Abstract

This paper begins by examining a text in which one writer, Richard Ford, is discussing both the persona and the work of another writer, Raymond Carver. Ford''s positive reaction to Carver provides us with a puzzle as to what the basis for it is. I suggest that what he is really admiring is a kind of originality that he detects in Carver. I try to specify the constitutive rules for the generation of this form of originality. They seem to take the form of at once being able to preserve what is valuable in existing material and yet managing to add what could be said to be missing. I then argue that, if Carver is doing this sort of work, so too is Ford. Having seen various examples of a kind of originality, I argue that the process we have been seeing might be formulated as the exercise of imagination, and address the issue of the possible significance of accomplishing such imaginative work. If, as many contemporary philosophers and workers in the human sciences have argued, there is no escape from the need for interpretation, there is a problem of what could ever be a satisfactory interpretation. I suggest that the idea or the possibility of an imaginative interpretation could be a way of providing such satisfaction.