This study attempts to discover the structural constants in imagination, especially in response to a breakdown of personal and social order, and to understand the role of imagination in maintaining human order and mediating social and personal change. The recurrence of radical visionary experience in crisis situations is considered across wide range of minds and societies, in order to show, not only that a patterned response does recur, but also to suggest the transformative and potentially curative power of such vision both for individuals and for societies.
In its most general sense the term “imagination” refers simply to the mind’s ability to form images or concepts in the absence of the actual objects. More specifically, imagination (called by psychology, creative imagination) denotes the synthesizing power of the human mind, its ability to solve problems by recombining former experience in the creation of new images and image patterns. The term “imagination,” as it is used throughout this study, will refer to a particular kind of creative imagination which has been called variously poetic, mythic, or visionary imagination and whose special nature is to generate humanly significant syntheses whose shapes are not merely a mirror of experienced life but also an implicit valuation of a particular human condition in a specific time and place. When that condition is one of extremity and crisis―of oppression, disorder, and disharmony―a special kind of visionary imagination, the apocalyptic-millennial, may intervene, revealing and resolving seemingly irreconcilable conflicts in a new vision of man and society.
The first chapter studies the occurrence of this apocalyptic vision among the prophets of some preliterate societies, using anthropological data to confirm that such visions are produced out of deep social crises of order; that they are the product of individual imaginations that share in a collective experience of disorder, and are often radically transformative and regenerative both for the individual psyches in which they occur and for the collectivities in which they find a communal resonance and assent; and further, that they often lead to radical realignments in actual socio-political structures which have become inadequate and oppressive. These visions, which involve inspired recombinations of heretofore conflicting systems, examined through comparisons with historical instances of similar phenomena spontaneously erupting in response to social dislocation, will suggest the common origin of all religions in such imaginative reconstitution of a cosmos out of crisis―uniting past and present, real and ideal, individual and society
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in the image of a perfected future on the far side of a creative heightening of conflict―through its destruction to a new resolution.
The second chapter contains a reading of the poets William Blake, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, and William Butler Yeats, who span a century when social change was outgrowing cultural forms, a reading against the imaginative paradigm of apocalyptic vision as response to social and personal malaise of order, suggesting the common imaginative source of both religious and poetic vision as well as the interpenetration of personal and social realities. Working on the assumption drawn from the evidence of the previous chapter that imagination has a diagnostic and curative human purpose, this section attempts to show how Blake’s imagination, fed by the revolutionary currents of his time and freed by his confidence in its saving power, evolves a full apocalyptic-millennial vision, Beddoes, on the other hand, will be discussed as a negative instance of apocalyptic or “doomsday” vision, his role likened to that of sorcery in preliterate societies, which kills where it cannot cure. Finally, the poetry of Yeats will be seen as a contrived or willed apocalypse, not a radically transformative vision but an accommodation which perpetuates a dualistic, split reality—a construction of unity which is revealed as both tragic and artificial by an imagination working as rebellious subversive agent in the fundamentally conservative system it is forced to serve.
The final chapter focuses primarily on another nineteenth century visionary, Karl Marx, whose new world view, embodying both social critique and prospective vision, is seen in terms of its power as an apocalyptic-millennial prophecy in perhaps its most fully developed modern form. With this vision, and a review of the others with which it shares a family relationship, this study concludes by attempting to point to the kind of human order which all these visions, through the agency of the mythic imagination, are designed to defend.
Any study of the visionary imagination demands by the very nature of its subject an interdisciplinary approach, for vision is the embodied nexus of the particular human being and his social matrix. Imaginative vision is the unification of the two seemingly opposing but actually interconnected and reciprocally determined states of particularity and collectivity: the king dreams for the community, the hero’s mythic journey ends with his return to and renewal of his society, the poet “purifies the dialect of the tribe”; in each case a psychological quest for individual wholeness leads inevitably to a social vision. As the very form of the myth suggests, vision is conceived in an individual mind and may be embraced by a community; visions once embraced are changed in that very act, altered by the work of other minds and other times on them, homogenized, recreated or transformed in their trans-
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mission until they have a collective life which is itself not single but various as the members of the collectivity who embrace them. And in speaking of individual visions in the first place, the language misleads, for the examination of any “individual” vision will show its roots in a common experience, in inherited images, shared language and beliefs, an inheritance whose depth in time can only be guessed at, and whose carriers, genetic or cultural, cannot be finally sorted out or separately determined. The imagination can only begin to reveal its nature, and our own, through an active encounter, by changing the mind that regards it, by demanding a method as concrete and holistic as its subject. This demands the crossing of disciplinary lines which tend to segment the experience that imaginative action unifies. Drawing, then, as it must, on a variety of disciplines, in particular on the complementary insights offered by anthropology, depth psychology, and literary criticism, this study is inevitably limited in knowledge in each of the separate disciplines and constantly encounters the frustration of not knowing nearly enough. It should be considered, however, for what it is the preliminary investigation of a vast and inexhaustible subject.
Finally, the development of the argument that follows also takes its form from its subject; a number of visions, in all their concrete detail, are allowed to reflect on each other for their mutual illumination and clarification, avoiding as far as possible their reduction into another and inappropriate set of terms. The imagination is the rebel of those subjects on which a detached analytic eye throws its light; it is often hidden, digging its tunnel to freedom, while the detached eye circles the prison yard with its cold white light. But escape requires cunning and a knowledge of the more limited―even if ruling―order it must outsmart; imagination is integrated intelligence, intellect attached to rather than detached from the totality of human life. Reason alone is helpless to bring the rebellious imagination to light precisely because it forgets that it is itself only a part, that the part cannot comprehend the whole, and that it is imagination, which contains intellect but is not exhausted by it, that therefore has true dominion. Thus, even as only equals are capable of anything approaching mutual understanding, the contemplation of imagination must itself be an imaginative act. The reader’s forbearance is asked, therefore, for what must be a somewhat internal argument; it is hoped that―with a little companionable patience―its intention may, as we proceed, reveal and justify itself.
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SOURCE:
Wilner, Eleanor. Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society (Baltimore; London:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), Introduction, pp. 1-3.
INTRODUCTION
1
1
THE COLLECTIVE EYE 4
Vision
as an Agent of Recurrent and Radical Change in Preliterate Societies
2
THE UNCOMMON EYE 47
Vision
in the Poetry of Blake, Beddoes, and Yeats
3
THE STORM’S EYE 135
Karl
Marx and Vision in a Troubled World
See “Gathering the Winds”: From Sartre to Hegel, Feuerbach, & Marx as visionary (Excerpt)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
185
INDEX
193
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