Imagination is not the same as fantasy

[WICKES]

I have read several writers who argue that imagination should be sharply distinguished from fantasy. What is the difference? Imagination is said to be vital, to come from a deep place and to be the life blood of art; fantasy is said to be childlike, shallow and escapist.

Is Harry Potter fantasy or a work of imagination? What about The Tempest? The Lord Of The Rings? I just don't get the difference. Is it the Romantics who first make the distinction?

[Red-Headed]

fantasy is said to be childlike, shallow and escapist.

The concept of escapism is an interesting one. I think it was Tolkien who asked what kind of people stop people escaping from something. His answer was simply that jailors are the people who stop escape. Those who partake in 'escapist' literature are hardly likely to be partisan. He has a point.


Is Harry Potter fantasy or a work of imagination? Plagiarism? Bollocks? I dunno squire?


What about The Tempest? The Lord Of The Rings? I just don't get the difference. Is it the Romantics who first make the distinction?

The Tempest was Shakespeare's last play written without a collaborator. It is often viewed as a romantic drama. Although there is no single source known for the play it may have been based on contemporary accounts of the wreck of the 'Sea Venture' in the Bermudas in 1609. It conforms to the unities & yet was quite experimental in its day. As for LOTR, well, I enjoyed it when I read it a few years ago. I don't know whether I could read it again though.

It seems that 'imagination' is very important to human beings & I often wonder if it & the human propensity for storytelling & myth-making were responsible for our ultimate survival over others. It could be that it gave us a cultural edge or evolutionary advantage over the Neanderthals & enabled us to survive when they couldn't change or adapt quickly enough. Possibly the extended metaphors of mythology helped share cultural conceptualisation & promoted a better survival strategy. I'm just guessing here though.

This reminds me of a C.S. Lewis essay (Cambridge English club 24th Nov 1955, I think) where he discusses a lady friend of his (a Jungian psychologist) who was complaining about a general dreariness in her life & an aridity in her mental landscape. When he asked her if she had any taste for fantasy or fairy tales she replied vehemently in the negative, hissing the reply "I loathe them!" I think that speaks volumes in itself.

[sixsmith]

I would have thought that imagination is the means whereas fantasy is but an end among many ends.

[Maryd.]

Imagination is something you have thought of but could be produced if you allow yourself to produce it. However I feel the reason it is called an imagination is something that should remain inside your mind as an image. Fantasy is something weird and wonderful, that you would like to happen but your mature mind tells you - it cannot and will not ever be real.

Well that's my opinion anyway.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I have read several writers who argue that imagination should be sharply distinguished from fantasy. What is the difference? Imagination is said to be vital, to come from a deep place and to be the life blood of art; fantasy is said to be childlike, shallow and escapist.

Is Harry Potter fantasy or a work of imagination? What about The Tempest? The Lord Of The Rings? I just don't get the difference. Is it the Romantics who first make the distinction?

In short, fantasy in this context is referring to the genre. The genre itself could be seen to be restrictive (and so "childlike", "shallow" and "escapist") I suppose, by usually conforming to a set criteia, involving such things as a quest, a grouping together to overcome a common enemy, a male base, a fight against the odds, it is usually set in a distant past that echoes our world, and so on, it could said to be something of a conservative genre and usually altogether a little limited in scope. Fantasy is always regarded in novel form I think. Imagination in your context implies the creative process of art generally I assume.

I think with your reference to the Romantics, (though they didn't call themselves that at the time) the whole 'movement' is usually seen as a reaction against the neo-classical work of people like Pope, with a greater emphasis on individuality, as opposed to a more structured formality that you immediately see if you read Pope and co, (Byron is actually often considered more neo-classical than Romantic incidentally).

Harry Potter is a work of fantasy and fits all the standard formulas, the quests, the grouping together etc, etc, I forget them all off-hand, I'd have to go through my past notes to get to them all, but I'm sure you get the picture.

The Tempest can't be considered a fantasy, it is not a novel for one, though it obviously contains fantasy elements, but the word has a different context than the one you are talking about in your opening set of questions. Lord of the Rings is obviously fantasy too.

[JBI]

The way I see it, fantasy can be imaginative, but fantasy doesn't imply a special emphasis on the imagination - the new movie Avatar, for instance, is science-fiction fantasy, but there is nothing imaginative, or particularly brilliant about it - more like 3 hours of geek pornography and crappy writing.

Likewise, it is wrong to suppose that because something is geographically or culturally removed, it is somehow insightful, or creative. Often I find that fantasy as a genre is rather uncreative, but then again, literature, as an industry is only creative in some aspects, and rarely all the time.

I think the more important thing is the distinction between what Coleridge termed imagination and fancy - Lord of the Rings to me is more fancy than anything else - I am not too sure if I believe in a sort of "imaginative capability" or any other such thing - I tend to see it all as a play on metaphor and how metaphor is constructed and played with to achieve certain effect and affect. Avatar burned 400million bucks or whatever, but to me it was 3 hours of the most boring, tedious cliches imaginable, to the point where when the movie was starting, I turned to my brother and asked - "This isn't the movie right, can you believe this garbage, who would see this," I thinking it another preview for another lame movie - but guess what - it was! 3 hours later I felt like smacking my brother for dragging me to that crap.

[MorpheusSandman]

It's funny that if you look up fantasy on Dictionary.com the first one listed is:

"imagination, esp. when extravagant and unrestrained."

Imagination is all about the ability to form images in your mind. It doesn't strike me that those images need to be divorced from reality to be imaginative. And yet fantasy is often distinctive because of its great divorce from reality. So perhaps we might say the difference is that fantasy is imagination heavily divorced from reality.

@JBI: I haven't seen Avatar, but it strikes me that if you're going to a film that's all about the visual brilliance and complaining about its writing you're really missing the point. Not every work of fiction has to 'reimagine' the rules of writing, fiction, drama, character, archetypes, etc. to be an achievement on other levels. Technology is advancing so fast and how film-makers (especially) are using that technology to create things we've never seen before or 'imagined' we could ever see. I don't think that fantasy is inherently more creative than realism or historical fiction, but we are still talking about two very different modes of creation. If we wanted to look at it on a scale with complete faithfulness to reality on one end and an extreme divorce from reality on the other then there is clearly a difference between those that create close to either of those poles. When I say that fantasy is more imaginative it probably has to do with the difference between imagining things we're exposed to everyday which are already imprinted on our brains and imagining things that don't exist existing in a world which doesn't exist and how do we rethink the rules/laws of that world and how do they differ and conform to our own? There is a much greater freedom in fantasy to 'imagine' things as however you want them. When dealing with anything in a more realistic vein that imagination/creativity isn't necessarily hindered so much as it is focused elsewhere.

[JBI]

It's not as different mode of communication as you suggest - fantasy works by playing with familiar themes - Avatar is a rewriting of Pocahontas (the Disney version, not the historical) with weird aliens instead of native Americans (by this point, instead of being just percieved as different, they are visually, traditionally, culturally, and fundamentally different, in terms of species) and has really very little removal from real life ideas, except that the good guys won here, whereas historically colonists came in and essentially committed a genocide.

The concept of imaginative because it has weird creepy blue guys in place of Native Americans to me seems to cheapen the notion of imagination. If movies were really about spending money to make all sorts of weird 3-d blue guys jump around this hairy tree thing then quite simply, I see no imaginative quality.


That fantasy is more free, more imaginative, more creative, more wide-ranging, or any other such notion to me seems to be trivial - there is really nothing that is new or imaginative intrinsically embedded into the genre as concept - Le Guin is creative in her approach, Harry Potter isn't really, Twilight isn't particularly - Potter can be read easily as a product of British class systems and education, Twilight as Mormon/Neo-Con propaganda (with cause). That the stories are somehow creative, or special in their removal is only a trick of the camera - We are not in the jungle in Avatar, we are in North America, the colors are just a bit different.

[MorpheusSandman]

As the old saying goes, there's only 7 (or whatever low number you want to input) stories and they've all been told. At best it's imagination that reconfigures them in ways that feel new. It's possible to pick out every basic source in Star Wars too but it doesn't negate the fact that Lucas managed to put them all in a fantasy universe that "felt" new to those who watched it. If you're always looking for the underlying archetypes then you're probably never going to find something that feels original enough. But I don't remember dragons in Pocahontas that the Indians had to tame by connecting themselves to them. You mention how Potter is just a product of "British class system and education" but when you combine that with the fantasy of wizardly all of a sudden you have a potent combination of something from reality (education and class systems) and fantasy that's never been presented before. As far as Twilight I really haven't heard about anything in it that hasn't already been done in vampire myths before; it's pretty much like Buffy the Vampire Slayer without the slaying part and with a younger cast.

[Red-Headed]

As the old saying goes, there's only 7 (or whatever low number you want to input) stories and they've all been told.

36 according to Polti. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations)

[Red-Headed]

Avatar is a rewriting of Pocahontas (the Disney version, not the historical)

Is the 'smurf' movie really that bad? Although I haven't seen it, I think you have probably described it perfectly. It kind of reminds me of another dominant theme in US sci fi; re-enacting the war of independence (as in Star Wars).



Potter can be read easily as a product of British class systems and education,

Or a ridiculous stereotypical view of it (excuse me, I have to go & polish my bowler now...). :lol:

[Red-Headed]

The way I see it, fantasy can be imaginative, but fantasy doesn't imply a special emphasis on the imagination.

Yes, but ultimately, fantasy must have its origins in the imagination. I think we could be being tripped up by semantics here as well. The noun fantasy has its source from the Greek phantasia (image in the mind). The adjective fantastic (Gk: Phantastikos ~ presenting to the mind) has connotations of 'excellence' to us in the year 2010, yet a hundred & fifty years ago it would have been more understood as meaning 'unbelievable' or even 'preposterous'.



I think the more important thing is the distinction between what Coleridge termed imagination and fancy

If I remember correctly Bacon had similar ideas in The Advancement of Learning: Poesy, 'Allusive or Parabolical'. How anyone can believe that Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's plays astounds me. They have obviously never read any Bacon!

[MorpheusSandman]

36 according to Polti. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations)Yeah, I've heard different numbers asserted with different theories. But they all basically confirm the idea that art is all about finding ways to say the same thing with an infinite amount of small and/or large variations.

[Red-Headed]

Yeah, I've heard different numbers asserted with different theories. But they all basically confirm the idea that art is all about finding ways to say the same thing with an infinite amount of small and/or large variations.

Polti really did his homework though. I must admit that I have often wondered about a 37th plot/situation! :lol:

[Red-Headed]

Of course, there is the situation that Douglas Adams mentions where a boy being & a girl being meet under a full moon that then explodes for no apparent reason, or something like that...:lol::banana::banana::banana::eek:

[Dinkleberry2010]

Let me put my two cents worth in and then I'll fall back into the audience. I have basically two thoughts about fantasy and imagination. One is that without imagination, fantasy would not exist. But imagination can and does exist very well, thank you, without fantasy. The second thought is this: I think imagination is the most powerful force in the universe. I thank you for your attention, and now good night.

[kelby_lake]

I have read several writers who argue that imagination should be sharply distinguished from fantasy. What is the difference? Imagination is said to be vital, to come from a deep place and to be the life blood of art; fantasy is said to be childlike, shallow and escapist.

Is Harry Potter fantasy or a work of imagination? What about The Tempest? The Lord Of The Rings? I just don't get the difference. Is it the Romantics who first make the distinction?

The Tempest is often referred to as a Romance- fantasy comedy which involves a miracle. (the other two are Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale). The fantasy genre on the whole doesn't interest me at all.

[mortalterror]

@JBI: I haven't seen Avatar, but it strikes me that if you're going to a film that's all about the visual brilliance and complaining about its writing you're really missing the point. Not every work of fiction has to 'reimagine' the rules of writing, fiction, drama, character, archetypes, etc. to be an achievement on other levels.
I agree with JBI. James Cameron can't write. He's like Ridley Scott, George Lucas, and Frank Miller: only interested in visuals. I care about story, character, acting, direction, and editing before I care about details like set design or technology. I was just watching Andrei Rublev and that is what epic looks like. Tarkovsky didn't even have to skimp on character or anything.

[JBI]

I agree with JBI. James Cameron can't write. He's like Ridley Scott, George Lucas, and Frank Miller: only interested in visuals. I care about story, character, acting, direction, and editing before I care about details like set design or technology. I was just watching Andrei Rublev and that is what epic looks like. Tarkovsky didn't even have to skimp on character or anything.

I would note though, that something like the Terminator had bad writing, but Arnold pulled it off, and made it still a half-decent film. That's just mediocre writing with good conceptualization in terms of the realization of the film - without Arnold, there is nothing, but with him, it has the pulp-cult appeal down solid, with classic lines to boot.

Avatar is something entirely different - it isn't bad writing in the Lucas sense, or in the Miller sense, it is bad writing in the bellow straight to video Disney movie sequel sense. It is Pocahontas, but with worse cliches - it is the most dreadful piece of writing I have seen this year - it isn't just bad, it is exceptionally bad. It is the dumbest, most cliche, most dragged out stupidity that ever burned hundreds of millions in production.

I didn't pay my money to see three drawn-out hours of technological geek pornography - I paid my money, and I expected at least an engaging film - for all the "stunning visuals," all that gets really boring, and quite tedious after the first hour, and only the terrible conceptualization is left in place - by the time the bad guys come to win, which they end up not succeeding in (he takes it past Pocahontas in the sense that rather than ripping off history by showing the mercy of the white man, he has the good old Americans forced out by the weird bow shooting blue people, sorry for the spoiler), one feels as if the bad guy should just drop a nuke, and be done with them already.

Seriously, it was one of the most spectacular displays of literary incompetence I have yet seen - if we are calling things imaginative, they must be imaginative in plot, character, setting and concept - to just invent weird stuff is not the goal of literature, and doesn't suffice itself as justification of the art's quality - a film like Seven Samurai is more imaginative, in that it combines great direction, with fantastic visual competence, despite being far older, and in black and white - for visuals, the amount of money and the size of the explosion doesn't mean anything. The Bicycle Thief is more visually imaginative and successful than Transformers, in that the way the camera moves fits in with the design of the movie itself - the neo-realism almost journalist quality the camera creates is a visual masterpiece in itself, despite the film being constructed on the cheapest of budgets.


This reminds me of Benjamin in his "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" where he compares the American film industry, with its acting as being centralized with the Soviet industry, which, he described, in keeping with the Socialist Realism aesthetics, as displaying Russian people as Russian people, without the need for actors - in that sense, the visual is more real and powerful than the artificial constructed by the "imaginative."

Benjamin in this sense is kind of a strange interpreter - his argument between fascist "aesthetics" in contrast to Marxist political backgrounding seems to prevail in a transplanted sense - we cannot exactly justify a film like Avatar as good because it is visual interesting - the concept of "visual aesthetics" is not structured enough to suggest this film is good because it adheres to certain forms, or exemplifies the visual - and in contrast, we cannot justify it on political grounds as a work of relative social persuasion either.

I think art in general needs to find some sort of middle ground - it needs to be both relevant, and aesthetically pleasing/challenging. Some film makers can do that - an example of such a movie going popular would be the fluke that occurred with Pan's Labyrinth where a relatively mediocre director (Hellboy and its sequel are terrible films) made a movie that visually was interesting, and in terms of writing had particularly strong merit. The film went popular, but at the same time, it surpassed its directors early films, in that it was able to transition from merely a pulp-cult appeal as Hellboy to a wider appeal because of its relevance, and its more formalized writing.

In that sense, I can say that fantasy is imaginative in the sense that Le Guin uses it - but Tolkien, well, in terms of construction of setting he seemed to be meticulous, but everything else seems lacking. His characters are neither infinitely deep like Shakespeare's, or Aeschylus', nor are they comical and memorable as Dickens' cartoonish cutouts. They have none of the comedic appeal of Mr. Collins, yet also none of the dramatic appeal of Macbeth - they are merely flat, uninteresting.

The prose too is marginal, and the actual content rather uninteresting in an applicable sense - the art for art sake, in the sense of the text doesn't seem justified, nor does an argument for utility of the text, in that it doesn't seem to have a particularly profound message either.

What then is imaginative, the construction of setting? Is that really imagination though, and in what sense is that comparable, in terms of imaginative quality, to something like Dickens' Bleak House - are we to say the fantastical element gives it a automatic one up on Dickens', or that the sake of it being fantasy has no bearing on its imaginative quality?

I would argue for the latter - there is nothing inherently imaginative about fantasy - just read popular Dungeons and Dragons fiction to get the idea. Fantasy, as a genre, is a genre element - a tool used, a vehicle - the tenor is all in how the vehicle is handled (note here I am using Richards' notion of metaphor as being vehicle and tenor, and in a long winded suggestion, am suggesting that a text itself works as a long winded metaphor, or perhaps a few metaphors).

Zola's Germinal, being naturalism, doesn't seem to be less imaginative than Peake' Gormenghast or Austen's Pride and Prejudice - the imaginative aspect is what lies beneath the text, and how the author handles the source, to the text, to the reader.


Another problem that seems to bother me is the notion of imagination itself, as something we have yet to define - are we going on the Coleridge definition, which puts emphasis on the poet writing from within, or are we taking a more grounded position of saying it is the author writing an interpretive mimetic copy of the world, or are we saying it is the reader themself constructing the imaginative quality? I tend to go with the second one - but I question the notion of what is imagination, how is it related to text, and beyond that, what is the purpose and affect of it on the reader.

[MorpheusSandman]

@JBI: I'll answer you later


I agree with JBI. James Cameron can't write. He's like Ridley Scott, George Lucas, and Frank Miller: only interested in visuals. I care about story, character, acting, direction, and editing before I care about details like set design or technology.Film is not literature. It is not about what's on the page, it's about how it's executed in front of a camera. There's a reason that directors, not writers, in film are referred to as auteurs. And many great directors have been mediocre writers or even worked with mediocre (or worse) writers and made great films. Saying that a director is "only interested in visuals" is akin to saying that a writer is only interested in words. And you can't really talk about direction and editing without talking about visuals. You mention Ridley Scott and George Lucas; both of which have created masterpieces of cinema despite their literary talents.

Now, it's true that the technology that goes into visuals are a tool to use towards something, but in films like Avatar Cameron is attempting to create a world we've never seen before. It's fine to say that archetypically it's drawing from cliched traditions but this doesn't change the fact that the visual world that it creates is still unlike anything that film goers have ever experienced. And it's important to remember that great writing by no means necessarily creates great cinema. Tony Kushner won the Pulitzer Prize for Angels in America, and yet the HBO adaptation is problematic at best and that's because great writing doesn't necessarily translate to great films. If it was then every Shakespeare adaptation would be a cinematic masterpiece and yet there are precious few of them.

[JBI]

Film is in part literature - there is a strong literary component behind film - I think people try to downplay that as an excuse - film is like the modern theater, though far more popular - it is time, I think, that film as a form will emerge, especially now that the visual elements have been so exaggerated in contemporary times - just look at the list of mediocre epic-style movies coming out - Robin Hood, Clash of the Titans, Harry Potter, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Prince of Persia, Narnia, etc.

The genre itself seems to be milking a market constantly getting dumber - last year it was sequels, now it will be epics and fantasy films, then probably some other trash.

This isn't about text and film anymore - film is in part text, and often adapted text - I just wish to stress that the creative vision is no more or less imaginative in a fantasy setting - fantasy and imagination are neither mutually inclusive or exclusive - fantasy is often trash, but has proven to possibly be good, depending on the author, as with every genre. That the removal or distortion of setting is imaginative is not really provable or in any sense practical.

Generally imagination in the sense I see it relies primarily on metaphor and suggestion as a vehicle. To me, text itself is purely layered metaphor, and it is the manipulation of various layers of this metaphorical thought that distinguishes imaginative, and "fancy" to keep with Coleridge's terms. Metaphor isn't exclusive to fantasy, nor is it very well handled by most fantasy authors. If we choose to interpret the content of text as metaphor then, it can be suggested that realist, futurist, pornographic, fantastic, romantic, and all other forms carry the vehicle for metaphor and imagination.

Style and form is another matter entirely, and in some cases is reflected in the metaphor of the text itself - Shakespeare is nothing without metaphor, and his metaphor is nothing without his style, which in itself is built on past metaphors - the whole line of literature is all about a comparison of the text to the reader's perception of existence, and as such, text as a whole is just one big metaphor questioning the bounds of reality and imagination. Poetry, as they say, is one long conversation on the question of what does it mean to have a creative impulse, but on that, the whole of poetry works as a metaphor for an explanation of the creative impulse, as straight language cannot express things - only through comparison do we understand, long is distinguished as a measure by the presence of short, as the Laozi suggests. What we have in text is merely an expression of a world that is unintelligible - how the world is seen, and how metaphor is manipulated depends on many conditions, many of them being the imaginative quality with which the constructor(s) imbue(s) the work with.

[sixsmith]

I agree with JBI. James Cameron can't write.

No revelation there. There's really nothing in his filmography which offers evidence to the contrary.


I didn't pay my money to see three drawn-out hours of technological geek pornography - I paid my money, and I expected at least an engaging film

Come on JBI. It is evident to me, not actually having viewed the film but having seen what must be a good chunk of it via advertising, that being a fan of Geek porn is mandatory when it comes to Avatar.


Film is in part literature - there is a strong literary component behind film - I think people try to downplay that as an excuse - film is like the modern theater, though far more popular - it is time, I think, that film as a form will emerge, especially now that the visual elements have been so exaggerated in contemporary times - just look at the list of mediocre epic-style movies coming out - Robin Hood, Clash of the Titans, Harry Potter, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Prince of Persia, Narnia, etc.

Film is in part literature in that the written word is present. And you are right that bad writing is bad writing. But does anyone really place high expectations on film as a representative of the written'spoken word? I dunno. The majority of films are inspired by the market and those films don't need an excuse for bad writing. For mine, a great many films that receive approbation for their writing, their narrative and plot are, in fact, crap. The bar is pretty low.


This isn't about text and film anymore - film is in part text, and often adapted text - I just wish to stress that the creative vision is no more or less imaginative in a fantasy setting - fantasy and imagination are neither mutually inclusive or exclusive - fantasy is often trash, but has proven to possibly be good, depending on the author, as with every genre. That the removal or distortion of setting is imaginative is not really provable or in any sense practical.

I agree.

[higley]

Imagination is, to me, rooted in reason; it's a tool connecting one possibility to another, even if they are both 'fantastic' possibilities--it's the creative interpretation of logic. Or that's how I see it, anyway. Fantasy, on the other hand, is the stuff out of thin air.