1

[published in: 2015 Reflections on Imagination: Human Capacity and

Ethnographic Method, edited by Mark Harris and Nigel Rapport, Farnham:

Ashgate, pp. 3-22.]

CHAPTER 1

‘Imagination is in the barest reality’:

On the universal human imagining of the world

Nigel Rapport

Enlightenment and Romanticism

For the Romantic Movement of early nineteenth-century Europe, the

Enlightenment and the modernism of the French philosophes represented the

degradation and destruction of much that was sacred in humanity. The

mechanistic world-view of Newton and Voltaire that saw nature as inert matter

to be understood by dissection, experiment and analysis was false and

sacrilegious. Nature constituted a single living organism. One understood it

through intuition and above all through imagination, revealing its powers and

mysteries through a kind of spiritual ‘dematerialisation’. Hence, one has

statements such as the following from Romantic notables:

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von Schelling: ‘Nature is visible Spirit: Spirit is invisible Nature’;

Novalis: ‘The poet understands nature better than the scientific mind’;

Goethe: ‘I return into myself and find a world’ [Young Werther];

Baudelaire: ‘[Imagination] decomposes all creation, and with the raw

materials accumulated and disposed in accordance with the rules whose

origin one cannot find save in the furthest depths of the soul, it creates a

new world, it produces the sensation of newness’.

Self-absorption did not mean isolation: quite the opposite. Imaginative and

intuitive insights became for the Romantics a redemptive mission.

When I learn this about Romanticism I find myself torn. On the one hand

I appreciate the emphasis given to, even the primacy given to, a universal and

individual human capacity to know through the private and personal activities of

imagining and intuiting. In the words of Fichte: ‘Intellectual intuition is the only

firm standpoint for philosophy. Thence we can explain everything that occurs in

consciousness; and moreover, only thence’. On the other hand I want to know

my anthropology as a kind of human science. I have no truck with mystical talk

of Spirit and superorganicism. The Enlightenment I appreciate as that moment

when human beings recognised their capacity and also their right to assume true

knowledge about their lives and the wider universe, deploying experimental and

critical methodologies, and to use this knowledge towards their own betterment.

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There was no supernatural warrant for anything, and Nature did represent a

spiritless or soulless complex of matter and processes.

One way in which to conceive of this collection of essays is as a project to

explore squaring this circle: the imagination as a warranted kind of evidence, as

data for a human science, that nevertheless derives from an individual turning

inward or being inward, an interiority that has no means of external verification

or reiteration (Rapport 2008a). I imagine what Doris, my farmer-informant from

Wanet, variously intends by her berating of her daughter Karen in the house

kitchen; I imagine what Roger, my porter-informant from Constance Hospital,

experiences when he walks down the corridors playing air guitar to an intoning

of Black Sabbath. I have the external evidence of their words and actions, of

course, but I am intent, above all, on entering my informants’ consciousness,

getting under their skin, and imagining their worlds from their perspectives.

How can this be science? What kind of claim does my imagination represent on

evidencing another life-world? What kind of knowing (Harris 2007)?

One further feature of Romanticism was to assume an analogy between

individual and community: tribe, nation and race. The individual was

metonymic of a particular collectivity that was to be recognised equally as an

organic, self-determining whole. The nation, for instance, as with the race,

contained its natural, volkisch wisdom of which the individual formed a part.

Das Volk and the traditional culture and language of a nation were to be

promoted, even worshipped, as were the insights of the individual. If Nature

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constituted a single living organism, then nation and race were intermediate

phenomena by which the individual belonged to the whole, the conduits through

which individual connected to and lived within Nature. Looking inside himself

or herself, the individual knew (intuited and imagined) because there was a prior

organic connexion that made him or her part of the whole: the nation, race and

Nature beyond.

If I believed this to be true then it might solve the problem of an

individual imagination and an anthropological scientist intrinsically separate

from other consciousnesses and life-worlds he or she might be intent on

knowing. One would simply say that the imagination is a species of collective

consciousness: an individual capacity and practice, yes, but one whose form and

content derives from socialisation and enculturation within a national or

communitarian or otherwise collective tradition. I imagine according to my

socialisation(s). And this has indeed been an anthropological thesis, a venerable

one, since the days of Herder, figuring largely in the work of Durkheim, of Levi-

Strauss, of Bourdieu, of Clifford Geertz. Thinking and feeling are not private

activities that occur in separate individual heads, argued Geertz; to the contrary,

thinking and feeling (and imagining) amount to similarly public and collective

practices to interaction in the market-place. The individual consciousness is

immersed in a set of symbol-systems which penetrate body and mind such that

to belong to a culture is to partake in the exchange of symbols that cause one to

imagine and feel and intend one’s fighting cock to be one’s perambulatory

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penis, say. As Geertz concludes (1973:405): ‘under the guidance of symbols,

[individuals and groups of individuals] perceive, feel, reason, judge, and act’.

There is no need to give way to psychologism, Geertz urges, and the

ethnographer need not pretend to empathy, because all social life, all human

experience, is construed experience and interpreted experience, determined by

the symbolic forms in terms of which the construing and interpreting takes

place.

But I do not believe this to be true. My experience leads me to distinguish

at every moment between the symbolic forms of my public exchanges and the

meanings with which I animate them—and to imagine other human beings to do

the same. At every moment I may make myself aware of the articulate interior

consciousness that proceeds alongside but that is absolutely distinct from the

exterior life beyond the surface of the self. My embodiment is an ontological

phenomenon: my membership of social groups—nations, communities, other

collectivities—is a symbolic and rhetorical and institutional arrangement distinct

from the absolute nature of my being. I might invest my body and mind in my

support of Arsenal Football Club, Israel, the British Humanist Association and

the Virginia Woolf Society, not to mention my family and my university, but I

know I am distinct from these and would deem it my right to be recognised as

such by others.

And so my problem remains. Imagination as a kind of human-scientific

source of true knowledge.

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Existentialism and Personality

There is an insight of Sartre’s that I find productive, in his claiming of the

imaginative as key to an existentialist appreciation of the human condition. The

defining feature of the imagination, asserts Sartre (1963[1948]), lies in the

ability of the human mind to imagine what is not the case. Key to the

phenomenon of the imagination is the mind (and a wide bodily awareness)

detaching itself from its immediate environs. We can distance ourselves from an

immediate experience and so gain a distinct perspective on it. This is our

freedom, Sartre goes on to assert, and the proof of our not being programmed to

react to stimuli or otherwise determined.

This character of the imagination as a distancing from the present, from

what presently exists, is taken up by anthropologist James Preston (1991),

whose interests are commensurate with my own: achieving a kind of

anthropological science which extends to include what he calls the poetic and

imaginative domains of human experience.

What is particularly interesting for Preston is the way in which the

imagination distorts what is the case along four transformatory dimensions or

domains:

1. the imagination plays with spatial properties: through such processes as

Miniaturisation, Magnification, Condensation (shorthand packaging) and

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Translocation (voyeurism), a locational transformation of physical

boundaries is effected;

2. the imagination plays with temporal properties: through such processes as

Simultaneity (sequential time becomes kaleidoscopic), Montage

(progressive—of future possible events—and retrogressive—of possible

past sequences), Progression/Retrogression (invention of possible pasts

and futures) and Flying, explorations of impermanence are effected.

3. the imagination plays with morphological properties: through such processes

as Transmutation (into another being), Materialisation (invention of

beings and the demise of others), Animation (e.g. anthropomorphism) and

Complementarity (e.g. the seeing of binarisms), an altering of the world of

shapes and structures, asymmetries and symmetries is effected.

and 4: the imagination plays with comprehensive properties permeating all the

above: through such processes as Chromatics (colour/light change), Focus

(flexible concentration and degree), Composition (a flexible balance and

make-up of all the above) and Distortion (twisting, enhancing, etc of

particular qualities and characteristics), worlds are changed wholesale.

Indeed, Preston suggests that the four properties he identifies in

imagination rarely appear in isolation: they interweave and layer one

another.

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Before considering how in the practical terms of my quest Preston’s

classification or topography of the imaginative might help, let me add that

Preston’s own conclusion is that anthropology should place the imagination

centre stage and see it as responsible for giving reality to cultural worlds.

Contrary to presumptions from Behaviourism, Functionalism, Cultural

Materialism, and Structuralism, subjective experience should neither be passed

over as irrelevant nor deemed epiphenomenal upon symbolic interaction or

discursive positioning, nor avoided as inaccessible, but approached as the

necessary process for the invention of culture and the manipulation of the

environment. The imaginative and poetic are key ingredients for an

understanding of the human condition: ‘every aspect of culture proceeds out of

the imagination’ and is shaped by it, Preston concludes (1991:102).

Preston’s coupling of the imaginative and the poetic leads me to the

penultimate constructive reference I would make. And that is to insights of

Oscar Wilde’s. In his book Intentions (1891), Wilde wrote that only by

intensifying his or her own personality and entering it into an analytical

interpretation could a critic truly, really, satisfyingly and convincingly interpret

the personality and work of others. Personality, Wilde urges, is ‘an element of

revelation. If you wish to understand others you must intensify your own

individualism’ (1913[1891]:156). And key to personality, Wilde elaborates in

the posthumously published ‘De Profundis’ (1905), is imagination. Echoing

Preston’s argument on the relation between imagination and culture, but taking

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it further, Wilde claims that the world is made by imagination, even if the world

cannot understand imagination. In other words one does not need to work to

make a connexion between imagination and exteriority because it is intrinsic to

our being-in and -with an exteriority beyond the self, even if the link appears

mysterious to the extent that the world created by imagination cannot look back

and explain its genesis. ‘It is in the brain that everything takes place’, Wilde

affirms (1990[1905]:874); redness and larks are in the brain as imaginative

transmutations of our sense impressions. And again: ‘Time and space,

succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought; the

imagination can transcend them and move in a free sphere of ideal existences.

Things are also in their essence of what we choose to make them; a thing is

according to the mode in which we look at it’ (Wilde 1990[1905]:887).

Pragmatism and Reason

I want to sound an empirical note, in touch with brute materialities rather than

the further reaches of what might be dismissed as idealistic and solipsistic

versions of our imaginative capacities. Even if imagination offers transcendence,

a tension remains with the world as is: if imagination as an attribute of

personality is responsible for the externalisation of our world-views and our

life-projects into wider physical environments then resistance is yet encountered

from otherness. The individual is not alone with his or her imagination. This,

indeed, is the starting point of a sophisticated recent anthropological

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engagement with the imaginative, in a Special Issue of the Journal, Ethnos,

edited by David Sneath, Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, and

entitled ‘Technologies of the Imagination’ (2009). Anthropology can develop

its own distinct approach to the imagination, they claim, if it counters the

mentalism of Psychology and posits a key role to materiality, to conditions,

relations and situations external to the imagining individual, as responsible for

constituting imaginative projects: ‘delineating the particular vistas on which that

which is imagined assumes its form’ (2009:14). There are ‘specific

“technologies” through which imaginative capacities are moulded’ (2009:5);

there are ‘social and material means by which particular imaginings are

generated’ (2009:6). The imagination is to be appreciated anthropologically as

an outcome not a condition, a relational object. And yet problems remain for

Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen, for does not the imaginative possess very

particular qualities? Yes, the anthropologist must recognize how the imagination

is nevertheless defined in terms of its irreducible indeterminacy. Hence, the

imagination remains ‘peculiarly underdetermined’ by the technologies that

produce it, by the processes that precipitate it (2000:19): an odd effect, bearing

neither a deterministic nor teleological relationship to its source. And its source

too must be seen to possess its own particularities, for what comprise

‘technologies of the imagination’ are any objects and practices that bring about

imaginative effects—that is, ‘outcomes that they do not fully condition’

(2000:25). And hence, Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen’s complex conclusion:

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Anthropologically to study technologies of the imagination is to explore those

‘specific conditions under which the unconditioned emerges’ and unconditioned

outcomes come about (2000:26).

I wish to retain the image of a tension—imagination as a space of

indeterminacy amid social and cultural life—but I would resist its

anthropological domestication as, by its nature, a conditioned and material

relationship. Rather than supposing that particular ‘technologies’ are responsible

for opening up an imaginative space, I would retain individual agency:

imagination is an individually embodied capacity, ontologically transcendent of

setting (other than the body), which impacts upon the material world. Yes, that

individual body (and its intrinsic capacities) is surrounded by otherness—other

human consciousnesses, histories of social institutions and cultural symbologies,

the material intransigencies of natural environments—but what is to be

anthropologically appreciated and accounted for is the way in which human

beings attend to the world around them by virtue of their own individual and

individuated interpretive processes and how a personal history of such

attendings-to results in a personal sensorium, a personal life-world, personal

contexts, in which each of us dwells (Rapport 1993, 2003).

And here, finally, I find a definition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s helpful:

‘The Imagination may be defined to be the use which the Reason makes of the

material world’ (Emerson 1981[1836]:35). I like this because in Emerson’s

conception, imagination, reason and the material world come together as

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individual practice. In using my reason to engage with the world around me I

shape that world in particular ways: this shaping is a creative, an imaginative

process. If, as an anthropologist, I shape the world into a particular sense, then

my informants, my fellow human beings, do likewise. I reason and imagine and

make of the material world alongside them. We are commensurate in our use of

universal human capacities even if there is a uniqueness to how we individually

substantiate those capacities: I imagine alongside my informants albeit that

precisely how and what they imagine is hidden from me by our discrete

embodiments.

Notwithstanding, to hear their words and see their actions is to observe

my informants’ imaginations in action, employed in both individual and joint

projects. These must be my clues.

Case-Studies

I turn now to three ethnographic episodes: two vignettes from fieldwork among

porters in a Scottish hospital (Rapport 2008b); one from a project, ongoing, that

explores the figuration of the human body in the art of English painter Stanley

Spencer (Rapport 2004, 2005).

For the first episodes it is necessary to know is that Constance Hospital,

Easterneuk, is a large state-funded multi-specialised teaching hospital in which

porters (and domestics) occupy rather a lowly position since their skills are not

medicine-specific or the result of long training. However, in the porters’ lodge

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(or ‘buckie’ in local parlance), two rooms in the middle of the hospital complex

of corridors and stairwells, the porters (some 140 in total, all but 2 being men)

have a home-in-the-institution in which they can act in a relaxed way and where

they display a masculine bullishness and a self-confidence that includes a

contempt for the hierarchies and self-importance of the hospital. This is born out

of the porters’ certainties concerning what it is to be a man on the streets and in

the pubs and the other residential and recreational venues of Easterneuk.

Here is a scene that takes place in the buckie. Two of the porters’

managers, Peggy and Mark, have recently left, having made one of their routine

visits that aim in part to show Management’s human face. Peggy and Mark often

come as a pair, however, because the machismo of the buckie can be

intimidating, while they often bring with them instructions or news about jobs

and pay and holidays and overtime that can be a source of displeasure for the

porters. Coming as a pair and offering one another mutual support also means

that Peggy and Mark will not themselves be tempted to ‘cross the line’ and

become too casual or relaxed or pally with the porters (since they have not

always been promoted staff themselves) and that the porters, in their turn, will

not be tempted to tease them in too openly an inclusive (and disrespectful) a

fashion.

On their recent visit, one porter, Brendan, had made a particular point of

haranguing Peggy and Mark about the state of the bin in the buckie: it was

‘smelly’. Peggy had admitted it was ‘a bit cheesy’—‘and that's even after it’s

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changed a few times a day’, Brendan had elaborated, the implication being that

the porters needed a new one if they were to be free from the ingrained odours.

‘Oh! So you’re having to change it yourselves’, Peggy had sounded surprised,

before concluding: ‘Well: you’ll just have to eat less!’. Her joke and lack of

sympathy had not gone down so well. Now, a short time later, not long after

Peggy’s and Mark’s departure, Wilbur, a senior porter, complains to those still

in the buckie about a task Peggy has now had him do: Wilbur has just been

instructed to go outside and clear away the members of the public as well as

hospital employees who have taken to gathering just outside the hospital front-

door and smoking, even though the whole complex is formally designated a

smoke-free environment. ‘What a job!’, Wilbur claims with annoyance. Arthur

agrees: ‘Imagine someone smoking who's just been in to see his dying mother!

You'd get the cigarette in your eye if you told him to stop!’. We laugh.

Conversation then turns to the way Brendan had recently ‘cheeked’ Peggy and

Mark over the issue of the smelly bin: Wilbur guesses Brendan will not have

done his prospects for job promotion much good by doing that, and Brendan

agrees resignedly. ‘You might get a ’phone-call in a few minutes to come up to

her office’, Arthur offers, and then adds as a lascivious afterthought (since

Peggy is also attractive): ‘Aye, in loose-fitting clothing!’. We laugh again at the

scenario Arthur imagines for us, Peggy’s potential disciplinary relations with

Brendan suddenly transformed into sexual ones. ‘Aye, Peggy’s okay!’, Brendan

concludes with a smirk.

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I will not say any more. But the suggestiveness of the scene is rich. Not

only the social norms concerning when and how it is conventional and

appropriate to invoke and deploy the imagination publicly, as Arthur does

among his fellows, but more significantly the existential work that the

imagination does: the kinds of non-existent realities that are imagined forth as

ways to rationalise the existent. The imagination of angry smokers justifies

Wilbur’s and others’ annoyance at Peggy; the imagination of Peggy as sexually

forward changes the complexion of her practice of intervening in the porters’

working lives. And so on.

The second vignette takes place some months previous to the one above, again in

the buckie. Now Arthur is informed by Dave that Peggy wants to speak to him

(both Dave and Arthur, like Wilbur, are ‘chargehands’, a position intermediary

between the portering management and the rest of the portering body; but since

they work in the buckie with the rest, and not ‘upstairs’ with the managers, their

identity as ‘one of us’ is assured). Arthur dismisses the significance of the

instruction to report to Peggy by joking that it will be because she ‘wants a

servicing’—she is requesting that he go and make love to her—and he mimes

the actions for us: he thrusts forward vigorously with his thighs a number of

times, an orgasmic look on his face. ‘Right through her tights’, he adds, for

dramatic effect; he imagines there will be no time or need for formalities. We

laugh at his show and the image he conjures, and Arthur goes off to find Peggy

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in her office. Some time later, Arthur is back and has sorted the problem:

Roger—given the appellation ‘Ninja’, by Arthur due to his well-publicised

fascination with karate—has agreed to come in and work on Boxing Day and so

the roster of porters on duty is full (Ninja will be paid double time, and be given

further days off afterwards). And Arthur phones Peggy immediately with the

good news, even though she has left work by now and gone home. ‘That’s

funny’, Arthur reports back to Dave on putting the phone down: there was a

male voice delivering the message on Peggy’s answer-phone. ‘I thought Peggy

had a boyfriend’, Arthur calculates: ‘that must be a son on the phone’.

Again, the imagining of sex with Peggy downplays the potential

seriousness of Arthur’s being called to account. Arthur succeeds in turning a

work event into a leisure activity; his boss, moreover, is imagined as the one

with needs (‘servicing’) and Arthur can reprise his male role as the active

member in their upcoming encounter; indeed, he can further imagine giving

immediate satisfaction (‘through her tights’). The same levelling work continues

as Arthur conjures up the image of their somewhat obsessive (and unfit-

seeming) work-mate Roger as the sleek, professional and secretive ‘Ninja’. But

then the scene ends with another kind of imaginative work. Here, the unknown

qualities of Peggy’s life beyond the institution are pierced, and pieced together.

She is unmarried, so even though she is known to have a boyfriend there is no

male relationship in her life with the sufficient formality or publicity to warrant

her home answer-phone message being enunciated in his voice—other than a

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filial one of course. Thus does Arthur reason and imagine and shape the world

around him into a particular sense—and I likewise as his anthropological

interpreter. (It is only some months later, shortly after the first vignette I offered

above, that Peggy announces she will be getting married (and honeymooning in

Turkey).)

The evidence in my third ethnographic episode is rather different in form.

Stanley Spencer, the great British painter of both realist and visionary scenes,

died in 1959. In accompaniment of his art he left millions of words of written

account dealing with his life and his art. He was an obsessive writer. He was

obsessed with developing a definitive metaphysic of love, concerning the nature

of life on earth, the identity of its living things, and the ordained way in which

they should relate one to another. He wrote—scribbling in pencil on any scrap of

paper that came to hand—the continuing summation of all that he knew: all that

life kept revealing to him, through every progressive moment of inspiration.

Writing was also a preferred mode of communication—although he was also an

incessant talker—even with loved ones. (His preferred form of love-making

with his wife, Hilda, was through an exchange of love-letters, written in private

and then read out loud to the recipient.) These writings of Stanley’s now reside

in large part in the Tate Gallery Archive, in London. I draw on them here as my

primary source of ethnographic data.

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Let me begin with an extract from a letter written by Stanley in 1957 to

John Rothenstein, then Director of the Tate Gallery and for long a supporter of

Stanley’s art as well as being a friend. As usual, Stanley’ pencilled scrawl, in

this case on pieces of tracing paper, is accompanied by an idiosyncratic style of

spelling (in this and ensuing extracts I use a calligraphic font to evoke Stanley’s

own):

‘Dear John,

The only way I can write about any painting of mine I

at all like is when I am assured of the same or nearly the

same degrees of liking in the reader. It is no use for me to try

to describe how I did a marvellous thing when it has not been

agreed that I did a marvellous thing. (…)

I am sure there is a key to the realysation of my hopes

made by this fusion between my hopes & my response to the

visible world. That what I hope is going to come about

[previous word unclear] being through the visible world. With

the faith in the existence of that meaning I now look at the

visible world & I look & the surroundings are some how with

me in this hope & longing. The unformed unrealysation &

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only beloved in meaning came first & later on certainly that

something in me effected by visible world was a key. (…)

I remember in 1910 (about) when I was doing the John

Donne picture saying to myself “imagination is in the barest

reality”.

And yet bare reality was only barable to me when

related [? word unclear] to my feelings in a very special way.

(…)

Every thing for me has (especially the visible world) a

degree of meaning which I want to see manifested. This can

only be done by the degree of belief one has in it: a belief in

the infinite meaning it possesses. (…)

Yours ever

Stanley’ (Tate Gallery Archive 8419).

On one level, Stanley’s explication of his art that ‘imagination is in the

barest reality’ can be taken to mean that whether it is a question of the

visionary paintings that he saw as his life’s work or the landscapes and portraits

that he produced in order to earn a living, interpretation is foundational. When

he sees a landscape in his home village along the Thames (‘Cookham Moor’

(1937)) and when he sees that landscape as the setting for a Biblical or spiritual

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narrative (‘Women going for a walk in heaven’ (1938)) the process is similarly

one of interpretation. There is no reality, even of the barest kind, that is not an

interpreted reality when those barest of details are composed into a design and

painted.

But Stanley also means something more. Here is an extract from ‘A

Personal Note’ that Stanley wrote for the catalogue to accompany an exhibition

of his work that was mounted in 1958 (the year before he died), in Cookham

Vicarage and Parish Church to help support the Parish Church Building Funds

Committee. Stanley wrote:

‘While I have a certain respect for my landscapes I was never

able to express in this form the meaning that was to be found

in Cookham. It was when I painted what I had imagined, that

I came nearer to the feeling Cookham gave me. There was

nothing in these [latter] works that bore any specific

similarity to any one part of the village. Sometimes in fact, I

noticed something which I thought was very Cookham in one

of these imagined Cookham paintings and realized that no

such place as I had painted was anywhere to be found. I

would hunt about everywhere for it and then conclude I had

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gone one better than Cookham in expressing this special

atmosphere.’

In expressing himself artistically Stanley recognises that even when his medium

is his immediate village environment that he is imagining those aspects of

village setting—fields and river and copses and the inhabitants’ habitual

practices—that provide him with the feeling and the meaning he wishes to paint.

It is imagination that directs his engagement with the surroundings that inspire

him: it is imagination that is foundational both of his vision and his painterly

practice.

Far from this process being the personal province of one rather

idiosyncratic, even peculiar, English painter, however, what I gain from

Stanley’s account of his (claimed) practice is an appreciation of the use of the

imagination that may have universal applicability. We imagine our

environments, our identities, our relationships, before we inhabit them and

practice within them—however counter-intuitive this might sound. At the very

least our realities are co-produced, and our projects within those realities co-

directed, by our bodily being in them and by a transcendent, imaginative

construction of them.

Let me develop this argument in ethnographic terms by returning again to

Stanley, and the story of his relationship to Hilda, his first wife and the relational

mainstay of his adult life. She appears in this painting from 1950, ‘Love

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Letters’. 1950 was the year of Hilda’s death from cancer, but here Stanley

recollects their favoured form of communication. (The imagery itself recollects

a sketch that Stanley had added to a letter to Hilda he had written in 1930.)

Stanley imbibes the emotion from letters that Hilda extracts from her bosom,

while both are cosily cushioned in the embrace of a giant settee:

Figure I.1: Love Letters, by Stanley Spencer, 1950 (oil on canvas, 86.4 x 116.8 cms); Thyssen-

Bornemisza Collection, Lugano [© The Estate of Stanley Spencer 2009. All rights reserved

Bridgeman Art Library.]

For Stanley, it is to be argued, relations with Hilda were always, first and

foremost, imaginative ones. ‘It seems incredible’, Stanley wrote to her in

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1937, the year of their divorce, ‘that you exist in the flesh!’ (cited in Collis

1962:127).

It was in 1920 that Stanley, then 29 and already a graduate of the Slade

School of Art (London) and a survivor of the Great War, joined the New English

Art Club, in London, an association founded in 1885 as an alternate (more

avant-garde, more democratic) venue to the Royal Academy of Arts. Here he

came into contact with broader European movements of ideas than he had

previously. He also met the Carlines, members of an artistic, also well-

connected family based in Hampstead (whose expertise extended to literature

and anthropology as well as fine art). Richard Carline, in particular, was to

remain an important influence as well as a lifelong friend, a source of political

radicalism (sympathetic with the Far Left) and of social conscience

(campaigning against the perils of Nazi Germany and for Jewish refugee status).

The Carline household became a place Stanley would stay, reading widely in the

family library that included the literary canon as well as comparative religion

(Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam). While the Carlines provided Stanley with an

entrée into a London world, he had, by now, a growing reputation of his own.

There was due to the success of early paintings such as ‘John Donne Arriving in

Heaven’ (1911), ‘Apple Gatherers’ (1912-13), ‘Zacharias and Elizabeth’ (1913-

14), ‘Swan Upping’ (1915-19), as well as post-War ones such as ‘Travoys with

Wounded Soldiers Arriving at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia’ (1919),

‘The Last Supper’ (1920) and ‘Christ Carrying the Cross’ (1920). Indeed,

24

Stanley had described himself as in danger of becoming ‘“smug” on success’

(Bell, K. 2001:30).

The period was one of great productivity for Stanley, like a dam-burst

after the parched years of war. He was also ambitious socially. It was a

disappointment, then, when he felt himself spurned by the Bloomsbury set, the

pinnacle of the London avant-garde, and by its critical guiding light Roger Fry.

It was Fry’s judgment that developments in French painting, its ‘post-

impressionism’, were the direction of the future and he cast aspersions on

homegrown orthodoxies and the Slade. Once Stanley had been seen artistically

to turn his back on Paris and to continue on his own, ‘English’ way, Fry and

Bloomsbury came to pour scorn on his painterly practice and its absence of

intellectual grounding. Fry professed to finding Stanley’s work ‘dull and

inexpressive’: a ‘distinctly unpleasant and disagreeable stimulation’ (1927:794-

5), an opinion he would reiterate through the years: ‘I am sick of [Spencer’s]

muck’, he is said to have confirmed in the 1930s (Hyman 2001:26), blocking

Gwen Darwin’s attempt to have Stanley commissioned to paint for the

Cambridge University Library. To his marginalisation from the British avant-

garde, Stanley would himself demur that Fry’s and Bloomsbury’s Francophile

formalism was merely ‘a sort of wine tasting, worldly performance’ (cited

in Paton 2003:14).

Each summer the Carline family would depart on a painting expedition

with a small group of friends, and in 1922 it was decided that the new state of

25

Jugoslavia would be the destination. Stanley was invited to joint them. En route

the galleries of Old Masters at Cologne, Munich and Vienna were visited. This

was, however, to be Stanley’s only visit to the great museums of the Continent

(and nor were the great London galleries a large attraction). Volumes of

monochrome reproductions of famous works fulfilled his appetite for the

stimulation of other artists and apart from that Stanley knew he wished to stay

put. Going ‘all over the place’, as in wartime, was disturbing, he told his friends:

to settle into his work it would suffice if he engaged in no more movement than

walking up and down the garden path at the Carlines’ Hampstead home for the

rest of his life.

An important appetite that was begun in earnest on this European tour,

however, and one that was to prove life-long, was for the daughter of the Carline

family, Hilda. A couple of years older than Stanley, but also a student at the

Slade, Hilda had had a number of admirers among Stanley’s friends, including

his brother Gilbert, but she and Stanley became engaged. The engagement

proved a protracted, on-off affair but eventually they married, in 1925. Stanley’s

upbringing had been what might now be termed ‘sheltered’, and when in his

thirties he did discover ‘the world of sex’, it was a revelation:

‘The first time I deliberately touched a woman [I felt] here

was a miracle I could perform’ (…) From that day onward

what I had always understood as being Stan Spencer was now

26

no longer so—a whole heap of stuff lust or what you will was

sweeping me along helpless’ (cited in Hauser 2001:46).

‘[H]aving grown up and having more developed sex feelings

than I had before the war (…) they made the earliest feelings

of religion and Cookham so almost die out as to be memories

of consciousness rather than consciousness itself’ (cited in

Hyman 2001:21).

Sex and marriage affected Stanley’s artistic vision for the remainder of his life,

or at least gave a different name to his desire and his urge or longing to create

visual representations. The mainstay of his earlier inspirations—‘God’,

‘divinity’, ‘Nature’—were now complemented by ‘women’, ‘sex’ and ‘bodies’:

‘Happy world of women’s skin / That my own thoughts can make love

in’ (cited in Hyman 2001:147). Stanley would now follow his sexual and

physical drives, albeit that he saw these as intimately connected to his abiding

artistic drives. Indeed, following them was his artistic duty, wherever he felt

they were leading him. His drives were essentially a private matter, a domestic

matter, and an artistic matter, he argued, whatever the conventions of society

might say and however the law might seek to interfere and channel and

constrain. Writing to Hilda in 1955—now five years after her death—Stanley

27

looks back on this period in his life and decides that the sexual ‘desecration’ of

his innocent childhood perspective had not signalled anything but a ‘wonderful’

growing up:

‘This non-innocent disillusioned you-hugging me feels so much

compensated for the joy of being conscious me, that I feel it is

in great degree a fulfilment of the childhood hope and need’

(cited in Hyman 2001:38).

The relationship with Hilda was, however, not to be a calm one. It lasted

twelve years and produced two daughters, but domestic, emotional and

‘metaphysical’ differences made Hilda’s and Stanley’s time together as husband

and wife fraught and unnerving. The relationship began with an enormous sense

of hope on Stanley’s part. As he wrote to her in 1923:

‘You are the most secret & greatest joy of my life, you are like

redemption to me. I think of you all the time; because it

brings everything to life when I do. (…) If I belonged to you I

feel you would do wonderful things both with your self & me.

(…) You know I used to think that the sort of person I ought to

marry would have to be a very clever witty and altogether

28

thoroughly developed character so that I could boast and

swagger with her to all eternity but I suddenly said to myself

yes, but what is all this wit learning and sense got to do with

me specifically to where is the great joy of making each other,

when the person you have married is already made’

(cited in Rothenstein 1979:29).

But it remained, for Stanley at least, more of an ideal than an actuality that was

habitually consummated. Living together was difficult, even at the start, and

love-making at a remove was Stanley’s preferred form:

‘I often wish that though we see each other every day we

could nevertheless continue to write to each other. (…) I wish

we could both celebrate and chronicle every second of each

others life. I don’t feel this is a letter, it is not it is a wonderful

spiritual journey that we are both taking together’ (cited in

Rothenstein 1979:30).

This was 1924. The awkwardness of their differences was easier to handle when

Hilda switched from being an actual housemate to being a sentiment: a persona

in a private pantheon of imagined others and a sense that Stanley had of himself.

29

‘Hilda’, Stanley would write, ‘was the love I felt for what I looked at, she

was the smoke coming from the factory chimneys. I want and need her

in all my experience’ (cited in Pople 1991:453).

By 1930 Stanley is being more explicit concerning the preferableness to

him of their ‘making love’ at a distance:

‘But its so lovely just sending my thoughts to you: sending

them ‘home’. (…) This difficulty I seem to have of being able to

retain as clear a vision of you when you are here or with me,

that I can when you are away is rather, in fact exactly like

the difficulty I have about painting from objects; with the

object in front of me I mean.

With the object in front of me & with you with me I

have to see a lot of things that I have not imaginatively

comprehended and don’t like & the remedy required in each

case is identical; confidence, that one can see only perfection

wherever one looks (…) or wether I look at you gardening or

what ever you do that I don’t like; if I see only the perfect you

which ever way I look’ (cited in Rothenstein 1979:37).

30

There was a self-intensity to Stanley, a self-centredness and self-interestedness,

that made the reality of marriage to Hilda and their family life burdensome. His

vision was his obsession, and the work it engendered. According to Hilda’s

brother, Richard (1978:140-1), however, the break-up of the marriage was also a

case of mutual blameworthiness. Both Hilda and Stanley were extremely

stubborn, each demanding complete agreement, and so heated arguments (on

religious views and domestic ideals) went on for hours. The strain lead to Hilda

absenting herself, first mentally and then physically, and often and for long

periods. She also gave up on her painting, originally a major point of meeting

between them. Stanley felt he was doing much himself, including the childcare.

By the early 1930s, Hilda’s retreat from the marriage in the 1930s entailed her

returning to her family home in Hampstead while Stanley remained with his

painting projects in the country. With her went their two daughters, and while

Stanley would visit often over the years, the four of them did not live together as

a family again.

Hilda and Stanley formally divorced in 1937. However, this did not stop

her remaining the ‘most powerful force in his life’, as Stanley’s brother Gilbert

put it (Spencer 1974:200). Hilda remained someone to whom Stanley considered

himself still ‘married’, whatever the law might say. She was the continuing and

continuous focus of his letter-writing: his primary audience and love-object,

still, after the divorce in 1937, after her nervous breakdown in 1942, after her

31

death in 1950, and up to Stanley’s own death in 1959. Here he is writing to her

in 1937, then:

‘I think that even while now we are in the midst of this legal

fight that in our real selves we continue to be utterly at one,

rejoicing in our oneness’ (cited in Nesbitt 1992:42).

And again in 1943 (he was a constant visitor to her nursing home):

‘I can only feel that oneness that I love, with you. I could

identify myself with you utterly so that I felt like a single

being that was me and you. Also you are the only being I can

write to or want to. It is a wonderful thing to write and not

have to be careful what I say. (…) Nothing ever compensated

me for the loss of you’ (cited in Hauser 2001:59).

and in 1957:

‘Dear ducky Hilda: Hilda ducky – (…)

I feel when I write to you it is a call to you from any

moment of my life. Just as I knew I could love you at any

32

moment: even arrange to specially love you at some specific

quarter of an hour in a week, so I know I can at any time in

my life say hullow ducky & hullow again ducky & at once we

are being together at this moment & you noticing the bed

backed against the wall opposite the windows. (…)

And now I will read yet another of my letters to you

ducky. It is from 696 to 704E. I may tire before finishing it

but lets see what it is about ducky. Lets see what I am writing

to you on Sunday evening July 16th 1948. It begins “dear

ducky” & it seems to be about the relationship between my

Cookham feelings and my you feelings. I am (in this letter I

am reading) sure there is a relationship. I then note that I am

I all the time. That is probably the link.

But I may return to this’ (Tate Gallery Archive 8419).

There was never a time after the collapse of their marriage that Stanley

was not thinking of a reconciliation with Hilda, of their being and living together

again, even of their remarriage. Hilda, too, was pleased to have the legal

unpleasantness behind them. She writes touching letters to Stanley’s agent,

Dudley Tooth, as a kind of emotional intermediary: ‘I feel intensely relieved,

because of the happier feeling it gives, & if I feel relieved, I imagine that

33

Stanley must feel far more relieved [to be starting afresh on a better, non-legal

basis]’; ‘all this legal business will now be at an end, [and] how much against

the grain [it has been]’ (Tate Gallery Archive 8917/2/7 & TGA 8917/2/8). And

most revealingly:

‘Being with Stanley is like being with a holy person, one who

perceives. It isn’t that he is consciously or intentionally good or bad,

or intentionally anything, for he is the thing so many strive for and he

has only to be’ (cited in Pople 1991:463).

Stanley and Hilda remained on good terms for the remainder of her life, seeing

each other frequently, even though their marriage would not be formally re-

constituted. They also seemed to have reached a mutual understanding, at least

on paper. As Hilda wrote to him (in 1942):

‘You are too much of an artist to have satisfactory relations with any

women. That is the price you have to pay for your genius’ (cited in

Collis 1962:174).

Stanley responded (in 1944):

34

‘In spite of all I feel for you and my need for you, somewhere

in me is an absence of love. I never have fulfilled love for

another’ (cited in Collis 1962:195).

This account of Stanley’s relationship to Hilda is sufficiently rich, I feel,

to warrant the space the vignette has received as a case-study. And while it

appears focused on Stanley’s imaginary life, his sense of vision, his artistic

project, and in particular his imaginative construction of Hilda as his wife and

mainstay, it speaks to a far wider truth. It is an instance, I suggest, of the way in

which every human relationship is, and must be, first and foremost a meeting of

imaginative constructs. One imagines the other, whether that be a spouse, a

child, a work-colleague, a co-religionist, a stranger fulfilling a role (shop-

assistant, doctor, politician) or an adversary (a competitor, a possible terrorist).

The imaginative act may take place within a context of norms—this is how a

family, a university, a church, a bus journey, a job application should ordinarily

function—but even that context owes to a personal interpretation for it to be

inhabited by individual role-players at any one time. The individual animates the

normative structure with his or her own sense of ordinariness, propriety,

meaning, desire and gratification; amid this structure he or she will be imagining

the identity—the sense of ordinariness, propriety, meaning, desire and

gratification—of those human others with whom he or she is playing out the

35

relation of roles. Stanley interprets ‘a marriage’ in his own way—how does he

desire to inhabit the normative structure?—and he imagines the woman, Hilda,

with whom he has agreed to play the roles of husband and wife.

I imagine my wife in the same way. It is a separate issue the extent to

which individuals’ imaginations may or may not coincide or be compatible: the

luck or the work involved in achieving an alignment of constructions of the

other such that a viable mutuality occurs. What is fundamental to appreciate is

the place of the imagination in arriving at those interpretations of the world in

whose terms the individual then proceeds to act. Imagination underlies our

world-views and our life-projects (Rapport 1993, 2003).

This should not be taken as a kind of idealistic conclusion, a solipsistic

form of argument. What is especially revealing in the example of Stanley and

Hilda is the physical nature of their engagement, and the way in which Stanley’s

artistic vision was born out of a physical dwelling within a rural environment he

knew from childhood: ‘free to roam and forage, I grazed for years on the

fields and plains’ (cited in Kisler 2003:38). Stanley dwelled in Cookham

village and he dwelled in Hilda’s body as imaginative acts. It is only in our

human embodiment, separate, individual, that we both dwell in the world as

feeling, as sensation, and come to know the world as imagination and

interpretation. Imagination ‘is what enables us to cross the empty spaces

between ourselves and those we have called “other”’ (Greene 1995:3). Or at

least to set sail across these spaces.

36

Imagination describes that process by which we formulate meaningful

possibilities of otherness—of the world beyond our bodies—and build up

interpretive models of the world and what it is we wish and may and will do

with ourselves and others within it. Imagination also describes the way in which

this process is ongoing. So long as my body functions as an interpreting

mechanism and unit, I am imagining worldly scenarios. Stanley went on

imagining Hilda beyond divorce and death. The porters in Constance Hospital

kept imagining scenarios through which the institutional hierarchy was being

overcome in their experience, such as feeling their ways into an extra-marital

affair with Peggy, their boss. Imagination underlies the ways in which the world

is both humanly constructed and reconstructed continually. In the contributions

to follow, in this volume, we find more examples of imagination in its

foundational role in a personal human sensorium. Imagination is foundational of

our physical dwelling within environments and our intellectual-cum-emotional

appreciation of them. Imagination is foundational of our formation of

meaningful worlds and our re-formations of them.

‘Existence precedes essence’

Sartre’s aphorism would appear an appropriate means to bring this introductory

chapter to a close. Human beings, Sartre explains (1975:348), have the capacity

to formulate, select and change the mode of their being and the roles they will

adopt. They are, and they are free to make and choose, before they are anything

37

else. They are free to form moral plans, and to act on these or not. They are free

and always aware of their freedom, they are self-conscious about their identity

and they can always choose to become someone different. This is different to

other animals to a marked degree, not to mention to plants and to the inorganic

world. Uniquely for human beings, and to a marked degree, their existence

precedes their essence: their existence is not determined by instinct or

environment—they transcend these—and they have the capacity (the ‘existential

power’) instead to decide who and what they will be (their ‘essence’). Their

decision-making power is not absolute: human beings are still subject to disease

and death, to hunger and pain; but comparatively speaking human beings’

existential power is remarkable.

Imagination is an aspect of this power; indeed, a key part of our human

consciousness. It describes, to recall Emerson, the potentiality that we are able

to see in the material world, the myriad ways in which we are able to make

sense of it, and to remake that sense. Imagination is a way to talk about the

random workings of the human mind, the way it always opens to its owner new

possibilities for thinking about the world and engaging with it (Rapport 2001).

What is social-anthropological about this understanding of the

imagination? Social anthropology might know itself as that intellectual project

where the universals of human bodily capacities are brought into tension with

the specificities of particular lives: individual bodies in time and space. Given

the human capacity for imaginative transcendence, how is it used in specific

38

cases to construe the world, and to what effect?

39

References

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Phaidon.

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Collis, M. 1962 Stanley Spencer: A Biography, London: Harvill.

Emerson, R. W. 1981 The Portable Emerson (ed. C. Bode),

Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Fry, R. 1927 ‘Mr. Frank Dobson and Mr. Stanley Spencer’, The Nation &

Athenaeum March 12: 794-5.

Geertz, C. 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic.

Greene, M. 1995 Releasing the Imagination, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Harris, M. (ed.) 2007 Ways of Knowing, Oxford: Berghahn.

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Nesbitt, Judith 1992 ‘Catalogue’ in J. Nesbitt (ed.) Stanley Spencer: A sort of

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40

Miracles: The art of Stanley Spencer, Dunedin: Dunedin and Auckland

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—— 2003 I am Dynamite: An alternative anthropology of power,

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41

Rothenstein, J. (ed.) 1979 Stanley Spencer: The Man, Correspondence and

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—— 1990 [1905] ‘De Profundis’, in The Complete Works of Oscar

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Archival Sources

Tate Gallery Archive, Stanley Spencer Collection, Items number 8419,

8917/2/7, and 8917/2/8.