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Articles

All in the Imagination

Is it healthy to have a realistic outlook on life? How might that affect, for example, your attitude to the arts? Michael Bulley considers some of the consequences of how we view the objective world.

When I discuss drama with teenage students, most (to begin with) invoke realism as the main yardstick: the closer to real life, the better the play must be. Doubts can be sown by suggesting, in that case, going to the theatre is an unnecessary expense, since you can watch real life for nothing. You would also have to count The Tempest and Oedipus inferior to Brookside or Hill Street Blues. In the end it might be agreed that, even if you still preferred realistic drama, what you want from it is not just a resemblance to real life but some understanding of it, and that an unrealistic play may do that just as well.

Even so, most people, I think, in the western European tradition at least, put their trust in the concept of reality, regarding the obviously perceptible things in life, like bank balances and back gardens, as the serious ones; that is – to put it in a slightly paradoxical way – they think that what can exist independent of their thoughts is real and, therefore, important.

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