Continuing to read Elaine Scarry’s “Dreaming by the Book” is, of course, taking me deep into literary territory, since the novel is Scarry’s laboratory. Most of what I have read over the few hours I’ve spent with the book over the last couple of days has essentially been a series of illustrations from classic literature of Scarry’s theories about how authors instruct us to imagine. Of course, that is what Scarry set out to do, but I am reading for more oblique purposes. I am interested in how the book form (or format, or declaration or whatever) gives the author permission to instruct the reader, and, simultaneously, gives the reader permission to be instructed. This is a step away from ordinary cognition, and places the signifying job of the book under a modified gaze (or, if one prefers, in a modified situation). Whatever is going on, there is something going on when the reader allows him-or-herself to be led. It lies somewhere in the social construction of the book (I think I have written about John R. Searle’s social constructions elsewhere) and in the pyschological and reality-forming powers of narrative (again, I’ve written about Kearney’s exposition of Ricoeur elsewhere, and about Reading for the Plot, by Peter Brooks). Readers have their reasons. This even ties into my early reading from Grau about panoramae and immersive experience: there is a great difference between the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ with its participatory and creative element for the reader, and the ‘sensual assault’ of the most enthusiastically-pitched cinema. As readers and viewers, we ocillate in our desires to create and to be forcefully led into creation.

Obviously Scarry’s book resonates with me and my previous reading (next up will be another look at Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality. At the moment though, I’m finding Scarry’s book somewhat too literary for my purposes. I need her to return from her specific phenomenology of how imagination constructs literary narrative, to answer questions about the form of the book as a vehicle for doing this. Scarry early on says that imagination associated with reading is different from daydream. She’s exposing the mechanisms of this in later chapters, but not the threshold event of crossing into that realm of guided imagining. Books are a symbol for this event, as well as their physical mechanism.

It’s something I wrote of before to some extent when I mentioned Ral Veroni’s book Sophie: it’s a vehicle that passes instructions before our eyess in a sequential and translucent way (optically, as well as chronologically-one can see what is to come and what has passed).  It works for visual books as well as for novels (which is why I am interested). What is our (the readers) relationship to the author’s picturing? What is our relationship to books? What kind of reading are we performing?

With that question “What kind of reading?” I may be ready to come back to the Blue Notebook  and look at the notion of reading as prowling.