Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

THE WRITER’S IMAGINATION AND THE IMAGINATION OF THE STATE

The State has no imagination.

The State has no imagination because the State sees imagination as something that can be put into service.

The Writer is put into service by his imagination; he or she writes at its dictate.

The State is a collective intelligence. This is so whether it is arrived at by way of the Central Committee of the Party or whether it is the result of the long process of primaries and secondaries in a multi-party order. When the State projects a social vision — and it has no more concentrated unit of vision — it does so through the perceptions of planners, advisers, commissions, experts in this and that, ministers of this and that, constitutional lawyers, spokesmen, politicians. The formation of the State’s vision is a process of briefing. Its product is social engineering.

The imagination can never be the product of a collective. It is the most concentrated of cerebral activities, the most exclusive, private, and individual. If there is a physiological explanation of it, I have never read one that matches the experience I know, and others do, as writers. Wicks along the way of the past — childhood or only yesterday, or even an hour ago, in the dark of time in which the Writer, unlike other people, is always comfortable, as a blind man feels along his darkness — these wicks are lit up one by one, and they are followed to caverns that were missed, where voices that did not complete what there was to say, sound on; places that have never been open to ordinary perception, or may be in time to come. For the Writer is connected with time; that is the imagination. The State is connected with history; the State has only projection in place of imagination. For the writer, those small lights fuse in a single vision and become the Cyclops eye. It is what that eye sees that no other does. Only the Writer him- or herself can focus that beam as a social product — poem, novel, or story. The inner eye of the State is one of those revolving balls made up of fragments of mirror which used to dominate old dance-halls. It winks all over the place, casting back upon all who pass under its surveillance whatever spotlight it chooses to illuminate itself with from without — turning faces timid with green, tense with violet, or happy with sunset-rose.

What kind of relation can there be between the imagination and the projection?

How do the Writer and the State get on?

We know that there have been examples of the imagination feeling at home within the projection; something close to what Lukÿcs calls the duality of inwardness and outside world, overcome. This unity, then, becomes ‘the divinatory-intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life.’ Time and history meet. And of course the philosophy of social order, from which the State selects for projection whatever serves the purpose of power in its particular circumstance (rebellious population, high unemployment, famine or plenty) — the philosophy of social order was first imagined, in the secular world, by writers, the writers of antiquity. It was from Plato’s cavern of small lights that the shadows on the walls came out to try democracy, in the flesh. But what the State made of the ancients’ visions of social order belongs to the realm of history and not imagination — extant in the forms of democracy that actually do exist in some countries of both East and West, and also in the kind of total travesty that exists in my own country, South Africa, where the State fantasizes (which is not at all the same thing as imagining) the projection of a ‘democratic process’ as a social order where the majority of the population has no vote.

But I believe that more often, in instances where time and history appear to have met, this has been, so to speak, before the event: the Writer’s imagination has visualized an ordering of human lives that seems to be attainable by the projection of a State not yet created. The Risorgimento is one example. The Russian Revolution, in the vision of a Mayakovsky, another. And there are more. But once the State is established, the duality between Writer and State opens again. Why? I do not think the whole explanation is to be found in the stark fact that the ideals of a revolution are at best difficult to realize and at worst are betrayed, when the revolution itself succeeds. The Writer himself knows that the only revolution is the permanent one — not in the Trotskyite sense, but in the sense of the imagination, in which no understanding is ever completed, but must keep breaking up and re-forming in different combinations if it is to spread and meet the terrible questions of human existence. What alienates the Writer from the State is that the State — any State — is always certain it is right.

Brecht’s imagination had an uneasy relationship with the projection of the State in East Germany; although his political beliefs were those he saw embodied in the idea of the State, the State’s projection of the idea was not that of his imagination. His theory of epic theatre seemed orthodox enough (orthodoxy always belongs to the projection, of course); it was, in the words of Walter Benjamin, ‘to discover the conditions of life’. That is what the Writer’s imagination seeks to do everywhere; and as happened to Brecht, it is generally not exactly what the State would have from the Writer. The State wants from the Writer reinforcement of the type of consciousness it imposes on its citizens, not the discovery of the actual conditions of life beneath it, which may give the lie to it. The State wants this whether it is in the form of the pulp fiction where individualism is safely channelled as a monogram on a variety of consumer goods and the ideal of human achievement takes place not on earth at all, but is extraplanetary, or whether it is in the form of the incorruptible worker exposing the black marketeer, or whether — East or West — it is the retributory bad end of the spy who sells defence plans, his fate thus transforming the State’s nuclear arms into the sacred sword of King Arthur.

Where the State’s projection of social order allows it to do so, it often goes so far as to imprison the imagination, in the person of the Writer, or the banning of a book. Where the State says it welcomes and encourages assaults by the imagination on the State’s projection, it invites the poet to dine at State House, and shores up if not the law, then something invoked as the traditional morality of the nation, against the breaches the high tide of the imagination has made in the consciousness of the State’s subjects.

The imagination, freed in time, never forgets what the projection, bound in history, constantly rewrites and erases.

— Address to PEN Congress

New York, January 1986