\/em>.)<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n What color is your <\/em>Ishmael\u2019s hair? Is it curly or straight? Is he taller than you? If you don\u2019t picture him clearly, do you merely set aside a chit, a placeholder that says, \u201cProtagonist, narrator\u2014first person\u201d? Maybe this is enough. Ishmael probably evokes a feeling in you\u2014but this is not the same as seeing him.<\/p>\n Maybe Melville had a specific image in mind for his Ishmael. Maybe Ishmael looked like someone he knew from his years at sea. But Melville\u2019s image is not ours. And no matter how well illustrated Ishmael may or may not be (I can\u2019t remember if Melville describes Ishmael\u2019s physical attributes, and I\u2019ve read the book three times), chances are we will have to constantly revise our image of him as the book progresses. We are ever reviewing and reconsidering our mental portraits of characters in novels: amending them, backtracking to check on them, updating them when new information arises \u2026<\/p>\n What kind of face you assign to Ishmael might depend upon what mood you are in on a particular day. Ishmael might look as different from one chapter to the next as, say, Tashtego does from Stubb.<\/p>\n Sometimes, in a play<\/em>, several actors perform a single role. In these instances, the cognitive dissonance aroused by multiple actors is evident to the theatrical audience. But after reading a novel, we think back on its characters as if they were played by single actors. (In a narrative, multiplicity of \u201ccharacter\u201d is read as psychological complexity.)<\/p>\n Another question: As a character develops throughout the course of a novel, does the way this character \u201clooks\u201d to you (their appearance) change \u2026 as a result of their inner development? (<\/em>A real person may become more beautiful to us once we are better acquainted with their nature\u2014and in these cases our increased affection isn\u2019t due to some closer physical observation.)<\/p>\n Are characters complete as soon as they are introduced? Perhaps they are complete, but just out of order<\/em>; the way a puzzle might be.<\/p>\n Levin gazed at the portrait, which stood out from the frame in the brilliant light thrown on it, and he could not tear himself away from it \u2026 It was not a picture, but a living, charming woman, with black curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; triumphantly and softly she looked at him with eyes that baffled him. She was not living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be. Peter Mendelsund is the associate art director of Alfred A. Knopf and a recovering classical pianist. His designs have been described by <\/em>The Wall Street Journal as being \u201cthe most instantly recognizable and iconic book covers in contemporary fiction.\u201d He lives in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n This is an excerpt from <\/em>What We See When We Read<\/a>, by Peter Mendelsund. Copyright \u00a9 2014 by Peter Mendelsund. With permission of the publisher, Vintage Books. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>*I recently had the experience while reading a novel wherein I thought I had clearly seen a character\u2014a society woman with \u201cwidely spaced eyes.\u201d When I subsequently scrutinized my imagination, I discovered that what I had been imagining was the face of one of my coworkers, grafted onto the body of an elderly friend of my grandmother\u2019s. When brought into focus, this was not a pleasant sight.<\/small><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n\n
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\u2014Anna Karenina<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n