27/100 What is the Work of the Imagination?

some questions, no answers.

I often find myself asking this. As a novelist, it’s my job, not only to put my imagination to work, but also to put the imagination of my readers to work. Art exists, as we are reminded, to make the stone more stony, it does not exist to create the stone’s replica. I recently saw Jeremy Deller in conversation with Mary Beard. In this conversation they had a back and forward about statues, Jeremy said a curious thing, he said that statues are not art. I wanted him to expand on this, this kind of deliberately provocative statement is exactly the thing I’d have jumped on if I’d been chairing the conversation, but I wasn’t. Instead, I went away and thought about it. A friend and I spoke about it in the pub afterwards, standing on a street corner next to Trafalgar Square - all those plinths - with our drinks, we agreed that certainly we couldn’t make statues. Did our own ineptitude make someone else’s craft art?

Having thought about this, and I have a slow mind, I think that perhaps what was meant was that in statues being a fairly accurate replica, they aren’t art because they exist to show the world as is or was or as the powers at be desire it to be, they do not exist to create questions about the world. In fact, they do the exact opposite, often a means of totalising, and of imposing a certain narrative around a conflict or an idea of nationhood. Few public statues are work of imagination or invite the imagination to be deployed. I am here leaving out the work of fellow Scot, Eduard Paolozzi, who was a sculptor more than a statue maker and whose Newton greets me every time I visit the British Library, evoking a certain specific feeling of homesickness and national pride. The replica of Paolozzi’s studio in the National Galleries in Edinburgh is one of my favourite places to think; I used to take my eldest daughter there when she was a baby, her sixth birthday party a kind of spot the difference there, but I digress.

When it comes to the imagination, it is not being put to work if we only replicate what’s already there. Of course all work is a step away from reality, but in trying to capture a version akin to reality, the potential of the imagination is lost. Neither the imagination of the writer or the imagination of the reader is being stretched in this scenario; is work that fails to stretch the imagination art or not?

I have been called a stylist so often that now I can probably rightly call myself one; style lies at the heart of everything I make, because it’s style that directly deploys the imagination. When I wrote The Last Days, it was important that I wrote it in a novelistic style because the story was so different to many people’s reality that the imagination was essential. Books are often touted as being of benefit because they deploy the imagination as if this is a blanket guarantee across each and every book.

There are two reasons this is nonsense. Firstly, why does a book have to do anything? This is a Calvinist imposition. A book does not have to be useful. This has recently become a preoccupation of mine, in my next novel the protagonist, an artist, is obsessed with making things that are neither useful nor beautiful. I think maybe I am too. To infer that a book has to be useful or of benefit is similar to the idea that all art is political or that all art has to be political, whereas I’d argue that it’s often the apolitical nature of art that allows it to reach its fullest potential. It is possible to explore moral problems without making declarative utterances, in inviting readers into an amoral and apolitical universe, the imagination is put to better use. It is also to suppose that our free time must be measurably useful.

Secondly, some books do precisely the opposite of deploying the imagination. Either they exist simply to entertain or to perpetuate a comfortable, easy narrative. Few books exist to disrupt or to disturb. My thinking veers close to Deller’s here, although I am only inferring what he’s thinking, but my claim is that not all books are art, just as not all statues are art; not all books work the imagination, not all writers use theirs particularly well either.

It is hard to imagine the amoral. It is even harder to imagine the immoral. I am doing this daily as I draft my next novel. It is not a nice book. I do not write nice books. I often wish I did. I would be richer if I did. I would perhaps be happier too. I would certainly be less fulfilled. In Ava Anna Ada, there is implicit child abuse and violence towards a child. These were not easy scenes to write. They were difficult scenes to publish. We live in a time where the artist no longer exists separately to their work, and more, is expected to publicly defend their work. I think here of the controversy around Lucus Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favourite, a distinct and deliberate nod to Lolita. In the outcry that followed its publication, he was targeted as being some kind of deviant, as if the work reflected his own predilections. Anyone who read that book or who read Lolita would be able to discern the level of conflict the perpetrator feels, as well as the damage done to the victim. Any outcry betrays the paucity of imagination on the part of the outcrier; perhaps then what is needed is more fiction that steps into the amoral, apolitical space.

As books align more and more closely to some version of reality, the true work and potential of the imagination becomes lost. The work of the imagination on the part of the writer is, I think, to imagine future scenarios, whether those be linked to time or simply what X character does in Y situations. The job of the novelist is a pre-emptive one, which is why novelists often tend to be long term people, concerned with the world, concerned too with things outside of them and their own world, because how can the mind’s eye see what it hasn’t seen? How can it train itself to have a wider field of vision than that it’s daily presented with?

My job, as I see it, is to imagine the not yet seen, and to know the not easily known. It is not to base my imagination on things easily understood or part of a comfortable narrative, it is not to repeatedly depend on my own life for material. It is not based either on an empathetic response. Stretching my imagination means I need to try to comprehend the incomprehensible. I might feel sick while I do that, I certainly did during and after The Zone of Interest. I do not want to look at the holocaust through Nazi eyes, and yet I did, and my imagination is now the richer for it. The same with Gordon Burns’ Happy Like Murderers; I don’t want to understand Fred West, I don’t want to feel sorry for him, I don’t want to think he was let down as much as his victims were, and yet because of that work, I do. In dispelling the notion of evil, art disrupts the idea of good.

Perhaps in making the world more stony, art makes the work more complicated, making our human place in it more complicated. Humanity, history has shown repeatedly, is not an easy thing; humans are a complex species capable of wonderful and terrible things, often with the same body. This is what art shows us. This is what statues don’t come close to doing. Or perhaps, sometimes, they do…