Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the lecture Eli Siegel gave on May 5, 1971, on that tremendous, confusing, infinitely important subject imagination. It’s titled Poetry i: Imagination Is All This. And Mr. Siegel is the critic who showed what imagination, at its very basis, is—be it everyday imagination or the imagination behind great art; be it imagination that’s kindness or imagination that is cruel.

All imagination, he showed, is a joining of the chief opposites in everyone’s life: self and world. Whenever there is imagining, a person is looking at some item or aspect of the world, and is doing something to it, changing it, adding him- or herself to it. “Imagination,” Mr. Siegel said early in this talk, “can be described essentially as what we add to the world through our minds.”

And do we add to things, to the world, for good or for ill, justly or unjustly? There are, Aesthetic Realism explains, two kinds of imagination. And as I wrote in our last issue: Mr. Siegel’s showing the difference between good imagination and bad is one of the most important—and kindest—critical achievements in history. The two types of imagination, he showed, arise from the two big desires fighting in everyone: the desire to respect the world, see meaning in it; versus the desire to have contempt—to lessen what’s not us as a means of making ourselves superior.

In Many Ways

Bad imagination is present in very many ways. All brutality toward someone is preceded by bad imagination: You sloppily attribute certain motives, qualities, actions to a person, or just feel (obscurely yet fiercely) this person represents a world that’s rooked you. Then you imaginatively use what you’ve built up to give yourself the right to hurt the person.

Bad imagination can also be quite ordinary. But it’s always contempt. Here’s an example—from “real life”: A man, out walking one evening, saw a dark shape on the sidewalk a few feet ahead. He immediately was sure it was something repulsive—a dead and decaying rat. But when he came closer, he was surprised to see it was simply a large glove that someone had dropped. Where had his intense rat-imagining come from? Had it come from contempt as desire in a person? A good deal of people’s imagination does have in it a making of things uglier, more distressing than they are. In Self and World Mr. Siegel writes: “To see the world itself as an impossible mess—and this is often not difficult at all—gives a certain triumph to the individual” (p. 11). The triumph is our feeling that we’re superior to the world—we’re made of much finer stuff, and what’s around us is unworthy of us.

Meanwhile, when imagination is very good, it may include a beautiful desire to look at what’s unlikable and repellent. But the desire in good imagination is to look at these things justly. When real art deals with the repugnant, the artist is impelled by this question (usually unarticulated): Is there something like Form, like Meaning, like the Structure of Reality, even here? This respect-impelled dealing with what’s ugly has occurred powerfully in various instances of art. It’s in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights; in James Thomson’s “City of Dreadful Night”; in Eli Siegel’s “The World of the Unwashed Dish”; in Voltaire’s Candide; and more.

A Work of Sean O’Casey

In the present lecture Mr. Siegel is looking at the Sean O’Casey play Juno and the Paycock. Set in Dublin, 1922, the play is one that Mr. Siegel spoke of on other occasions, showing why it is important art. But here, he is using it to illustrate the many aspects of imagination, including, for example, how an idiom has imagination in it; how an instance of Irish phraseology has.

Then, there’s the way a character in a play can have unjust imagination, can think of another character unfairly, cruelly. And Mr. Siegel has us feel the greatness of the fact that O’Casey, using his imagination beautifully, created characters having imaginations of their own. O’Casey imagined so well that his characters are immortal, and some are immortal in their wrongness.

As a means of placing the part of the play Mr. Siegel discusses here, I’ll give a little background. The unmarried daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Boyle has become pregnant. The father-to-be is Charles Bentham, a teacher with some legal knowledge. Bentham was instrumental in drawing up a will for a now deceased cousin of Mr. Boyle, who had wished to leave Boyle money. But the will was not drawn up properly. And Bentham has left Mary and Ireland.

In the Midst of the Lecture

I want also to comment on an instance of imagination that takes place in the midst of the lecture itself, and that I see as great. (I’ll try to comment on it without “giving away” too much.) At a certain point, Mr. Siegel says that a sentence of Mrs. Boyle has the quality of something one finds in classic Greek drama. And, spontaneously yet so thoughtfully, he puts the statement of this Dublin wife and mother into free verse lines. And as he reads them—and as you’ll see them here—they are graceful and firm, reverberatingly classic, tormentedly throbbing in their music.

Then—Mr. Siegel says Mrs. Boyle’s sentence could be in rhymed lines too. And, again on the spot, he thoughtfully rephrases her utterance, this time having it be a poem with rhymes. The music of the rhymed poem is rather different from that of the free verse one he’d created—yet both are beautiful. As we see all this, and hear it in our minds’ ears, we’re in the midst of imagination as grandeur and kindness. And grandeur and kindness are what Eli Siegel always had.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

O’Casey Represents Imagination

By Eli Siegel

Mrs. Boyle tries to get Boyle to think of Mary and her sadness, instead of seeing himself as hurt.

Mrs. Boyle. Mary’ll have maybe forty years to face an’ handle, an’ every wan of them’ll be tainted with a bitther memory.

So Mrs. Boyle, imagining, makes a memory become part of what will be. We know we’ll have memories. Man, being able to relate past, present, and future in every way possible, has a constant territory for imagination, a moving territory.

Meanwhile, Mr. Boyle chooses to be angry:

Boyle. Where is she? Where is she till I tell her off? I’m tellin’ you when I’m done with her she’ll be a sorry girl!

An ill-natured person is one who uses his or her imagination for material to be angry with. We are in a way the controllers of our imagination—the charioteers, as Plato said, of it and its horses. So what are we going to use it for?

Imagination Is in Figures of Speech

Mr. Boyle has asked, “Where is she?” (That is, Mary.)

Mrs. Boyle. I left her in me sisther’s till I came to speak to you. You’ll say nothin’ to her, Jack; ever since she left school she’s earned her livin’, an’ your fatherly care never throubled the poor girl.

The last statement, “your fatherly care never throubled the poor girl,” represents a phase of imagination. It’s irony. And irony shows that you can get across an idea by presenting the opposite in a certain atmosphere. Another way of putting what Mrs. Boyle says is She was never bothered by your benevolence. It’s ironical and imaginative.

Boyle. Gwan, take her part agen her father! But I’ll let you see whether I’ll say nothin’ to her or no! Her an’ her readin’! That’s more o’ th’ blasted nonsense that has the house fallin’ down on top of us! What did th’ likes of her, born in a tenement house, want with readin’? Her readin’s afther bringin’ her to a nice pass…!

The implication here is that a girl who reads doesn’t know how to take care of herself. Well, she may not; but neither do women and men who don’t read—because people don’t know how to take care of themselves.

Mrs. Boyle. When she comes back say nothin’ to her, Jack, or she’ll leave this place.

Boyle. Leave this place! Ay, she’ll leave this place, an’ quick too!

Mrs. Boyle. If Mary goes, I’ll go with her.

This is a seeing of possibility, in a determined way, as cause and effect: “If Mary goes, I’ll go with her.”

Boyle. Well, go with her! Well, go, th’ pair o’ yous! I lived before I seen yous, an’ I can live when yous are gone. Isn’t this a nice thing to come rollin’ in on top o’ me afther all your prayin’ to St. Anthony an’ The Little Flower.

Praying has imagination in it: there’s something we see as possible and in the power and command of the Lord, and we ask that it be.

Boyle says “Isn’t this a nice thing to come rollin’ in on top o’ me.” There’s imagination in the phrase “rollin’ in on top o’ me”: the calamity is made a little like water that drowns a person. People have used similar phrases when they’re imaginative, like I am overwhelmed by the waves of Destiny; and there is Hamlet’s “take arms against a sea of troubles.”

Boyle. I wonder what’ll the nuns think of her now? An’ it’ll be bellows’d all over th’ disthrict before you could say Jack Robinson.

There’s a mingling of shouting and the spreading of air, I think, in the word bellows’d. It’s related to another phrase: I’m gonna shout it from the rooftops. That is imagination.

Boyle. Whenever I’m seen they’ll whisper, “That’s th’ father of Mary Boyle that had th’ kid be th’ swank she used to go with; d’ye know, d’ye know?” To be sure they’ll know—more about it than I will meself!

Mr. Boyle shows that he has a great penchant to think of his own repose and comfort. He cannot be called illimitably altruistic at this time. —That sentence of mine has irony—or some might say it’s understatement. All the figures of speech in any language have to do with imagination, because when you don’t leave a thing alone, for its own good, you’re using imagination—when you change it for its good.

A Brother Imagines This Way

Then Johnny, Mary’s brother, speaks.

Johnny. She should be dhriven out o’ th’ house she’s brought disgrace on!

So Johnny shows how he sees. But he’s so given to his own sorrows he cannot include too much.

Mrs. Boyle. Hush, you, Johnny. We needn’t let it be bellows’d all over the place; all we’ve got to do is to leave this place quietly an’ go somewhere where we’re not known, an’ nobody’ll be the wiser.

That is possibility. It’s said in a simple way. There are two things powerful in literature: one is great simplicity, nothing adorning, nothing added; the other is discreet addition.

Boyle. You’re talkin’ like a two-year-oul’, woman. Where’ll we get a place ou’ o’ this?—places aren’t that easily got.

Mrs. Boyle. But, Jack, when we get the money…

Boyle. Money—what money?

Mrs. Boyle. Why, oul’ Ellison’s money, of course.

Boyle. There’s no money comin’ from oul’ Ellison, or any one else. Since you’ve heard of wan throuble, you might as well hear of another. There’s no money comin’ to us at all—the Will’s a wash out!

The phrase wash out is used here to mean a dreary kind of failure. It has to do with the fact that you’ve seen something having color, and then it reaches a liquid and there’s no color—it’s just drab. That term has been used to describe failure in life: wash out.

Mrs. Boyle. What are you sayin’, man—no money?…

Boyle. The boyo that’s afther doin’ it to Mary done it to me as well. The thick made out the Will wrong—

The word thick has an uncomfortable sound. (Apparently, it’s Irish slang for stupid.) Here “the thick” seems to be someone who is in one’s way—who didn’t consider people, and therefore was thick.

Boyle. He said in th’ Will, only first cousin an’ second cousin, instead of mentionin’ our names, an’ now any one that thinks he’s a first cousin or second cousin t’oul’ Ellison can claim the money as well as me, an’ they’re springin’ up in hundreds, an’ comin’ from America an’ Australia, thinkin’ to get their whack out of it.

There’s exaggeration here, and one form of imagination is exaggeration. For instance, there’s imagination when Hamlet says “forty thousand brothers”—that he loved Ophelia more than forty thousand brothers could. Another person, being conservative, might have said just twelve thousand. Or you could be really cautious and settle for eight hundred. But Boyle says hundreds of people claiming to be those cousins are just springing up.

They’re “comin’ from America an’ Australia, thinkin’ to get their whack out of it.” Whack here is a metaphor for some kind of power, such as one can get out of striking something.

Boyle. …while all the time the lawyers is gobblin’ it up, till there’s not as much as ud buy a stockin’ for your lovely daughter’s baby!

So there’s gobbling, a word that has two related meanings. That is, to eat and swallow something quickly does seem related to a motion and sound made by various fowl—geese, chickens, ducks, turkeys. It’s interesting to see lawyers described as gobbling. —Then Boyle gets indirectly to the baby. He’s already seen that the baby might need stockings—which requires imagination. You also have to have knowledge of intimate sociology.

Mrs. Boyle. I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it!

Johnny. Why did you say nothin’ about this before?

Mrs. Boyle. You’re not serious, Jack; you’re not serious!

Boyle. I’m tellin’ you the scholar, Bentham, made a banjax o’ th’ Will.

That means he meddled with it, made something false out of it. Every language has some terms that people who speak other languages or dialects have to study, like this word banjax.

Boyle. Instead o’ sayin’, “th’ rest o’ me property to be divided between me first cousin, Jack Boyle, an’ me second cousin, Mick Finnegan, o’ Santhry,” he writ down only, “me first an’ second cousins,” an’ the world an’ his wife are afther th’ property now.

“The world and his wife” is a metaphor for humanity: “an’ the world an’ his wife are afther th’ property now.”

Mrs. Boyle. Now, I know why Bentham left poor Mary in th’ lurch; I can see it all now—oh, is there not even a middlin’ honest man left in th’ world?

This could almost be a Greek chorus in free verse:

And with a little application, I could put it in rhyme:

Well, it’s a little like a Greek chorus, with a touch of Hibernia.

Feelings Affect Imagination

Johnny (to Boyle). An’ you let us run into debt, an’ you borreyed money from everybody to fill yourself with beer! An’ now, you tell us the whole thing’s a wash out! Oh, if it’s thrue, I’m done with you, for you’re worse than me sisther Mary!

Our feelings make us accent things, and accenting things is a phase of imagination.

And a wonderful thing imagination does is blame people. One can blame people, and the way one does it is not usually expert. Johnny says:

Johnny. …He’s a nice father, isn’t he? Is it any wondher Mary went asthray, when—

Johnny is not completely blaming his father, but he is leaving out other things. And he is at least fractionally blaming him.

Boyle. I’m goin’ out now to have a few dhrinks with th’ last few makes I have, an’ tell that lassie o’ yours not to be here when I come back; for if I lay me eyes on her, I’ll lay me hans on her, an’ if I lay me hans on her, I won‘t be accountable for me actions!

He is so angry that he’s very careless now. And while he’s looking to tell things to Mary, and he’s angry with her, other people are angry with him. That has to do with imagination.

This is, then, Sean O’Casey having to do with imagination. And he has to do with it in many other ways. Each one of his plays is another presentation of imagination.