Meditation on Fantasy and Imagination

 

         C. S. Lewis has had at least as great of an influence on me as any other writer. 

A couple of places I cannot go with Lewis, theologically. His views on women and marriage will seem quaint to many. But these things are on the margin and do not diminish just how much he has taught me and my appreciation of what a wonderful writer he is. The Abolition of Man, The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, A Grief Observed, Miracles, Three Ways of Writing for Children, and the short Meditation from a Toolshed – all wonderful, essential. I have just re-read his autobiographical discussion of how he became – kicking and fighting– a Christian: Surprised by Joy. I could read this book over and over. Here I want to reflect on an important theme of that book: the distinction Lewis makes between (Freudian) fantasy and imagination. This essential distinction Lewis shares with another great influence on me – Iris Murdoch. I will restrict myself to Lewis’ thought, however. Here are some key passages from Lewis:

It will be clear that at this time – at the age of six, seven, and eight – I was living almost entirely in my imagination; or at least that the imaginative experience of those years now seems to me more important than anything else…. But imagination is a vague word and I must make some distinctions. It may mean the world of reverie, daydream, wish-fulfilling fantasy. Of that I knew more than enough. I often pictured myself cutting a fine figure. But I must insist that this was a totally different activity from the invention of Animal-Land (Lewis’ imaginary world). Animal-Land was not (in that sense) a fantasy at all. I was not one of the characters it contained. I was its creator not a candidate for admission to it. Invention is essentially different from reverie; if some fail to recognize the difference that is because they have not themselves experienced both. Anyone who has will understand me. In my daydreams I was training myself to be a fool; in mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist.

 

Applying this distinction to reading different kinds of literature, literature based on fantasy as opposed to imagination – as does Murdoch – Lewis makes the distinction even more sharply – I must quote at length:

 

Let us...lay the fairy tale side by side with the school story or any other story which is labelled a ‘Boy’s book’ or a ‘Girl’s book,’ as distinct from a ‘Children’s book’. There is no doubt that both arouse, and imaginatively satisfy, wishes. We long to go through the looking glass, to reach fairyland. We also long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl, or the lucky boy or girl who discovers the spy’s plot or rides the horse that none of the cowboys can manage. But the two longings are very different. The second, especially when directed on something so close as school life, is ravenous and deadly serious. Its fulfillment on the level of imagination is in truth compensatory: we run to it from the disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to the real world undivinely discontented. For it is all flattery of the ego. The pleasure consists in picturing oneself the object of admiration. The other longing, that for fairy land, is very different. In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and discomforts of a fairy tale? – really wants dragons in contemporary England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing. The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself, as it often is in the more realistic story. (“On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in On Stories – And Other Essays on Literature, 37-38.)

 

Both Lewis and Murdoch find this distinction essential for thinking and judging literature: literature based on fantasy – sentimental literature – is at best an escape from one’s troubles; at worst, it feeds the narcissistic potential of our personality and cuts us off from truth.

        I understand the distinction as the boundary between the ‘empirical’ and the ‘noumenal’ ego, to use Kantian language; or the psyche (e.g. as Freud and Plato before him understood it) and the soul. The psyche is largely a system of egocentric energy and fantasy, fed by an evolutionary past and, powerfully, by socialization. The soul – which includes our intellect and ‘heart’ and all higher spiritual powers, including the imagination – is that potential that in a limited, perspectival way, experiences love (and gives it), goodness, beauty, and truth. The family and social matrix forces a separation between the psyche and the soul during the course of our childhood. How and why is a problem beyond my power. The Christian idea of original sin is just as good as anything science can offer. I suppose the inheritance of evolution and history work against any unity. The combination of pure love, virtue, wisdom, community, historical roots, and justice every child needs seems beyond us as a species. Some families, burdened by economic necessity, oppression, or fortune cannot lovingly attend to their children. Some parents, themselves damaged as children, pass that damage further onto their children. Failures of love and bonding activated the psyche; pure love together with the rootedness and bonding love activate the soul. (I make no metaphysical assumptions about the substance or destiny of the soul. I am using it in an everyday sense, as when we translate a line of Homer as “a man loses half his soul the day he becomes a slave.”)

          In capitalist-consumerist-modernist-technological society, the dissolving of community and family produces narcissistic and otherwise damaged personalities as if off the assembly line. Children absolutely depend on their parents for all their needs. Parent, themselves narcissistically needy, use their children to satisfy their own narcissistic needs; ignore them when these needs require it – or resentfully attend to them. The children sense this, and withdraw into a psychic castle to protect their vulnerable egos. They never experience the kind of love that reassures them: they are “good, very good”; it is wonderful that they exist, that they have come into the world. And the world? They are thrown into schools, where, radically insecure, they often confront a kind of “war of all against all,” albeit a sublimated one. Lacking the security that they are worthy of a pure love, they compensate by striving to increase their social market value – in my case, through sports and appearance. But it is a game they cannot win. Always there is someone whose social value implies: you are of lesser worth; you are in the end not lovable. The child loses awareness of that deeper worth that only pure love and nurture can implant.

Fantasy is a necessary defense mechanism allowing us to live with this, though not the only one. (Submerging yourself in a more powerful collective identity, as in sentimental-romantic nationalism, is another.) Daydreams compensate for our lack by imagining us having whatever attributes place one high up on the scale of social value – and thus often make us a worthy object of sexual love by some elevated peer. A typical adolescent fantasy of mine (I cringe to tell it) was to imagine I was much taller and more powerfully built, making me a dominating basketball player. My girl would watch my fantasy-self dominate the game. Well, I am in good company. Lewis relates part of his experience:

 

At boarding school] There was a great decline in my imaginative life…. My reading was now mainly rubbish…. I read twaddling school stories in The Captain. The pleasure here was, in the proper sense, mere wish fulfillment and fantasy; one enjoyed vicariously the triumphs of the hero. When the boy passes from nursery literature to school stories he is going down, not up. Peter Rabbit pleases a disinterested imagination, for the child does not want to be a rabbit, though he may like pretending to be a rabbit as he may later like acting Hamlet; but the story of the unpromising boy who became captain of the First Eleven exists precisely to feed his real ambitions.

 

As Lewis wrote: that kind of fantasy is “training to be a fool.” The more you lack, the more insecure you are, the more powerful the hold fantasy will gain over you. Obviously, much art fuels this ego-program. I myself have never been able to write fiction because as soon as I do I find fantasy takes over the story I wanted to tell.

Imagination (in Lewis’ and Murdoch’s sense) allows an escape from this alienation, allows you to get in touch with the soul. The longing mentioned by Lewis expresses the longing of the forgotten soul to emerge from its subconscious prison into the light of consciousness and the world. Lewis connects it with the experience of joy – in a very special sense. I have always firmly believed that joy is utterly different from happiness, and that somehow joy flows from the sublime soul (sublime because buried beneath the socially constructed ego) whereas happiness (very fleeting) comes from the ego. Lewis describes it like this:

 

…an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

 

It is the greatest blessing of my life that I understand this because I have experienced exactly the longing Lewis refers to here. For me, for example, the fall season; reading The Lord of the Rings; my books; at times, the Catholic liturgy; formerly the Christmas season, and still the Easter season; my children as babies as periodically still – all this has evoked Joy in me. In Joy you leave the unrelenting ego behind. Something deeper is touched – the soul. The contact comes from some place, idea, thing, or person. You reach out to a reality that is not only an end-in-itself but like a portal to another world, or rather came “trailing clouds of glory” from that other world. I don’t think this commits me to a dualism: the fallen world and the divine realm, for example. I might also explain it as a removing of the ego-blinders such that this world and this life is for a moment revealed in its full glory. You are able to see, not “through a mirror, darkly”, but truly. In this seeing, you become aware that you are a living soul – precisely because you are not focusing on yourself.

       Joy is sublime. By sublime I mean something precise, learned and adapted from Thomas Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime (1976). His account illuminates the psyche-soul relation I have been exploring through the distinction between fantasy and imagination. Joy is a sublime experience of transcendence. Whether transcendent to the everyday psyche or the material world – or both – is beside the point now. In our everyday, happy-and-pleasure-pursing, pain-and-unpleasantness-avoiding self we experience the world and everything in it – from trees and the sun to our children – from the perspective of this interpreted self. So, for instance, the first stage: I go out for a fall walk, take in the trees, the sky, the vegetation, the homes, and so on.

Of course, I could sentimentalize these things; transform them in my mind into a kitschy greeting card, for example – and experience some self-gratifying feelings. That is just one aspect of the fantasizing psyche and no escape from it. The longing (Sehnsucht) that is Joy is no longing to be in a kitsch painting. Rather, in the second stage of the sublime experience, your normal categories of ‘autumn’ break down. You – your empirical ego or socially constructed self – is not part of the longing at all. You, or what you ordinarily imagine yourself to be, have left the stage; Joy has replaced you. It’s like you can – as Moses looking into the Promised Land – almost visualize how autumn would be in Heaven or in a Platonic Idea. It is a difficult thing for me to understand. Not the actual fall day or moment in time holding a newborn baby – wonderful though they be – but the longing for joy occasioned by such events goes beyond what occasioned them. It is as if what occasioned them, their full being, breaks through that fantasizing ego and opens the door for the soul to apprehend this being. Now a fall day or a newborn baby may be, as Lewis puts it, an image or reflection of divine reality, or the divine spirit that infuses our being. In Lewis’ own words:

 

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. “Reflect” is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image.

 

This is the completion of the third stage of the sublime. The everyday experience – say of the fall day – was ruptured by joy in the second stage, and now when you experience other fall days, even though not in the grip of joyful longing, you see them as something very different – as images or reflections (symbols) for some reality that transcends ordinary ego consciousness. The memory of the original experience becomes part of the longing. Simply put, you see the world differently. The fall day activated your spiritual consciousness that emanates from another part of your being, your soul. The only necessary dualism that I insist on is the world as seen through the lens of the constructed self, its clichés and fantasies; and the world as seen through joy and longing – in which imagination plays a powerful role. From the perspective of the latter, the former seems a form of blindness.

            The sublime experience that reveals the living soul is not yet religion. As Lewis wrote,

 

In me, at any rate, it contained no element either of belief or of ethics; however far pursued, it would never have made me either wiser or better.

 

This reflects Lewis’ commitment to Christianity – a commitment to the belief that only direct contact with Christ can make a person wiser or better than pagan virtue. I don’t quite agree with Lewis here, and the difference is theological and philosophical. Only in fear and trembling do I disagree with Lewis, and fear he may be right and I wrong. I agree that the experience of Joy is probably a necessary condition for religious experience, agree with him that Joy is not yet religion. Still an absolute difference in attitude toward life and the world does exist between those locked in their distorting egos and those who, however much dominated by ego consciousness in their daily lives, have had the breakout experience of Joy.

        In Plato’s allegory of the cave, people have been chained from birth and can only see images on the screen of the cave wall, images produced by cliché and media in the service of the powers that be. They take this to be reality. This is the state of the constructed psyche. Joy is one way to break these chains. It gets you to the top of the cave where the sun cancels the darkness of psyche and reveals the bright world to a soul. This is an absolute difference. A life spent in the cave of ego, from the point of view of the soul who at least knows light exists, is not worth living. Indeed, it is a form of Hell. Once in the sun, you may discover God, you may discover that God’s love infuses the Creation, and much more. Perhaps from that higher spiritual imagination, the sunlight we may see in joy seems as pale a thing as the life of the cave seemed to the soul that the sunlight first awakened. I don’t know. I am sure that the worst thing – Hell – is for the cave (social power and ego) to imprison the soul, and thus never know or even want to know the world as it really is, the world that can awaken a soul into existence.

            One of the tragic, frustrating aspect of making this distinction is that only those who have experienced the escape from the damaged or narcissistic ego that is Joy will be able to believe it. This, moreover, has little to do with merit. Joy is a free grace, but those whom failures of love and community have badly damaged by may not be able to experience it, through no fault of their own. Still, from their perspective, all Joy will be sentimental delusion, which is in reality a corruption of joy. If the damaged, self-protecting narcissistic ego is all, then any apparent escape from must necessarily be an act for others or self-deceit for the purpose of elevating the insecure ego at the expense of other egos. There is little or nothing to be done about this.

            The distinction between fantasy and imagination – and the two parts of our inner lives that each comes from – is key not only for thinking about art but religion. As long as ego consciousness keeps us down, God can only originate in our fantasy. The whole world and heaven can be little more than our own projection, socially constructed at that perspective largely is. The ego consciousness creates its own God, one that makes them feel good, removes their insecurities, places them above others, and above all makes no demands of them. I fear that much liberalism as well as fundamentalism in religion have their sources in ego consciousness. Many people have rightly insisted that the absoluteness of goodness and the demands of a clear conscience place one in touch with something deeper than the superficial self. It is clear to me that imagination does the same.

         

           

Afterthought

All religious people and most thinking people up till the modern period beginning in the 17^th century believed that the anti-thesis of goodness, the definition of the Satanic, was what we call today “autonomy.” As Milton’s Satan precisely puts it: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” Thus what is real and good doesn’t come from Being, from Creation, but from our wills – as informed exclusively by an ego consciousness that walls out any contact with reality and love. Satan knew what he rejected. His will was evil. Our egos, just as busy walling out reality and love, just as busy building “a hell in heaven’s despite,” to quote another poet (Blake), don’t know any better, having been damaged in childhood and throughout our lives by failures of love and community, and subject to a powerful ideological and medial conditioning. You may as well expect someone who knows nothing but soap operas to respond to Shakespeare. It is possible! But only by a difficult rebellion.

     I would end with a quote from Schiller’s well-known poem “Ode to Joy”

 

Deine Zauber binden wieder,

Was der Mode Schwert geteilt;

Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder,

Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

 

Thy enchantments bind together,

What did custom stern divide,

Beggars becomes princes’ brothers,

Where thy gentle wings abide.