Mind’s Eye

The other day when I was listening to the Archers someone started talking to me. Nothing unusual there. My children are unable to understand, it seems, that in order to know what’s going on in a radio programme you have to be able to hear it. There are no visual clues to keep you going for the duration of whatever vital exchange they need to have right that minute. You can imagine, can’t you?

Me: deep sigh

Child: “Blah, blah, blah.”

Me: flaps hand towards the radio

Child: “Blah, blah, blah-di-blah.”

Me: grabs remote and turn up radio

Child: “Oh, err, sorry. I’ll come back later.”

Me: “Well, if it’s not important...”

So the next day, we’re all sitting there and somehow the Archers comes up again. They want to know why their dad and I listen to it. Nothing ever happens, they say, and they’re right. In fact, on the occasion when there has been a Big Story, you know, Ruth having an affair (or not, I can’t remember if she actually Did It), Nigel falling off the roof, those things irritate me. What I like about the Archers is the buzz and hum of life, the mundane nothingness of the everyday. I used to like that about Coronation Street until it turned all Eastenders and I stopped watching.

OK, so by now maybe you’re thinking this is supposed to be a blog about books, why’s she wittering on about soap operas. Well, what happened was this: I had a little moan about the kids interrupting when I was listening to the Archers, and one of them asked if I had a picture of each character in my head, if I actually knew what they looked like. And I had to say no, not in the way that they were imagining. Their idea, I suppose, is that you sit there with a sort of Archers movie playing in your head. It isn’t like that at all though, any more than when you read you have the movie of the book playing in your head. However I do think that if a book or a radio programme or an audio book captures you sufficiently, in some way it must stimulate some visual sensors in your brain as well as the auditory and understanding ones. Even though you can’t see it, you have a sense that you have seen it. Think of it like this, you know what your husband or your mother or your dog looks like, don’t you? But when you’re not with them, you don’t have an actual image of them in your head, just a sense of them.

There is one downside I have found with this whole inner visualisation thing. Sometimes when I’m driving, if I’m listening to something interesting, or making up stories, there are moments when I have to remind myself to focus on what’s ahead of me on the road instead of what I can see with my mind’s eye.

Does this make any sense to you? What I’m talking about is the imagination. It’s the same thing you get when you write. You don’t need a photo of your character to know you’d recognise them if you came across them in the street. And what you’re hoping to do as you write is to implant that visual sense of the character in the mind of your reader.

Disenchanted reader

I've just finished reading Enchanted Hunters: the power of stories in childhood by Maria Tatar and I'm feeling frustrated. The quotations and the blurb promise me that she will pin down, analyse and explain the magic of storytelling and the power of reading in children's lives. Hurray! I thought. Therein lies some questions I'd like answered. But it revealed nothing at all but rather repeated the purely obvious: stories allow children to explore situations and other emotions beyond their own experience and allow them to indulge their imaginations by plunging them into fantasy. Perhaps I have not read carefully enough and there's more substance to this than I'm seeing. She has interesting things to say about various books (especially about the child-centredness of Lewis Carroll and Dr Seuss), and I enjoyed the part about how story-telling morphed into bed-time reading over the ages. There's also an entertaining appendix of quotations from different authors about how they first experienced reading. But on the whole, a disappointment, and I didn't follow Maria Tatar's explanation of why she used a quotation from Lolita for the title at all.

I come away with unanswered questions:

Why does the fantastic appeal to children? Why do they love magic and other worlds, time slips and aliens?

Why do many adults lose the taste for the fantastic? Do they gain something else? Is it to do with the fact that the whole world is less mysterious to them? Is it to do with the fact that they have learned to be critical and can no longer suspend disbelief?

Why do I still like to read children's books? Is this childish? Do I read them the same way as I did when I was a child?

Why do some children become so involved in stories? Or perhaps how? Do they feel part of the action? Or is observing enough? Why do reading children seem to get this all-encompassing involvement often, whereas I only occasionally reach this point with a book (I suspect there is a time-to-spare factor here!).

So here's my plan. I'm going to search out some books about reading, about how we read and why we read, and some books about children's books (or I could reread the dozen on my shelves whose contents I seem to have forgotten). And I'm going to think about it. Maybe the reason Maria Tatar didn't come up with any revelation is because there isn't any. So, more on this at a later date, but if you have any answers or can suggest any promising leads in my quest, let me know.