I was in the library reading LOTR (Just finished the Fellowship, my god would I recommend it!), and at the beginning of the session, I was reading the book and the descriptions and prose were so magnificent that I willed myself to try imagining what everything looked like in my mind’s eye. So this raises a question. Do you see the picture while reading? If so, how vividly? And is it automatic?

Just to clear up confusion, I’m not just talking about understanding the text. Or retroactively creating an image. I’m talking about while reading the text, you imagine what’s happening visually. And when something changes in the text, say the grass becoming dimmer, do you imagine that process happening?

  • GlenGrail@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Some readers indeed do this automatically (and can’t comprehend without it). Some readers claim to experience no visual imagery when they read. Some critics (I’m thinking of William Gass) insist that readers not create visual imagery, so they can stay firmly within the verbal structure assembled by the author. If you feel like visual imagery helps you comprehend or enjoy a work, or increases your neurological contact with it, great. But know that it’s also perfectly all right to imagine in less vivid or more abstract ways; a lot of readers imagine spaces or settings, but not specific details. Look up “reader response criticism” if you want some empirical studies of how different readers read, cognitively and phenomenologically.

    • RoutineNotes@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I don’t claim to experience no visual imagery. It’s a fact, and it is some people’s reality.

    • only_honesty@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I wonder if aphantasia exists on a spectrum. The only visualizations I can do are of scenery- landscapes/buildings/streets. And it’s more like I can feel myself in the space and sense the dimensions of things.

      If you ask me to picture an apple, I see: either whatever I’m looking at or the weird color of one’s eyelids.

      I can picture the grounds of Hailsham from Never Let Me Go, for example. Kinda. If I try to bring it into focus, it goes away entirely.

      It feels like I’m lying if I say I have 0 visualizations while reading, but I have no concept of a character’s looks, ever.

      Other things I can see a bit: the Battle School corridors from Ender’s Game, the weird blocked-off alley in The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, the grounds and gardens of Misselthwaite Manor in The Secret Garden.