Earlier this month, I read The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. He is a writer whom I have heard about for many years, but whom I have not read until this book. I never thought I would be interested; to my surprise, I found the book excellent. I even slowed down the pace of my reading—something I seldom do, given the amount of books on my ‘to read’ pile—because I so thoroughly enjoyed it.
When first purchasing the book online, I discovered there was a movie that had been made of the novel, and that Anthony Hopkins played the protagonist, who is the book’s first-person narrator. I don’t know if I’ll see the movie—the novel’s force, I felt, was largely due to its ambling, nostalgic structure, and the narrator’s voice is the foundation of that structure. I’m not sure how well it would translate visually.
But this brings me to the main point I’d like to jot down in this brief note: as I was reading the book, I regularly pictured Anthony Hopkins as the book’s narrator. That is, I pictured Hopkins sitting at a desk, or staring out a window, sifting through the contents of his memories. Upon first noticing this mental habit, I made an effort to stop. I did not want to picture Anthony Hopkins as I read. As much as I tried, before I knew it, there he was again: Anthony Hopkins, as I was reading, sitting somewhere in my mind, wearing a butler’s costume.
It made me think about how frequently I've encountered this tendency in my life’s reading experiences. When I read about a country estate, I often picture a house I had visited in upstate New York when I was a child; the book’s characters fill that landscape, or that house, but the mental image is from my memory, not from what I read. There is a section in Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch that discusses this very phenomena, which makes me think it’s not so uncommon.
In general, perhaps, this habit (or imaginative shortcoming) is a reason why I tend to be a descriptively sparse writer: I often find it unnecessary furniture, and readers will do whatever they want with their own mental images, or so I suspect. I cannot say, really.
In the following image, I am Moe, the bartender, and Anthony Hopkins is the pink-shirted drunkard. Every time I throw him out of the drinking longue of my mind, he returns.
