On Freud

In our class discussions we spoke often about contributing to genres. One part of the Freud reading struck me as particularly useful when considering genre theory. Freud writes: “The ‘creative’ imagination, indeed, is quite incapable of inventing anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one another.”

It is useful to consider this phrase in terms of the creation, or as Freud would claim “combination”, of fiction. It seems to me that in terms of fiction Freud might contend that the entirety of fiction has already been written and it is the practice of “new” writers to do nothing more than combine or manipulate elements of past works and massage them into a contemporary format, thus creating a “new” but entirely un-original prose.

The question that this leads me to is the same paradox, the same which came first; the chicken or the egg, question that we’ve followed since the beginning discussions on genre theory. If one was to claim that every new thing is just a sum of previous parts, a conglomerate of some ancient original then, by design, they are admitting to the establishment of some “original” thing at some point. Before we can contribute to the genre it must be established and defined. In order for an original to be imitated it must first be created or introduced. If Freud is accurate in his claim that imagination cannot invent anything then how was the “original” form conceived of in the first place? Then my curiosity forces me to wonder if we understand the original creative process is it possible to ever get back there and create something truly new. Or by investigating the original and attempting to redo it, are we merely falling prey to imitation once again?

-Okay, I’ve given myself a headache, I’ll see you in class.