IMAGINATION AND THE NOVEL

Near the beginning of the nineteenth century, at a time not unlike our own of international tension and political uncertainty that entailed threats to personal liberty and freedom of thought, and when he himself had been victimized for atheism, the poet Shelley wrote a Defence of Poetry, which has become celebrated for its definition of the role of the imagination in the discovery and direction of our lives. Laws and conventions deriving from ‘ethical science’ may be necessary, he concedes, for the conduct of ‘civil and domestic life’, but it is the imagination that unlocks our full humanity. ‘A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively’, divining a more profound morality beyond the scope of rational requirement. ‘The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.’ And at the end of the twentieth century, many wars, revolutions, and anathemas later, we are if anything even more aware that the active exercise of the imagination is indispensable to the realization, establishment, and defence of those values which define us and according towhich we try to live our lives. In what amounts to a near paraphrase of Shelley, the subject of this study, Salman Rushdie, insists that the imagination, ‘the process by which we make pictures of the world… is one of the keys to our humanity’ (IH 143).

It is also true that the appeal to the imagination, then as now, invites rather than evades argument. In that extraordinarily modern document from the early eighteenth century, A Tale of a Tub, Swift identified the imagination as that which gives access to the whole spectrum of human potential, leading us ‘into both extreams of High and Low, of Good and Evil’. As if to prove Swift's point, what Dr Johnson reproves as a ‘licentious and vagrant faculty’ is later enshrined as a principle of perception and expression by the romantics: Coleridge's ‘shaping spirit of Imagination’. But, from the start, apologists for the novel had invested less heavily in the imagination, relying more on observation and documentation – though Sterne's Tristram Shandy, with its focus on ‘what passes in a man's own mind’, provides an important qualifying instance.