by Tom Jacobs
How many stories are born of images? All of them? Most of them? Without some founding image (of a person, of a family, of a moment) is it even possible to conceive of a story? The relation between an image and its story—all of the resistances and exchanges between these two very different forms of expression and representation—is both important and incredibly slippery. In a Paris Review interview, Faulkner was asked “How did The Sound and the Fury Begin?” His answer is struck with the force of a small revelation, in part I guess because it is so simple. It began with a mental picture.
I didn't realize at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl's drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother's funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and that it would have to be a book. And then I realized the symbolism of the soiled pants, and that image was replaced by the one of the fatherless and motherless girl climbing down the drainpipe to escape from the only home she had, where she had never been offered love or affection or understanding.
He notes that he tried to tell the story through the eyes of several characters, and even to “gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman,” and ends up admitting that he “never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again.”
Kundera, too, in his excellently-titled, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, explains that his characters came into being by virtue of a haunting image. I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. […] I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking out across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do.” He is trying to figure out if what he feels for Tereza is hysteria or love.
This puts me in the mind of (as most things that I find incredibly engaging interesting do), Walter Benjamin. He has a castoff comment in his Arcades Project where he is thinking about why criticism and analytical thinking are so much less successful than advertising. And he says this: Not what the moving red neon sign says—but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt. That, to be sure, is the kind of declaration that will, if you are so inclined and share a similar sensibility, make you stop and think really hard.
There’s something there, but what does it mean? Why does the reflection of something affect us in such a different manner than the thing itself, unmediated? We have all seen an advertisement or a sign or whatever via its reflection and been kind of startled by it. It’s hard to know why our sensuous assimilation of things is so hard to talk about or describe or explain.