7

Third Way: Addition and Subtraction

If an image is present, then disappears, it seems to have moved. This act of subtraction is an easy operation to perform, since it takes almost as much mental labor to sustain an image over three, five, or twenty-five seconds as to compose it in the first place. Permitting it to vanish requires no work, since, left to itself, the image vanishes on its own.

When Charles Bovary first travels to Les Bertaux at dawn on a winter morning, as he nears his destination we are asked to picture the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the small boy who acts as his guide. The following sentence requires three still pictures in the mind, a boy in front of a hedge, a hedge with no boy in front of it, a gate with a boy in front of it: “The boy slipped through an opening in a hedge, disappeared, then reappeared ahead, opening a farmyard gate from within.” So, too, when Emma Bovary stations herself in front of her window, we picture the passage of people along the street by mentally placing them within the window frame, then subtracting them out again. The passage magnifies the effect by also instructing us to dematerialize the person into a ghost, thus facilitating the act of subtraction by making the image a rare one:

Twice a day Léon went from his office to the Lion d’Or. Emma could hear him coming in the distance; she would lean forward as she listened, and the young man would slip past on the other side of the window curtain, always dressed the same, never turning his head. At twilight, when she had put down her embroidery and was sitting there with her chin in her left hand, she often started at the sudden appearance of this gliding shadow.1

We see Emma in two almost immobilized postures, and then comes the motion: Léon is there, then not there; and again at twilight, there, then not there. (Of course, Emma is only almost immobilized: she leans forward right before the first appearance, starts during the second appearance, and in fact jumps up a second later; the way Flaubert gets us to bring these motions about seems his most brilliant contribution to the art of moving mental pictures, as we shall see in the next chapter.) The window frame makes the distance Léon must travel so short that there isn’t really much room through which his “gliding shadow” needs to glide: the Iliad’s spear shadows must be kept gliding horizontally in the mind for a longer interval, as can be tested by imagining that we had been asked to see the spear shadow only for as long as it takes it to fly past an open doorway. Merely by his image being there, then not there, Léon seems to “slip past” and “glide.”

Finally, the practice of addition and subtraction figures crucially in getting us to compose frantic motion. We rapidly put before the mind a series of still images, and create by doing so a whirl of motion:

There [the carriage] turned back; and from then on it wandered at random, without apparent goal. It was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont-Gargan, at Rouge-Mare and the Place du Gaillardbois; in the Rue Maladrerie, the Rue Dinanderie, and in front of one church after another—Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien, Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise; in front of the customs house.

More than most writers, Flaubert often comes close to naming the process of image-construction he is using, as here, where he tells us of the cabman’s desperation—“demoralized, and almost weeping from thirst, fatigue, and despair”—and the scandal of “a carriage with drawn shades that kept appearing and reappearing, sealed tighter than a tomb and tossing like a ship.”2

This way of acting on a mental image—first compose it, then let it vanish; or first compose it, then aggressively subtract it away—is so stark, so straightforward, that it perhaps requires no elaboration. However, it is often at work where we might not at first recognize it. Take, for example, the Iliad’s many moments of engaging us in picturing the breakers of an ocean. As the armies pour from the ships in Book 2 to assemble on the meeting grounds, they surge like “wave on shrieking wave” at sea, “like waves / crashing against a cliff … the waves will never leave it in peace … breakers left and right,” the “breakers crash and drag / along some endless beach.” A phrase like “crash and drag” requires that we picture a wave, then let the picture suck back, recede. A phrase like “wave on shrieking wave” requires that we picture a wave, let it for a split second disappear, then bring the picture back: in effect, we make the wave image pulse. Burst upon burst, “wave on blacker wave, cresting,” the picture comes, goes, comes, goes; and by this simple set of additions and subtractions, the sea and the armies seem in motion in front of us.3 Though there are variations—now it comes from the left, now from the right, now out of the night, now out of the blue—in fact a single image asserted and withdrawn accomplishes much of the work.

Embedded in the practice of addition and subtraction are three distinguishable mental actions. One requires that a single image be asserted, then withdrawn, then reasserted, as in the case of Léon passing and repassing Emma’s window, or again in the case of Homer’s waves. A second requires that the mind rapidly compose a sequence of images each of which is itself immobile; the sense of motion comes from the fact that the person or object stays in the picture while the background changes, as when the carriage holding Emma and Léon is asserted to be in front of a succession of churches: Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien, Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise. It would work just as well to imagine the carriage in front of a gray church, a brown church, a green church, and a yellow church, for the sequence of specific names functions as an instruction to change the background church, and does not necessarily require that we compose some intricately detailed, let alone historically accurate, building. A third version is a slight modification of the second. Simply by first picturing a carriage in front of Saint-Romain, then picturing it in front of Saint-Vivien, we seem to see the carriage in motion; and if we are asked, in between, to picture Saint-Romain with no carriage in front of it, this transitional image with the subtracted carriage may heighten our sense of motion. This is the case with Charles Bovary’s young guide: in between the appearances of the boy in front of a hedge and in front of a gate is a picture of the hedge with no boy in front of it. Sometimes an entire picture disappears; sometimes the picture holds steady and one element in it—a person, an object—disappears. But how do we get from one composition to the next?

The extraordinary sense of violent movement in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights depends on many practices, one of which is addition and subtraction. Often Brontë’s most powerful scenes are dyadic: two pictures appear in the mind, bang, bang, two acts of imagistic assertion, with the second simply erasing or subtracting the first. Here is Nelly describing the last meeting between Catherine and Heathcliff before Catherine’s death.

An instant they held asunder; and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace.

Two spatially separate persons are imaged—click—and now the two are jammed together. The verb, “made a spring,” dictates this sudden revision without precisely specifying how it happens. In fact, we are explicitly relieved of the requirement to imagine the transition: “I hardly saw…” The scene continues:

He flung himself into the nearest seat.4

We move across two pictures: Heathcliff (with Catherine in his arms) standing; Heathcliff (with Catherine in his arms) sitting; and the word “flung,” rather than precisely being an embodied action that we see, simply acts to force us, as would an imperative, to change the picture to the second item of the dyad. The image of Heathcliff in the chair arrives in the mind as though it has been flung there.

I have written earlier about the importance of authorial instructions in getting us to imagine vividly. When we daydream, our awareness of our own volition interferes with the vivacity of the images we compose: repeated daydreams are likely to be slightly more vivid because they acquire an automatic or self-standing quality; the fact that we are practiced in the composition of the pictures relieves us of our sense of our own effort to produce them. Authorial instructions, in contrast, suppress our awareness of volition, allowing images to approximate the “givenness,” hence vivacity, of our actual perceptual world: the pictures in the book seem simply “to arrive” in our minds the way sensations do, even though we have of course constructed them (at someone else’s suggestion).

Now, Brontë is an extreme case. Most authors somehow disguise the fact that they are giving, and we are following, directions. But imperatives are hurled back and forth within Brontë’s book at a furious pace; and without our realizing it, they are effectively hurled at us as well as at our fictional siblings, since the imperative comes to be the reigning voice, the voice under which we compose. “Imagine this. Now. Do it. Fast.” Her verbs for action are so forceful that it is as though the sheer surprise and assertive thrust of the instruction can make us at once carry it out. We overcome our ordinary resistance to imagining. When, early in the novel, Brontë has Heathcliff diving down the cellar steps—

Joseph mumbled indistinctly in the depths of the cellar, but gave no intimation of ascending; so, his master dived down to him, leaving me vis-à-vis the ruffianly bitch, and a pair of grim, shaggy sheep dogs, who shared with her a jealous guardianship over all my movements.

—it is as though we were given no time to protest, to say we can’t picture the motion of diving. When young Cathy asserts, in a sentence that combines assertive verb force with rarity, “Minny and I went flying home as light as air,” we seem to produce a faint airy image of them flying, even though we can’t ordinarily do that with a bird, let alone with a girl and her pony, unless it’s the bird’s shadow or reflection in ice.5

But we must return now to the practice of addition and subtraction, for we have left the dying Catherine and Heathcliff clasped in each other’s arms. The press of the embrace is so prolonged that it leaves black-and-blue marks on Catherine’s arms and is only unfixed by another dyad: our picture of Nelly, Cathy, and Heathcliff in the bedroom is suddenly, without transition, displaced by a picture of Edgar, Nelly, Cathy, and Heathcliff in the same room. Here is Edgar’s entry (after a few auditory warnings that he is somewhere about the house): “Edgar sprang to his unbidden guest.”6 The word “sprang,” rather than designating a moving picture of Edgar’s way of coming through the door, instead designates the forceful imagistic arrival of another picture in our minds, just as “flung” tells how the picture of Heathcliff in a chair arrives in our minds, and “made a spring” tells how the picture of Catherine in Heathcliff’s arms does. Edgar, in other words, never comes through the door. He is just suddenly standing there with the other people. A group of three is now a group of four.

*   *   *

The imperative production of a second unmoving image to displace a first unmoving image and hence cause the impression of motion is a trait deeply specific to Emily Brontë. But the general phenomenon—a verb that appears to describe motion within the text that instead prompts and describes the arrival of a picture in the imaginer’s mind—can be recognized in many other places. Half in the imperative and half in the voice of petition, John Donne addresses his mistress for permission to let him move his hands across her undressed body—

License my roving hands, and let them go

—but it is also the imaginer who is being solicited to make the picture of Donne’s hands move across the picture of the woman’s body, a sense of movement achieved by a sequence of five stills, five locations on the woman’s body:

License my roving hands, and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.7

Here the directional words specify bodily locations, the content of the pictures to be imagined. In Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” directionals themselves become imperatives, acts of giving directions. Words like “out,” “up,” “over” seem relatively neutral; but their position as the first word in each line gives them the force and surprise of an active verb.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Out of the mocking-bird’s throat …

…

Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond,

…

Down from the shower’d halo,

Up from the mystic play of shadows

    twining and twisting as if they were alive

Out from the patches of briers and blackberries …8

The fourth line quoted uses radiant ignition, and the fifth and sixth, rarity; but all of them use subtraction. The directional instruction moves us away from each image before we can even finish composing it, so that the half-glimpsed image (cradle, mockingbird, sand, field) is licensed to vanish. Its disappearance—the ordinary fate of images which are always difficult to sustain—is accounted for in our specified movement out from, up from, down from the picture.* Its vanishing far beneath us, or in back of us, or above us produces a vertiginous mimesis of our own motion.

Although the practice of addition and subtraction may be more clear-cut in Flaubert than in Brontë or Homer, its presence in all three is important and entails not actual moving images but the mind moving across a single still image or a set of still images. (In contrast, the other practices already looked at—radiant ignition and rarity—involve the image itself moving, and we shall see the moving image again in the practice of stretching in chapter 8.) This motion across in themselves still images is also at work in film and animation, of course, where it is so familiar to us that it may eclipse our sense of how starkly operative it has always been in the many-centuries-long practice of mental imagining.9 Poets and novelists consciously use mental motion across otherwise immobile pictures, and often even require us to concentrate on the immobilized stage for an extended period. Catherine and Heathcliff are for a time eternally locked in their embrace; and Emma Bovary seems to be sitting still in her chair in front of the window from morning until twilight. The Iliad, too, often concentrates on radical immobilization during key passages, after which motion erupts again. For a time during their fateful run around Troy, Achilles and Hector remain stationary, equidistant:

endless as in a dream …

so the one could never run the other down in his speed

nor the other spring away.

How often, too, are the heroes interrupted in midstride—“Achilles shouted in mid-stride”—or, like a statue of a discus thrower poised to hurl, frozen in some emphatic posture full of motion but unmoving: so Priam’s son Polites

had kept a watch for the Trojans, posted atop

old Aesyetes’ tomb and poised to sprint for home

at the first sign of Argives charging from the ships.

The highly etched verbal portraits and self-portraits of “the famous runner” similarly bring him to a sudden midstride halt, as when Thetis several times announces in a single fixed picture that her son will soon die: “Never again will I behold him striding through the gate.” With the stride situated in so specific and constrained a location as the gate, the picture is made stationary. Achilles articulates his fidelity to Patroclus in lines that picture him with bent knees about to, or having just, lifted off the ground:

    Why this deep debate?

Down by the ships a body lies unwept, unburied—

Patroclus … I will never forget him,

not as long as I’m still among the living

and my springing knees will lift and drive me on.10

Each of these passages invites us to compose a “still” picture, but moving pictures, not still pictures, are our subject. We wait to see Achilles complete the stride that was interrupted by his shout outside the high gates of Troy; to watch one runner close in on the other by the city’s walls; to watch the loyal friend, whose springing knees have lifted him into the air, land again. And, as we now can realize, this resumed motion, which we already know may occur through rarity or radiant ignition, can also come about through addition and subtraction. A picture may have one component taken out: Emma is on the garden steps and, a split second later, not on the garden steps. Or a single picture may be reasserted, like the breakers of the sea or a lover who takes habitual walks. Or it may be abruptly displaced by a second picture, so that Catherine seems to have sprung into Heathcliff’s arms. Or it may rapidly be abandoned the moment it is composed, as we go on, not just to a second but to a third, fourth, and fifth image, in Emma Bovary’s carriage ride or John Donne’s licensed hands or Whitman’s soaring imaginer watching the landscape below her swing away. And since moving the mind from still picture to still picture is sometimes as difficult as imagining physical motion, it can be assisted by the force or surprise of the authorial instruction.

But adding and subtracting are just the simplest operations that can be applied to images of solid objects. Now we shall see a more startling one.