Jungles of the Imagination

Within the imagination that generates novels there are impulses of incalculable complexity. We read novels with an appetite little understood either by psychology or criticism or ourselves, allowing the articulate imagination of another to project, as vividly as a movie onto a screen, upon that retina which physiology has not yet discovered, our imagination. In this amazing, accepted, even unsuspected theater we can witness, with the advantages if not the accomplished understanding of the ranging angels, any spectacle the novelist can construct. To take the act of reading thus is, of course, to indulge the tricky fallacy that fiction is somewhat real, that artists are magicians, and that we readers are perfectly passive, perfectly accurate perceptors. None of these statements, from the top of this column to where your eye is now, is true.

What the artist makes us see is indistinguishable from what we ourselves see, and the transmutation of reality by the novelist (“Ah yes, Lewis Carroll, England’s Zola,” a friend remarked recently) can scarcely compete in magnitude with the endless fantasias into which we rearrange our own perceptions of reality. We read novels because we are convinced that they are not fiction, and value beyond any practical consideration the privilege of knowing the content of other lives—which, just as everything and nothing is true in a work of fiction, we can know so well that we weep, laugh, and change our ideas and behavior, and which, we soberly realize, we can never know at all.

GD

About the Author

Guy Davenport

Featured Tags

Within the imagination that generates novels there are impulses of incalculable complexity. We read novels with an appetite little understood either by psychology or criticism or ourselves, allowing the articulate imagination of another to project, as vividly as a movie onto a screen, upon that retina which physiology has not yet discovered, our imagination. In this amazing, accepted, even unsuspected theater we can witness, with the advantages if not the accomplished understanding of the ranging angels, any spectacle the novelist can construct. To take the act of reading thus is, of course, to indulge the tricky fallacy that fiction is somewhat real, that artists are magicians, and that we readers are perfectly passive, perfectly accurate perceptors. None of these statements, from the top of this column to where your eye is now, is true.

What the artist makes us see is indistinguishable from what we ourselves see, and the transmutation of reality by the novelist (“Ah yes, Lewis Carroll, England’s Zola,” a friend remarked recently) can scarcely compete in magnitude with the endless fantasias into which we rearrange our own perceptions of reality. We read novels because we are convinced that they are not fiction, and value beyond any practical consideration the privilege of knowing the content of other lives—which, just as everything and nothing is true in a work of fiction, we can know so well that we weep, laugh, and change our ideas and behavior, and which, we soberly realize, we can never know at all.