I picked up Radix last night, and reread the first few pages. I might end up rereading the whole book. We’ll see how accurate my description from last night is -- it’s been a while since I read it. (I think I’ve read it twice so far -- first in 2009 and again in 2012.)
Anyway, reading the first few pages, it’s striking how visually dense the descriptions are. Like, here’s an example sentence:
He drove first along a rutted dirt road that smoothed into a causeway and arced out of the industrial district.
That just seems like a lot of visual description, all packed succinctly into one line. It gives me a clear mental image of what that entire stretch of road looked like. And it isn’t even a descriptive sentence! Attanasio doesn’t write “The road was...”; he fits all that visual description into an action sentence which keeps the plot moving. (Ugh, I sound like a five-paragraph essay.)
Anyway, it’s interesting because... with descriptions that dense, if you paused to construct a detailed mental image for each one, it would take forever to get through the book. And I know I didn’t do that when I first read Radix, because I sped through the book in a matter of days. But somehow, I still extracted meaning and clear visuals from the book (or at least large parts of it; there were surreal parts of it that failed to resolve into clear images, but which still gave me a strong sense of meaning).
Sometime in grad school, I got it into my head that the human mind processes sentences by constructing a sensory simulation of the scene that’s described, and therefore I needed to carefully visualize every image in every book, or I wouldn’t be “really getting the meaning”. Which, uh... in retrospect, was not a good idea, and deeply screwed up my ability to read anything (fiction or non-fiction) for the next few years.
For what it’s worth, there is some evidence that people process language (or at least concrete, descriptive language) by constructing a sensory simulation of the scene that’s described. But, like, to whatever extent we do this, it’s largely an unconscious process; we don’t sit around consciously visualizing everything that anyone says, or else it would be impossible to focus on the conversation at hand.
But anyway, during this phase where I had convinced myself that I needed to read each sentence carefully, and consciously construct an image associated with it, it took me forever to read fiction, because I would sit there, reading every sentence over and over again until I could visualize the scene perfectly in my mind. This was extraordinarily time-consuming. I want to emphasize that this is *not* how to read. I think it contributed to a lot of my sensory processing issues; I used to be able to read in a crowded room, but now I can’t (maybe I’m using the auditory parts of my mind to process text more than I used to?). And in general, I’ve been feeling like my sensory issues have gotten worse over the last few years, but maybe my sensory processing is theoretically fine, and I’m just using the wrong parts of my brain to process information. (Here’s a previous post I wrote about my difficulties reading and how I’ve been recovering from them.)
But anyway, all of this makes me wonder, how do we read? Because last night, when I read that sentence from Radix, my eyes brushed over it fairly quickly and then moved onto the next sentence. And I could feel my mind constructing meaning, but what did that meaning contain? Did it actually contain a sensory simulation, containing all the sentence’s visual details (but processed much faster by the subconscious mind)? Or did my eyes gloss over some of the details, and just extract the fact that the protagonist drove down a road?
I think it’s closer to the former, but my intuition is that... the meaning my mind simulates is much less concrete, much less definite, than the visual images I was trying to consciously construct. And so my mind might skip over some details, or generate a rutted road and a smoothed road but not necessarily the full mental image, all at once, of the whole road connected together. Or something. I don’t know. But my mind seems to extract meaning out of the sentence, even when I read it very quickly, and that meaning seems to be at least partially sensory / visual.
But it also seems to contain something other than the visuals. It seems to contain abstract understanding and a visceral emotional sense of what it’s like to experience this road. And I think that’s partially conveyed by the sentence structure. One thing I’ve noticed about Attanasio’s writing is that he puts a lot of visual description into the verbs. The description of the road “smoothing” out and then “arcing” gives a sense of movement, which goes well with the narration of the protagonist driving, and which wouldn’t be conveyed by saying “The road started out rutted, and gradually transitioned to smooth.”
Anyway I’m just really interested in the writing in Radix, and how it conveys meaning, and what that meaning looks like in our minds. Because the first time I read it, a lot of the descriptions were semi-incomprehensible to me, and I had the distinct sense that I was reading the book impressionistically (see a previous post I made on this topic). I had the sense that I couldn’t quite visualize what was going on, but at a deeper level, I nonetheless perfectly understood what was happening.
Anyway I’m writing this post now because this phenomenon continues to fascinate me.
