The Fields and Walls of the Imagination: A Topographical Sketch of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

Literary Theory

is a puzzling thing: puzzling both in its essence and in its seductive pull on so many of the twentieth century's prominent academic minds. It is hard to imagine that any nineteenth-century thinkers would ever have predicted this pull. They might well have foreseen developments in physics, biology, and perhaps even computers; they might have expected more technological and humanitarian accomplishments. But could they ever have predicted the energy that would be poured into disputes over what imaginative literature is, and how it should be read?

Listening from a seat in the early twenty-first century, the literary discourse of the twentieth sounds like a prolonged conversation about frames of reference.¹ Does the literary work of art generate its own frames (at least to some extent), as the New Critics argued? Should it be read against the backdrop of "literature" in general, conceived either in the abstract or historically? Is it best considered a subset of linguistic practice? Psychological dynamics? Socio-political discourse? Economic activity? The totality of this conversation forms a kind of multi-dimensional puzzle, with frames intersecting or excluding one another and the whole thing lurching in spasmodic motion.

Any object of inquiry requires a frame of reference, and usually several frames are possible. What makes literary theory especially puzzling is the peculiar nature of its object, which is, ultimately, the human imagination. When we set literary theory on the basis of human psychology, socio-economic history, or literary tradition, we are saying that these things dictate terms for the imagination. And surely they do, to some extent. But it is remarkably difficult to conceive all this clearly. Imagination is the faculty of conjuring an alternate reality, something that does not (or does not yet) exist. It is the means of departure from the terms of our ordinary existence. Can we really say what its terms are? If we can, is it still imagination? If imagination is always a kind of departure, then what is its home?

Ecology,

another academic discipline that prospered in the twentieth century, offers an attractive parallel or paradigm. Etymologically the science of the home, ecology concerns itself with interactions between elements and their surroundings. Plants, animals, rocks, and rivers do not exist in isolation. The practice of isolating and analyzing them generates a large amount of precise information, but the enabling insight of ecology is that certain truths inhere in a situation, a place, even a home, rather than in the individuals who populate it. Ecology attempts to understand those dynamic relations among frames of reference (colony, habitat, ecosystem). The frames are numerous and their relations complicated, and ecology, therefore, is an extraordinarily complex discipline. Like any scientific discipline, it must isolate its objects of study; yet its fundamental object of study is interconnection, the opposite of isolation.

Because of a common interest in the relations between individual specimens and their homes, or between elements and frames of reference, twentieth-century cultural and literary theory bears a striking resemblance to twentieth-century ecology. The most obvious convergence occurs in works such as Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind, that attempt to treat ideas in terms drawn directly from the study of "natural" ecology. Bateson refers to interaction, "natural selection," "survival," "extinction or death," "economics," "region," and "stability of ... a system or subsystem" as concepts that may apply to mental as well as physical phenomena (1972: xv-xvi).

Even where the parallel is not so explicitly announced, and even in cases where it may have escaped the notice of the theorists, it is strong enough to make us think they are discussing similar problems. For example, the Russian Formalist critics began their careers with rather flamboyant gestures of scientific isolation, but were soon propelled by the logic of their own ideas to discuss such complex, ecological-sounding propositions as literary "environment" and "evolution."² They wanted to make a science out of literary criticism; that science turned out to be a kind of ecology.

In the Russian (and sometime Soviet) context, the most...