Pareidolia: what does it have to do with it?

 

The Last and the First (1971): apparently, in both her late and posthumous work, Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) maintained her sense and taste for what the Mexican writer Sergio Pitol would call “rigorous and symmetrical titles.” Previous ones are, to mention a few, Brothers and Sisters, Daughters and Sons, More Women Than Men, The Present and the Past... and the work that Pitol prologues for the Spanish edition of Anagrama, Criados y doncellas. This British author wrote a total of twenty novels—her style is often compared to those of Henry James and Jane Austen. Ivy Compton-Burnett never married or had children, for more than thirty years she lived with her partner Margaret Jourdain, she mourned the loss of her mom and wore black most of her life... Anyone can find out about this and more by reading The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett (1973), by Elizabeth Sprigge.

 

British like I. Compton-Burnett —as Ivy Compton-Burnett's books were signed in their original editions— Elizabeth Miriam Squire Sprigge (1900-1974) was also a prolific literature lover: she produced novels (7), books for children (4) and several biographies: one about the American writer Gertrude Stein, another dedicated to the actress Sybil Thorndike Casson, one about Jean Cocteau, and the one that would bring her fame, The life of Ivy Compton-Burnett... But I'm not going to talk about that book, but about another biography: in 1949, Sprigge published The Strange Life of August Strindberg. Sprigge also translated six of the Swedish writer's plays into English, including The Father, Miss Julia and A Dream. Even today, Elizabeth Sprigge's is considered one of the most essential biographies of Strindberg.

 

Johan August Strindberg was born in Stockholm in 1849, exactly one hundred years before the book written about his life by Elizabeth Sprigge was published. The Swede did  not only wrote literature —drama, novel, poetry, essay— and philosophizing —he corresponded with Nietzsche—, he also dedicated himself to photography, painting  —he was a friend of Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin— and to alchemy, magic, astrology and spiritualism. In her book The strange life of August Strindberg, Elizabeth Sprigge narrates the following passage alluding to Strindberg's childhood:

But although lessons seemed meaningless August Strindberg liked learning, and although he found the world unjust, he was eager to explore it. He examined the shape and texture of everything, and often saw second images in things. A face, a figure or a landscape would appear—in the grain of wood, perhaps, or in the pattern of plaster on a wall—and seem as real to him as the object itself. He began to observe that in all things were other things which many people did not notice, and his special vision became both an excitement and a loneliness.

The type of perception referred to in the text is called pareidolia. The word is formed by the Greek voices eídōlon (εἴδωλον) and pará (παρά), “figure” or “ghost” and “next to” or “similar to”, respectively, so pareidolia means “rigged image” or “ghost image”, something that is perceived attached to what is seen: observing other things in things. We often forget that seeing and perceiving images are not the same: seeing images refers to the physical act of receiving visual stimuli through the eyes, while perceiving images involves interpreting and making sense of those visual stimuli. In other words, seeing is the physical process of capturing light and shapes with the eyes, while perceiving involves the conscious interpretation and understanding of what is seen, which involves cognitive and emotional processes. Don Quixote does not experience pareidolia when he sees giants in the windmills; No, the gentleman is delirious and hallucinating. Unlike hallucinations, which are vivid and clear, just as powerful as normal perceptions, and not subject to voluntary control, in the case of pareidolias, perceivers can see the ghost image knowing that it is not that you might see a rabbit shape on the moon knowing that there on our natural satellite there is not really a animal, or the outline of a body shaped )  on a hill or the shape of a sleeping woman on a volcano, for example- these participate in this mental dynamic, as Strindberg did as a child, striving to discover those images.

 

It is not very clear who coined the term pareidolia. Perhaps the first to use it was the German psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum in an 1866 article —On the Deception of the Senses— or perhaps it was, a year earlier, the Russian psychiatrist Victor Kandinsky. In any case, the meaning was more or less the same.

 

At the beginning of this text I wrote that apparently Ivy Compton-Burnett maintained her taste for “rigorous and symmetrical titles” in her last book. It seems that way, but it wasn't like that. Although the novelist managed to finish her work, she left it without a title. The editors were wise enough come up with a title respecting the author's style and taking a phrase said by one of the characters, of course, in turn taken from the Bible: “the first will be last and the last will be first; for many are called, but few are chosen” (Matthew 20:16).

 

The original title of Criados y doncellas, another of Compton-Burnett's novels (mentioned in this article) Manservant and Maidservant. And Strindberg's fondness for pareidolias was not made up by his biographer, the Swede himself refers to it in many of his books, and in one of them, he describes how since he was a child he looked for ghost-images: The Servant's Son... But What does that have to do with anything?