On Art as Imitation
Aristotle, Jacques Maritain, and Caroline Gordon on the imitative quality of art and fiction. Further notes on people watching and the artist and the digital world.
As I intend other posts in A Journeyman’s Journal to be in the future, these are selections from an entry in my personal journal from earlier this month. The selections concern the imitative quality of art and, specifically, the art of fiction.
I wrote this after finishing and reflecting on three books: Aristotle’s Poetics, Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, and Caroline Gordon’s How to Read a Novel. Gordon and Maritain were significant influences on the work of both Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. Gordon, in particular, edited O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Percy’s two unpublished apprentice novels. Of course, I don’t have to argue Aristotle’s qualification as the father of literary criticism. All three books gave me a detailed understanding of the fundamental principles of art, beauty, storytelling, and prose style, which I intend to lay out here incrementally in addition to my own considerations.
From Sunday, June 8, 2025
According to Aristotle, art is imitation. Imitation is natural to man. Not only do we learn from it, but we take delight in it because “to be learning something is the greatest of all pleasures.” Specifically, art imitates through the use of signs, and we experience joy when we intuitively grasp the meaning of these signs. Different types of art use different means to imitate, but all art imitates nature. The artist is, thus, a “sub-creator” (to borrow from Tolkien’s lexicon1), “an associate of God in the making of beautiful works,” according to Jacques Maritain. The novel, in particular, is a form of art which uses written words to imitate “the conduct of life itself,” or, per Caroline Gordon, “life, and life as it manifests itself in change, in action,” action which is virtuous or vicious. A short story or novella does the same, but maintains a shorter form. All of the prose arts concerned with the imitation of action - concerned with story - I will refer to broadly as fiction.
Fiction, as all art, requires form, and so cannot imitate the formless. Nor can it imitate abstractions. Again, joy in art results in some sort of intuitive understanding, which abstraction can only divert us away from. Beauty in art, according to Maritain, “rejoices without work and without discourse.” It is grasped without effort, grasped leisurely.
Since art must imitate nature, and nature possesses both material and immaterial components, art can ignore neither spirit nor matter. Since fiction specifically imitates human action, it must involve both components of human nature: body and soul.
Because of art’s imitative nature, the fiction writer, as any artist, cannot section himself off from society or creation. Whether the setting of his story is Middle Earth or our own Earth, he must derive inspiration from the real. Any artist would do well to familiarize himself with his subject, and so the fiction writer can’t afford to confine himself to the desk and the reading chair. He must interact with and observe people and nature.
Perhaps this necessitates some degree of people watching. This is part of the reason I feel frequent walks have become sacrosanct to me. I walk where people are and observe them act and interact. I try to do this elsewhere too - at breweries, coffee shops, etc. - but unless I’m doing something else like reading or socializing, something feels awkward about it. Part of me wants to watch, but does not want to be watched. Why? I don’t know. There is always the temptation to pull out the phone, to engage with something. Somehow, that is attuned to hiding. It is, nevertheless, a distraction and an impediment to the artist truly paying attention to the world he is tasked with imitating.
And what of observing and interacting with the digital world? Is not the digital world purely abstract? Yet, that is a place where people interact with each other, detached as that interaction may be. I imagine a novel or any piece of fiction set in such a world solely, or even primarily, would cease to be interesting altogether, though to bar oneself from it might be to ignore a significant facet of life in the 21st century.
Still, the writer of fiction, even if he does venture into the online, must keep in mind its spell. He must guard against its constant demand for his attention, and he must always prioritize interactions that are concrete. The algorithms also have a mysterious way of influencing behavior, of demanding absolute conformity within the niche and alienating all niches from the other.2 The artist must resist this gravity, which is a constant battle. But it is a battle he must fight unless he wants to risk alienating himself from the world he both speaks to and imitates.
From Monday, June 16, 2025
Must a storyteller be careful to build his story off of other stories? The stories we love will undoubtedly influence the way we write. The only way to rid ourselves of such influence is to stop reading them, which would not be worth it at all. Still, we can expect ourselves to draw from our own lives, to imitate not someone else’s imitation but relationships, society, feelings, nature, etc., as we experience them. That necessitates close observation. It demands a great deal of awareness which is often uncomfortable. The writer must persist through this discomfort by an unbending curiosity for human life. He must live and resist the urge always to retreat to the book. Books are wonderful, but they are not retreats from reality. At least good ones aren’t. Rather, they are windows into it. Once more, I think of people watching, being alone in public, listening, taking walks, spending time outdoors…
L.W. Blakely is a writer in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of The Wayfarer, a newsletter where he publishes literary fiction, criticism, and musings. Learn more about L.W. and The Wayfarer on the About page, or (if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read) consider subscribing and sharing his work.
See J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Stories.
The contrast between the community and the niche is a concept I’ve been toying around with in my head often as of late. By niche, I mean a group of people defined by some interest apart from geographic proximity, kinship, or some other binding commonality with tangible features like friendship, citizenship, or fellowship in the body of Christ. A community would be a group defined by these tangible commonalities. A niche is a different sort of category because participation in the group is based only on conditions within the participant; what piques their interest, what brings them pleasure, what makes them angry, etc., etc. Participants aren’t bound by anything outside themselves, like land, blood, goodness, or grace. Think: cat ladies, book lovers, liberals, Trads, Swifties, Deadheads, and so on. Since the advent of the internet, niches have come together online, where they form mock communities, and the algorithms make them harder to escape. Whereas the community demands some higher unity, it generally tolerates diverse personalities and forces its members to learn to live with each other in spite of their flaws. The niche demands conformity to a particular personality, of which the defining commonality of the niche becomes central. This is how we get extremely online people whose entire personalities are based on the niche that they’re in. This is what I argue here the artist must resit: the temptation not only to imitate an imitation but to become an imitation of an imitation himself.