After a week of the creeping misery [also known as a sinus infection of sorts], I have finally regained my mental prowess [though none more than already had, don't expect much] and thusly am finally approaching the bench for a report on Le Goff [whose name still makes me giggle inwardly]. I apologize for the delay. And the fact that this is just a bit on the intro, as my brain still has no focus power, and I didn't make it to the Marvelous just yet.
Anywho.
Let me join both of Mark and Brandon in congratulating/thanking Le Goff for poking out of the historical boundaries into a broader realm. There is great truth behind his statement that "the life of men and societies depends just as much on images as it does on more palpable realities...the imagination nourishes man and causes him to act" (5). It brought to mind a quote from Lewis in which he states that "Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival." To imagine and create is an imperative for man, for whatever technical or philosophical reason and to separate any examination of man that goes beyond the physiological from such a thing would be silly. Incomplete, as it were. As Le Goff says, "a history without imagination is a mutilated, disembodied history" (5). [I liked page five.]
Outside of that, I would just like to attempt to clarify his definition of the imagination as, though he provided three "nots," he did not set it outright for me to see. Kind of like trying to set up a square pasture with three fences--the proverbial cows are guided in a direction but are set roaming after a certain point. Or maybe it is just me. Bear with me as I basically walk through what he says.
What is imagination, then? Le Goff sets it next to three similar concepts with which it may be confused and proceeds to separate them. The first was "representation" which he defined as "the mental image of an external reality" (1). Put simply enough, it is a mental construct of something in the physical reality, his example being our idea of a cathedral as gleaned from art or literature. Imagination, he states, "is more comprehensive than representation. Fantasy is nto limited by the intellect" (1). Symbolism [add the lisping, elongated s there, Brandon!] is applied when the object in question is used to make "reference to an underlying system of values," a process possibly involving the imagination, but not imagination itself (1). Lastly is ideology, the imposition of a conception of the world, possibly upon an image of some sort. Ideology and imagination again are simlar with a fuzzy boundary, but ideology is a preformed notion that will, when applied to either, distort temporal and imagination based reality.
My conclusion is that this reality he is attempting to describe is one completely created through the "inner" sensibilities, which he notes are often linked to the divine or supernatural (6). The presentation of these worlds are creations are unique historical realities in and of themselves; "aesthetic values and ideas of beauty are in themselves historical constructs" (4). These, being their own self-contained entities, cannot be interpreted through the same lens as techincal historical documents, which may still have small applications of the imagination through set up and presentation, etc.
Does this make sense, and can you help further the concretization of these thoughts with comments, gentlement [and Mandy, if she has time]?
I am looking forward to see how all this comes together in the essays. And I again apologize for my tardiness and incomplete reading. [sheepish]
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A worm ate words. I thought that wonderfully
Strange -- a miracle -- when they told me a crawling
Insect had swallowed noble songs,
A nighttime thief had stolen writing
So famous, so weighty. But the prowler was foolish
Still, though its belly was full of thought.
5 comments:
Leslie, Thanks for getting us started on this issue. I remember reading along and feeling like the cows you mention--and I was still wandering in relation to the central concept until reading your post. Your emphasis on the inner senses resonates for me. I wonder if the way they operate includes representation but goes beyond it, is a pre-requisite for symbolism, which in terms goes beyond imagination to a more formally conceived set of relations, and is on the same plane as ideology, but on the 'fluid, individual' end of the spectrum where ideology is on the 'fixed, collective' end. Does any of that make sense?
Leslie, great thoughts! I've been mulling these issues over since I first saw this posted, but still haven't fully constructed my thoughts about it. I'll try to voice some of them, though.
I've now had a chance to read through all of Le Goff (I finished it about two weeks ago, after I had a stint of voracious reading, brought on by procrastinating from my real work). After reading through his essays, I'm still curious about his concept of "imagination." You are right, Le Goff fails to define it--and I think intentionally--and leaves it to the reader.
I'm wondering, though, if it isn't actually connected in some way most closely to what he calls "representation." As you've pointed out, he believes imagination "is more comprehensive than representation. Fantasy is not limited by the intellect" (1)--and thus imagination is not a "representation" of reality, but a construct of what people believe exists. If one looks at the TOC (and on further reading), it's clear that a lot of his discussion is based on examining people's creations and perceptions: marvels, the meaning of the Wilderness, Purgatory, and Dreams. In this sense, imagination is a psychological construction of various concepts. From this basis, I believe, Le Goff takes these concepts and attempts to reconstruct what the medieval people thought about their world and how they interacted with it through such a constructed lens.
Also, MLP, I like the way you've characterized imagination as on a spectrum--encompassing but not quite meaning the same things as representation, symbolism, and ideology. I think that's what I was trying to say in my comment, but on a different level. It's a paradoxical combination of and divergence from these three things that makes the imagination and helps us understand its function. Also, I think you've hit correctly in that imagination is individual, and the various individual imaginations feed together in Le Goff's reconstruction of the medieval conceptions.
Brandon, You're way ahead of us in reading (not that I haven't been reading to procrastinate as well--look for an upcoming R47 post on T. Holt's Meadowland). I'll want to finish LeGoff soon in order to interact with your first comment, but three quick reactions come to mind.
1. The convergence/divergence conceptualization really rounds out the dynamic I was playing with. I think there's an interest conceptual definition forming between these comments.
2. That emergent definition probably is framed from an individual standpoint; the cultural magic comes when the phenomenological becomes social, and I'm sure I'll see more of that in LeGoff as I finish it.
3. I still want to go back to the 'what hooked you and how do you think about it' pilot survey we did a couple of years ago. Mystery and imagination were part of the medieval hook for at least some folks, and I would love to tease that out with some further work.
I think there definitely is something very imaginative about the medieval--especially for us, looking back upon it--and definitely part of what gets a lot of us interested in it. Your thoughts about going back to that survey sound good in this regard. I think there's a lot more that could be done with that.
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