“Inharmonious, unconsorting ideas will come to a man, but if
he try to use one of such, his work will grow dull, and he will drop it from
mere lack of interest. Law is the soil in which alone beauty will grow; beauty
is the only stuff in which Truth can be clothed; and you may, if you will, call
Imagination the tailor that cuts her garments to fit her”—George MacDonald, Fantastic Imagination
George MacDonald uses the realm of fantasy to show that
human beings are locked in the cage of God’s Law, if you will, the reason of
the world, God’s Reason. But his religious comparisons seem to break down into
a desire to fight the contentions of reason or the author’s intended truth.
In one place MacDonald suggests that beauty is dependent
upon truth to exist but later retorts that another’s meaning of a text may be higher
than what an author intended.
This might be sloppy thinking or connecting on his part, but
it would seem more reasonable and perhaps more academic to conclude that what
MacDonald desires is to get people off the train of needing to extract explicit
meaning from everything written and fantastic.
“If I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE
under what I foolishly meant for one. Any key to a work of imagination would be
nearly, if not quite, as absurd. The tale is there not to hide, but to show: if
it show nothing at your window, do not open your door to it; leave it out in
the cold.”
In addition he gives power back to the reader, enlisting
them into the conversation of producing textual meaning.
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