Maps of the Imagination by Peter Turchi

Author:Peter Turchi [Turchi, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1595340416
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 2012-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

The impulse toward comprehensive comprehension is most directly reflected in fiction and poetry in the epic—in works such as the Thousand and One Nights and Beowulf, Moby-Dick and The Canterbury Tales, Bleak House and War and Peace and the Odyssey. While not even those works claim to tell us everything, they take in the world with a wide embrace—even when, as in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the work is centered around an individual voice, an individual perspective. Ultimately, the route to the greatest knowledge of all that’s around us combines an awareness of infinite possibility and the close examination of the individual.

Beginning writers are told to write what they know, and all too often they do, with wearisome results. Stories and novels and poems that never transcend the writer’s self-interest might be beautifully executed, but they are executed nevertheless—not even well-built roads to nowhere but completely circular driveways. At its best, the emphasis on the individual leads to deeper understanding of others, an imaginative leap beyond the confines of the self—which we can never truly escape. “The most singular, most limited position,” Ellen Bryant Voigt has said, “may be as close as we ever get to something we all share. There is a way, I think, in which the careful making of poems can distance or externalize the self—the gaze remains steadily outward, and the self becomes another small part of the world. The point is not to prohibit the personal, but to examine it with utter ruthlessness.” Flannery O’Connor agreed: “The writer has to judge himself with a stranger’s eye and a stranger’s severity…. No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing being seen and the thing being made.”* Whitman’s most famous title only appears to be insufferably egotistical; “Song of Myself” is anything but self-obsessed. Emily Dickinson may not have gotten out much, but her poems create a universe. The challenge is not only what to select for telling and how to present it, but how to evoke, simultaneously, the Theater of the World—how to make the leap from ego-vision to omnivision.

FIG. 33 AN “ACCURATE” CAMPUS MAP EMPHASIZING CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS

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