Fear of the Imagination

In the feed of book reviews I got this weekend was an article in The Guardian by Greil Marcus. It talks about a book he has written called Listening to Van Morrison. The book is based on interviews with audiences at Van Morrison concerts. Consequently much of it is about how people interact with art. This section stood out for me:

One of the themes of the book I wrote has to do with the fear some people have for the imagination, for their resistance to being moved by something that is invented: made up. It’s the desire to reduce anything that affects them to the biography of whoever it might have been who made the work.

It seems to me that this is applicable to far more than just music. It touches on the determination that so many readers have to interpret a book in terms of “what the author intended”. Heck, people even judge the abilities of celebrity sportsmen such as David Beckham or Tiger Woods on the basis of whether they view them as “good people” or not. The phenomenon also has connection with diversity politics, because so many people try to defend works of art on the basis of whether or not the creator intended to cause offense. I find this all very odd. A performance — any performance — has a life of its own way beyond that of its creator.

2 thoughts on “Fear of the Imagination

  1. *nods* it’s like that video you posted from Jeanette Winterson… one aspect of a person’s life has little to do with another. I know – personally – many a musical performer, from passable to awesome, who are lovely human beings… and I know a couple of great performers who are egotistical jerks, and a couple who are right flakes.

    What’s interesting is watching Tiger’s game suffer under the stress… golf is such a mental game, and while Tiger has obviously been less than what polite society would call acceptable for quite some time now, but it’s only recently, since all this has come to light, that his game has begun to suffer…

    Conversely, watching someone like JMS, an avowed atheist, create Babylon 5, a universe full of Archetypes… or Howard Tayler, a good Mormon, create Schlock Mercenary, a universe whose *hero* is a sneaky, mercenary so-and-so… great fun.

  2. Hum .. you may be under-rating the part that the Blog .. Er, maybe more properly ? ..the Fanosphere has to play in this. For Example.

    I’m rather fond of Jim Butchers ‘Harry Dresden’ series … if you have only seen the ‘Dresden Files ‘ on TV then you do need to know that whilst ‘ The Dresden Files ‘ had tremendous merit as a successor to ‘Buffy ‘ alas the series was nickeled and dimed down until only the names of the Major characters were left from the books and the promise was wasted.

    Anyway Jim Butcher has a web site, and incorporated therein is a fan base that grows in size by the day with a Policy on Fan Fiction and so forth..

    http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php

    It seems to me that the relationship of a writer to his/her readers has changed profoundly since the development of the Web.

    Certainly readers will interpret an authors books in a particular way … I KNOW what Nero Wolfe looks like, thank you very much ! … but other readers can now join into discussion and debate in real time, and without any geographical bounds, and that is, I think, something new in the world.

    Given that publishers must monitor the market then an authors Fan Base on line has got to influence the likelihood of investment in marketing campaigns and advances on future work in any given series …. and thus readers have more influence on a writer future prospects than ever they had in the past.

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