Lecture delivered at the Vermont College of Fine Arts on July 1, 2019
As an artist, like everyone else on this planet, you encounter the world out there primarily in your bodies, moment to moment through your senses. Everything else derives from that. You are creatures of your senses. All that follows—all the stuff of the mind, all the analysis, all the rationalization, all the abstracting and interpreting—follows up that point of contact, in the moment, through your senses.
-Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream
Let’s start at the beginning—before we knew about themes and metaphor, about symbols, about voice, about plot, about dialogue, about character. All those things writers obsess over. What was your first immersive reading experience? When did the book in your hand dissolve and the walls and the floor and all the furniture in the room recede beyond all your perceptions? When did your consciousness first slip away and inhabit what John Gardner described as a “continuous fictive dream”? To answer that question is to answer the question we’ve all asked ourselves: Why are you here? Not just the existential one, but the more immediate one: Why are you here at an MFA residency in Montpelier, Vermont? What was the book, or story, or poem that started you on this journey?
When you had that first immersive reading experience, and it is just that—we don’t read great literature, we experience it—did you ask yourself, “How did the author do that?” How did those words on the page reach into us and communicate things that we thought were beyond language? How does the verbal communicate the non-verbal? The writer may be someone just like us, but because we consider ourselves all unique snowflakes, there is no one just like you. The writer could be living or long dead. The writer could be a different gender than ourselves, or a different race, or ethnicity, or orientation, or even of a different generation. He or she could be different than ourselves in every way that humans choose to identify themselves. And yet, that story, that poem, that essay, becomes an intimately shared experience between us and the writer and among all those who read the same work.
What we share, what all human beings share, is the way in which we experience the world: Our five senses. Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Among the challenges that computer scientists face when creating artificially intelligent systems is the fact that computers lack the most crucial ingredient needed in creating consciousness: a human body. Just over fifty years ago, science fiction author Arthur C. Clark imagined a sentient computer. He named it HAL 9000. HAL was so sentient that he became psychotic and murdered nearly the entire crew of a spaceship on the way to Jupiter. In spite of all the technological advances since then, we are, thankfully, nowhere closer to HAL than we were in 1968. Instead we have moved the goalposts and lowered our expectations of what machine intelligence actually is: it’s facial recognition and or it’s guessing what we would like to order next from Amazon. Maybe when HAL is able to see, taste, smell, hear, and feel he will become a truly sentient being. Maybe he will even dream.
When we are born, our brains are only partially developed. The last nine months of brain development occurs outside the muffled tranquility of the womb and out in the world where we are constantly stimulated by the infinite textures of all five senses. It is an inescapable experience that we all share. Long before these theories of neuroscience, James Joyce understood this when he wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. It had a queer smell. His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance.
Ultimately, writing should invoke an emotional response in the reader, the more complex, the better. Before that emotional response, however, comes a physical sensation. What’s miraculous, what’s magic is that the physical response, can be provoked by mere words on a page. We can use the verbal to communicate that which is non-verbal. Our challenge is that, for the most part, language lacks the ability to directly stimulate our senses. One might say, “Words cannot describe…,” but we are writers, so that excuse is not available to us. Furthermore, as Diane Ackerman explains in her book, “The Natural History of the Senses,” the four senses other than vision are not as well developed in humans and sensitive as they are in other species. These four senses may still provide a vivid experience, but our ability to discern them is less precise. Instead, we must tap into the experience that the reader brings to the text. Not their experience growing up in a dysfunctional family (although that may be relevant too), not their experience falling in love (which they may or may not have had happen to them yet), or losing a soul-mate, or being unjustly accused of a crime, or any of the other things that comprise their personal histories. Instead, we must reach deeper. We must start with something primal. Our senses have memories that are inexorably entwined in our life experiences. If our writing does not tap those sense memories, we will never be able to create the emotional resonances that all great literature does. The silvery-blue light of a full moon, the high-pitched whine of the dentist’s drill, the taste of lemon and honey softening the bitterness of black tea, the mixed cocktail of industrial disinfectant and the odors of bedpans in a hospital room, the warm breath of a lover whispering in our ear.
Of all the five senses, vision is the one most readily available to our writing. We are primarily a visual species, and our language provides a rich vocabulary to describe visual imagery, so most of us rely very heavily on visual descriptions. As Chekhov, a master of visual imagery said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” The other four senses can be elusive. We must resort to describing, for example, a smell or a taste as the smell or taste of something else and hope that the reader knows what that something else smells or tastes like. Fortunately, when it comes to these other four senses, a little goes a long way. If “a picture paints a thousand words,” then a taste, or a smell, or a sound could be worth a thousand pictures. Take this example from Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.” “Brokeback Mountain” covers a timeframe that could easily fill a novel, yet Proulx manages to compress twenty years of the character’s lives into a short story, without losing any of the richness and complexity of those lives. She uses her sensory imagery to cover long periods of time without the story feeling stripped down:
In December Ennis married Alma Beers and had her pregnant by mid-January. He picked up a few short-lived ranch jobs, then settled in as a wrangler on the old Elwood Hi-Top place, north of Lost Cabin, in Washakie County. He was still working there in September when Alma Jr. as he called his daughter, was born an their bedroom was full of the smell of old blood and milk and baby shit, and the sounds were of squalling and sucking and Alma’s sleepy groans, all reassuring of fecundity and life’s continuance to one who worked with livestock.
This passage has far more telling than showing, but the sensory descriptions tell us, in a very visceral way, everything we need to know about Ennis and Alma at that point in their lives: “old blood and milk and baby shit,” … “squalling and sucking and groans.” There this is no visual imagery in this passage. Could this compression have been accomplished as concisely and effectively with only visual imagery?
Later in the story, Poulx refrains from visually describing a turgid tryst between Jack and Ennis in a motel room and instead simply describes the aftermath relying solely on the sense of smell:
The room stank of semen and smoke and sweat and whiskey, of old carpet and sour hay, saddle leather, shit, and cheap soap.
These non-visual images replace what might have been dramatized in an extended scene that would likely have tested the limits of The New Yorker’s editorial standards. Instead, the drama is contained within a single sentence.
The effectiveness of even the shortest sensory descriptions cannot be understated. When the proper context is created, it may take only a single sensory image. A single taste, a smell, a sound, or a touch in the proper context, may be all that is need and can tell more than paragraphs of description or exposition. In John Updike’s short story, “Wife Wooing,” a family is on vacation, presumably on the Cape. Saturday night, in the motel room, the husband hoping to have sex with his wife. She, however, has different ideas. She’s exhausted and feeling disgusting after spending the day at the beach with the kids and turns him away. When they return home the next day, the husband is disappointed and even feeling a little resentful. (poor dear). Later that night, after the kids are in bed she has showered and emerges from the bathroom in her bathrobe:
So, I am taken by surprise at turning when at the meaningful hour of ten you come with a kiss of toothpaste to me moist and girlish and quick.
Within the context of the story something seemingly ordinary—the taste of toothpaste—becomes unexpectedly sensual. (Not to mention unabashedly charming and vanilla).
According to Ackerman, our non-visual senses are the ones that most directly connect with our memories. The taste and aroma of an old family recipe, the scent the pines surrounding your grandparents summer cottage in the Adirondacks. When we experience these sensations in our continuous fictive dream, we can be transported back to not only the time and place, but to the emotional state. There are several ways in which this can work for us as writers. First, the sensation may be common enough among our readers, and the memories it relates to may be similar. The reader may bring their own “sensual history” to the text. Second, the sensation can trigger a memory and an emotional state in the character. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a sensation experienced directly by the reader; it just needs to be described. In David Jauss’s “The Stars at Noon,” a woman’s mental state is affected by the sounds in her hospital room:
She had been sleeping, it seemed, then she heard someone cough. Who is coughing? she thought. Then she realized: it was herself.
Silly old woman. Silly, half-dead old woman.
Then she noticed that she was sitting up. Why? She looked around the hospital room. The vaporizer breathing the menthol odor of death. The late afternoon light on the linoleum like the outline of someone killed in a highway accident. Anastasia shivered. Why did she have to think such thoughts? This was no time to think like that. This was a time for joy. She lay back into herself, hugged the chill inside her. I wouldn’t be long now. Now what was that? Nurses talking in the hallway? She raised her head from the pillow and strained to hear what they were saying. But she couldn’t make out the words over the his of the vaporizer. So, she lay back.
Then it wasn’t the nurses talking. It was the cicadas buzzing in the trees around her father’s farm.
She heard the ratcheting hum every August when she was growing up. Once, she and Tom collected the brittle, umber-colored husks left in the elms after the humming stopped.
In this example, Jauss uses a sound to trigger the character’s memory, providing a brief flashback and an added dimension to the character. Now, if the reader can recall the sound of cicadas, that’s great, but it’s not necessary. What’s provided here is an accurate description about how our senses and memory work that is familiar to the reader and it creates its own resonance.
Sometimes, a sense memory can trigger an unconscious response the reader may feel but struggle to define. The sensations may be universal in that they can trigger a response, even if the reader can’t consciously recall the specific event. Here’s a scene from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye:
Frieda restuffs the window, I trudge off to bed, full of guilt and self-pity. I lie down in my underwear, the metal in my black garters hurts my legs, but I do not take them off, for it is too cold to lie stockingless. It takes a long time for my body to heat in its place in the bed. Once I have generated a silhouette of warmth, I dare not move, for there is a cold-place one-half inch in any direction. No one speaks to me or asks how I feel. In an hour or two my mother comes. Her hands are large and rough, and when she rubs the Vicks salve on my chest, I am rigid with pain. She takes two fingers’ full of it at a time and massages my chest until I am faint. Just when I think I will tip over into a scream, she scoops a little of the salve on her forefinger and puts it in my mouth, telling me to swallow. A hot flannel is wrapped around my neck and chest. I am covered up with heavy quilts and ordered to sweat, which I promptly do.
The imagery in this passage is universal: lying in a cold bed waiting for it to warm up, rough hands, the weight of the quilts, and most of all, Vicks salve. Do those words directly describe a sensation? I looked up the ingredients in Vick’s Vapor Rub and found that the distinctive smell comes from a mixture of camphor, menthol, and eucalyptus oil. Listing these ingredients is unnecessary, and even counterproductive. The word “Vicks” is all we need to conjure up childhood memories of getting a cold and feeling really, really bad. There’s also nothing visual in this imagery. It’s all smell, taste, and touch, which makes us embody young Claudia in a way that a visual image—say, a movie—never could. This is a unique feature of literature that sets it apart from all other art forms. And while most of us have never actually eaten Vicks Vapor Rub, we can easily imagine what it tastes like. Now, when I gave an early draft of this lecture to a trusted friend to read, she wrote back that the above scene for her evoked the memory of being very sick and being soothed and comforted by her loving mother. In a book filled with the most horrendous acts of abuse, this is a tender moment. The rough handling paradoxically expressing gentleness.
Inviting, or sometimes even forcing, our readers to physically embody a character in our story is the advantage that writing has over every other artform, at least until someone develops Star Trek’s holodeck.. Some writers, in some contexts, are able to provide an experience so thoroughly immersive that we’re not sure where we end, and the character begins. Consider Charles D’Ambrosio’s short story, “The Point.” D’Ambrosio takes us on a journey inside the body of fourteen-year-old Kurt. The story is quite popular among creative writers, and I’m sure it’s launched at least a thousand critical papers over the years. It’s a thematically rich story that we can study from many different perspectives. We can be Harold Bloom and analyze it in terms of the great western literary tradition and call it a Telemachia, or as Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, or a coming of age story with Kurt in the role of Huckleberry Finn, or more likely Holden Caulfield, or maybe even a Neo-Freudian psychoanalytic study of a boy with an Oedipus Complex but no father left to kill. However, we may interpret this story, the one thing that is very clear is that we are not on his journey, this quest, with Kurt. We are on this journey as Kurt. D’Ambrosio opens this story using all five of our senses, multiple times, to place us physically in Kurt’s body, the first step to reach us emotionally and spiritually. As I read this, take note of how each of the five senses are touch, directly and indirectly:
I had been lying awake after my nightmare, a nightmare in which Father and I bought helium balloons at a circus. I tied it around my finger and Father tied his around a string bean and lost it. After that, I lay in the dark, tossing and turning, sleepless from all the sand in my sheets and all the uproar out in the living room. Then the door opened, and for a moment the blade of bright light blinded me. The party was still going full blast, and now with the door ajar and my eyes adjusting I glimpsed the silver smoke swirling in the light and all the people suspended in it, hovering around as if they were angels in Heaven—some kind of Heaven where the host serves highballs and the men smoke cigars and the women all smell like rotting fruit. Everything was hysterical out there—the men laughing, the ice clinking, the women shrieking. A woman crossed over and sat on the edge of my bed, bending over me. It was Mother. She was backlit, a vague looming silhouette, but I could smell lily of the valley and something else—lemon rind from the bitter twist she always chewed when she reached the watery bottom of her vodka-and-tonic. When Father was alive, she rarely drank, but after he shot himself you could say she really let herself go.
The story continues in this manner, with Kurt struggling to escort a drunken party-goer home to her apartment in the same complex. The emotional climax of the story comes at the end in the very last sentence. It’s a devastating ending, enabled by how deeply embedded we have become in Kurt’s physical being.
In contrast to this overwhelming onslaught of sensual experience, a passage with just a few spare images can also be effective. The opening paragraph of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar contains just a few sensory images, but they are well-chosen and precise, and a little bit strange:
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers – goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-selling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.
That final sensation isn’t one that Esther, the narrator, experiences, she only imagines it, and we, having the same nervous system and history of sensory experience can imagine along with her. And, of course, it becomes one of the major motifs in the novel.
I’ve used examples from works that couldn’t be more different from one another, from writers who couldn’t be more different from one another—Joyce, Proulx, Updike, Morrison, Jauss, D’Ambrosio, Plath—and they use imagery in different ways for different purposes. In the end, however, I’d like to return to the Butler quote that I read at the beginning of this lecture:
As an artist, like everyone else on this planet, you encounter the world out there primarily in your bodies, moment to moment through your senses. Everything else derives from that. You are creatures of your senses. All that follows—all the stuff of the mind, all the analysis, all the rationalization, all the abstracting and interpreting—follows up that point of contact, in the moment, through your senses.
This is how we create what binds us to our reader: a shared emotional experience.
My final quotation comes from Raymond Carver’s short story, “A Small, Good Thing.” In this story, a couple experience the ultimate tragedy, the death of their son that comes after the frantic and harrowing experience of standing vigil over him in the hospital after he is hit by a car. As I was reading this story for the first time, I did that thing that MFA students do when they read a story like this: I kept saying to myself, “Okay, okay, I get it, but how the hell are you going to end this story, Mr. Carver?” The ending, when it comes, is an example of a sparse, yet vivid sensory experience that provides catharsis: emotional catharsis and even deeper a spiritual catharsis. The mourning couple, are offered communion by a stranger:
“Smell this,” the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. “It’s a heavy bread, but rich.” They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.
I’d like to conclude with a small exercise. I’ve got two photographs for you to examine. For each of them, write down some sensory images. Don’t do the visual, I’ve supplied that with the picture. What does the picture make you feel? What does it make you hear, taste, and smell?
Let me formally conclude this lecture with my sensory interpretation of this last picture:
The strip of pictures slid out of the slot on the side of the booth It felt damp and smelled faintly of vinegar. The roller coaster roared overhead and rattled the walls of the booth. In the corner of his mouth he felt the sting of the spicy brown, mustard that was on the hotdog his father bought him. His cheeks and shoulders radiated the heat from an afternoon spent on the beach under a blazing sun. The air smelled of ocean. And of English Leather aftershave..
Thank you.
Works Referenced
Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. Phoenix, 2000.
Butler, Robert Olen., and Janet Burroway. From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. Grove, 2006.
DAmbrosio, Charles. The Point: Stories. Little, Brown and Co., 1995.
Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction Notes on Craft for Young Writers. Vintage Books, 1999
Jauss, David. Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories. Press 53, 2013.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin Books, 1987.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Vintage Books, 2016.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Harper Perennial, 1971.
Proulx, E. Annie. Close Range: Wyoming Stories. Scribner, 1999.
Updike, John. The Early Stories, 1953-1975. Random House, 2012.
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