Grant Morrison and Imagination

A fine and interesting Grant Morrison interview (via Long Story, Short Pier). At the risk of dragging down the tone by dragging in Kendall Walton again when we could just chat about superheroes, let me connect one passage from the interview to my posts of the last few days. We all have words we like, and it turns out Morrison is more than averagely partial to 'imagination'. I've been wondering what 'imagination' means, if you haven't noticed. What's the difference, if any, between 'imagining x', 'supposing x', 'considering x', 'entertaining x', 'make-believing x', 'suspending disbelieve in x', 'appreciating representations of x'?

Morrison isn't remotely concerned with any of this. He's telling the comics industry to grow a spine of self-confidence. Good advice. But I'm struck by the rich data set of ordinary usage he has inadvertently generated along the way. He really likes this Swiss army knife of a term, 'imagination'. (Underlining mine.)

"Wise up: the more comics imitate movies, the less need movies will have for comics as a source of imaginative material; let's remember that the movie industry is ONLY NOW learning to simulate the technology and imagination Jack Kirby packed in his pencil 40 years ago. As I've been saying to the point of boredom for the last couple of years, our creative community owes it to the future to produce today the insane, logic-shattering, side-splitting day-glo stories which will be turned into all-immersive holographic magic theatre experiences in 40 years time. The comics medium is a very specialized area of the Arts, home to many rare and talented blooms and flowering imaginations and it breaks my heart to see so many of our best and brightest bowing down to the same market pressures which drive lowest-common-denominator blockbuster movies and television cop shows. Let's see if we can call time on this trend by demanding and creating big, wild comics which stretch our imaginations. Let's make living breathing, sprawling adventures filled with mind-blowing images of things unseen on Earth. Let's make artefacts that are not faux-games or movies but something other, something so rare and strange it might as well be a window into another universe because that's what it is. Let's see images which come directly from the minds of inspired artists, not from publicity stills. Superhero comics are way too expensive for the mass market and the brand of garish, violent pulp they were once the only source for is available these days in more attractive media. We should get real about this and stop dumbing down, stop stunting our artists' creativity and stop trying to attract a completely imaginary 'mainstream audience'. The best way to consolidate comics as a viable medium is to make them LESS like other media, not more. Let our artists go wild on imaginative page layouts. Let our writers find stories in their dreams and not in the newspaper pages, at least for a little while again. Aim for the cool, literate 'college' audience, as Stan Lee did to great success in the 60s."

I could offer a thumbnail analysis of each occurrence, but that would be pedantic even by my standards. Let me just point out - you can connect the dots on your own time - that 'imagine' and variations thereupon let you talk about producers of art, art objects ,and consumers. Imaginative people imagine things, causing them to produce wildly imaginative imaginative works, making us imagine things, thereby stretching our imaginations, making us imaginative ... and around the circle of artistic life goes.

'Imagine' and variations thereupon allow you to make descriptive claims, normative claims - claims about actualities and potentialities, powers to produce and things produced. You can easily, i.e. with superficial plausibility, reify the denotation of 'imagination' and thereby metaphorically conjure a circulating substance emblematic of the whole economy of art - production, art object, consumption. It can even be reified to the point where it ends up in Kirby's pencil. (You would never say 'Jack Kirby packed supposition that Captain America is real in his pencil.') It's handy to be able to invoke, with one sweep of the hand, a sense of the unity of circulating artistic energy by talking about all stages of that circulation under one verbal heading, even if you don't actually have any particularly rich theory of the unity of circulating artistic energy.

'Imagination' is, on reflection, vastly semantically and syntactically plastic. It's got noun, verb and adjectival forms ready for use. You can slide between saying what is and what should be. (When Morrison writes, "a source of imaginative material", that mean both 'a source of fictional material' and 'a source of good material'.) It's handy to be able to slide lightly over the sticky fact that the nature of artists, the nature of art, and the nature of audiences are three separate issues.

Not that Morrison is being lazy; quite the contrary. That's what makes this passage so nice. The judgment being rendered is clear-eyed, decisive and rather thoughtful. Which just goes to show you that thoughtful people can put to economical use a Swiss army knife of a term that sort of means everything and therefore sort of doesn't mean anything. What this really shows is that the term 'imagination' is a fine multi-purpose tool in the hands of those who already have (or feel they have) a fairly confident grasp of the nature of fiction, and need a handy hook from which to hang their forceful opinions. I think attempts like Walton's to reverse this order of things - to try to take some independent sense of 'imagination' and leverage it into understanding of the nature of fiction - are much less plausible. It's like asking: what is the REAL shape of this soft lump of clay? Wait two sentences. It'll change.

Comments

[Kip Manley]

No time; no time. Working an extra shift today, or I'd sit down at some point with the ideas banging about in my head, since I saw Spider-Man 2 yesterday. —I'm seeing this Morrison interview as an opposite pole to the Fanboy Elite (not to knock fanboys, or elites) who are currently crying out in delight that they've finally been given the apotheosis, or something approaching an apotheosis, of the superhero movie. I just have no clear idea yet of the continuum these poles book-end. Hence the need for time.

Well, it makes a nice excuse, anyway. (It's working for my lack of an attempt to tackle the good, rich Walton stuff, anyway.)

But! I will offer up (to y'all, at least) this amazing Spider-Man story I've been reading. It's a series of columns that start out to summarize the long and tangled saga of the Spidey clones, which dominated the Spider-Man books in the '90s. (If you're not familiar with the story, you'll pick up enough to follow it as you go along. I did. I never was a Spider-Man fan; Batman was my go-to guy. Even though these days I realize a working-class kid doing his best to live up to a crippling sense of responsibility is a better role model than a brooding rich guy working out his inner demons by beating down the lower classes. But I digress. —You know the barest bones of the Gwen Stacey clone? You'll do fine.)

Anyway. It starts off with a sort-of insidery perspective, and draws in interviews and comments from editors and writers working on the Spider-Man books at the time. It's a fascinating train wreck. It's the long-form maxiseries soap opera of the anecdote Samuel Delany tells at the start of "Politics of Paraliterary Criticism," about the up-and-coming genre writer who tries his hand at a Batman script, gets schooled in the craft of (industrial) comics writing as a result, and quits in disgust. Rich, pulpy, fascinating stuff. It's not fiction, but it ends up being a much better story than the fiction it summarizes. (Obligatory attempt to tie it all back to the topic at hand.)

[jholbo]

Kip, I'm up to part 11, 'maximum clonage'. It definitely gives you that Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast - "Oh, so there are TWO Confusatrons!" "Exactly!" - Barton Fink feeling. But to judge from the interviews, just about any professional comic book writer can give me that feeling. Sweet sainted Aunt May, shouldn't these people feel more giddy than they seem to? Maybe you can get used to anything.

[Kip Manley]

Me, I'm still staggered by the Zen beauty of this one sentence, from Part 15, re: (one of the) Gwen Stacey(s):

He apparently discovered that she was no clone and was in fact, nothing more than a successful genetic duplicate.

[spacetoast]

This is getting away from things, but I read that the etymological root of "imagining," "imago," and its root, which I can't remember but which is also the root of our "imitate," were used to denote the imitation-through-fashioning-of-3d-objects type activities of artisans--the doing of sculptures, carvings, engravings, and whatnot--up until the Renaissance, and then, with the Renaissance and particularly the advent of Cartesian mind, then imagining evolves into the idea of being a kind of registrant of "mental pictures." One thing that's striking in view of the pre-Renaissance use, it seems to me, and this seems to crosscut issues of how imagination is metaphorically construed (as a faculty, property, container, mental-film, etc.), is the way that ordinary contemporary use so often connotes contraries of "likeness." When we say that such and such a thing is very imaginative, we obviously sometimes are implicitly saying that something is a poor likeness; but, even when we don't mean to say that, we are saying something to the effect that it is novel or incredible or "other-worldly." I.e. does-not/does-not-intend-to track reality. In verb use too, it seems to me that an ordinary sense is that imagining involves entering or activating something other-worldly, where in the pre-Renaissance use, in my understanding, it would have denoted the actual activity of fashioning likenesses. It's weirdly interesting, I think, how extensions have been built from a concept involving likeness that emphasize un-likeness and other-worldliness.

Anyway, thanks for the great, fascinating, thought-provoking, posts on Walton and fiction.

[jholbo]

Thanks, Spacetoast. I sort of knew that, but it's useful to be reminded. 'Imago', in Latin actually covers the allegedly post-Cartesian stuff. (I'll just google and cut and paste from a handy Latin dictionary: "imago -inis f. [an image , copy, likeness; any representation, portrait, statue]; in plur. [waxen figures, portraits of ancestors; the shade or ghost of the dead; an echo; a mental picture, idea, conception]; rhet., [metaphor, simile, image]; abstr. [mere form, appearance, pretence]."

So you see it's all there already. You can say you have an 'imago' in your head. But you are right that there is a lot more emphasis on 3d statuary, but maybe that's just a cultural thing not a conceptual thing. (Those little household gods are very important.) We still have a hint of this in 'graven image' which we sense means both pictures and statues and such. And I think you are right that the root suggested the process of shaping and forming. (I'll have to quiz Belle about that. She's the classicist of the family.) What this goes to show is how intertwined the senses of 'fiction' and 'imagine' are, via their etymologies. We say that you can imagine a fiction, i.e. cook one up. But you can also fashion (same root) an image, i.e. cook one up. Both terms concern both process and product.

I think the 'bad likeness' sense is there too with the possible meaning of 'mere form' or 'pretense'. Not sure about that.

Anyhoo, glad you enjoyed the posts.

[spacetoast]

Hm, that's very interesting. Are you sure that definition doesn't antedate "mental picture" w/respect to the Renaissance/Descartes though? It seems like there's a good bit more metaphysics in that one than most of the others.

[Mosaic]

imagination include everything...... sometimes were keep on imagining things to our day busy.sometimes its just wasting our time.but its good to imagine good memories...........