24.5.2010
There is this strange thing about perception: it's so weak and deceptive,
it leads us astray all the time. When we're missing something, we often
don't even notice, but instead we subconsciously fill in details; we fill
in something we expect, something we wish, hope or fear. (What exactly we
fill in seems to depend on a variety of factors.)
The paradigm story is Edgar Allan Poe's "The Spectacles". Here the
protagonist's weak sight is instrumental in getting him driven to marry an
old woman of eighty-two years, and the punch line is that this mistake of
some consequence is simply because he literally never got a good look at her
until after the wedding. Of course, that's only part of the reason: hadn't
he refused to wear glasses (a refusal born out of sheer vanity, it seems),
he wouldn't have sunk into his mistake so deeply without noticing what was
going on. (Deliberate misleading on the part of his friends plays a role,
too.)
The experience of being fooled by perception is familiar to all of us.
Haven't you at times found yourself, walking through the streets, looking at
some person from far away and seeing someone you knew? You were sure you
were recognizing their look, the color of their hair, their typical way of
dressing and moving — and yet, when you got closer, and took in more
details, you found yourself grossly mistaken: many of the small details you
saw were quite different from what your acquaintance would have looked like;
and at some point you accepted that you'd been mistaken and that the person
you were looking at was a perfect stranger.
Or, probably equally familiar, think of situations where someone seemed
from a distance an attractive-looking person that turned out, on getting
closer, really different, and thus the feeling of attraction quickly
receded. This example would be even closer to the experience Poe is using
in his story. (Of course, attraction is itself a complicated psychological
process dependent on many more factors than just visual impression; and
certainly there is an influence in the opposite direction as well: someone
can initially not look attractive at all, even after you studied all the
details of their physical appearance, and then gain attraction for you after
you get to know them closely and connect with their personality traits.)
Obviously, what goes on in the streets in episodes like the one I
described above is inconsequential, and at any rate corrected quickly and
effortlessly. Compared to this, it's different with the process of getting
to know someone well enough to decide you want to marry them. Here's a
stretch that requires poetic license, and thus we find it in stories only
(hopefully). But still, there is a common motif here as well, for do we not
in many cases ask ourselves, of someone who takes that decision, whether
they haven't failed to notice some details about their future spouse? Since
the preceding process of getting to know each other was in most instances
sufficiently extended, some more systematic failure of perception must have
been involved there. Or, in other words, it's unlike the scene in the
streets in an important respect: There the problem was that insufficient
detail had been taken in; which however had been gradually corrected when
you got closer to the person you were looking at, taking in more, and
richer, detail. In Poe's story of the spectacles, thanks to a number of
(rather far-fetched, to be sure) circumstances, there was never an occasion
for the protagonist to take in more and richer detail (which would have made
him recognize his misperception, or incomplete perception). Precisely that
is the part that is symbolically played by the refusal to use the glasses.
The protagonist, for some reason, doesn't even think of taking a certain
kind of look at things; that is what the refusal to put on the glasses
stands for. It's not just that he's not seeing, one might put it:
it's that he doesn't even bother to look at all.
But note that at this point we are already (and I think, more precisely)
talking about a refusal to take in details, no longer about a
built-in weakness of perception itself. It's not that perception as such is
imperfect that is the problem here. It's that getting to the relevant
details requires something on the part of the perceiver as well, and if the
perceiver chooses not to do that, then detail won't be taken in and
perception is misled or remains incomplete.
Poe's story, perhaps, is mostly about making fun of vanity; but the
underlying theme of a disconnect from reality goes deeper. The protagonist's
predicament arises at root neither from a weakness of perception (that is, a
biological or psychological fact about human cognition) nor from the actions
of his friends. Both wouldn't have been effective without a weakness in his
character: his vanity. Unhappiness, as arising out of losing touch with
reality, once more turns out to be based in character rather than caused by
the external.
