Dreaming by the Book by Elaine Scarry

Author:Elaine Scarry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Fifth Way: Floral Supposition

When we look through literary passages that are particularly brilliant in prompting us to create moving pictures, we find an inexplicably high number of them have flowers or vegetable matter braided into their folds. In the passage in Madame Bovary where Charles spills a drink on a taffeta gown, Flaubert has us imagine not simply a swaying patch of transparent liquid closing in on a patch of red, but orgeat and cerise, almond and orange-flower water closing in on cherry-red.1 We may on occasion be able to persuade ourselves that the flowers are intrinsic to a literary scene: the white moths that fly in the final sentences of Wuthering Heights flutter among harebells—as we saw in the rarity chapter—because harebells are referentially part of the heath. But when Emma Bovary throws “some torn scraps of paper” past the yellow window curtain of her lurching carriage and we are told that “[t]he wind caught them and scattered them, and they alighted at a distance, like white butterflies on a field of flowery red clover,” the presence of the flowers cannot be explained in terms of reference. The flowers are not part of the actual scene being described: there are no butterflies or red clover on the street. Further, unlike white butterflies—which do at least look like the scraps of paper being tossed—there is nothing in the street that is even the visual analogue of a field of flowering red clover.

Flowers occur in passages about motion in three different ways: they are in the actual scene being imagined (the purple harebells); they are analogically but not actually in the scene (there are no cherries or orange flowers in the opera lobby but the objects that are present share with them at least one of their features); or they are introduced without either a literal or an analogical counterpart (the non-actual, non-analogical red clover). These three possibilities sensitize us to the odd randomness with which flowers suddenly appear in the midst of the compositional process, so much so that we did not even notice the part played by flowers in those three passages when we first looked at them. We can look back and see this in many other passages: the grain that rotates down on the Homeric battlefield, the flowers Emma Bovary imagines catching before imagining embroidering costumes, the braided flowers Andromache weaves into the dark folding robe.

The difference between Brontë’s harebells and Flaubert’s red clover—between flowers actually present in the imagined scene and non-actual, non-analogical flowers that are nonetheless present in the imagined scene—will eventually help solve the mystery of how vegetable matter becomes a formal practice of mental composition. To make a distinction between the two may, at the same time, be misleading: we may wrongly reason that if there is a referential occasion for the flowers, they are not introduced because of their ability to assist us in a compositional practice. But the opposite is true: the harebells are present because they are so key to

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