Imagination

In Kyle’s wiki, imagination surfaces through the afterword to Wicked, where Gregory Maguire makes the case that fiction is a survival tool rather than an escape. The argument runs through the “World Next Door” — exile from “the World at Hand” is what “liberated [Dante, Malory, Milton, and Bunyan] into being able to conceive of a map to the World Next Door.” Maguire’s claim is that even after “the Enlightenment, then… Darwin” folded up the old maps of “otherness,” we still need them: “The World Next Door is crucial to our ability to survive the World at Hand. We need a Middle-earth when there is an Al Qaeda.” The pivot quote is Roger Scruton’s: “The consolation of the imaginary is not imaginary consolation.”

This connects to the wiki’s Storytelling thread — fiction as “a map to the World Next Door we need to navigate the World at Hand” — and to the afterword’s note that, after real catastrophe, “Fiction couldn’t hold a metaphoric candle to the literal firestorm of reality,” yet the imaginative faculty is exactly what lets us “see more clearly where we really stand, and what to do next.”

Where this appears

• Wicked — Maguire’s afterword treats imagination and fiction as a “map to the World Next Door,” a survival tool for navigating reality rather than an escape from it.