A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  In Western philosophy, the link between memory and the imagination goes back to the Greeks. The Latin imago, meaning image or picture, lies inside the word “imagination” itself. Imagination traditionally referred to the images in our minds that are not immediate perceptions—the mental pictures we carry in our heads. Aristotle insisted on the pictorial character of imagination and observed that it, unlike direct perception, could be false. He located imagination and memory in the same part of the soul, an idea echoed by Aquinas, which was subsequently echoed by numerous other writers over the centuries. For Descartes, the imagination, fantaisie, was a middle ground between the bodily senses and the intellect. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes wrote, “Imagination and memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations has divers names.”4 Hobbes was a mechanistic materialist, for whom thought could be reduced to brain machinery. There was a hierarchy, however. Reasoning, not memory and imagination, was the avenue to truth. Cavendish knew Hobbes, but he refused to engage her directly because she had the wrong body for a philosopher. Unlike Hobbes, Cavendish proposed a continuum of thought, from the conceptual to the imaginative. For Spinoza the lowest level of knowledge was imagination, and it contained memory within it. In The New Science (1725), Vico, the philosopher and historian, also regarded memoria, fantasia, and ingegno (ingenuity) as parts of the same mental function, but all of these emerged from the body. Hegel understood consciousness, with its ability to bring the past into the present in memory, as a movement of the imagination.

  Although parsed in various ways by many thinkers, my point here is broad. Memory and imagination have repeatedly been connected or combined in philosophy, and this makes sense when we think about the nature of mental imagery. What are those pictures we have in our heads? I can call forth an image of you at dinner last night or a visual memory of the house where I grew up. But I also have a picture of a character in my novel The Blazing World—I see Harriet Burden working on a sculpture in her studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The first two images are from life, the last is from a work of fiction, but I do not think they are qualitatively different. In her remarkable book The Art of Memory, Frances Yates discusses Rhetorica ad Herennium, written by a scholar for his rhetoric students in 86–82 B.C. Yates explains that the practitioner of artificial memory who wished to remember a speech would move through a real remembered architecture and sequentially populate the rooms with vivid, emotionally potent images, usually human—beautiful, comic, grotesque, or obscene—which helped him remember the words because, as the ancient author points out, “The things we easily remember when they are real we likewise remember without difficulty when they are figments.” Further, he writes, “For the places are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the delivery is like the reading.”5 The rhetorician uses mental images of places, which he populates with imaginary figures to remember his text.

  Artificial memory is a conscious use of our imaginative abilities. Natural memory is also mutable and frequently fictive. We do not retrieve memories from a fixed storehouse in the mind. Our brains are, in fact, not computers that contain intact memories, as in random access memory or RAM, through which a single byte of memory can be retrieved without affecting the other bytes. Long before neuroscience came to the conclusion that memory is constructive, not reproductive, thinkers such as Wilhelm Wundt, William James, Sigmund Freud, and others argued against the notion of static preserved memories that can be called forth on demand. Without being conscious of it, our autobiographical or episodic memories are continually altered and re-created by the present in a process called reconsolidation. We do not recall an original memory but rather the last time we took it out and examined it.

  There is a lot of research on false memory, memory distortion, misrecognition, and how one event often collapses into another to create a form of hybrid recollection. The same brain systems appear to be activated in both remembering and imagining. Recollecting one’s self in the past and casting one’s self as a character in the future belong to the same psychobiological processes. People who suffer memory loss from brain damage to the hippocampus are also poor at imagining detailed fictional scenarios. The scientists Daniel Schacter and Donna Rose Addis argue that our flawed, constructive memory systems are actually adaptive because they are flexible rather than static and are used to predict and anticipate what will happen to us through what has already happened to us.6 Imagining one’s self in the future is creating a personal fiction, a narrative of what it might be like . . . , which is a close relative to what if . . . , I hope . . . , and I dread . . .

  The writing of fiction clearly partakes of this geography of the potential, the land of play, daydreams, fantasy, and reverie, of wishes and fears. The activity that the psychologist Endel Tulving called time travel—locating the self in the past and imagining it in the future—is a function of reflective self-consciousness, the ability to represent and imagine one’s self as another person. Without this temporal mobility of the self, there would be no fiction, and yet, whatever innate capacities human beings have for language, they do not begin life with fully formed imaginations. The imagination develops over time. What is the source of a novel? How do novels begin?

  Sometimes a book begins with a feeling. My first novel, The Blindfold, was generated from an uncanny sensation I had felt during and after an encounter with a man who wanted me to write pornography for him. The Enchantment of Lily Dahl began with a true story I was told by someone in my hometown about the twin brother of a person I knew. The twin walked into a café, ordered breakfast, ate it, took out a gun, and blew his brains out in front of his fellow diners. It was a scene that haunted me. I saw it in my mind over and over. My novel What I Loved began with the cinematic mental image of a door opening onto a room. Inside the room was an obese dead woman stretched out on a bed. The Sorrows of an American began with a recurring image of a girl sitting up in her coffin. The coffin was lying on a table in my grandparents’ living room. The Summer Without Men began with a sentence: “Sometime after he said the word pause, I went mad and landed in the hospital.”7 I found the sentence at once dark and funny and went on to write a comedy.

  These anecdotes about beginnings, however, tell us only about consciousness, not unconsciousness. Why that sensation? Why that story about the twins, why those images, and why that sentence? Only the first is autobiographical in any genuine sense, and what I wanted to reproduce was not the incident but the feeling I had had. The twin’s suicide was a dramatic story that stuck with me. The mental images seemed to come from nowhere, as did the sentence. This is why writers roll their eyes at the question, where do you get your ideas? It is because it seems unanswerable. And yet, there are clearly unconscious processes that precede the idea, that are at work before it becomes conscious, work that is done subliminally in a way that resembles both remembering and dreaming. Sometimes long after I have finished a book, I realize that I have snatched the voice of one person I know, taken the teeth of another and the vulnerability of a third, and then combined them in a single character. That mingling, however, like the condensations in dreams, had taken place without my knowing it.

  I daydream about my characters. I listen to them talk before I go to sleep. When I’m stuck in a book, my effort to discover what should happen in the narrative is very much like trying to remember something that actually happened to me but that I can’t bring to light. I never feel there are a hundred possibilities. I feel there is one true event that must happen, and it must be recalled correctly and put into the book. The right solution is purely a matter of my feeling. It feels right, and I go from there. Once my characters have been born, they direct me. I have sometimes wanted to force them into situations, and they adamantly refuse. This has made me wonder about the connection between novel writing and what used to be called multiple personality disorder, which is now called dissociative identity disorder. Obviously, the two phenomena are not th
e same. However real my characters may become to me as other selves, I am aware that they are my creatures.

  In “Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car,” Virginia Woolf writes about the spectacle through the window, the colors and forms of the gloaming landscape. She feels the beauty, and she resists it. In a parenthesis she writes, “It is well known how in circumstances like these the self splits up and one self is eager and dissatisfied and the other stern and philosophical.” More selves appear, but at the very end of the essay, she remarks, “ ‘Off with you,’ I said to my assembled selves. ‘Your work is done. I dismiss you.’ ”8 The novelist may well have multiple selves, but usually they retire on demand.

  Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer who dreamed the doubles Jekyll and Hyde and attended closely to the nighttime visits of his brownies, the little people who danced about in the theater of his head for inspiration, asked the question I posed earlier: Why do some passages, some stories, some books feel wrong? “The trouble with ‘Olalla,’ ” he wrote to a friend, “is, that it somehow sounds false . . . and I don’t know why . . . I . . . admire the style of it myself, more than is perhaps good for me; it is so solidly written. And that again brings back (almost with the voice of despair) my unanswerable: Why is it false?”9 I cannot answer for Stevenson. I can say that any number of well-written books feel false to me, that falseness has nothing to do with either good sentences or subject matter. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa waking up as an insect and the terrible loneliness of Mary Shelley’s monster are just as true to me as Tolstoy’s evocation of Anna Karenina’s ostracism or the grief of Wharton’s Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, for whom the links in her bracelet are “like manacles chaining her to her fate.”10

  Truth, the kind of truth Stevenson refers to, is located elsewhere. I have written about this kind of fictional truth in a piece that was originally published in the journal Neuropsychoanalysis under the title “Three Emotional Stories: Reflections on Memory, the Imagination, Narrative, and the Self.” It was republished in my collection of essays Living, Thinking, Looking (2012) without the subtitle, abstract, key words, and peer reviews. In the last line of the lopped-off abstract, I write: “Culling insights from Freud and research in neuroscience and phenomenology, I argue that a core bodily, affective, timeless self is the ground of the narrative, temporal self, of autobiographical memory, and of fiction and that the secret to creativity lies not in the so-called higher cognitive processes, but in dreamlike reconfigurations of emotional meanings that take place unconsciously.”11

  What does this mean? It means I am interested in what happens underground, before an idea or picture or sentence surfaces. It is now a commonplace to say that most of what the brain does is unconscious, or nonconscious for those who want to avoid sounding Freudian. Although much of a story may be created unconsciously, the writer’s recognition that a story is right or not right is consciously felt. Feelings are by their very nature conscious and serve as guides for our behavior, even when we have no idea why we have the feelings we have. I also stress that it is important to remember that emotions can never be unreal, even when they are triggered by fictions.

  I use the Russian Formalist term fabula to describe what a writer draws upon for a book. The difference between the fabula and the sujet can be described simply as the difference between what happens in a story and how it is told. The Cinderella fabula is always the same; its sujet, on the other hand, has taken myriad forms. The fabula of a story feels to me as if it is already there in me, not yet known but glimpsed as a kind of dream-like memory, part of the subliminal self, a thing that must either be dredged to the surface or unleashed in a great rush. The sujet, on the other hand, is often up for grabs. How to tell it? Who should tell it? These are often fully conscious decisions. And yet, it happens that parts of books or poems or entire works are written in trances. The underground pushes upward and becomes Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In his classic work on creativity (1952) that collects the accounts of many thinkers and artists, Brewster Ghiselin writes in his preface, “Production by a process of purely conscious calculation seems never to occur . . . Automatism is reported by nearly every worker who has much to say about his processes, and no creative process has been demonstrated to be wholly free from it.”12

  Countless writers, as well as mathematicians and physicists, have described sudden revelations that came to them in dreams, in dream states, or in sudden rushes of inspiration. I have experienced periods of more or less automatic writing in my own work when the book appears to be composing itself. It is exciting, and it occurs only in states of extreme relaxation and mental openness to whatever comes along. It is a permissive, fearless state, in which one gains access to “stuff” one didn’t know was there. The psychoanalyst Ernst Kris, who was interested in the making of art, understood this state as a powerful release of passion while the artist remained under the protection of “the aesthetic illusion”—words that suggest explosive creativity without ego disintegration.13 The protection of the aesthetic illusion is no doubt also a way to articulate the vital barrier between the artist’s multiple selves and the alters of a traumatized, dissociated patient.

  The sudden release of a solution, formula, poem, or part of a novel from subliminal regions of a person, however, is dependent on what is down there, and the bulk of that material, I am convinced, is not produced by an essential, fixed self, nor does it come from some elusive quality of “genius.” It is the accumulation of years of reading and thinking and living and feeling. It is the result of autobiography in the loosest sense—not as literal facts, but as the creation of a story that appears from a writer’s depths and feels emotionally true to her. The story of Mary Shelley’s monster expressed her own deep reality. In her preface to the novel she writes that the story poured out of her as in a waking dream. The lonely, vengeful monster is a product of her own emotional complexity, but it is also, and this is essential, the product of her reading of and love for John Milton.

  Every good novel is written because it has to be written. The need to tell is compelling, and it is always directed at another, not a real other but an imagined other person. (In my case, the fantasy person is someone who gets all my jokes, references, and puns and has read every single book I have read. I have come to understand that, despite my great longing for this stranger, she or he does not exist.) Nevertheless, every work of fiction inhabits the realm of both “I” and “you”—on what I call the axis of discourse or in the between-zone.

  That between-zone is established long before we learn language in the back-and-forth gestural, musical, and tactile exchanges between our infant selves and, usually, our mothers. There is even a term used by scientists for the language people use to answer babies—“motherese”—which is not, of course, limited to mothers. This proto-conversation is crucial to human sensory-motor-emotional-cognitive development. These early social interactions influence how a brain matures and a personality emerges. The rhythms of this back-and-forth dialogue create expectations about how others will respond to us, which undergird who we are and who we are still becoming, despite our absolute amnesia for that time of life. In Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer writes, “There are certain aspects of so-called ‘inner life’—physical or mental—which have formal properties similar to those of music—patterns of motion and rest, of tension and release, or agreement and disagreement, preparation, fulfillment, excitation, sudden change, etc.”14 Langer’s description of these aspects of inner life encapsulates the pulsing realities of narrative art. Meanings in a novel are not limited to dictionary definitions. They are also found in the muscular, sensory, emotional realities of the human body. And it is from these that we recognize the rights and wrongs of fiction. I know when I have hit the right story for myself, when there is no longer any need to change what I have done because the truth of the page is answered by a gut feeling inside me, which I rely upon absolutely.

  But no one becomes a
person in isolation. We are beings embedded in a world. What we learn and master, whether it’s riding a bike or reading or solving an equation, the process swiftly becomes unconscious and automatic. We are creatures of perceptual habits and patterns and pay little attention when the world goes along as we expect it to. Those unconscious habits of mind include judgments, prejudices, beliefs, and ideas. The unconscious is neither primitive nor unsophisticated; it is a repository of what is so deeply known that we don’t have to be conscious of it anymore.

  Although novels may grow out of this vast unconscious underworld, when the book is finished, it is nothing but words. When you open a book, what you find inside it is only print. The joys and sorrows of the book’s creator, her biography, her personal experiences of emotional truths, her rhythmic sense are there only insofar as they are represented by those black marks on the page. The writer is not there. Her body is absent. And representation, by its very nature, is estranged from what is being represented. In speech and writing we alienate ourselves from ourselves even when we say “I” to indicate the self as speaker.

  The reader animates a novel. Without a reader, the words lie inert on the page. The reader feels a work’s meanings in his body, in the tension of his muscles as a scene develops toward crisis or, in their relaxation, when the same scene dissipates, and the character has survived. The reader brings his own memories and his mental pictures to his reading. He brings his thoughts, as well as his prejudices, limitations, and particular emotional tone to the text. Together, reader and book form a collaboration of meanings, which have no objective reality but create yet another between-zone, an intersubjective exchange, which sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. I recall stifling my fury when a well-known novelist sitting across from me at a dinner uttered these words: “Well, everyone knows Dostoyevsky is just no damn good.” Recollecting myself in tranquility, I realized that Dostoyevsky is probably not for everyone, even though a part of me thinks his work should be universal. I also realized that this particular writer was so enamored of Nabokov that he had probably adopted his hero’s literary views, which, in my opinion, were often egregious.