Imagining Community
Gerard Woodward
Do children still play with train sets? A recent story that appeared in the UK media and gained widespread coverage seemed to highlight the ambiguous status this traditional toy has among young people. Market Deeping Model Railway Club had its exhibits destroyed by a group of teenagers when they were stored overnight in preparation for a display the following day. The members of the model railway society were mostly older men, in their sixties and seventies, and their train layouts were beautifully crafted landscapes with miniature villages, churches and all the paraphernalia of railway life that had taken many years to complete. At the time of writing nothing is known of the vandals, but it is tempting to see the incident as an instance of two different cultures literally colliding – an older generation committed to a physical form of imaginative world-building, and a younger generation more interested in virtual worlds and the relentless destructiveness of computer games.
When I was young I became obsessed with railway modelling for a few years. There were remnants around the house of my older brothers’ train sets, heavy cast iron locomotives, bent sections of rail and an old transformer that shone a red light whenever there was a short circuit. My ambitions were for a permanent layout fixed to a board, and I began to map out a very complicated train landscape. I only half acknowledged the fact that this could never become a reality - our house didn’t have enough space to contain such an ambitious layout. But the excitement and joy of the experience was all in the planning. It was the creation of detailed maps, and the designing of landscapes that mattered. I realised years later that what I had done in planning my layout was create a version of the landscape I knew through our summer holidays in the North Yorkshire Moors. In the Barnsdale Moors and Dales Railway (BMDR – I designed a logo for it centred around the spokes of an engine wheel) I had reframed the treasured experience of a particular landscape, and in creating villages and stations, moors, lanes, cliffs, cutting, gorges and fields I had made a place that I could visit in my imagination.
What sort of reality did my imagined, never-to-be-realised train set represent? I didn’t go so far as to begin to populate it with characters, but I did begin writing stories that used the same landscapes of North Yorkshire. I like to think now that what I had done was to create an imaginative world similar to those created by the Bronte children. The Brontes provide perhaps the best and one of the most famous examples of the juvenile impulse towards imaginative creation. Their earliest fictional world, Glasstown, was inspired by a set of toy wooden soldiers that Bramwell was given by his father. Glasstown expanded into Angria, and then several other fictional worlds - Angora, Gondal. The stories emanating from these settings were on the edge of science or speculative fiction, perhaps inspired by writers like Defoe and Swift, they told stories of political intrigue and plotting, war, romance and much else. They were very different from the kinds of stories that the sisters would write as adults, and there is little in the juvenilia that prefigures the future Heathcliffe or Jane Eyre, on the surface at least. The mature novels of the Brontes are rooted in the everyday world that they knew from experience, though sometimes wrought into the highest pitch of drama. The impulse to tell a story and to create an imaginative world precedes any ideas about what sort of stories we want to tell or what sort of worlds we want to create. What was important was the creation of a world in which anything was possible, in which reality could be re-run time and time again.
W.H.Auden once remarked that intellectual achievement, especially artistic achievement, grows from the child’s attempt to understand the mechanism of the trap in which it finds itself. The child might re-enact scenes from family life in the manipulation of dolls in a dolls’ house, or trains in a train set. For the child who becomes a writer these self contained worlds of dolls and trains might quickly take a literary form and become worlds of storytelling. Through the telling of stories the components of reality can be reformed and reframed in countless different ways. The narrative of life can be re-run endlessly and a different outcome observed each time.
The imagining of community is what writers do, novelists especially. It is often said that the novelist’s main job is the creation of character, but if he or she creates more than one character, he or she has created a community.It might be the community of a household, as in for instance the novels of Jane Austen, or an alternative reality – think of Nabakov’sAntiterra set on a twin Earth hidden on the other side of the sun, or Kafka’s Amerika, a place Kafka never visited but which he created from his imagination, which resulted in a place that was neither authentically American or anything else, but was a distinct and unique place. In all these cases the writers have created communities. If we accept that it is through the creation of character that writers help us understand what it is like to be another person - to enter a different consciousness - then it is reasonable to argue that the same thing can be said to happen with community. The imagined communities that writers create help us understand and enter a community that is not our own, that is different from the familiar world we know.