The Act of Creation (47 page)

Mountains like White Elephants
, or
Cat in the Rain
, will
show that the comparison is hardly exaggerated.

 

 

But there exist other, different, methods of infolding -- obliquity,
compression, and the Seven Types of Ambiguity -- a modest estimate
of Empson's. The later Joyce, for instance, makes one realize why
the German word for writing poetry is 'dichten' -- to condense
(certainly more poetical than 'composing', i.e. 'putting together';
but perhaps less poetical than the Hungarian
költeni
--
to hatch). Freud actually believed that to condense or compress several
meanings or allusions into a word or phrase was the essence of poetry. It
is certainly an essential ingredient with Joyce; almost every word in the
great monologues in
Finnegans Wake
is overcharged with allusions
and implications. To revert to an earlier metaphor, economy demands
that the stepping-stones of the narrative should be spaced wide enough
apart to require a significant effort from the reader; Joyce makes him
feel like a runner in a marathon race with hurdles every other step and
aggravated by a mile-long row of hieroglyphs which he must decipher. Joyce
would perhaps be the perfect writer -- if the perfect reader existed.

 

 

Evidently, if the infolding technique is pushed too far, obscurity
results, as witnessed by much contemporary poetry. It may be only
a passing effect, due to a time-lag between the artist's and his
public's maturity and range of perception; it may also be a conscious
or half-conscious deception, practised by the artist on his public --
including himself. To decide which of these alternatives applies to a
difficult work of art is one of the trickiest problems for the critic;
here, as a warning example, is Tolstoy's assessment of the French
symbolists: [1]

 

The productions of another celebrity, Verlaine, are not less affected
and unintelligible. . . . I must pause to note the amazing celebrity
of these two versifiers, Baudelaire and Verlaine. . . . How the French
. . . could attribute such importance to these versifiers who were
far from skilful in form and most contemptible in subject-matter,
is to me incomprehensible.

 

 

The Last Veil

 

 

We have seen the Law of Infolding at work in the evolution of humour --
from the coarse comedian's rubbing in of the joke to the mere hint, the
New Yorker
type of riddle. The
comic simile
starts with
comparing a man to a pig or an ass (neither of them comic any longer,
but simply a colloquial adjective) -- and progresses to Heine's esoteric
comparison of a girl's face to a palimpsest. A similar progression could
be shown towards more oblique or condensed forms of
metaphor
and poetic imagery, replacing explicit analogies which, through wear
and tear, have shrivelled to empty clichés. Long before the Symbolists,
Blake realized the drawbacks of trying to make 'a complete demonstration
of the object' and thereby depriving it of its mystery:

 

The vision of Christ that thou doest see
Is my vision's greatest enemy.
Thine has a great hook nose like thine
Mine has a snub nose like to mine.

 

Rhythm has undergone a similar evolution. Unlike the beat of the tom-tom
or the rattling of the carriage wheels, metre does not consist of simple
repetitions, but of intricate patterns of short and long stressed and
light syllables, on which patterns of assonance and alliteration have
further been superimposed. As music has travelled a long way from the
simple repetitive figures performed on monochords and other primitive
single-tone instruments, so has metre. Its original, simple pulse is
only preserved in its sub-structure -- implied, but no longer pounded out.

 

 

In his analysis of metric form, I. A. Richards [2] calls its effect
'patterned expectancy':

 

Rhythm and its specialized form, metre, depend upon repetition, and
expectancy. Equally where what is expected recurs and where it fails,
all rhythmical and metrical effects spring from anticipation. As a
rule this anticipation is unconscious. . . . The mind, after reading a
line or two of verse . . . prepares itself for any one of a number of
possible sequences, at the same time negatively incapacitating itself
for others. The effect produced by what actually follows depends very
closely upon this unconscious preparation and consists largely of
the further twist which it gives to expectancy. It is in terms of the
variation in these twists that rhythm is to be described. . . . This
texture of expectatious, satisfactions, disappointments, surprisals,
which the sequence of syllables brings about, is rhythm. . . . Evidently
there can be no surprise and no disappointment unless there is
expectation. . . . Hence the rapidity with which too simple rhythms,
those which are too easily 'seen through', grow cloying or inspid.

 

If the mind is to experience the 'waking trance' which Yeats promised as
poetry's reward, it must actively co-operate by filling in the missing
beats and extending the sequence into the future. The witch-doctor
hypnotizes his audience with the monotonous rhythm of his drum; the poet
merely provides the audience with the means to hypnotize itself.

 

 

While elaborate metric forms impose a strain on our patterned expectation,
the
rhyme
is its sudden and full reward; it has the same
cathartic effect as the harmonious resolution of a musical phrase. It
is gloriously explicit in its affirmation of unity in variety; of the
magic connection between sense and sound; of the oggly-gobbly delights
of sheer repetition. That is obviously the reason for its unpopularity
with contemporary poets; it offends against the ascetic diet imposed by
the law of infolding. I am old-fashioned enough to regret its passing,
as I regret the passing of the barrel-organ.

 

 

Emphasis
derives from the selection, exaggeration, and
simplification of those elements which the artist chooses to regard
as significant; it is a means to
impose
his vision on his
audience.
Economy
is a technique designed to entice the audience
into active co-operation, to make them re-create the artist's vision. To
do so the audience must decipher the implied message; put into technical
terms, he must (cf.
pp. 84-6
)
intrapolate
(fill in the gaps between the 'stepping stones');
extrapolate
(complete the hint); and
transform
or reinterpret the symbols,
images, and analogies; unwrap the veiled allegory. Now these operations
which the audience must perform (interpolation, extrapolation,
transformation) to get the artist's implied message, correspond --
like mirror images, as it were -- to the devices for lending a message
emphasis: exaggeration, simplification, selection. The artist, intent on
driving home his message, exaggerates and simplifies -- the audience
co-operates by filling in the gaps and extending the range of the
communication. He chooses what he considers to be the significant aspect
among other aspects of a given experience -- the audience discovers the
significance by reinterpreting the message. All this may sound a little
abstract, but it leads to a simple conclusion: explicit works of art
with an emphatic, pointed message contain all the elements in ready-made
form which otherwise the audience would have to contribute. The surest
symptom of decadent art is that it leaves nothing to the imagination;
the muse has bared her flabby bosom like a too obliging harlot -- there
is no veiled promise, no mystery, nothing to divine.

 

 

The law of infolding affects science too, though in a different
way. Aristotle had thought that nearly everything worth discovering about
the ways of the universe had already been discovered; Francis Bacon and
Descartes believed that to complete the edifice of science would take but
a generation or two; Haeckel proclaimed that all the seven riddles of the
universe had been solved. The idea of progress (in science and any other
field) is only about three centuries old; and only since the collapse of
mechanistic science around the turn of the last century did it begin to
dawn on the more far-sighted among scientists, that the unfolding of the
secrets of nature was accompanied by a parallel process of infolding --
that we were learning more and more about less and less. The more precise
knowledge the physicist acquired, the more ambiguous and oblique symbols
he had to use to express it; he could no longer make an intelligible model
of sub-atomic reality, he could only allude to it by formal equations
which have as much resemblance to reality 'as a telephone number has
to the subscriber'. One might almost think that physical science is
determined to implement the programme of the French symbolists.

 

 

It may seem that I have laid too much stress on the law of infolding. But
quite obviously it plays an essential role in the progress of art
and understanding; and it is in fact a characteristic of the human
condition. For man is a symbol-making animal. He constructs a symbolic
model of outer reality in his brain, and expresses it by a second
set of symbols in terms of words, equations, pigment, or stone. All
he knows directly are bodily sensations, and all he can directly do
is to perform bodily motions; the rest of his knowledge and means of
expression is symbolical. To use a phrase coined by J. Cohen [3], man
has a meraphorical consciousness. Any attempt to get a direct grasp
at naked reality is self-defeating; Urania, too, like the other muses,
always has a last veil left to fold in.

 

 

 

Summary

 

 

Art originates in sympathetic magic; in the illusions of stagecraft its
origin is directly reflected. In the mind of naïve audiences, the
impersonator becomes identified with the character impersonated, as in
ancient days the masked dancer became identified with the rain-god. On
the other hand, sophisticated audiences are conscious and critical of
the actors' performance, but are nevertheless caught by the illusion to
the extent of producing the physical symptoms of intense emotion; their
awareness suspended between two planes of experience, they exemplify
the bisociative process in its purest form.

 

 

The escapist character of illusion facilitates the unfolding of the
participatory emotions and inhibits the self-asserting emotions, except
those of a vicarious character; it draws on untapped resources of emotion
and leads them to catharsis.

 

 

Rhythm and rhyme, assonance and pun are not artificial creations, but
vestigial echoes of primitive phases in the development of language,
and of the even more primitive pulsations of living matter; hence our
particular receptiveness for messages which arrive in a rhythmic pattern,
and their hypnotic effect. Association by sound affinity is still employed
in subconscious mentation; it is manifested in the punning mania of
children, in sleep, fatigue and mental disorder. The poet creates by
bisociating sound and sense, metre and meaning; his voice is bi-vocal --
so to speak.

 

 

Metaphor and imagery come into existence by a process, familiar
from scientific discovery, of seeing an analogy where nobody saw
one before. The aesthetic satisfaction derived from the analogy
depends on the emotive potential of the matrices which participate in
it. Synesthetic cross-references from sight to touch, for instance,
may enrich the experience, depending on personal preferences. Visual
imagery, derived from the most important sense organ, carries a special
emotive appeal; the 'picture-strip' language of concrete imagery predates
conceptualized thought. The highest emotive potential is found in images
which evoke archetypal symbols and arouse unconscious resonances. They
lead to the 'earthing' of emotion by relating particular experiences to a
universal frame, the temporal to the eternal -- as the scientist relates
particular phenomena to general laws and ultimate causes. In both cases
the flash of spontaneous illumination is followed by emotional catharsis;
'truth' and 'beauty' appear as complementary aspects of the indivisible
experience. The difference between the two in objective verifiability
is a matter of degrees, and arises only after the act; the act itself
is in both cases a leap into the dark, where scientist and artist are
equally dependent on their fallible intuitions.

 

 

Originality, selective emphasis, and economy are certainly not the only
criteria of literary excellence, but they proved to be a kind of handy
mariner's compass for the critic at sea; and the 'law of infolding'
appears to be equally valid -- and tantalizing -- in science as in art.

 

 

 

 

 

XIX
CHARACTER AND PLOT
Identification
In his monologue in Act II, after the First Player's dramatic recital,
Hamlet asks a pertinent question:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all the visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,
A broken voice . . .
. . . and all for nothing,
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?

The answer to Hamlet's question was given by Flaubert:
Emma Bovary,
c'est moi
.
The magic tie is identification. Without it, why indeed should our
tear-glands become active on Hecuba's behalf? Goethe's early novel,
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, unleashed an epidemic of suicide
in Germany; every romantic young man felt that he was Werther.
The extent to which a character in a novel 'lives' depends on the
intensity of the reader's participatory ties with him. To know what
Hamlet feels while listening to the ghost, is the same thing as to know
how it reds to be Hamlet. I must project part of myself into Hamlet,
or Hamlet into myself -- 'projection' and 'introjection' are metaphors
referring to the partial breakdown of the crust of personal identity. This
remains true, regardless whether the reader admires, despises, hates, or
loves the fictional character. In order to love or hate something which
exists only as a series of signs made with printer's ink, the reader
must endow it with a phantom life, an emanation from his conscious or
unconscious self. The major contribution will probably come from the
unconscious, which takes phantoms for granted and is apt to confuse
personal identities.
Thus the figments of Bovary, little Lord Fauntleroy, and Alyosha Karamazov
which float around us in the air, are projections which body forth from
our intimate selves, like the medium's ectoplasm. The author has created
the prototype-phantoms, and the reader creates out of himself a copy,
which he assumes to be like the original, though this is not necessarily
the case. Whether the Elizabethans saw Shylock in a tragic or grotesque
light, my own Shylock is a tragic figure -- he has a great hook nose
like mine, not a snub nose like to thine.
Some novelists give meticulous descriptions of the visual appearances
of their characters; others give little or none. Here again the general
trend is away from the over-explicit statement towards the suggestive hint
which entices the reader to build up his own image of the character. I
am always annoyed when the author informs me that Sally Anne has auburn
hair and green eyes. I don't particularly like the combination, and
would have gone along more willingly with the author's intention that
I should fall in love with Sally Anne if he had left the colour-scheme
to me. There is a misplaced concreteness which gets in the way of the
imagination. It is chiefly due to the misconception that 'imagination'
means literally seeing images in the mind's eye; and consequently that,
for a character to come alive, I must carry a complete picture of it in
my mind. Now this is an old fallacy which affects the subject we are
discussing only indirectly, but has a direct bearing on certain basic
assumptions about the nature of perception and memory, on which the
present theory rests. These are discussed in Book Two, which also contains
the detailed evidence for the rather summary remarks which follow.
Phantoms and Images