L’imagination créatrice et visionnaire Cours

Born from the vivid imagination of Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's pen name), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a shining example of this literary genre and its absurd, weird, and nonsensical world.

The book was born from the stories Lewis Carroll (whose real name is Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) would tell to the three little girls of Henry Liddell's, the dean at Oxford's Christ Church College. To entertain the little girls, Lewis Carroll turned into a storyteller and narrated the somewhat silly adventures of Alice (after one of the girls' names) to the young ladies.

As the storyteller went further in the narrative, the imagination and improvisation skills developed by Lewis Carroll became keys to enriching the young girls' fantasy world. In order to please Alice, Lewis Carroll ended up writing down on paper the whole story.

Lewis Carroll's astounding imagination takes the readers, together with his major character Alice, on a journey in a world where Alice attends the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, follows in the footsteps of the White Rabbit, meets with a caterpillar who insults her, (though he helps her use the growth altering Magic Mushroom), the always smiling Cheshire Cat, to name but a few, and the Queen of Hearts, the enraged queen who threatens to cut Alice's head off.

All these characters are said to be mad by the Cheshire Cat but in fact, madness in this book is an explanation and a word for things that are fantastic and imaginative. As Alice and the readers explore the nonsense world of their imagination, even though she is dreaming the voyage, Alice explores the world itself and challenges the limits of reason.

When Alice wakes up and, consequently, comes back to the real world, the dreams inside of her are still real and her imagination, stimulated and powerful as it is, becomes real.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was certainly one of the very first books for children to value entertainment rather than morals. Lewis Carroll obviously favoured and delighted in pun on words, absurd characters, weirdos and fantasy over the Victorian morals and values of his time. What is for certain is that he relied on his imagination to escape the world around him that he found too dark. Literary nonsense was his way of escape.

On a different note, because it is another medium for artists to express and share their imagination, it would be relevant to take a look at what the cinema and TV have to offer. The TV-series Game of Thrones is a good example of how an imaginative world is created from elements of reality: the author was inspired by the Wars of Roses that started in England in 1455, and the settings are typical of British landscapes.

Hollywood author and story writer George R.R. Martin's name doesn't necessarily ring a bell but the acronym GOT most certainly does. Actually, the acronym stands for Game of Thrones, the world-famous TV series that was created from George Martin's books. It is all the more interesting to study the process of imagination in Game of Thrones because coming up with such a complex and multifarious universe as the one in Game of Thrones is the ultimate challenge of the creation process.

Contrary to what most people think, Game of Thrones and the books it is made from were not the fruit of George R.R. Martin's pure imagination, far from the human reality of our world. The author's creativity didn't come out of the blue. In fact, it originated from all time periods in history and it took inspiration from ancient traditions and myths.

In the same way as Shakespeare is said to have borrowed his plots from other writers and to have reorganised them, adding new plots, subplots, events, and characters, George R.R. Martin explains that he took inspiration from the Wars of the Roses, (fought between 1455 and 1485 between the Houses of Lancaster and York. Initially started for control of the mentally ill king Henry VI, it ended up being a war for the throne), when it came to developing the intrigue and schemes around the Iron Throne in Westeros.

Moreover, Westeros reminds the readers and viewers of some British landscapes and atmospheres. The name itself is made from Wester Ross, a region of the North West Highlands of Scotland.

The Wall is inspired from Hadrian's Wall, or the Dothraki, who are reminiscent of Mongol Empires in the 13^th and 14^th centuries.

Clearly, starting from major historical events and characters, and choosing his sources carefully was Martin's first step in view of the story he wanted to write. But then, the capacity to weave all those elements into a coherent, though extremely complex, story required him to resort to his creative and visionary skills as a writer.

As a matter of fact, it almost looks as if creativity and imagination were not about having the best or most original idea ever, but rather about being able to mingle, interpret, adapt, and transform the already existing so as to turn it into THE story one has in mind.

One of the best illustrations of the combination of dreams and fantasy in a literature, and in drama more specifically, is Shakespeare as in most of his comedies, the Bard of Avon used to weave the themes of reality and fantasy, and dreams and reality.

A little bit more than a hundred years later, A Midsummer Night's Dream was adapted by Henry Purcell into a semi-opera and first performed in London in 1692. This Baroque interpretation of the play included extensive musical scenes, or masques, singing, speaking, and dancing roles. Based on Shakespeare's play, Purcell's semi-opera was entitled The Fairy Queen, thus bringing a shift in form and subject. Indeed, Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons, a central character in the play, is removed. Also, only three plots remain of the four plots in the initial play. In fact, with this interpretation, the focus is no longer on the dreamlike aspect of the drama but on the fairy play. Titania is the fairy queen and she reigns over nights and nature.

The end of the eighteenth century and middle/end of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of the Romantic school of poetry. The poet was described by its leader, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as a man who has the capacity to create new images. The imagination of the poet is unlimited, the process of creating is mysterious.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a leader of the British Romantic Movement and was greatly influenced in his verse by William Wordsworth, whom he met in 1795. The two artists soon befriended and this friendship triggered the change in Coleridge's poetry that turned from a celebratory and conventional tone to a more natural style. After a trip in Germany where Coleridge became fluent in German and studied Immanuel Kant, among other philosophers, Coleridge went back to England, started lecturing on literature and philosophy, and writing on religious and political issues.

In his book Biographia Literaria, he explains that there are two different types of imagination:

• the "primary imagination", which allows man to define concepts, make connections, and deal with the information received from the world around;
• the "secondary imagination", which is about man's capacity to create new images. The "secondary imagination" is similar to creativity. According to Coleridge, the secondary "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate". He also wrote that the poet creates "by that synthetic and magical power…of imagination".

The Romantic movement of painting is best illustrated by William Turner and William Blake.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, a British artist of the nineteenth century belonged to the Romantic movement and, as such, expressed beauty and a reverence to nature in his works. But at the time of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain (from 1780 to 1840), he also focused his work on the impact of this revolution.

Another famous painter of the 19^th century Romantic movement was William Blake, though he had a very personal approach to the movement. As a painter as well as a poet, William Blake deeply believed in the power of imagination and in the capacity of art to convey ideas and emotions.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is a movement created by idealistic men and women. These young people aimed at creating a new form of painting, taking inspiration from the medieval art rather than from the Renaissance art. They painted dream-like images and always used literary references.

The movement was named Pre-Raphaelite as a reference to the great masters of the Italian painting such as Fra Angelico, Il Greco, or Botticelli, before Raphael.

The artists painted from nature, out of doors, and chose to use bright and shiny colours (as opposed to the smoky grey colours of the Industrial Revolution) to express genuine ideas, and added great details to their work.

Their favourite themes were religious, and some of them as they had travelled to Palestine, added touches of Orientalism to their paintings; last nut not least, the literary references were numerous:

• Shakespeare for all of them,
• Dante for Rossetti,
• the Greek mythology for Rossetti,
• fairy tales for Edward Burne-Jones,
• Celtic legends and English folklore.