Dreaming by the Book

Dreaming by the Book is Scarry's extended analysis of how great writers produce vividness in the reader's mind. The book takes seriously Sartre's observation that the imagined object is structurally thinner than the perceived object: the imagined rose has only the properties the imagining consciousness actively constructs, while the perceived rose exceeds perception at every level of examination. Scarry demonstrates that literary language, at its best, operates as a set of instructions that guide the reader's imagination toward a density it cannot generate unaided. The writer does not merely describe; the writer provides the specific material cues — weight, translucence, the way light passes through a petal — that the reader's imagination requires to approximate the density of the perceived. The result is a theory of reading as collaborative vividness, in which the beauty of the imagined scene is produced in the space between author and reader.