Imagination is not a nice accessory to human thought. It is an essential part of how a human being pursues and grasps the truth. An embodied psycho-social life is in need of something “thicker” than mere fact. If the truth I’m after is bound to some deeper spiritual layer of being, a psychological dynamic, or an event—historical, time-and-space reality—a fact can only get at a slice of the truth. When we know only the “facts,” we know only in part.

The spark of this series is Le Guin’s phrase “farfetching,” a mode of thought her character Genly Ai defines this way: “the intuitive expression of a moral entirety, and thus it tends to find expression not in rational symbols but in metaphor.”
There is a mode of human knowing that Le Guin is trying to define, or rather, characterize, all throughout her book.

It’s an implicit kind of knowing, not a scientific one, but neither is it unserious. I think this form of knowing is part of her own literary vision, what she believes she’s up to in being a novelist. Thus, if we’re trying to use fiction as a launching-off point for understanding our own capacity for imagination, or even what we are participating in as we read a novel, we’ve got to investigate this theme. Luckily, there’s lots to go off of.

At one point, Genly Ai, the farfetcher, makes this observation of Estraven, his sole loyal friend on the world he’s been sent to as an envoy:

Once he told me that being so slow thinking he had to guide his axe by a general intuition of which way his luck was running, and that this intuition rarely failed him. He said it seriously. It may have been true. The foretellers of the fastnesses are not the only people on Winter who can see ahead. They have tamed and trained the hunch, but not increased its certainty.…The gift is perhaps not strictly or simply one of foretelling, but is rather the power of seeing, if only for a flash, everything at once, seeing the whole.

One of Le Guin’s preoccupations within this theme is the idea of seeing in wholes, not in parts. That is right-brain activity—the power of the mind to intuit, create, and grasp things in the big picture. But let’s save this aspect of it for a future post.

What is this mode of knowing for? What is the imagination for? Why do we use metaphor and symbolism and imagery?

The characters in Le Guin’s novel are concerned with this form of knowledge for the sake of finding themselves in the groove of reality. Estraven elsewhere talks of his “luck” as a big “wheel” whose turning and movement his intuition is meant to grab hold of. There is a power out there in the world. Estraven finds himself in need of it. And this form of knowledge they call intuition, or the tamed hunch, has the purpose of getting themselves in the thrust of its motion.

We stand apart from the world.
Birds know when a storm is on the move. Trees receive specialized signals about a coming forest fire through root-level, forest-floor, fascia-like messengers.
Sometimes you hear of the guy who can tell you it’s going to rain because he can feel it in his knee.

That’s what I’m talking about. We seek ways of being connected to this world. Otherwise it is alien to us, not a home or habitable in any meaningful way. But let’s not talk about the rain. Let’s talk about the mysteries of the future; the dimmed meaning of some current event; the dynamics of the family you are entering; the consequences of a choice you make about your career. These are all human dynamics, but the rule remains the same. We want to know that within these realities and the ensuing consequences there will be room enough for us. Will it be habitable for me?

The critic Northrop Frye has written about this use of the imagination and other such right-brain activity. Importantly (for us), he connects it to the act of novel-reading and novel-writing. In the first chapter of his book The Educated Imagination, he stresses the really intense mental move being made anytime we use a metaphor. The point of stressing the extreme nature of saying “this” is “that,” as he says below, is to force us to say, “Yeah, that’s pretty crazy that we do that.” And then to ask, “Why do we do that?”

As for metaphor, where you're really saying ‘this’ is ‘that’, you're turning your back on logic and reason completely, because logically two things can never be the same thing and still remain two things. The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

Good fiction is the creation of a world in which the human soul finds a kind of natural habitation. This is a world and a version of story and time whose meaning finds a resonance with our own vision, needs, and identity. Literature speaks to us not out of foreign worlds that merely float beyond us, not as creations of the impenetrable imagination of another, but as worlds with a personality and shape that invite us in. It invites us in because, unlike the harsh realities of nature, if we gaze long and hard enough at these works we’ll see a shadow. It is a shadow of the human frame.

Later, Frye quotes Baudelaire. Poetry and fiction offer both “the world outside the artist and the artist himself.”

The spark of the trick happens when we recognize how well the poet or the novelist has really gathered up all this sense and perception and experience from the real world into the shape that is so undeniably human, so undeniably like a home for our minds (so much so we often cannot escape even after we finish reading).

Reading fiction trains our own capacity for seeing the dynamics of society and nature around us—the things that confuse and mystify us—and giving them a shape human enough for us to enter. By reading fiction, we do exactly what Estraven was doing by training his hunch. We seek some entrance onto that big wheel of reality, that groove whereby our own conscious minds might seek a deepened friendship and association with the world outside of us.

Reading fiction is a part of our quest to find ourselves at home in this world. Perhaps this is true of all art and religion, too. Indeed, Frye finishes the chapter with a reference to St. Paul:

“Because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.”