Abstract
This paper attempts to reconcile two apparently opposed ways of thinking about the imagination and its relationship to literature, one which casts it as essentially concerned with fiction-making and the other with culture-making. The literary imagination’s power to create fictions is what gives it its most obvious claim to “autonomy”, as Kant would have it: its freedom to venture out in often wild and spectacular excess of reality. The argument of this paper is that we can locate the literary imagination’s complementary power of cultural articulation in this fictional activity. The suggestion is that we should conceive of the literary imagination as expressing its interests in culture not mimetically but by producing a certain kind of meaning. This meaning is irreducibly narratological, and understanding it helps us to see the role of narrative in bringing into harmony the literary imagination’s interests in both the imaginary and the real.
The magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story.
(Vladimir Nabokov)
The full passage is: “The three facets of the great writer—magic, story, lesson—are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought.” (Nabokov 1980: 6)
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Notes
- 1.
By “literary imagination” I mean nothing technical. The phrase functions to indicate that a point is being made not about the imagination simpliciter but as it is implicated in the production of narrative literature.
- 2.
See Budick (2010) for a striking study of Kant’s interest in Milton.
- 3.
The concept of a lebenswelt or “lifeworld” makes its way into the phenomenological tradition via the work of Edmund Husserl, and the notion of lebensform or “form of life” into ordinary language philosophy via the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
- 4.
In recent years it has become popular to combine Walton’s make-believe theory with speech-act theory. This approach tends to favor making the notion of a fictional utterance explanatorily primary. A fictional utterance is grammatically indistinguishable from an assertion except that it is produced with the recognized intention that “we make-believe what is expressed by [the] utterance, rather than believe it.” (Davies 2006: 42) The virtue of having recourse to speech-act theory here is that its reliance on speaker intentions allows us to offer a tidy way of explaining the difference between something being fictional and something merely being treated as fictional, a basic distinction many worry Walton’s otherwise acceptable theory cannot accommodate (see Davies 2006: 40).
- 5.
All book and line references to Paradise Lost indicated in parentheses are to Milton 2006.
- 6.
That is to say, in the epistemic vernacular of this debate, that they offer knowledge, and not mere evidence, of the mental states so expressed in these gestures. See Green 2007 and Bar-On 2004. If it is worth mentioning, my suggestion is not that we should model literary expression on self-expression. The analogy is fruitful but clearly limited.
- 7.
As grammarians, so to say, understand a declarative statement. I am unconcerned here with those areas of ordinary language philosophy and linguistics in which declaration is a technical notion for a speech-act that is to be contrasted with assertion.
- 8.
If one agrees with Stacie Friend that “fiction” is a genre term and functions neither to characterize the status of a work’s content (as, say, all made-up or imaginary) nor to specify the kind of cognitive attitude (belief or make-belief) to be taken up in respect to it, then it is question begging to call truth-apt or world-representing stretches of literary language nonfictional (see Friend 2007, 2008). I am sympathetic to this but do not rely on this model of fictionality here.
- 9.
Arthur Danto often conceives of the representational quality of artworks in this light, making it a matter of their embodied meanings (see Danto 2000). I am reluctant to think of the meaningfulness of artworks, at least in the sense I give it here, as in any interesting respect “representational.” Regardless of this, what I am denying is the relevance of the traditional mimetic notion of representation: the old idea that a literary representation of life somehow offers an image, picture, or mirror of reality.
- 10.
I ignore here discussion of whether we should be narrativists in respect to actual life and real selves. I agree that narrative has as much potential to distort as it does to reveal, and this admission implies exactly nothing about the extent to which literature makes use of narrative to bear on reality. For an excellent discussion of this, see Goldie 2012: 150–171.
- 11.
It is true that a culture could possess these stories without possessing a literary tradition, and that my example thus does not say much about the specifically literary significance of these narratives: of how the literary and aesthetic dimension of these works matter to their narratives and the value we find in them. A fully developed theory of literary narrative would clearly have to address thus. Here, however, I am simply exploring a point about the importance of possessing stories—about what we acquire in virtue of having access to narratives that organize cultural material in a particular way—and I do not have the space to tackle this larger issue. I think it should be clear that my point about narrative sets up a novel way of approaching these literary and aesthetic issues, but it is another project. I thank Tzachi Zamir for bringing to my attention that I owe a word on this.
- 12.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference in honour of Sanford Budick at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and it is worth saying that the paper itself grew out of an attempt to make sense of Budick’s immensely suggestive claim that the way in which poetry, as exemplified in Milton, reconciles originality and inheritance “may be said to constitute culture itself, perhaps even what is considered to be human” (2010: 1). I am grateful to Tzachi Zamir and Sanford Budick for discussion of the ideas presented here and for their hospitality during my stay. Zamir offered extensive criticism on the version published here, and while the argument will still fall short of convincing him, I hope it is clear that it is at least better on account of him.
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Gibson, J. (2015). Narrative and the Literary Imagination. In: Speight, A. (eds) Narrative, Philosophy and Life. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9349-0_9
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