On Vivacity: The Difference between Daydreaming and Imagining-Under-Authorial-Instruction

Abstract

WHEN WE SPEAK IN EVERYDAY conversation about imagination, we often attribute to it powers that are greater than ordinary sensation. But when we are asked to perform concrete experiment of comparing an imagined object with a perceptual one-that is, of actually stopping, closing our eyes, concentrating on imagined face or imagined room, then opening our eyes and comparing its attributes to whatever greets us when we return to sensory world-we at once reach opposite conclusion: imagined object lacks vitality and vivacity of perceived; it is in fact these very attributes of vitality and vivacity that enable us to differentiate actual world present to our senses from one that we introduce through exercise of imagination. Even if, as Jean-Paul Sartre observes, object we select to in this experiment is face of a beloved friend, one we know in intricate detail (as Sartre knew faces of Annie and Pierre), it will be, by comparison with an actually present face, thin, dry, two-dimensional, and 'inert.' It seems that we tend to notice this phenomenon only when we are especially keen on seeing a face, only when we desperately care to have it present in mind with clarity and force. We then notice deficiency and, like Proust's Marcel, who berates himself for his inability to picture face of Albertine or face of his grandmother, we conclude that vacuity of our imagining is somehow peculiar to our feeling about this particular person and that there must be a hidden defect in our affection. In fact vacuity is general, and all that is peculiar or particular to such cases is intensity of wishing to imagine that makes us confront, with more than usual honesty, fact that we cannot do so. It is when we are soaked with longing to that we notice, as John Keats confessed, the fancy cannot cheat so well/As she is fam'd to do.2 By means of vividness of perceptions, we remain at all moments capable of recovering, of recognizing material world and distinguishing it from our imaginary world, even as we lapse into and out of our gray and ghostly daydreams. Aristotle refers to this grayness as the feebleness of images. Sartre calls it their essential poverty. Of course, insofar as imagination is enfeebled and impoverished, it is so only on sensory grounds. To complain that imagined object lacks vivacity and