by Paavan Agarwal
Sometimes when I sit down to write or to read something, I start thinking about the relationship between writing and images and get irresolutely stuck in that conceptual rabbit hole. How can or should one describe a sight or a vision using the written word? Ezra Pound called it “phanopoeia”, “the throwing of an image on the mind’s retina”. When does writing evoke imagery in the mind’s eye and when does it not? As a writer, can every image in your mind’s eye that comes to you as you write be translated into this other medium and still make for compelling writing, and evoke the desired image in the reader’s mind?
Let me illustrate the problem with a scenario – let’s say that I write a passage describing a sunset in great detail, naming every colour and feature I see vividly in my mind. I show it to a reader I trust, and the nightmare comes to pass; reading the description visibly bores them but they pretend they aren’t. I realise I have failed at evoking any affect or emotion in them or in sharing how that sunset made me feel. The description of the sunset bored them because I was working with the names of colours and not the colours themselves. Maybe I should’ve been a painter or a photographer. Maybe this should’ve been an Instagram post.
Picture another scenario – you are a science fiction or fantasy writer who sees enormous spaceships, dragons or castles in your mind’s eye. You faithfully account for every detail that you see clearly in your mind, whether it is an intimidating ziggurat, a rivet on a spacecraft’s exterior, or a translucent, outstretched dragon’s wing. All these details are important to the story and will be of use later. Then, you show it to people, and once again, the nightmare comes to pass. You see their eyes bounce off the descriptions and their reactions are non-committal, and you realise that the writing bored them. After all, they can see fantastical, awesome, and no-longer-impossible-to-realise images in IMAX 3D, or on streaming, or on social media, and have seen it all.
And we are quite far along into this way of life, are we not? Our relationship to images accelerated dramatically in the last fifty or so years, and that overload itself kicked further into high gear in the 21st century with the smartphone and social media. If you see a beautiful sunset, you can take a photograph or even a panorama of it with your smartphone. All sorts of fantastical fauna, spaceships, and floating castles can be represented with computer-generated imagery, with near-complete photorealism. Images are also the primary form of propaganda and advertisement, and we are bombarded with them constantly. What is the writer to do? Is the written word obsolete?
I don’t think so. Here, we as writers should perhaps start thinking about what writing can do best, versus what images, both moving and static, do best. A closeup can zoom in no further than the brow or the eyes (and this itself is only a visual metaphor with conceptual limitations). But writing has the enormous advantage of providing access to subjectivity in ways that images do not. A film may need voiceover or dialogue to express what is immediate to the written word. The modernists knew these things and were also responding to the inventions of photography and film by thinking about what writing could do that those other media could not, and I believe that the writer trying to write for the contemporary audience should try to continue along these lines.
So, we need not and should not give up on trying to represent the visual. Instead of trying to describe an enormous castle or spaceship in entirety, you can write how it makes the characters seeing it feel. Are they seeing it for the first time, awestruck, or is the sight so familiar that it only registers as a rearrangement of shapes in the background? This brings back the visual to writing stronger than before, and one can even speak of light and shade without anxiety. Perhaps a good writer is not someone who can describe a beautiful sunset that they saw but instead someone who can evoke in the reader’s mind a beautiful sunset that the reader saw.
Let me propose another, more contemporary solution. If there is an image or a set of images that you really do want to share with your readers, do it! You can create it yourself or with the collaboration of a visual artist of some kind. Maybe your novel wants to be a graphic novel. Maybe you want to include a map of a kingdom, a computer model of a spaceship, or something more avant-garde, a photograph or painting that represents a specific emotion, affect, or vision that you believe writing cannot or should not or need not represent. We do so much reading and media consumption with our devices and they can come in handy here because they make it fairly easy to put together and display multimedia. Another benefit of this approach is that it is pro-social and it involves your artistic community. Collaboration may also help you further articulate and develop your vision, and if you are able, you should compensate your collaborators. Of course, sometimes what we need is not other collaborators but to isolate ourselves to do our work, which is also fine.
We have now arrived at the elephant in the room, the truly anti-social, anti-artistic and anti-human approach, which would be to feed a written description to an LLM and obtain some impersonal, characterless image, something that banalizes and insults both the image and the written word. Like any two languages, the written word and the image are not mutually translatable in some kind of objective way that does not involve human interpretation. This is also worth remembering when one collaborates with others and tries to bring a vision from one medium to another, because communication is key and it usually takes a lot of it for a group of people to start to share a vision.
I hope I have left you with enough food for thought for the next time you encounter the conundrum of the visual in the written. Done with intelligence and intention, both the modernist approach and the multimedia approach are artistically valid and vital, and knowing all your options helps you focus your artistic intentions and ambitions. It is of the utmost importance to think about what a form or medium can do best and to work with that. Having said that, with enough dedication and thought, the written word is extremely powerful and can represent anything you want it to. It can be used to represent not only visions but also things that go beyond the senses, and beyond description. The secret to doing that, which I also hold, I will reveal in my next blog post 😉
Paavan Agarwal is a writer and editor. Currently a copyeditor working in India, he studied English and physics at the University of Toronto. His interests lie in postcolonial studies, modernism, and postmodernism. He is passionate about form, but also content. He loves trying to help others’ work reach its full potential, as well as his own. He is currently working on two speculative fiction short stories and editing a third. He watches movies in his free time and has many unsolicited recommendations.
The views and opinions expressed in blog posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of all WiT members.
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