Dreaming by the Book

Comparative Literature, Winter 2002 by Kumbier, William

BOOK REVIEWS

DREAMING BY THE BOOK. By Elaine Scarry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. 292 p., index.

The preposition in the title of Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the Book means to work a double sense: Scarry urges that books-specifically books of fiction and poetry-enable varieties of imagining that flourish alongside ("by") both dreaming and daydreaming, and that the writers of these books-notably Homer, Flaubert, Emily Bronte, Rilke, Wordsworth, Tolstoy-achieve that imaginative enactment through instructing the reader on the making and moving of images, by subtly stimulating the reader to construct and develop mental pictures "by the book:' that is, according to rules or "formal practices" prompted through the text. After remarking on the vagueness, the faintness, or, as Scarry quotes Aristotle, the "feebleness" of daydreamed or naturally imagined images, Scarry opens her inquiry by asking why the images prompted through verbal descriptions in novels and poems "acquire the vivacity of perceptual objects" (p. 4), a vivacity said by Sartre and others to be lacking in daydreaming or other mental recollection of those objects. Scarry asserts that imagining is "an act of perceptual mimesis" and frames her central question thus: ". .how does it come about that this perceptual mimesis, which when undertaken on one's own is ordinary, feeble and impoverished, when under authorial instruction sometimes closely approximates actual perception?" (p. 6). Scarry's answer, and her book's main claim, is essentially that writers are capable of enabling that "perceptual mimesis" because they can tap into the "deep structure of perception" (p. 9), coaxing the reader into constructing vivid mental pictures by enlisting and relying upon perceptual habits. Certain writers, it seems, possess an uncanny knack, an almost magical feeling for the perceptual sleight-of-hand that fabricates and unveils images that animate before our mental eyes (a phenomenon classical rhetoric referred to as enargeia, a term Scarry invokes [p. 211). Proust, for example, succeeds in evoking the "solidity" of the wall, door and doorknob in Marcel's bedroom by inviting us to imagine the (really no more or less tangible) magic lantern images that glide over them: "the transparency of one somehow works to verify the density of the other" (p. 12). Writers like Proust and Hardy take "what the imagination is best at (dry, thin two-dimensionality) ... and enlist it in the operation [of the imagination] " (p. 23). Scarry imagines that writers contemplate a reader who will assist and be assisted in creating the novelistic world: as Scarry sees it, "Reading entails an immense labor of imaginative construction" (p. 37). That is, the reader of imaginative literature is one who is willingly instructed to construct by the writer, sometimes-if we accept the detail of Scarry's readings-with stunning exactitude. Thus, the verbal descriptions embedded in the narratives of Madame Bovary or Wuthering Heights activate, through generally implicit directions to the reader's imagination, a mental mimesis that seems essential to what literature can and should foster.

Scarry identifies five "formal practices" that writers engage to effect this mimesis, to compose mental pictures and make them move, and to each of these she devotes at least one chapter. The first is radiant ignition, the practice of injecting light into an image, surrounding an imagined object with light, or even marking the flash or spark of light on or in an object. Scarry's instances of the quickening effect of radiant ignition come mainly from Homer's Iliad, as with the flickering of the Achaeans' campfires or the gleam of Hector's helmet. By lighting the image, radiant ignition facilitates the image's movement. A second compositional practice, rarity, works by introducing "rare" (i.e., not dense) substance, petals, butterfly wings, feathers, gauze, veils, shadows-into the representation; Scarry asserts that despite their inherent "fragility or filminess,' rare objects "can move in the mind with direction and force" (p. 239). Rarity slips onto the mental screen, for example, when Monsieur Lheureux "enthralls" Emma Bovary with his "gossamer silks and scarves" (p. 91) or, again in the Iliad, when Homer reports that not Paris's spear but "his spear's long shadow flew" (p. 93; Fagles translation). Writers also can move the reader's mind from picture to picture (panning, so to speak) or, keeping it focused on a static image, alter the image through the practice Scarry labels dyadic addition or subtraction, as when Leon suddenly slips into and out of the longing frame of Emma's window on the street (p. 101), or when Catherine, for an instant "held asunder" from Heathcliff, suddenly springs into his embrace (p. 104).

A fourth compositional practice, one to which Scarry devotes an inordinately extended chapter, could be called manipulation, though she names it stretching, folding and tilting. Here the writer introduces an image, then alters it-or, as Scarry would say, "instructs" the reader to alter it-by imagining its elongation or contraction, its bending or turning. For Scarry, the master of such manipulation is Flaubert, who exercises his images through diverse "genres of stretching." Scarry lingers on an early depiction from Madame Bovary: "Emma is first vertically elongated-`Emma ... reached to a high shelf for two liqueur glasses . . .'-then tilted to one side-`Because it was almost empty she had to bend backwards to be able to drink. . .'-and, now within the same sentence, comes the instruction to sketch the interior of the image `and with her head tilted back, her neck and her lips outstretched, she began to laugh at tasting nothing . '-after which comes a last form of stretching that is particularly difficult to carry out (but Flaubert frequently has us carry it out): most of the image is held steady while one small part of its interior is mentally pulled toward us-and then the tip of her tongue came out from between her small teeth and began daintily to lick the bottom of the glass"' (pp. 113-14; Steegmuller translation). This example may demonstrate Flaubert's subtlety-and Emma's gymnastic suppleness-at stretching, folding and tilting, but it also reveals the degree and extent of the minute articulations Scarry inclines to read into or unroll from descriptions that, even in a slower reading, still pass pretty quickly. To show the intricacies of Flaubert's puppetry here, Scarry must, to borrow from film jargon, process the sequence into a slow motion shot that seems forced, stilted, even tortuous.