Shoes, Truths, and Scallop TV
Perspectives and possibilities
One of the delights - and torments - of fiction-writing, is putting yourself (and, ideally, your reader) into other people’s shoes. As writers we explore the hinterland behind a character’s words and deeds, and seek to reveal them to the reader through a - it is to be hoped - natty combination of ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. But the idea of a hinterland - our own, other people’s, or our characters’ - raises a host of questions. Putting to one side with some alacrity the whole notion of an unconscious, about which I have all sorts of unresolved reservations,1 I’d like to touch on here two separate areas of interest. The first is that of inner and outer selves. The second is that of perspective and outlook.
It seems pretty much incontrovertible that every human being has a public and a private side - and that the private side is often inaccessible to others. As King Duncan says early on in Macbeth, “There is no art to tell the mind’s construction in the face.”2 That disparity between the inner and outer self is, of course, one of the great tools in the writer’s toolkit, as Shakespeare himself knew well, deploying it often and to great effect. It’s not by chance that Duncan is saying these words about the unsuspected treachery of the first Thane of Cawdor, into whose shoes the subsequently treacherous Macbeth then steps. In Shakespeare’s plays, the villains often hide their wickedness from the other characters, but reveal their inner evil to an accommodating audience in shady asides.
George Eliot, too, was pretty hot on all the inner and outer, appearances and perspectives side of things. In fact, I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to say that this is what the whole of Middlemarch is about. As Eliot has Dorothea discover in an early conversation with Ladislaw, “he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.”3 Mention of Middlemarch brings the whole situation of the omniscient narrator to the fore - and I would argue that there is no narrator in literature more overwhelmingly omniscient than George Eliot. In fact, I have to admit, there are moments when I find her knowingness about her characters more than a little irritating - she leaves little space for her readers to make up their own minds about the characters and the ways in which they behave. Rather, she takes the reader by the scruff of the neck, points a stern narrative finger, and more or less says, ‘See, this is a good and helpful way to behave, that is a thoughtless and destructive way to behave - look and learn.’ Eliot, I feel, rather dominates her readers. To be perfectly candid, there is one point in the novel which invariably has me poised to hurl the book across the room. More or less half way through Book 3, Eliot opens a chapter with, “Dorothea - but why always Dorothea?”4 - to which I can only respond with a frustrated cry, ‘Because that’s who you’ve been writing about, you dipstick - you’re the author! We readers have had no choice but to follow the characters you choose to concentrate on!’ Harrumph. There, I feel better now.
Seriously, though - and this brings me back to the second point I said I’d like to touch on all those paragraphs ago - there is, it seems to me, a fundamental difficulty, in life perhaps even more than in fiction, about having a fixed view on what and how people think and feel and see.
This was brought home to me with some force when reading Ed Yong’s stunning An Immense World.5 In his book, Yong methodically and empathically explores all the different ways in which animals perceive the world around them, and how that affects the way they think and feel and act. He cites Jakob von Uekküll, a Baltic-German zoologist who, in 1909, coined the term for these different and distinct perceptual worlds - he called them umwelten, from the German welt, or environment. Every species on the planet perceives their environment in a different way, depending on the senses they have at their disposal. In explaining what this means in practice, Uekküll used the analogy of a house. Each animal’s body is like a house. “Each house,” he wrote, “has a number of windows which open onto a garden: a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile windows. Depending on the manner in which these windows are built, the garden changes as it is seen from the house. By no means does it appear to be a section of a larger world. Rather, it is the only world that belongs to the house - its umwelt.”
Those of us who own pets or who observe animals, in the wild or in labs, will be to a greater or lesser extent aware of the fact that our dog or cat or snake or rat perceives the world differently to us. Human beings have a host of fairly well-developed senses - we see pretty well, have a fair sense of touch, and a reasonable sense of smell, some sense of taste, and so on - but there are other stimuli to which we are deaf and blind - ultraviolet, infrared, fields of electricity or magnetism. To some animals, the ability to discern those stimuli is a matter of life and death, just as the ability to gauge the speed of an oncoming car could be to us. Other animals cannot perceive the world we perceive - and nor can we perceive theirs, whatever imaginative gymnastics we might employ.
Take scallops, for example. Delicious with a touch of butter and garlic, to be sure. But there is much more to them than that. Along the edges of their shells, scallops have eyes on stalks - up to 200 of them - as well as an undulating fringe of teeny tentacles with which they smell. Their vision is, apparently, extraordinarily good - but why? What on earth do they use this fantastic vision for? In order to try and find an answer to that question, marine biologist Daniel Speiser designed a charming experiment, which he called Scallop TV. He fastened a group of scallops to little stools so that they couldn’t swim away, and placed them in front of a monitor showing computer-generated moving images of smaller and larger particles floating past. Speiser found that, if the particles were large enough and moving slowly enough, the scallops opened their shells - and their eyes - wide, studying the particles.
At first Speiser thought the scallops were eyeing up the particles for food, but subsequent experiments suggested something different. Scallops smell with tentacles interspersed between their eyes all along the edges of their shells. It is this sense of smell which alerts them to swim from danger or draws them towards food. What Speiser thinks was happening was that the scallops were using their superb vision to check out whether the particles they saw were worth giving them a sniff. Or, as he put it, the scallops, with their wide-open eyes, were being curious.
We can have only the most hypothetical and rudimentary way of guessing what the world is like to a scallop, or a bat, or a dolphin, or a tick. We can extrapolate from information about a creature’s senses to imagine what they perceive - but we can’t know it, or feel it. Are we any better off with other human beings? I somehow doubt it. Of course, we have language, but that’s not exactly without its perils and pitfalls.
Trying to work out how other people see the world, and how and why they act within it in the way they do is, arguably, the entire rationale and raison d’être of fiction. At least, that’s what we fiction-writers would like to claim. To paraphrase (with apologies) Robbie Burns, “O, wad some Power the gift gie us, To see the world as others see it.”6 Could writing fiction be that power?
I know, I know - all you Freudians et al stand down. I am not unaware.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, scene 4
George Eliot, Middlemarch, Part 2, Chapter 21
Op. cit., Part 3, Chapter 29
Ed Yong, An Immense World (Vintage, 2023)
“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us!” Robert Burns , from ”To A Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church