What is the Literary Imagination?

And are there different kinds, some more interesting than others?

The idea of imagination is everywhere in talk about art and writing, and yet it's forever out of focus. It is easy to imagine what it means to say Tolkien had imagination, but what could it mean to say Beckett had a stronger imagination? What's the difference between a novelist like the Australian writer Michelle de Kretser, who is very accomplished in conjuring places and people, and a writer like Jon Fosse, who seems indifferent to all those skills, and yet is clearly full of imagination?

In condensed form, from least to most interesting, this is how I think about this problem of distinguishing kinds of literary imagination.

1. Transcription of the actual world
This includes autofiction as well as thinly fictionalized memoirs and authors who report on their lives but present their work as fiction (Annie Ernaux), and it also includes a swath of fiction like Michelle de Kretser's novel The Life to Come, where the actual world is presented in detail on every page. de Kretser's vignettes of Australian life are precise and satisfying. Having visited Australia a number of times, I enjoy descriptions of outlying areas of Sydney, its wood-lined houses, its hills like "asphalted waves," its "yolky light" and surprising ethnicities. Often de Kretser's details are well judged, and the writing is admirable in that sense -- but many authors can do the same. If I am not reading to get new insights into Australia -- if I'm reading to see how fiction works -- then I'm disappointed by the lack of shaping, the absence of a distance between the implied author and her descriptive project. Why not try to step back, I keep thinking, why not attempt to feel the episodes and memories and transform them into something different, where the sense and mood of the world come through even more forcefully because they are not always in front of our eyes in perfect repertorial order?

2. World-building, "sub-creation"
A more imaginative approach to fiction is to use the novel form to build an entire invented world. A starting place here is Bakhtin, because his idea of dialogic novels turns on a prior distinction between literary modes that are open-ended, engaged in direct discourse with the world (like realism), and those that are internally coherent or self-enclosed. Tzvetan Todorov's study The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970) has a similar distinction between the fantastic and the marvelous, or between mimetic (realist) representation and more imaginative, self-contained worlds.
The simplest, most literal version of a self-enclosed world is "secondary world-building" practiced in fantasy fiction, genre, and science fiction. Tolkien argued for this in "On Fairy Stories" (1938) and so did Samuel Delaney in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977). I don't mean "sub-creation" is easy. As Tolkien says, "to make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labor and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft." But in the end, if fantasy and escape aren't the final purpose of reading, "sub-creation" is not an interesting use of writing or fiction, because it is immersive and therefore unreflective about itself, its medium, its words and voice. The green sun does not exist as a strange expression, it just shines in the sky.

3. Fantasy
A step farther on from "sub-creation" is fantasy, understood as the building of logical worlds. Detective and spy fiction, murder mysteries, and elaborate plots as in Jennifer Egan or David Mitchell belong here. They don't present universes complete with green suns, but logically complete puzzles, perfect architectures. Iris Murdoch has some good things to say about the relation between this sort of fantasy and a more general imagination. In an interview with Bryan Magee, reprinted in Existentialists and Mystics, she says "creative imagination and obsessive fantasy may be very close, almost indistinguishable forces in the mind of the writer." A serious writer, though, has to "play with fire," because in "bad art, fantasy simply takes charge... Fantasy is the strong cunning enemy of the discerning intelligent more truly inventive power of the imagination." Good art, she says, "is good for people precisely because it is not fantasy but imagination. It breaks the grip of our own dull fantasy life and stirs us to the effort of true vision."
I'm not so sure art is "good" even in Murdoch's philosophically-informed sense of that word, but it certainly makes us work, and I think that work is often directed against the fantasy we read, or read into, our fiction.
What, then, is next on the road from the rote transcription of the world to more interesting forms of imagination?

4. Traditional allegory
In the past, from the Middle Ages until the Enlightenment, one answer was allegory. This isn't a current possibility for most fiction. I mention it because it's needed to contrast against a looser kind of allegory. By "traditional" I mean books like Pilgrim's Progress, which draw one-to-one correspondences between episodes and morals. The wider, modern sense of allegory has been adumbrated by Walter Benjamin in "The Origin of German Tragic Drama" (1927; see Bainard Cowen in New German Critique, 1981) and Stephen Melville and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe's Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory (1997).

5. Modern allegory, abstract literature, non-referential literature
Several strands may weave together here. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, with its interest in modernist autonomy, is a reference point for literature that does not lean on the real world in a way that is direct (option 1) or systematic (options 2 and 3).
"Allegory," in this broad sense, is a way of describing what happens in writing like Beckett's trilogy, where the world seems to be referred to obliquely, at a remove, but consistently if not systematically as in traditional allegories. The mood or the universe of the narrator in The Unnameable seems like it must be a picture of life, but at an unmeasurable remove (i.e., not like A Pilgrim's Progress.)
Metafiction is a literalized, unnecessarily exact version of allegory, as in some of Gerald Murnane's more insistent meditations on "fiction."

I think that imagination of this last sort is the strongest and most interesting use of fiction. Writing literary versions of reality can be difficult (de Ketser is an excellent writer) but that road is often level and easy to travel, and it leads to familiar country (the eloquence of Foster, Maugham, and so forth). Writing world-building novels can also be difficult (like everyone, I admire the sense of endlessness in worlds like Tolkein's or Herbert's) but it is mechanical, like a job, and that mechanism shows in the seams and mortar of the made-up world. The imagination can be stronger, stranger, more concerted, more defensive and alert to its otherworldliness. It's possible to think, and feel, and live in a fictional world until that world is no longer a transcription or a fantastical alternative but an autonomous, strange, entrancing fabric of fiction, a world in a much stronger sense than Middle Earth.

Postscript
Why put a meditation on an enormous subject like this in a telegraphed form and bury it in a Substack? Because life is short, and if I'd made this into a book that would be another year gone.