Book 007 What Survives Reading
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So far we have suggested that writing and reading a piece of literature is like crossing the gap between the author and reader on a bridge, and that what crosses the bridge is not exactly what the text says, but the text somehow rendered in space, the text without its logical connections, the text, in a way, re-presented in things we'll call images. We also suggested that art (texts with images) has the power to affect us on a different, sub-conscious level. From these, the question naturally arises: what do we think actually crosses the bridge that is both less and more than the text we see?
If we take away the logical relationships and connections in a text like negation, causation, the sub- and coordination of clauses, then what we are left with are fragments of words and short phrases I'll call minemes. Focusing on these is useful because most of the time, these are quite visual, like "heavy mahogany door", "face", "distort", "lemon" in "He turned to open the heavy mahogany door hardly able to hide his face distorted by the lemon-like frustration he felt," and, most of the time, it is their visual quality that allows them to create images. From the examples we've seen it is also apparent that the minimes are easy to find in the text itself, and, unlike logical structures, hardly change when translated from the text into images in our minds. A door will be just that, a door, no matter what other minemes we put next to it or what images it will appear in. In other words, minemes function like atoms in this model of literature, and provide a great starting point when we try to understand how a piece of text affects us.
There are a number of ways in which we can try to describe the properties of this sea of apparently unrelated minemes to understand their effect on us (or any other reader). We can, for example, determine how many of them feel negative ("darkness", "death", "fall") or positive ("birth", "summer", "wealth"); or how many of them are in the world the text is creating, and how many of them cannot be, which we have mentioned earlier. We will discuss these approaches a bit later.
At the same time, it is also clear that when we read some literature, we get more than this sea of minemes; that these minemes, despite the lack of logical structures, organise themselves into manageable collections. In our model we try to describe this phenomenon by introducing the notion of images.
Our definition of an image is simple and flexible. An image is a collection of minemes that help to describe, or even, to a certain extent, visualise, a mineme at the centre of this structure, which we will call the exhibit of the image. For example,
TODO
- Layer II is uniform across readers - effect on subconscious
- Ways to arrange minemes: images, AB
- concreteness
- Lyrical I, global exhibit
- Connections, see also
- metathesis
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