Writing and the flowering of imagination

Posted on | April 17, 2010 | 5 Comments

How do we imagine feeling? There are two questions there: first, how do we imagine? And then, how do we imagine concepts that are not in themselves tangible objects in the world out there—a flower, a horse, another person–but in here, inside the space behind our foreheads? And a third question: if we imagine feelings, do we also feel them?

According to the cognitive psychology drawn upon in Elaine Scarry’s curious (in the best sense) and idiosyncratic work of literary criticism Dreaming by the Book, the neural patterns for imagining something are the same that are fired by actually seeing or experiencing something. So if we imagine a box, that picture we have conjured—the conjuring—is done by the same neural networks as seeing/experiencing the box for real.

Scarry is a Professor of Aesthetics at Harvard, and before leaping into the texts she uses to illustrate her points, she first (and continually) asks the reader to explore how imagination works—to prove through empirical experience that self-directed imagination (e.g. daydreaming) or conjuring up an ideal (the perfect holiday spot) will never have the same vitality or vivacity of the real object (the holiday spot example is mine; I began writing this post while sitting on an idyllic balcony in the south of Turkey with, over the road, overrunning government building works that were meant to have concluded by the Easter weekend). So: imagination lacks vivacity and vitality compared with the real world. (Added: interesting post on the neuroscience of daydreaming and consciousness.)

Except, Scarry argues, in literature, poetry and prose. And prose literature most of all. When we read a novel which invites us to imagine characters, plots, worlds or, as with some of Beckett or Kafka, just boxes, the literature that we remember being moved by will be the literature that is most effective in getting us to imagine things ‘for real’.  That is because, she argues, the imagination is the material with which writers work more so than any other artists. As she says during her reading of Wuthering Heights:

Bronte, and other extraordinary writers, has an unfailingly precise sense of the limits of the compositional powers of the human mind, and by crafting her instructions to match [Scarry refers to the informational composition of literature for the reader to think/feel/imagine ‘this motion, this action’], with strict care, the pictures we can actually make, she achieves, through our trust, the power to carry us beyond them.

How could a painter craft without knowing the powers and limitations of the paint? How could a sculptor not know the attributes of the material to be worked? How could Mozart compose for a musical instrument without knowing what sound that instrument made? Why should it seem odd that literary composition takes into account the nature of the instrument, in this case the imagining mind, on which it will be played: Minuet for the Imaging Mind; Duet for the Mind That Can Do Radiant Ignition Plus Stretching; Sonata in G for a Floral Imaginer (Scarry 2001: 191).

Her argument is that there are certain strategies that a writer employs—such as radiant ignition (using instantly imaginable actions, such as flashes of light or streaks of colour) and floral imagining (using the imagining of flowers or vegetative material as a template for more complex imaginings) and rarity (easily imagined two-dimensional, fragile and feeble images such as mist, fog, ghosts, fabric etc)—because, she argues, they are images in tune with the way mental life already works: that is, in a limited, constrained way, where small, fragile and vague images are most easily imaginable. The most effective writers know this, and draw upon how the mind imagines to first “win our trust” as readers to readily imagine the work’s ‘template’ images; and, having ‘fired us up’, then carries us beyond our own self-directed abilities—as evidenced in our own daydreams, which lack vitality and vivacity—to use these templates to imagine the more complex life of the work.

(And what would Scarry make of the ‘Twilight’ front-covers on new editions of Wuthering Heights?)

Of all the books I took with me on my two-week break (nine books in all; I have a minor panic if I have less than one for every two days–it’s called hyperlexia, and also suffered by people such as blogger A Common Reader, writing and mapping for us, beautifully, among other writers, Flaubert) it was Scarry’s I read first.

Well, actually second, after W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. (And then I read Austerlitz.) Scarry’s is the perfect cheese in the sandwich, so to speak (that ‘so to speak’ is an important tic, by the way, in Austerlitz, which I’ll write about later) for reading Sebald’s works, because he, I believe, is easily added to the writers that Scarry draws upon as extraordinary writers; in fact, is perhaps the writer who pushes Scarry’s arguments to both their toughest test but also their strongest validation.

However, I read Scarry as my first critical work on my holiday because of a conversation with my friend K, over dominoes and red wine, just before heading off for Turkey, about the impact of everyday use of language on the writer’s work. That is, words are our materials for both writing and living, in a way that the sculptor’s marble or the musicians instruments are not. My suggestion was (did I mention it was two bottles of red wine, and quite a competitive game of dominoes?) that because as writers we have to engage with our material at all times in life simply to navigate life, the work of writing is the hardest art of all. There is no respite from the dealings of life as lived by a writer, which is perhaps why, I’m proposing, that while creative artists are eight times more likely to suffer from mental illness than the general public (see Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease or anything by Redfield Jamieson), I bet it is writers such as Sebald, and the writers he writes about, who are most are afflicted by depression, melancholy and despair: in fact, Sebald’s ‘character’ Austerlitz specifically has a breakdown within and around language because of this very fact. More on that later.

Back to Scarry. Scarry then leads her reader through the close analysis of several passages from The Iliad, Wuthering Heights, the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin, of course Proust, and also Uncle Tom’s Cabin to propose what is, in some respects, a startling assertion, and in other ways a development of Aristotle’s argument for rarity, and more recently, Jonah Lehrer’s argument for reading difficult novels to exercise selective attention in the development of intelligence: that is, great writers such as Homer and Emily Bronte understand how to get their reader to fully stretch the limits of their imagining powers, and as such, most fully ‘experience’ the literature they are reading. In Scarry’s words:

Homer or Tolstoy is giving us a transcription, in verbal form, of the images as they come full-blown into the mind, and in doing so, each encodes the formal properties of those envisioned pictures on the page so that we can reconstruct those pictures. In effect, writers give us a transcript of how the brain works because they look at images turning up in their own minds with such concentration and dedication (Scarry 2001: 244).

Scarry’s key vehicle for explaining how these writers do what they do in getting us, the reader, to imagine the life of the work, is motion: how do these writers get us, in our minds, to imagine movement ‘for real’? So, she draws upon Achilles’ chasing Hector three times around the besieged city of Troy (which was not so far away from where I was reading the book: while in Canakkale I stood under the wooden horse used in the 2004 film Troy; although I didn’t visit, opting instead for Ephesus) and on the movement of Cathy and Nellie across the heath in Wuthering Heights. All of these moments in the great works are told with floral imagining, drawing on circles and wheeling (according to cognitive psychology, the most easily imagined of shapes), the handle-ability of objects (the part of the brain that deals with hand-made objects is also the part that deals with motion), rarity (misty moors etc) and radiant ignition (the gleaming shield of Achilles).

And so the interesting question for my research: what step from motion to e-motion in the mental imaginings of a work? It has been posited that it is the same part of the mind used for feeling affect and emotion as it is for when we are prompted to imagine feeling affect and emotion. The same part of the brain is at work when we both feel fear and imagine fear. (This is not my area of expertise at all, and I know it has been debated at length: here’s an intro to literature, feeling and mirror neurons.)

And so, if it is our imagination at work when reading works that ask us—demand of us—to be moved, what role do these templates—flowers, streaks of light, and perhaps most of all, rarity—play in preparing the mind to be moved: that is, to feel the emotion that we are asked to imagine.

My assumption is that, if Scarry is right—or perhaps not ‘right’, but a responsible reader—then these strategies for imagining are central to the ways in which writers and writing—words—get us to feel. That is, they are central to writing emotion. And, for the emotions of uncertainty, indecision, and the feeling of not knowing one’s own feelings, there is something particularly relevant, and worked at in Sebald, regarding these limitations and constraints on imagination that are best overcome through literature that draws on rarity, the vegetative, and radiance.

That is: we imagine the feelings of uncertainty (and the difficult sense of being uncertain even about that uncertainty: a condition perhaps related to alexithymia – take the test here) through an overabundance of these templates and their appearance in the literary work. As Sianne Ngai argues in her book Ugly Feelings, the overwhelming amplification of tone in Melville’s novel The Confidence Man _is_ the means by which tone is defeated; so in Sebald, I argue, the feeling of uncertainty is realised in the reader through the text by the overwhelming ‘rarity’ and compostable, disintegrating nature of the things we are first asked to imagine before being asked to imagine the emotions of uncertainty and indecision. I’ve just picked up John Wylie’s essay ‘The Spectral Geographies of W G Sebald’ which I’ll write about soon.

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