When I was a kid, or at any rate just getting started in the English racket, I discovered Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. I think I was intrigued by the title. (I was always a sucker for Latin.) So of course it wasn't long before I began struggling to understand his distinctions between the two important faculties of the mind, fancy and imagination. On the one hand it all seemed pretty straightforward. Fancy was imitative, or like memory, and worked with or reworked material already present from experience. But imagination, the more creative faculty, was generative, creative, and inventive. In his effort to further describe and elaborate this distinction and its importance Coleridge gets all tangled up in some of the most fascinating and frustrating prose ever written.
Still, I think he had a point that goes a long way to explaining two distinct kinds of writing and writers. Some writers work almost entirely with their own experiences and extrapolate from those to rework their perceptions of life. Some would say this is true of most realistic fiction, but even some fantasy is really just the reworking of quotidian reality with some bending of the rules for time and/or space. Other writers, however, would rather imagine worlds apart, things beyond their own experience. Coleridge realized how difficult and rare this is. Even within the conventions of fantasy and magic there is very little that is truly imaginative.
So I've tried to come up with some examples. Homer, I would say, was an imaginative writer. Even putting aside all that business about the gods and goddesses, his description of the heroic ethos must have gone far beyond any experiences of the poet in actual life. Moreover, of the two poems the Iliad is by far the greater work of imagination, since, again apart from the supernatural, most of the human experience of the Odyssey is predictable and familiar, whereas the Iliad actually depicts a heroic ideal that captivates us even when we deplore the carnage of the warfare at its heart. I'm not saying this well, but anyone who has read both epics repeatedly will probably have had the same reaction.
Unfortunately, Homer seems to have taken most of the air out of the room for succeeding generations of classical authors. Even Virgil, great as he is artistically, never rivals Homer. It was not until Dante that another author of comparable imaginative power would emerge. In the Comedia he was able to imagine a world apart from ordinary human experience of reality, and I'm thinking not only of the Inferno, which may be more reality based, especially in its depiction of human emotions, but of Purgatorio and Paradiso. But then how does allegory fit in?
And what of more recent authors? Imagining new and fanciful worlds is quite popular these days. Does that mean a growth of imagination over fancy? One of the most fanciful and imaginative books I've read recently is Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (which I've posted about earlier). But apart from the many tricks, is this more fanciful or more imaginative? I'm told that House of Leaves is an example of ergodic literature. (I would have called that puzzle literature; the real work for the reader comes with someone like James Joyce.) But where does such a concept fit in? Perhaps these are questions for another day. What interests me now is the extent to which ordinary realistic fiction, and more than that autobiographical non-fiction -- letters, diaries, memoirs -- have tended to dominate my reading in later years, almost totally displacing my earlier interests in fantasy and imaginative literature. Is this merely another sign of age?
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