The Act of Creation (10 page)

None of this was said; all of it was implied. But the listener has to
work out by himself what is implied in the laconic hint; he has to make
an imaginative effort to solve the riddle. If the answer were explicitly
given, on the lines indicated in the previous paragraph, the listener
would be both spared the effort and deprived of its reward; there would
be no anecdote to tell.
To a sophisticated audience any joke sounds stale if it is entirely
explicit. If this is the case the listener's thoughts will move faster
than the narrator's tale or the unfolding of the plot; instead of tension
it will generate boredom. 'Economy' in this sense means the use of hints
in lieu of statements; instead of moving steadily on, the narrative
jumps ahead, leaving logical gaps which the listener has to bridge by
his own effort: he is forced to co-operate.
The operation of bridging a logical gap by inserting the missing links is
called
interpolation
. The series A, C, E, . . . K, M, O shows
a gap which is filled by interpolating G and I. On the other hand,
I can extend or
extrapolate
the series by adding to it R, T,
V, etc. In the more sophisticated forms of humour the listener must
always perform either or both of these operations before he can 'see
the joke'. Take this venerable example, quoted by Freud:

The Prince, travelling through his domains, noticed a man in the
cheering crowd who bore a striking resemblance to himself. He beckoned
him over and asked: 'Was your mother ever employed in my palace?'
'No, Sire,' the man replied. 'But my father was.'

The logical pattern of the story is quite primitive. Two implied codes of
behaviour are brought into collision: feudal lords were supposed to have
bastards; feudal ladies were not supposed to have bastards; and there is
a particularly neat, quasi-geometrical link provided by the reversible
symmetry of the situation. The mild amusement which the story offers
is partly derived from the malicious pleasure we take in the Prince's
discomfiture; but mainly from the fact that it is put in the form of a
riddle, of two oblique hints which the listener must complete under his
own steam, as it were. The dotted lines in the figure below indicate the
process (the arrow in M1 may be taken to represent the Prince's question,
the other arrow, the reply).

Incidentally, Wilde has coined a terser variation on the same theme:

Lord Illingworth: 'You should study the Peerage, Gerald. . . .
It is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.'

Nearly all the stories that I have quoted show the technique of
implication -- the hint, the oblique allusion -- in varying degrees:
the good little boy who loves his mama; the man who never aimed as
high as that; the kind sadist, etc. Apart from inter- and extrapolation
(there is no need for our purposes to make a distinction between them) a
third type of operation is often needed to enable one to 'see the joke':
transformation
, or reinterpretation, of the given data into
some analogous terms. These operations comprise the transformation of
metaphorical into literal statements, of verbal hints into visual terms,
and the interpretation of visual riddles of the "New Yorker" cartoon
type. A good example ('good', I am afraid, only from a theoretical point
of view) is provided by another story, quoted from Freud:

Two shady business men have succeeded in making a fortune and were
trying to elbow their way into Society. They had their portraits
painted by a fashionable artist; framed in gold, these were shown at
a reception in the grand style. Among the guests was a well-known
art critic. The beaming hosts led him to the wall on which the two
portraits were hanging side by side. The critic looked at them for
a long time, then shook his head as if he were missing something. At
length he pointed to the bare space between the pictures and asked:
'And where is the Saviour?'

A nice combination of transformation with interpolation.
Economy
, in humour as in art, does not mean mechanical brevity but
implicitness.
Implicit
is derived from the Latin word for 'folded
in'. To make a joke like Picasso's 'unfold', the listener must fill in
the gaps, complete the hints, trace the hidden analogies. Every good
joke contains an element of the riddle -- it may be childishly simple,
or subtle and challenging -- which the listener must solve. By doing
so, he is lifted out of his passive role and compelled to co-operate,
to repeat to some extent the process of inventing the joke, to re-create
it in his imagination. The type of entertainment dished out by the mass
media makes one apt to forget that true recreation is re-creation.
Emphasis
and
implication
are complementary techniques. The
first bullies the audience into acceptance; the second entices it into
mental collaboration; the first forces the offer down the consumer's
throat; the second tantalizes, to whet his appetite.
In fact, both techniques have their roots in the basic mechanisms
of communicating thoughts by word or sign. Language itself is never
completely explicit. Words have suggestive, evocative powers; but at the
same time they are merely stepping stones for thought. Economy means
spacing them at intervals just wide enough to require a significant
effort from the receiver of the message; the artist rules his subjects
by turning them into accomplices.
NOTE
To
p. 70
. Cf. the analysis of an Osbert Lancaster
cartoon in
Insight and Outlook
, p. 80 f.
IV
FROM HUMOUR TO DISCOVERY
Explosion and Catharsis
Primitive jokes arouse crude, aggressive, or sexual emotions by means
of a minimum of ingenuity. But even the coarse laughter in which these
emotions are exploded often contains an additional element of admiration
for the cleverness of the joke -- and also of satisfaction with one's
own cleverness in seeing the joke. Let us call this additional element
of admiration plus self-congratulation the intellectual gratification
offered by the joke.
Satisfaction presupposes the existence of a need or appetite. Intellectual
curiosity, the desire to understand, is derived from an urge as basic
as hunger or sex: the exploratory drive (see below,
XI
, and
Book Two, VIII
). It is
the driving power which makes the rat learn to find its way through
the experimental maze without any obvious incentive being offered in
the form of reward or punishment; and also the prime-mover behind human
exploration and research. Its 'detached' and' disinterested' character --
the scientists' self-transcending absorption in the riddles of nature --
is, of course, often combined with ambition, competition, vanity: But
these self-assertive tendencies must be restrained and highly sublimated
to find fulfilment in the mostly unspectacular rewards of his slow and
patient labours. There are, after all, more direct methods of asserting
one's ego than the analysis of ribonucleic acids.
When I called discovery the emotionally 'neutral' art I did not mean
by neutrality the absence of emotion -- which would be equivalent to
apathy - -but that nicely balanced and sublimated blend of motivations,
where self-assertiveness is harnessed to the task; and where on the other
hand heady speculations about the Mysteries of Nature must be submitted
to the rigours of objective verification.
We shall see that there are two sides to the manifestation of
emotions at the moment of discovery, which reflect this polarity of
motivations. One is the triumphant explosion of tension which has
suddenly become redundant since the problem is solved -- so you jump
out of your bath and run through the streets laughing and shouting
Eureka! In the second place there is the slowly fading after-glow,
the gradual catharsis of the self-transcending emotions -- a quiet,
contemplative delight in the truth which the discovery revealed, closely
related to the artist's experience of beauty. The Eureka cry is the
explosion of energies which must find an outlet since the purpose for
which they have been mobilized no longer exists; the carthartic reaction
is an inward unfolding of a kind of 'oceanic feeling', and its slow
ebbing away. The first is due to the fact that 'I' made a discovery;
the second to the fact that a discovery has been made, a fraction of
the infinite revealed. The first tends to produce a state of physical
agitation related to laughter; the second tends towards quietude, the
'earthing' of emotion, sometimes a peaceful overflow of tears. The
reasons for this contrast will be discussed later; for the time being,
let us remember that, physiologically speaking, the self-assertive
tendencies operate through the massive sympathico-adrenal system which
galvanizes the body into activity -- whereas the self-transcending
emotions have no comparable trigger-mechanism at their disposal, and
their bodily manifestations are in every respect the opposite of the
former: pulse and breathing are slowed down, the muscles relax, the
whole organism tends towards tranquillity and catharsis. Accordingly,
this class of emotions is devoid of the inertial momentum which makes
the rage-fear type of reactions so often fall out of step with reasoning;
the participatory emotions do not become dissociated from thought. Rage
is immune to understanding; love of the self-transcending variety is
based on understanding, and cannot be separated from it.
Thus the impact of a sudden, bisociative surprise which makes reasoning
perform a somersault will have a twofold effect: part of the tension
will become detached from it and exploded while the remaining part will
slowly ebb away. The symbols

on the triptych are meant to refer to these two modes of the discharge
of tension: the
explosion
of the aggressive-defensive and the
gradual catharsis, or 'earthing', of the participatory emotions.
'Seeing the Joke' and 'Solving the Problem'
The dual manifestation of emotions at the moment of discovery is reflected
on a minor and trivial scale in our reactions to a clever joke. The
pleasant after-glow of admiration and intellectual satisfaction, gradually
fading, reflects the cathartic reaction; while the self-congratulatory
impulse -- a faint echo of the Eureka cry -- supplies added voltage
to the original charge detonated in laughter: that 'sudden glory'
(as Hobbes has it) 'arising out of our own eminency'.
Let our imagination travel once more across the
triptych
of creative activities
, from left to right, as it were. We can do
this as we have seen, by taking a short-cut from one wing to another,
from the comic to the tragic or sublime; or alternatively by following
the gradual transitions which lead from the left to the centre panel.
On the extreme left of the continuum -- the infra-red end of the emotive
spectrum -- we found the practical joke, the smutty story, the lavatory
humour of children, each with a heavy aggressive or sexual or scatalogical
load (which may be partly unconscious); and with a logical structure
so obvious that it required only a minimum of intellectual effort to
'see the joke'. Put into a formula, we could say that the ratio A: I --
where A stands for crude emotion, and I for intellectual stimulation --
is heavily loaded in favour of the former.
As we move across the panel towards the right, this ratio changes, and
is ultimately reversed. In the higher forms of comedy, satire, and irony
the message is couched in implicit and oblique terms; the joke gradually
assumes the character of an epigram or riddle, the witticism becomes a
challenge to our wits:

Psychoanalysis is the disease for which it pretends to be the cure.
Philosophy is the systematic abuse of a terminology specially invented
for that purpose.
Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive. What they
conceal is vital.

Or, Heine's description of a young virgin:

Her face is like a palimpsest -- beneath the Gothic lettering of the
monk's sacred text lurks the pagan poet's half-effaced erotic verse.

The crude aggression of the practical joke has been sublimated into
malicious ingenuity; gross sexuality into subtle eroticism. Incidentally,
if I had not mentioned that the last quotation was by Heine, whose name
combined with 'virgin' arouses ominous expectations, but had pretended
instead that it was from a novel by D. H. Lawrence, it would probably
have impressed the reader as profoundly poetic instead of malicious --
a short-cut from wing to wing, by reversal of the charge from minus
to plus. Again, imagine for a moment that the quotation occurred in an
essay by a Jungian psychologist -- and it will turn into an emotionally
neutral illustration of 'the intrusion of archetypes into perception'.