Author: Colin Bennett
Publisher: Headpress Critical Vision
Isbn: 1 900486202

Many FT readers will be familiar with Colin Bennett’s work, while visitors to UnCon in recent years will have been stimulated, irritated and, in some cases, driven to unseemly and sometimes inarticulate heckling by his provocative presentations.

Those who’ve read his remarkably sympathetic account of the life and work of contactee George Adamski (Looking for Orthon) will know that Bennett is no friend to scepticism (which he sees as a debilitating and all-too-prevalent contemporary illness), and Politics of the Imagination takes a similarly partisan (if not downright opinionated) view of Charles Fort’s place in 20th century culture.

Bennett provides a nice account of Fort’s life and work, and the day-to-day context from which his books emerged. It’s easy to forget, as forteans, that Fort was, amongst many other things, a writer, and Bennett does him (and us) a valuable service by reminding us of the literary context in which he worked; to me, at least, it’s only right to see Fort alongside other revolutionaries of the written word, and there are real and fruitful comparisons to be made with modernists as disparate as Joyce, Lawrence or Kafka.

But this is just where Politics of the Imagination will annoy some readers; by casting his net so wide as to encompass references to art, literature, philosophy and æronautical design, Bennett risks swamping us in a sea of references and allusions that sometimes seem to obscure the very points he is trying to make. On the one hand, this is a fair strategy for dealing with a writer as fond of linguistic and semantic twists and turns as Fort undoubtedly was, but on the other it leads Bennett to adopt some wilfully bizarre devices. He’s quite right to look at Fort’s work as literature, and to attempt to disentangle the narrating voice of Lo or New Lands from Fort the historical personage; but to insist on referring to this narrator as ‘Sonnabend’ (after the central figure in Lawrence Weschler’s book about the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder) can’t help but seem a perverse decision.

All Bennett’s usual themes are present: media and advertising as consciousness, science as the engineer of philosophical conformity, the wholly illusory nature of ‘facts’ and the interdependence of mind and universe as a reality beyond the grasp of the reductionist hard or social ‘sciences’. It’s enlightening and aggravating in equal amounts.