'Words, Pictures, Objects' (2)

"I have said that the art of writing novels is the ability to perceive the thoughts and sensations of protagonists within a landscape — that is, amid the surrounding objects and images. This ability is less important in the art of some novelists, the best example being Dostoyevsky. Reading Dostoyevsky's novels, we sometimes feel that we have encountered something surprisingly profound —that we have attained a truly deep knowledge of life, of people, and above all of our own selves. This knowledge seems so familiar and at the same time so extraordinary, that it occasionally fills us with fear.

The knowledge or wisdom that Dostoyevsky provides us speaks not to our visual imagination, but to our verbal imagination. With regard to the power of the novel and an understanding of the human psyche, Tolstoy is sometimes equally profound; and because these two men wrote during the same period and within the same culture, they are invariably compared with each other. Yet the greater part of Tolstoy's insights are different in kind from Dostoyevsky's. Tolstoy addresses not just our verbal imagination, but—even more — our visual imagination.

No doubt every literary text addresses both our visual and textual intelligence. In live theater, where everything takes place in front of our eyes and for the pleasure of our eyes, wordplay, analytical thought, the joys of poetic language, and the flow of everyday speech are also, of course, part of the pleasure. In the case of an exceedingly dramatic writer like Dostoyevsky—say, in the suicide scene in The Devils—there may be no explicit image on the page (the reader has to imagine, along with the hero, someone committing suicide in the room next door), yet the scene leaves a strong visual impression on us. Still, despite all the tension that sets the reader's head spinning—or perhaps because of it— only a few objects, images, and scenes from Dostoyevsky's work actually stick in our mind. Whereas Tolstoy's world is teeming with suggestive, subtly placed objects, Dostoyevsky's rooms almost seem to be empty.

Allow me to generalize here, so that I can more easily explain my point. Some writers are better at addressing our verbal imagination, while others speak more powerfully to our visual imagination. I will call the first kind ‘verbal writers' and the second kind ‘visual writers'. Homer, for me, is a visual writer: as I read him, countless images pass before my eyes. I enjoy these images more than the story itself. But Ferdowsi, the author of the great Persian epic Shahnameh, which I read over and over while writing the novel My Name Is Red, is a verbal writer who mainly relies on the plot and its twists and turns. Of course, no writer can be placed solely on one side or the other of such a divide. But while reading some writers, we become more engaged with words, with the course of the dialogue, with the paradoxes or thoughts the narrator is exploring, whereas other writers impress us by filling our minds with indelible images, visions, landscapes, and objects.

Coleridge is the best example of a writer who can be either visual or verbal, depending on the genre he is employing. In his poetry—for instance, in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—he is a poet who, rather than telling a story, paints a series of splendid pictures for the reader. But in his prose, personal journals, and autobiography, Coleridge becomes an analytical writer who expects us to think entirely in concepts and words. Moreover, he is able to describe, with great insight, how he created his poems: he wrote them with his visual imagination, while analyzing them with his verbal imagination—see, for example, the fourth chapter of his Biographia Literaria. In the same way, Edgar Allan Poe, who learned a great deal from Coleridge, explains in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” that he wrote his poem “The Raven” by addressing the reader's textual imagination.

In order to understand the dichotomy between what I call “visual literature” and “verbal literature,”let's close our eyes for a moment, focus on a subject, and allow a thought to form in our mind. Then let's open our eyes and ask ourselves: As we were thinking, what passed through our mind—words or images? The answer can be either, or both. We feel that sometimes we think in words, and sometimes in images. Often we switch from one to the other. My aim here is to show, by using this distinction between the visual and the verbal, that any particular literary text tends to exercise one of these centers in our brain more than the other.
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Here is one of my strongest opinions: novels are essentially visual literary fictions. A novel exerts its influence on us mostly by addressing our visual intelligence —our ability to see things in our mind's eye and to turn words into mental pictures. We all know that, in contrast to other literary genres, novels rely on our memory of ordinary life experiences and of sensory impressions we sometimes do not even notice. In addition to depicting the world, novels also describe—with a richness that no other literary form can rival—the feelings evoked by our senses of smell, sound, taste, and touch. The general landscape of the novel comes to life—beyond what the protagonists see—with that world's sounds, smells, tastes, and moments of contact. Yet among the experiences of living that each of us feels from moment to moment in our own unique way, seeing is no doubt the most significant. Writing a novel means painting with words, and reading a novel means visualizing images through someone else's words.

By “painting with words,”I mean evoking a very clear and distinct image in the mind of the reader through the use of words. When I am writing a novel, sentence by sentence, word by word (dialogue scenes aside), the first step is always the formation of a picture, an image, in my mind. I am aware that my immediate task is to clarify and bring into focus this mental image. From reading biographies and writers' memoirs, and from conversing with other novelists, I've come to realize that—compared to other writers—I put more effort into planning before I put pen to paper. I take somewhat greater care to divide a book into sections and structure it. When I write a chapter, a scene, or a small tableau (you see that the vocabulary of painting comes naturally to me!), I first see it in detail in my mind's eye. For me, writing is the process of visualizing that particular scene, that picture. I gaze out the window just as much as I look down at the page I am writing on with a fountain pen. As I prepare to transform my thoughts into words, I strive to visualize each scene like a film sequence, and each sentence like a painting.

But the analogies of film and painting are valid only up to a point. When I am about to describe a scene, I try to envision and highlight the aspect of it that can be expressed in the most succinct and powerful way. As my visual imagination constructs the chapter I am writing, scene by scene and sentence, it focuses on those details that can be expressed most effectively in words.
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Pamuk em The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist.