A NEW KNOWLEDGE OF REALITY

To be clear, it might be useful to distinguish three phenomena. First, immediate sensory content: the light-filled surface of Matisse's Interior at Nice, the sweet fleeting notes of "Honeysuckle Rose" on Fats Waller's piano recording, or indeed the particular room one, at this moment, inhabits while reading. Second, delayed sensory content, or what can be called "instructions for the production of actual sensory content." A musical score has no immediate acoustical content, only the immediate visual content of lines and dots and the immediate tactile content of the smooth, thin pages, but it does directly specify a sequence of actions that, if followed, produces actually audible content. The third case, in contra-distinction to the first two, has no actual sensory content, whether immediate or delayed; there is instead only mimetic content, the figural rooms and faces and weather that we mimetically see, touch, and hear, though in no case do we actually do so.

It probably makes sense in this third case, as in the second, to use the word "instructions." When we say "Emily Brontë describes Catherine's face," we might also say "Brontë gives us a set of instructions for how to imagine or construct Catherine's face." This reformulation is accurate if cumbersome, in that it shifts the site of mimesis from the object to the mental act. We habitually say of images in novels that they "represent" or "are mimetic of" the real world. But the mimesis is perhaps less in them than in our seeing of them. In imagining Catherine's face, we perform a mimesis of actually seeing a face; in imagining the sweep of the wind across the moors, we perform a mimesis of actually hearing the wind. Imagining is an act of perceptual mimesis, whether undertaken in our own daydreams or under the instruction of great writers. And the question is: how does it come about that this perceptual mimesis, which when undertaken on one's own is ordinarily feeble and impoverished, when under authorial instruction sometimes closely approximates actual perception? In the poem "Birthplace," Seamus Heaney describes a young boy named Seamus Heaney staying up all night to read for the first time a novel (Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native) and at dawn not knowing whether the newborn sounds of bird and rooster and dog were coming to him from the surface of the field or from the surface of the page.
--Elaine Scarry, from Dreaming By the Book


NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING BUT THE THING ITSELF
by Wallace Stevens

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.