Dreaming by the Book

Comparative Literature, Winter 2002 by Kumbier, William

To that idea Scarry might object that the imagining we engage in while reading is far less constrained than that we are allowed as a filmmaker's sequence of images rush before our eyes, that in reading we are not subjected to the literal fulness of someone else's vision. There is always less immediate information in a verbal description than in any frame of film, and thus more freedom to supplement the description imaginatively. Yet Scarry so stresses the detail and precision with which writers construct their instructions to readers that it is hard not to think of her authors as auteurs, composers whose goal is to control the reader's perception of their worlds. The referential, the movement from word to thing, will never disappear from language, and Scarry's book delights in the richness inherent in the simulations writers can create. As for exploring the resources of language that play alongside or beyond referentiality, beyond imaging-that move us from mimesis to metamimesis, to the medium's self-consciousness and its irrepressible tendency to reflect on itself-Dreaming by the Book leaves something frustratingly, tantalizingly to be desired. As the book's broader-than-academic marketing and Scarry's choice not to discuss the original French, German, Greek or Russian stylistic singularities and beauties of her key texts imply, the book may be targeting an audience only just becoming aware of the resourcefulness of novelists' and poets' imaginative play. Still, I wonder if some members of that potential audience might not wonder, after struggling through some of Scarry's recipes for reading, why they shouldn't simply drop the book and watch the video.

WILLIAM KUMBIER

Missouri Southern State College