Dreaming by the Book

"This is a book I just read and was very struck by. I wanted to include it because it seemed like an interesting companion to the other books. Elaine Scarry is not writing about painting or photography, she’s writing about novels or poetry in which there is a strong visual experience for the reader. When you’re reading Homer or Wordsworth or Thomas Hardy you have a sharp visual image in your mind. She’s writing, in a way very technically, about what techniques she thinks writers are using to have this evocative effect. She begins with an interesting paradox. If you’re told, “Imagine the face of a friend,” it’s very hard to call up an image. Your mind doesn’t really do that very readily. But if you’re reading a description of someone’s face, you can get it in your mind quite clearly. The question is, what’s happening in the visual imagination that allows for that ease, that facility of calling up images? She thinks that it actually helps to be instructed, that if you’re told how to look, then your mind enters into a different space and you can call up these images. So she’s looking at the kinds of instruction the great writers use. “The best measure of whether a book about visual experience is working is whether it returns you to the world with clearer eyes.” I think she’s quite right, about these kinds of techniques: for example, the way that butterflies and birds and other things allow you to imagine flight or movement through the air. So I was very interested in that. For me, it was also useful because when you’re writing about a painting or photograph there’s always a question, are you trying to get the reader to see the thing? Or are you doing something different? I think both things are valuable. For a writer who is interested in evoking visual material, this is a wonderful book to look at, because it’s so technically clear. Yes, it does seem to me it’s very persuasive and unusual. It’s not like anything I’ve ever read before. As a writer, I sometimes did have the feeling that I imagine a dancer might have reading an anatomy book, that you don’t necessarily want the bones laid bare in that way, to know what’s happening in this thing you’re using in this interpretive way. But, at the same time, I thought it was essential reading for someone trying to understand how writers create visual experience. That’s right, and that’s also why it’s interesting to read books about visual work, even if that’s not your main interest, or even if you think “Well I don’t write about photographs or paintings.” It’s a very concentrated study of how you move around in the world with your eyes, which is surely what a lot of writers are trying to do. It sharpens and it sensitizes things. Going back to your first observation, we live in an ever more visual culture, we see so many more images every minute then people did 20 or 50 years ago. Somehow, interpretation of visual experience has become one of the primary jobs of the writer. Maybe it has always been, but it certainly is now."