Lately (see posts here), I’ve been thinking about how pictures relate to thoughts or words. I’ve been painting portraits of writers, figuring out how reading them influences the way I see their faces, and vice versa.
Pictures and words do have a funny relationship. We know that fact from dreams: Weird images can capture complex ideas in powerful ways. For instance, someone can say in plain old words that “three people don’t relate to each other.” But if you have a picture of three things, then their positions in space, their colors, and their different shapes convey parts of the relationship that words do not totally capture:
After a year off, I’m about to go back to teaching literature, and I’ll be using Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” a tight emotional story that I just reread. I’ll be teaching a course on “Emotion in Literature,” and because I’m coming back to literature after a year in the “real world,” I feel like I want to cut to the chase or approach stories in quick or practical ways. So I’m picturing Salinger’s stories in the relatively clean world of images.
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” has three main scenes: One in which a vain New Yorker is talking to her mother on the phone from an empty hotel room. Her mother is trying to talk about her husband’s depression, but the daughter keeps shutting the subject down. In the next scene, we get the two other focal points of the story: Her depressed husband and an innocent little girl around age four. Like the woman in the first scene, these two are also lone souls, talking past each other. They are play-talking in a nearly manic way, but we get a sense of their divide (Him=depressed veteran. Her=4-yr-old wide-eyed innocent). In the last scene, the husband goes back to his hotel room and kills himself. Each body in the story was starkly alone: talking manically into space. To me, these three characters feel like orbs, or like balls floating through the story with white space between them.
Salinger’s story is partly structured by an image. His story shows three well-defined entities that don’t touch. Perhaps when an author gets conscious of the structure or image that his story is building, it helps him polish it: to paint one character clearly in contrast to another, to make the two resonate through isolated details (e.g. a similar shirt each wears; or a joke or word that each uses in different ways), to cut clearer space between the characters, or to make their coming and going cleaner. If you see some structural form that your story is making, you can probably cut more distinct lines between the parts. We do tend to see divisions more easily in images than through the confusing abstraction of words (which is why teachers often use the blackboard for sketching out important organizing principles).
Compare the effects you get from the abstract phrase “the difference between things” with the edge of a wall that cuts a difference clearly in space:
The phrase "the difference between things" allows for many different ideas; and somehow the visual of a line forms something clear for everyone: a dividing space with a certain width.
It can be helpful to think of the images behind the stories you read: Is this a story structured by gleaming white, like a beach scene? Or are there any number of distinct forms at play with each other? Or is the story painted in dark, or light, colors? I think visuals give form to wordy arts. And I think Salinger built a story by putting space between three perfectly circular balls.
Do you ever see stories in terms of images, and how can images either help an author write or a reader understand what the author made?
Catch Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in his excellent Nine Stories.
Ilana Simons is a therapist, literature professor, and author of A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf. Visit her website here.
Ilana, this is what you said:
That is, I don't mean to be writing about the actual physical scenes that Salinger describes, but about the shape his story makes in my mind. I think I tend to see writing in "structural" terms because I'm used to grading student essays, and I tend to think "ok...this student has an introduction that's just a few lines long, and then three big paragraphs, each of which feels like a meaty chunk and explains one thing each, and then she's got this really long, loose paragraph, and I'm not sure where that fits in the structure of the essay." So I see writing in terms of the parts that hold together, like a building's structure.
And this is what first hit my mind, believe it or not, before and after reading what you just said. I went after those mortar building scenarios, when all I had to do is show you this...This isn't exactly the painting I wanted of his, but it's close enough.
Piet Mondrian - Rhythm of Black Lines
An except from an essay - Here's the website
"Mondrian wanted the infinite, and shape is finite. A straight line is infinitely extendable, and the open-ended space between two parallel straight lines is infinitely extendable. A Mondrian abstract is the most compact imaginable pictorial harmony, the most self-sufficient of painted surfaces (besides being as intimate as a Dutch interior). At the same time it stretches far beyond its borders so that it seems a fragment of a larger cosmos or so that, getting a kind of feedback from the space which it rules beyond its boundaries, it acquires a second, illusory, scale by which the distances between points on the canvas seem measurable in miles.
" 'The positive and the negative are the causes of all action ... The positive and the negative break up oneness, they are the cause of all unhappiness. The union of the positive and the negative is happiness.' The palpable oneness of the solitary flower or tower, being subject to time and change, had to give way to the subliminal oneness of a vivid equilibrium."
- From David Sylvester, "About Modern Art: Critical Essays, 1948-1997"
