Topical Guide 643
Mark Dorset
Imagination, Products of: Imaginary Friends
What a Piece of Work I Am, Preface:
MY BEST FRIEND was my imaginary friend, a boy named Rod, short for Rodney, friend of my own invention. […]
When I was little, I thought of this Raskol as a wanderer, sent by luck or fate to be my friend, but as I aged, or, possibly, as I matured, I came to see that he hadn’t come from anywhere; he had been with me all the time. Although I had made the shell of this friend from bits and pieces of other people—scraps, used parts that I’d picked up here and there from the junkyard of my memory and imagination—his head and his heart were mine from the start, and that’s why we got along so well.
Wikipedia, “List of imaginary characters in fiction” [a selection by me, MD]:
This is a list of imaginary characters in fiction, being characters that are imagined by one of the other characters:
Booby, a unicorn in the short story “The Unicorn in the Garden” by James Thurber
Bunbury in the play The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Godot, the unseen, ambiguously anticipated acquaintance of Vladimir and Estragon in the play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Harvey, a rabbit in the film and play of the same name
Hobbes in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Humphrey Bogart, played by Jerry Lacy, who is Allan Felix’s alter ego in Woody Allen’s film Play It Again, Sam
Jimmy Jimmereeno, Ramona Wengler’s imaginary friend in the short story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut by J. D. Salinger
The Policemen in the novel The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
Spiny Norman, a giant hedgehog in the sketch “Piranha Brothers” from Monty Python’s Flying Circus
An excerpt from Harvey:
Art and Its Viewer, Reader, Audience
What a Piece of Work I Am, Preface:
Most children give their imaginary friends up after a while, ignore them, send them away, or let them go, but I kept mine, and along with him I kept his entire family: his enormous half-witted brothers, his sturdy and long-suffering mother, his violent father—a battered, belabored, and disappointed man—and his sultry sister, Ariane. […]
I was allowed, even invited, to enjoy the sight of her, to appreciate the way she looked. In that sense and that sense alone she gave herself to me, and I took what she offered—regarding her, considering her, contemplating her for hours. The television set was always on during our afternoons together, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I spent my time watching Ariane. A work of art needs a viewer.
Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” Art News, June-July-August 1957:
All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
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