The I's Eye: Perception and Mental Imagery in Literature

Abstract

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY THINK BY MEANS OF CONCEPTS. Art, music, and painting think by means of percepts. That is what we are told: logos and tekhnd, in original Greek sense, are opposed as are two hemispheres of our brain, rational and intuitive, one calculating, other feeling. But how does literature, which is neither logos nor tekhnd, which is both art and knowledge, think, and by what means? Being neither pure sound nor pure image, literature does not address itself strictly to senses, nor does it address itself solely to intellect. The literary text cannot be reduced to mere intelligibility of its meaning nor to rational apprehension of its cognitive content. Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy?, argue that writers have no reason to envy painters or musicians: material used by writers is and syntax, a syntax created which rises irresistibly in author's work and which is transformed into sensation (158). As with all art, authors conclude, literature has as its goal the tearing of percept from perception of objects and from different states of perceiving subject, [ . . to] extract a pure sensory (Ibid.). More so than is case in other arts, literature may rise (to level of) percept, by detaching percept from concrete conditions of perceptionthese conditions being constituted by immediate relation between subject and object. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Thomas Hardy does not represent the perception of through eyes of a given character, but landscape [itself] as percept, in same way that we can speak of Melville's oceanic percepts in Moby Dick and urban percepts in Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (159). Is there not an apparent contradiction here? If building blocks of literature are words and syntax, as Deleuze and Guattari contend, then object of our sensations-in reading or in writing-will necessarily be composed of sounds and letters, of phonemes and graphemes, as these entities are concatenated in linear sequence of a sentence, rather than in a particular entity of natural world, be it a landscape, sea, or a city,