The Arbitrary Nature of Imagination: A Critical Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Work; ‘Imagination Dead Imagine

Objective: Write A Critical Analysis of one of the following stories by Samuel Beckett: ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’.
The Arbitrary Nature of Imagination: A Critical Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Work; ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’.
This paper seeks to give a critical analysis on one of Samuel Beckett’s magnificent work, ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’. The paper will dwell in the fields of psychology and philosophy in its attempt to give a definition and criticism to what is being relayed in the text. This paper will deal on the concept of the mind, body and soul in connection to the imagination portrayed in the narrative. This paper also has one of its objectives focused on the conceptualization of the dualism present in human existence; that the narrative posits themes of death, living, and experiencing in the context of the dichotomy of the unconventional disparity between the mind and body.
Imagination Dead Imagine is a complex piece of fiction wherein the contents muster up an approximate definition of the microcosm of the mind as seen through the images that were conveyed throughout the reading. The reading starts with the assumption of the total elimination of preconceived ideas. Quoting from the reading, ‘No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda’, we can see starting of the elimination of logic and senses as hinted by the specific line ‘Islands, waters azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit.’1 The distortion of the senses, specifically the sense of sight, is present in this instance. The logic of sight is then being omitted away from use of the reader. That the sight perhaps is not to be equated with the sight used in imagination, or the things you see in your mind. There is then a difference between sight of the eyes and the sight of the mind. That in this specific narrative, the sight of the mind is used in order to interpolate ideas coming from the text.
The focus on the imagination then becomes quite clear. The text unravels its next lines in a form of a blueprint for the readers to interpret and structuralize in the depths of their imagination. ‘No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA. Lying on the ground two white bodies, each in its semicircle. White too the vault and the round wall eighteen inches high from which it springs. Go back out, a plain rotunda, all white in the whiteness, go back in, rap, solid throughout, a ring as in the imagination the ring of bone.’2 This very paragraph presets the irony that is at play all throughout the narrative, that even if imagination is dead, as stated in the earlier lines, we are still able to imagine. That the dead imagination is still being imagined. What then is imagination? And how is it able to give an experience that we cannot fully experience with our bodily limitations.
Imagination begets the appreciation of art, form and formlessness. This statement is proven by Jean-Paul Sartre in his phenomenological account of the imaginative experience. Sartre’s theory of imagination provides the basis for his account of the experience of art.3 This art is what we experience, and we who experience it are called the appreciator.4 Thus as appreciators, we are able to experience understand and appreciate the arrangement of words written in a text as arbitrary as they may seem to be. ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ depicted as an art is appreciated through the sight and mind of the imagination. That this text cannot be read in a poorly unsophisticated fashion without accordance or adherence to the logic of the imagination. ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ can then be perhaps be fashioned under being an imaginative fiction. A fiction that activates the imagination and thought processes involved in it. This activation is presented by the different events happening in the text. ‘Emptiness, silence, heat, whiteness, wait, the light goes down, all grows dark together, ground, wall, vault, bodies, say twenty seconds, all the greys, the light goes out, all vanishes. At the same time the temperature goes down, to reach its minimum, say freezing-point, at the same instant that the black is reached, which may seem strange. Wait, more or less long, light and heat come back, all grows white and hot together, ground, wall, vault, bodies, say twenty seconds, all the greys, till the initial level is reached whence the fall began. More or less long, for there may intervene, experience shows, between end of fall and beginning of rise, pauses of varying length, from the fraction of the second to what would have seemed, in other times, other places, an eternity.’5 All these phrases adjoined together give off the notion that imagination does not only deal with perceivable objects as it is also possible to imagine abstract definitions like emotions, and scientific and quantifiable descriptions such as temperature and time. How is this possible?
In Sartre’s work, The Imaginary, he proposes his original theory of the imagination.6 The first assumption of his theory posits the fact that the image is one mode of consciousness. The very fact that we are able to imagine abstract, scientific and quantifiable definitions means that there is a different mode of consciousness. One that doesn’t deal only with the senses, experiences, and logic. The image being created through reading ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ stands on its own ground of consciousness. That interpretations of the text maybe different to one person as it is from you or from me. That the emotions and imagery being imagined are not universal as they are atomic. Atomic in a sense that they are specific to one individual. The individual has the capacity to imagine their own interpretations through the use of their own individual imagination.
Individual perception, real and imaginary, emerges as the challenge to both the reader and narrator in ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’. The reader must alternately enter and exit from the white rotunda. On the symbolic level this may represent the movement into and out of one’s mental world, the mode of perception and consciousness, but literally the narrator is simply asking the reader to view the rotunda and its contents from different perspectives. In a large part then imagination deals with the problems of visual perception. Sartre claims that ‘To imagine is to intend an object outside of consciousness in the mode of imagination, not the mode of perception.’7 Perception is not to be equated with imagination as imagination precedes perception since in imagining something or a concept one goes away with representations and potentially allows for a direct access to that which is imagined; when this imagined something does not exist, there is still an intention to become conscious of it through the imagination. This explains the imagination being dead in the text, that when we imagine an object our imagination accepts the notion that this object does not exist or is a dead object.
The text gives irony to this idea that the imagination is dead. Going back to the first line,’ No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine.’8 We can see the irony that there is no life in our imagination yet we conceive or birth a concept inside the facilities of our mind. ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ brings about or talks about the death of imagination through the paradoxical means of the impregnation of the mind with concepts that are given birth by means of imagination.
These concepts given birth by imagination are perceivable through human consciousness and a world view of an individual. Piaget argues that the world view is the result of arranging perceptions into existing imagery by imagination.9 This can be seen in the reading when we are able to comprehend the Cartesian mathematics behind the mapping of the rotunda. The points AB CD in a particular world view of mathematics can be understood as forming a circle and that ACB and BDA form two semi-circles. This is a psychological view of what imagination is. In ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’, the understanding of the concepts given and relayed through the use of imagery is in context to a grand world view, different world views perhaps. The concepts Diameter, Temperature, Color, Emptiness and etc, have their own descriptive analogies in the faculties of our mind. Thus there are differences present in how one is to imagine or read the text. Their reading of the text is based on their knowledge or their intention to think of what the words may mean or convey.
Using all of these ideas and notions about the imagination we can then state that there is no one objectively finite reading or meaning of the text. ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ contains a variety of facts that is unearthed only through the individual’s use of the imagination. These facts vary in a sense that there is no singular atomic truth in the reading, and also because the reader has their own individual prejudice, worldview and means of understanding. Thus this paper will only be able to relay what I, as a reader, understood in the text. That this is only an opinion, a facet of the differing truths present in the text.
In the middle parts of the text, there is a focus between the relationships of opposites. ‘Such variations of rise and fall, combining in countless rhythms, commonly attend the passage from white and heat to black and cold, and vice versa. The extremes alone are stable as is stressed by the vibration to be observed when a pause occurs at some intermediate stage, no matter what its level and duration. Then all vibrates, ground, wall, vault, bodies, ashen or leaden or between the two, as may be. But on the whole, experience shows, such uncertain passage is not common. And most often, when the light begins to fail, and along with it the heat, the movement continues unbroken until, in the space of some twenty seconds, pitch black is reached and at the same instant say freezing-point. Same remark for the reverse movement, towards heat and whiteness. Next most frequent is the fall or rise with pauses of varying length in these feverish greys, without at any moment reversal of the movement.’10 Light and dark, black and white, rising and falling, minimum and maximum, and stopping and resuming. If ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ is about imagination being dead in the processes of our minds then it is quite interesting to see these opposites dynamically interact with one another. That we perhaps imagine things by conceiving the opposites they have. That we think in two ways, first thinking the object as is and second thinking the object as an opposite of another. There is then a present force uniting these opposites. Carl Jung describes the complex relationship between opposites, he suggests that humans are born into the world of opposites and intuition.11 We know the opposites of things based on intuition, this intuition is an arbitrary belief in the mind since it is not structured upon knowledge but rather a premonition, an imagined suspicion. In this light, the opposites present in ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ gives a basis on the notion that the imagination is arbitrary. Imagination is based not on the senses nor anything else that is specific to an individual but rather to something more transcendental, something nonexistent, something dead.
The movement of the text from going in and out of the rotunda can be a metaphor for the going in and going out of conventional thinking, going in and out of the mind. (1) ‘Go back out, a plain rotunda, all white in the whiteness, go back in, rap, solid throughout, a ring as in the imagination the ring of bone.’ and (2) ‘Go back out, move back, the little fabric vanishes, ascend, it vanishes, all white in the whiteness, descend, go back in.’ These two deliberately gives accordance to different viewpoints the narrator was trying to project. The rotunda is to be viewed then as something conscious that it shows spontaneity and dynamism. The rotunda as a non-living entity has its own personality given to it by the author. The importance again of imagination is present here since in order to go out of conventional thinking and go out of the ‘rotunda’ one has to use their imagination.
The text ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ can also be an encompassing description of life itself. The reader continually entering and exiting the rotunda can be understood in the metaphor of an individual’s thinking process. That sometimes an individual in a process of judging and choosing between realities, he has to alternate between thinking of himself (going in) and thinking of the other (going out). Immanuel Kant’s idea then of having a moral requirement not only to the self but to the other is what’s being presented here. In Kant’s ‘The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals’, we can see the assumption that we act and live by a universal code of morality that goes away from thinking only at the individual level.12 This presents the ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ as being a moral sounding text. This may be an ambiguous argument to say but it is in these movements we see the very processes of humanity and of life. The text gives constant changes between two constant extremes, ‘white and hot’, ‘freezing-point and blackness’, ‘light and heat’. These constant extremes give an allusion to the two final extremes in life, first being life itself and second being death. Coldness and darkness alludes to the metaphor of death while the concept of warmth and whiteness can be specific to life. These two extremes are not only specific to life but it can also be about the imagination, it being dead or alive, or about morality, death being living for oneself and life being living for others which can be hinted from Socrates’ philosophy in his work Apology.13
The text also submits to the fact that life and the imagination is in no stable state. That a stable state of ‘darkness, lightness, coldness and etc’ only lasts no longer than twenty seconds. The state of imagination and to some extent life is also constantly shifting from one state to the other. In imagination, we can see the shift and changes to the imagery once we already experienced it. Upon experiencing the imagined object again through imagination, we can see shifts and differences to the overall appearance that is being conceived and birthed in our imaginative mind. An imagination of a creature that is called as a ‘heffalump’ may be different the second time around.14 In life, these changes in state are likely accountable to changes of emotion and knowledge. That we cannot be in one state of emotion and also we cannot be stuck in one opinion of reasoning. The stable state lasting no longer than twenty seconds and then everything either rises can also be seen as a mirroring of life. Individuals are always rising or falling in one way or another. This imagination, life, is seen as a torture. Torture in a sense that the mind is chaotic and controlling. The bodies are merely puppets standing at attention waiting for the torment of the mind, the unbeatable labyrinth of thought. The bodies presented here are the actual images formed in the imagination through reading ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’. The text describes two bodies that are conversely situated in two of the semi-circles of the rotunda. They are merely objects at which the imagination and mind is trying to tame and understand. The phrases, quoting from the text, ‘Still on the ground, bent in three, the head against the wall at B, the arse against the wall at A, the knees against the wall between B and C, the feet against the wall between C and A, that is to say inscribed in the semicircle ACB, merging in the white ground were it not for the long hair of strangely imperfect whiteness, the white body of a woman finally. Similarly inscribed in the other semicircle, against the wall his head at A, his arse at B, his knees between A and D, his feet between D and B, the partner. On their right sides therefore both and back to back head to arse. Hold a mirror to their lips, it mists. With their left hands they hold their left legs a little below the knee, with their right hands their left arms a little above the elbow’15 show the colonizing of descriptions through the use of the imaginative mind. We subject these descriptions into forming a body, a body that we dissect and manipulate in the inner faculties of our mind. This is where the unconventional disparity between the mind and body is hinted. That the mind subdues the body into a formal representation and experience of the initiative of the mind.
The hidden notions between the mind and the body also come together in the totality of the text. For the first part the mind is what is actually engaged first and given importance through imagination. The body comes later, as seen that it is only through the use of an imaginary mind that the reader is be able to perceive the rotunda, the different events happening in it, and the bodies resting on it. This gives a Cartesian idea that the mind comes first before the body. Descartes in his Principles of Philosophy, and in his ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’ accede the distinction between the mind and body, that the mind is superior to the body and it is in the mind that we seek to indentify ourselves with.16 17 Descartes proposes a thesis, which is now defined as the “Mind-Body Dualism”, that the nature of the mind is completely different from that of the body and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other. This very assumption gives light on the text ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ since it inculcates the existence of the mind though the body is dead and that though imagination as a body may be dead there is still an existence of imagination in the mind. What do I mean by imagination as a body? Imagination as a body is defined as a specific thought process, an objective perception of ideas that deal with the body and physical realities that we impregnate in the mind.
‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ having an aspect of mind versus body has Cartesian18 influences. We can see this as far back as 1930, the author of the narrative, Samuel Beckett, had won a prize for Whoroscope19, it is a poem about Descartes, who as stated earlier was the philosopher who brought the mind and body problem to the forefront of western philosophy. The text also has Cartesian influences through the use of rudimentary Cartesianism, which shows emphasis on logical analysis, its mechanistic interpretation of physical nature and its dualistic distinction between thought (mind) and extension (matter).20 These mechanistic interpretation of physical nature can be seen in the events encompassing the text. The changes of temperature, from cold to hot, the changes of light, from white to black, and the passing of time were all mechanistically described, ‘Emptiness, silence, heat, whiteness, wait, the light goes down, all grows dark together, ground, wall, vault, bodies, say twenty seconds, all the greys, the light goes out, all vanishes. At the same time the temperature goes down, to reach its minimum, say freezing-point, at the same instant that the black is reached, which may seem strange. Wait, more or less long, light and heat come back, all grows white and hot together, ground, wall, vault, bodies, say twenty seconds, all the greys, till the initial level is reached whence the fall began.’ All of these suggests that the text is highly influenced by Descartes philosophy, specifically engaging the reader to the concealed argument against the body and the mind.
The problem then with the text ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ is the use of imagination through a specific worldview. That in having a worldview one perceives and engages the imagination in a bodily method. That we perceive the world through our bodies and that the experiences we have in our bodies help make up an individual’s conscience of thought. It is through the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty that we can see this. Through his work Phenomenology of Perception, he engages the argument that the body and mind is not at all diverging.21 That there is a specific and innate connection between the two. His work sets the argument that we are first perceiving the world before we use the imaginative mind. In connection to the text ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ we can see this specifically in the descriptions allocated in each sentence and phrase. That we can imagine the temperature, the measurements, and all the other descriptions found in the text because we already have experienced them through our bodies. A main problem here would then be, what about the notions and descriptions that are yet to be experienced? This gives an argument whether or not the reading of ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ is actually experienced first before reading or experienced after reading. The reading of the text is an experience in itself but the understanding of the text based on individual imaginative thinking is another experience, one that is totally different from an experience taken from a worldview or a universal mode of consciousness.
Overall the text ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’, as from what stated in this paper and from my objective opinion, is a moral, philosophical, psychological and imaginative prose that intends to decipher and describe the complex processes involved in an individual’s thinking, imagination, and life. It can also be deemed as a critical review into one of philosophy’s great argument of the body and mind by Descartes. It also is a collation of a complex variation of themes that is understandable only through the imaginative mind. The imaginative mind is sought to be as one of the important tools in order to acquire what the text means and what it wants to convey to the reader. The text can be an apologetics about the imagination that we imagine living even though it is dead to start with. Moreover, the text can also be an emancipation of the arbitrary notions that we seek to deal with in the instance of engaging the imagination.
Bibliography:
Beckett, Samuel, Imagination Dead Imagine, Web. http://www.samuel-beckett.net/ImaginationDeadImagine.html

Beckett, Samuel. Whoroscope. Web http://archive.org/stream/samuelbeckett031321mbp/samuelbeckett031321mbp_djvu.txt

Carl Jung, Psychological Types. 1971/1921. Web. http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/flm/SH/MDL/GAL/GalDisChapts/galdis.chapter1.html
Kant, Imannuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Web. http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/Kant%20%20groundwork%20for%20the%20metaphysics%20of%20morals%20with%20essays.pdf

Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Web. http://faculty.ycp.edu/~dweiss/phl321_epistemology/descartes%20meditations.pdf

Descartes, Rene. The Principles of Philosophy. Web. http://84.28.193.12/files/Dox/E-books/Descartes,%20Rene%20-%20The%20Principles%20of%20Philosophy.pdf

Norihide, Mori. The Image and the Real: A Consideration of Sartre’s Early Views on Art. Web. Pg. 3 http://www.bigakukai.jp/aesthetics_online/aesthetics_16/text16/text16_morinorihide.pdf

Piaget, J. (1967). The child 's conception of the world. (J. & A. Tomlinson, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. BF721 .P5 1967X

Ponty, Maurice-Merleau. Phenomenology of Perception Web. https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/download/attachments/73535007/Phenomenology+of+Perception.pdf

Sartre, Sketch for Theory of the Emotion, Web. http://www.iep.utm.edu/sartre-ex/

Sartre. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Web. http://blog.exre.org/wpcontent/uploads/Sartre_The_Imaginary__A_Phenomenological_Psychology_of_the_Imagination.pdf Socrates, The Apology, Web. http://www2.palomar.edu/users/jfmartin/Adobe/Knowledge/Socrates_in_Apology.pdf

Bibliography: Carl Jung, Psychological Types. 1971/1921. Web. http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/flm/SH/MDL/GAL/GalDisChapts/galdis.chapter1.html Kant, Imannuel