A writer of fiction obviously needs imagination. Imagination is the most important tool in the box. In the literary context, however, there is more to imagination than you might imagine. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s seminal treatise, Biographia Literaria, he distinguishes between different modes or levels of imagination. At the highest level, the primary imagination is likened to divine creative power, (referred to as poetic genius by Coleridge’s contemporary, Wordsworth) operating beyond the will and control of the writer. Inspiration might be another word for this rather mystical phenomenon.
The Secondary Imagination coexists with the primary and comes into play at a more limited and operational level, when doing the actual writing. It is a synthesising faculty. At a lower, baser level, according to Coleridge, is what he refers to as Fancy, as in what we fancy or desire. Fancy operates with fixities, memories, and choices and is not truly creative. Similarly, the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT is able to create unique and coherent text by accessing vast amounts of information. It can write essays, stories, poems, songs, etc. but artificial intelligence does not possess consciousness or imagination and is not truly creative either.
The historical context of Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s theories of imagination ushered in the Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century. Romantic poetry typically perceived and portrayed spiritual forces at work in nature. If this all seems too poetical, historical and mystical, maybe even fanciful, we still need to find an explanation for the apparent prescience of certain writers.
In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe released a book called “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket”, which tells of the four crewmen of a whaling ship who had to draw lots to decide whom they would eat after days of hunger. The lot fell on the cabin boy named Richard Parker. Forty-six years later, a disaster at sea caused legal furore because three crewmen ate their cabin boy named Richard Parker after drawing lots.
Coincidence? Maybe, but could there be something supernatural about the exercise of the imagination? Carl Jung might explain such a phenomenon as the result of the imagination accessing what he called the anima mundi, or the collective unconscious.We may look to religion, where true spirituality is involved, for other examples of apprehending knowledge by supernatural means: for prophecy and in ministry, where events in, and insights into, a person’s life are revealed by means of ‘words of knowledge’, as mentioned in First Corinthians, Chapter 12 in the Bible. Christianity is, after all, a supernatural religion. In the case of Poe, who had a predilection for the macabre, he may have been operating under supernatural influence from some darker source.
In 1898, fourteen years before the sinking of the Titanic, the writer Morgan Robertson wrote a novel entitled The Wreck of the Titan, or Futility, in which the Titan, the world’s largest ship, supposedly unsinkable, sailing from England to New York, struck an ice berg 400 nautical miles from Newfoundland and sank, taking the majority of its passengers with it, due to an insufficiency of lifeboats. The many similarities between the description of the ships and the circumstances of the disaster gave rise to a number of conspiracy theories and many believed Robertson to be clairvoyant.
Consider a more recent example and one closer to home (for me, as a New Zealander). The New Zealand author, Owen Marshall, published a novel entitled Harlequin Rex, which features a mysterious global pandemic and centres where those afflicted were isolated and cared for. Not a unique premise in speculative fiction, but this story was set in New Zealand and I thought it was an odd coincidence that the Minister of Health in this story was a character by the name of Janis Bloomfield. Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the Director General of Health in New Zealand, became the face of reporting on Covid 19 by appearing alongside the Prime Minister in daily television broadcasts and was awarded a knighthood for his services. Harlequin Rex was published in 1999, twenty years before the advent of the Covid pandemic. The imagination throws up curious coincidences.
The individual unconscious mind plays a crucial role in creative writing. When I’m working on a story, my best ideas typically come to mind first thing in the morning, or sometimes on waking up in the middle of the night. I wake up with the ideas there without consciously thinking about them. While I’ve been sleeping, my unconscious mind has taken over from what my conscious mind was working on. Problem solving, including resolving writer’s block, is often accomplished by ‘sleeping on it’.