Notes on Imagination and the Novel

Abstract

1. ‘The most beautiful object is the one that does not exist’, writes the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. His phrase is paradoxical and suggestive: the beautiful object in question may be the Platonic form we never encounter directly in reality; it may even be thought by whimsy to be the product the Polish consumer never sees in the shops. In any case, it is privileged because it stimulates the imagination, the faculty which — ever since Romanticism, and Coleridge’s formulation of the distinction between Imagination and Fancy — has been a primary organ of our perception of the world. Imagination was granted this role because of its capacity to overcome distance: in the early nineteenth century, as the world began to shrink beneath the tightening embrace of new transport and communications systems, Imagination provided advance notice of imminent new realities. It permitted one to domesticate the shock of the new — of the other cultures imported into one’s own by the linked processes of industrialisation and colonialism. Imagination generated an art of prophecy, rendering the trembling of the rails in advance of the coming train. It introduced into the present the negative object (the temporal ghost of the flash-forward) that would shortly negate one itself through its real presence. It converted this object into a phantom, a figure of dread or desire, so that upon arrival it would pass through the perceiver, unhindered by the frictive resistance of his or her material presence. It anticipated the future in order to cancel it.