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In his final great novel, The Adolescent, Dostoyevsky (1875) writes: “A photograph very rarely resembles the person. That stands to reason since the person only rarely resembles himself. It is only for brief moments that the human face expresses a person's most characteristic thought, a person's essence. An artist studies a face and discovers in it that essence” (p. 461).
Thomas Mann refers to the Wesensbild, “the image of the essence,” recurrently in Joseph and His Brothers. In other passages of The Adolescent, Dostoyevsky uses the term blagoobraziye, which translates loosely as “blessing's image,” again an essence of goodness as image. Imagination, however, is rooted in imagery, and so is the Greek concept of phantasía, as in Aristotle's definition of shame as perí adoxías phantasía, a “fantasy [a perception, an image, an idea] of humiliation.”
The thought is: art presents a deeper reality that no photograph can represent. This insight leads directly to one of the central concerns of the work to be reviewed here: the dialectic between reality and imagination, their identity and difference: “In life as in art it is a matter of seeking that integrative point of arrival through the dialectical interplay between the real and the imaginary, the known and the fantasy, the symbolized and the enacted” (p. 18).
In the introduction to this interesting, often bewilderingly rich and complex, but at least for me quite difficult book, Lois Oppenheim, professor of French and chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literature at Montclair State University and a psychoanalyst, starts out from the statement that “creative endeavor augments the very awareness of self on which the regulation of our internal environment depends.” She aims in this work to illustrate “the enhancement of self that creativity affords” by investigating “the relationship of imagination to the self as agent” (p. xi; here and throughout, emphasis in the original).
Right away she wades into profound phi