Read The Act of Creation Online
Authors: Arthur Koestler
The Act of Creation (48 page)
In the first place, the evidence shows that there are people endowed with
the faculty of so-called eidetic imagery -- that is, of really seeing
mental images with dream-like, hallucinatory vividness; but this faculty,
though relatively frequent in children, is rare in adults. The average
adult does not really
see
anything approaching a complete and sharp
image when he recalls a memory -- for instance, the face of a friend --
though he may deceive himself into believing that he does. How do we
know that he is deceiving himself? Here is one way of proving it -- among
many others. The experimenter lets the subject look at a square of, say,
four rows of four letters (which do not form any meaningful sequences)
until the subject thinks he can see them in his mind's eye. He can, in
fact, fluently 'read' them out after the square has been taken away --
or so he believes. For when he is asked to read the square backwards, or
diagonally, his fluency is gone. He has, in fact, learned the sequence
by rote without realizing it -- which is quite a different matter from
forming a visual image. If he could really see the square, he could read
it in all directions with the same ease and speed.
The ordinary citizen, who does not happen to be a painter, or a policeman,
or of a particularly observant type, would be at a loss to give an exact
visual description even of people whom he knows quite well. What we
do remember of a person is a combination of (a) certain vivid details,
and (b) what we call 'general impressions'. The 'vivid detail' may be
a gesture, an intonation, an outstanding visual feature -- the mole on
Granny's chin -- which, for one reason or another, has stuck in one's
memory, like a fragment from a picture-strip, and which functions
pars
pro toto
-- as a part, or sign deputizing for the whole.
The 'general impression' on the other hand, is based on the opposite
method of memory-formation: it is a schematized, sketchy, quasi
'skeletonized' outline of a whole configuration, regardless of detail.
A woman may say to a man, 'I haven't seen you wearing that tie before'
-- though she has not the faintest recollection of any of the ties he
has worn in the past. She
recognizes
a deviation from memories
which she is unable to
recall
. The explanation of the paradox is
that although she cannot remember the colour or pattern of any single
tie which that man wore in the past, she does remember that they were
generally subdued and discreet, which the new tie is not. It deviates
not from any particular past experience, but from the general code,
from an abstracted visual quality that these past experiences had in
common. Such perceptual codes function as selective filters, as it
were; the filter rejects as 'wrong' anything which does not fit its
'mesh'; and accepts or 'recognizes' anything that fits it, i.e. which
gives the same 'general impression'. The gentleman with the new tie,
for instance, can get his own back with the remark, 'You have done
something to your hair, haven't you?' He has never noticed her previous
hair-dos at all, but be does notice that the present one just doesn't
go with her mousy appearance. Here the code is 'mousiness' which,
like all visual schematizations, is difficult to describe in words, but
instantly recognized by the eye. We talk of an 'innocent' or 'lascivious'
expression, of 'sensitive' or 'brutal' features -- characteristics which
defy verbal description, but which can be sketched with a few lines --
as emotions can be indicated by a few basic strokes indicating the slant
of mouth and eyes. Other codes of recognition may combine form and motion,
or vision and hearing: a characteristic gait, the timbre of a voice.
Thus recognizing a person does not mean matching a retinal image against
a memory image of photographic-likeness. My memory of John Brown is not a
photographic record; it consists of several, simplified and schematized
'general impressions' whose combination, plus a few 'vivid details',
enable me to recognize him when we meet, or to remember him in his
absence. But that remembrance is only partly of a pictorial nature,
and much less so than I believe it to be -- see the experiment with the
letter-square. The reason for this self-deception is that the process
of combining those simplified visual and other schemata and adorning
them with a few genuine 'photographic' fragments, is unconscious and
instantaneous. The perceptual codes function below the level of awareness;
we are playing a game without being aware of the rules. We overestimate
the precision of our imagery, as we overestimate the precision of our
verbal thinking (quite often we think 'that we have understood the
meaning of a difficult text and discover later that we haven't really)
because we are unaware of the gaps between the words and between the
sketchy contours of the schemata. All introspective 'visual' thinkers,
from Einstein downward, emphasized the vagueness, haziness, and abstract
character of their conscious visual imagery. True picture-strip thinking
is confined to the dream, and other manifestations of the subconscious.
The point of this apparent digression was to show that if the above
is true regarding our mental images of real people whom we know, it
must be all the more true regarding our images of fictional characters
which lack any sensory basis. A character may indeed be 'alive' with the
utmost vividness in the reader's mind, but this vividness need not be
of a visual nature. The reader may fall in love with Karenina, despair
when she throws herself under the train, mourn her death -- and yet be
unable to visualize her in his mind's eye or give a detailed description
of her appearance. Her 'living image' in the reader is not a photographic
image, but a multi-dimensional construct of a variety of aspects of her
general appearance, her gestures and voice, her patterns of thinking
and behaving. It is a combination of various 'general impressions' and
'vivid details' -- that is,
constructed on much the same principles
as images of real people
.
In fact, there is no sharp dividing line between our images of people whom
we have met in the flesh, and those whom we know only from descriptions --
whether factual or fictional (or a combination of both). The dream knows
no distinction between factual and fictitious characters, and children
as well as primitives are apt to confuse the two.
Thus the phantoms of Bovary and Karenina which float around us are not
so very different from our apparently solid memories of Joe Smith and
Peter Brown; both varieties are made of the same stuff. In one of Muriel
Spark's novels, a wise old bird asks his woman friend: 'Do you think,
Jean, that other people exist? . . . I mean, do you consider that people
-- the people around us -- are real or illusory? Surely you see that here
is a respectable question. Given that you believe in your own existence
as self-evident, do you believe in that of others? Do you believe that
I for instance, at this moment exist?' [1]
The only certainty that other people exist, not merely as physical shapes,
but as sentient beings, is derived from partly conscious, but mostly
unconscious, inference, i.e. empathy. We automatically infer from minute
pointers in a person's face or gestures -- which we mostly do not even
register consciously -- his character, mood, how he will behave in an
emergency, and a lot of other things. Without this faculty of projecting
part of one's own sentient personality into the other person's shell,
which enables us to say 'I
know
how you feel', the pointers would
be meaningless. Lorenz has shown that the various postures and flexions
of the wolf's tail are indicative of at least ten different moods. As we
have lost our tails we cannot empathize with these moods -- but since our
labial muscles are not very different, we feel at once the significance
of bared teeth.
The semi-abstract schematizations which we call 'general impressions'
of appearance, character, and personality, are intuitive pointer-readings
based on empathy. It is by this means that we assign reality and sentience
to other people. Once more, the process differs from bringing a fictional
character alive in our minds mainly by the nature of the pointers. A
bland face at a cocktail party uttering the conventional type of remark
may provide less pointers for empathy and imagination than the cunningly
planted hints of the novelist, specially designed to produce positive or
negative identifications. Some phantoms can be more real to the mind than
many a bore made of solid flesh. The distinction between fact and fiction
is a late acquisition of rational thought -- unknown to the unconscious,
and largely ignored by the emotions.
Conflict
Drama strives on conflict, and so does the novel. The nature of the
conflict may be explicitly stated or merely implied; but an element of
it must be present, otherwise the characters would be gliding through
a frictionless universe.
The conflict may be fought in the divided heart of a single character; or
between two or more persons; or between man and his destiny. The conflict
between personalities may be due to a clash of ideas or temperaments,
to incompatible codes of behaviour or scales of value. But whatever its
motif, a quarrel will assume the dignity of drama only if the audience is
led to accept the attitude of both sides as valid, each within its own
frame of reference. If the author succeeds in this, the conflict will
be projected into the spectator's or reader's mind, and experienced as
a clash between two simultaneous and incompatible identifications. 'We
make out of our quarrels with others rhetoric, but of our quarrels with
ourselves poetry,' said Yeats.
Dramatic conflict thus always reveals some paradox which is latent in
the mind. It reflects both sides of the medal whereas in our practical
pursuits we see only one at a time. The paradox may be seemingly
superficial, as when our sympathies are divided between Hamlet and
Laertes, two equally worthy contestants, with the resulting desire to
help both, that is to harm both. But at least the double complicity in
the double slaughter is prompted not by hate but love, and we are made
to realize that it was destiny, not their own volition, which made them
destroy each other; the paradox is 'earthed' in the human condition.
Thus the artist compels his audience to live on several planes at
once. He identifies himself with several characters in turn -- Caesar,
Brutus, Antony, projecting some aspect of himself into each of them,
and speaking through their mouths; or introjecting them, if you like,
and lending them his voice. He presents Brutus and Caesar alternately
in situations where they command sympathy and impose their patterns
of reasoning, their scales of value, until each has established his own
independent matrix in the spectator's mind. Having acquired these multiple
identities, the spectator is led to a powerful climax, where he is both
murderer and victim; and thence to catharsis. In the
Bhagavid Gita
the Lord Krishna appears on the battlefield in the role of charioteer to
his disciple Arjuna, whom he cures of his pacifist scruples by explaining
that the slayer and the slain are One, because both are embodiments of
the indestructible Atma; therefore 'the truly wise mourn neither for the
living nor for the dead.' I doubt whether this doctrine, taken literally,
had a beneficial effect on the ethics of Hinduism,* but to be both Caesar
and Brutus in one's imagination has a profound cathartic effect, and is
one way of approaching Nirvana.
Brutus is an honourable man; so is Caesar; but what about Iago? Through
pitying Desdemona, and sharing Othello's despair, we are compelled to hate
Iago; but we can hate Iago only if he has come to life for us and in us;
and he has come to life in us because he too commands our understanding
and, at moments, our sympathy -- the resonance of our own frustrated
ambitions and jealousies. Without this unavowed feeling of complicity, he
would be a mere stage-prop, and we could hate him no more than a piece of
cardboard. Iago, Richard II, Stavrogin, the great villains of literature,
have an irresistible appeal to some common, repressed villainousness in
ourselves, and give us a wonderfully purifying opportunity to discover
what it feels like to be frankly a villain.
But true-black villains are limit cases; the more evenly our sympathies
are distributed among the antagonists, the more successfully the work
will actualize latent aspects of our personalities. Caliban and Prospero,
Faust and Mephisto, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Christ and the Great
Inquisitor -- each pair is locked in an everlasting duel in which we act
as seconds for both. In each of these conflicts two self-contained frames
of reference, two sets of values, two universes of discourse collide. All
great works of literature contain variations and combinations, overt or
implied, of such archetypal conflicts inherent in the condition of man,
which first occur in the symbols of mythology, and are restated in the
particular idiom of each culture and period. All literature, wrote Gerhart
Hauptmann, is 'the distant echo of the primitive word behind the veil of
words'; and the action of a drama or novel is always the distant echo
of some ancestral action behind the veil of the period's costumes and
conventions. There are no new themes in literature, as there are no new
human instincts; but every age provides new variations and sublimations,
new settings and a different set of rules for fighting the old battles
all over again. To quote G. W. Brandt: 'There is basically only a limited
number of plots; they can be seen, in different guises, recurring down
the ages. The reason is in life itself. Human relationships, whilst
infinitely varied in detail, reveal -- stripped down to fundamentals --
a number of repetitive patterns. Writers straining to invent a plot
entirely fresh have known this for a long time. Goethe quoted Gozzi's
opinion that there were only thirty-six tragic situations -- and he
added that Schiller, who believed that there were more, had not even
succeeded in finding as many as that.' [2]
Integrations and Confrontations
If the individual act of discovery displays essentially the same
psychological pattern in science and in art, their collective progress
differs in one important respect. We have seen (
the faculty of so-called eidetic imagery -- that is, of really seeing
mental images with dream-like, hallucinatory vividness; but this faculty,
though relatively frequent in children, is rare in adults. The average
adult does not really
see
anything approaching a complete and sharp
image when he recalls a memory -- for instance, the face of a friend --
though he may deceive himself into believing that he does. How do we
know that he is deceiving himself? Here is one way of proving it -- among
many others. The experimenter lets the subject look at a square of, say,
four rows of four letters (which do not form any meaningful sequences)
until the subject thinks he can see them in his mind's eye. He can, in
fact, fluently 'read' them out after the square has been taken away --
or so he believes. For when he is asked to read the square backwards, or
diagonally, his fluency is gone. He has, in fact, learned the sequence
by rote without realizing it -- which is quite a different matter from
forming a visual image. If he could really see the square, he could read
it in all directions with the same ease and speed.
The ordinary citizen, who does not happen to be a painter, or a policeman,
or of a particularly observant type, would be at a loss to give an exact
visual description even of people whom he knows quite well. What we
do remember of a person is a combination of (a) certain vivid details,
and (b) what we call 'general impressions'. The 'vivid detail' may be
a gesture, an intonation, an outstanding visual feature -- the mole on
Granny's chin -- which, for one reason or another, has stuck in one's
memory, like a fragment from a picture-strip, and which functions
pars
pro toto
-- as a part, or sign deputizing for the whole.
The 'general impression' on the other hand, is based on the opposite
method of memory-formation: it is a schematized, sketchy, quasi
'skeletonized' outline of a whole configuration, regardless of detail.
A woman may say to a man, 'I haven't seen you wearing that tie before'
-- though she has not the faintest recollection of any of the ties he
has worn in the past. She
recognizes
a deviation from memories
which she is unable to
recall
. The explanation of the paradox is
that although she cannot remember the colour or pattern of any single
tie which that man wore in the past, she does remember that they were
generally subdued and discreet, which the new tie is not. It deviates
not from any particular past experience, but from the general code,
from an abstracted visual quality that these past experiences had in
common. Such perceptual codes function as selective filters, as it
were; the filter rejects as 'wrong' anything which does not fit its
'mesh'; and accepts or 'recognizes' anything that fits it, i.e. which
gives the same 'general impression'. The gentleman with the new tie,
for instance, can get his own back with the remark, 'You have done
something to your hair, haven't you?' He has never noticed her previous
hair-dos at all, but be does notice that the present one just doesn't
go with her mousy appearance. Here the code is 'mousiness' which,
like all visual schematizations, is difficult to describe in words, but
instantly recognized by the eye. We talk of an 'innocent' or 'lascivious'
expression, of 'sensitive' or 'brutal' features -- characteristics which
defy verbal description, but which can be sketched with a few lines --
as emotions can be indicated by a few basic strokes indicating the slant
of mouth and eyes. Other codes of recognition may combine form and motion,
or vision and hearing: a characteristic gait, the timbre of a voice.
Thus recognizing a person does not mean matching a retinal image against
a memory image of photographic-likeness. My memory of John Brown is not a
photographic record; it consists of several, simplified and schematized
'general impressions' whose combination, plus a few 'vivid details',
enable me to recognize him when we meet, or to remember him in his
absence. But that remembrance is only partly of a pictorial nature,
and much less so than I believe it to be -- see the experiment with the
letter-square. The reason for this self-deception is that the process
of combining those simplified visual and other schemata and adorning
them with a few genuine 'photographic' fragments, is unconscious and
instantaneous. The perceptual codes function below the level of awareness;
we are playing a game without being aware of the rules. We overestimate
the precision of our imagery, as we overestimate the precision of our
verbal thinking (quite often we think 'that we have understood the
meaning of a difficult text and discover later that we haven't really)
because we are unaware of the gaps between the words and between the
sketchy contours of the schemata. All introspective 'visual' thinkers,
from Einstein downward, emphasized the vagueness, haziness, and abstract
character of their conscious visual imagery. True picture-strip thinking
is confined to the dream, and other manifestations of the subconscious.
The point of this apparent digression was to show that if the above
is true regarding our mental images of real people whom we know, it
must be all the more true regarding our images of fictional characters
which lack any sensory basis. A character may indeed be 'alive' with the
utmost vividness in the reader's mind, but this vividness need not be
of a visual nature. The reader may fall in love with Karenina, despair
when she throws herself under the train, mourn her death -- and yet be
unable to visualize her in his mind's eye or give a detailed description
of her appearance. Her 'living image' in the reader is not a photographic
image, but a multi-dimensional construct of a variety of aspects of her
general appearance, her gestures and voice, her patterns of thinking
and behaving. It is a combination of various 'general impressions' and
'vivid details' -- that is,
constructed on much the same principles
as images of real people
.
In fact, there is no sharp dividing line between our images of people whom
we have met in the flesh, and those whom we know only from descriptions --
whether factual or fictional (or a combination of both). The dream knows
no distinction between factual and fictitious characters, and children
as well as primitives are apt to confuse the two.
Thus the phantoms of Bovary and Karenina which float around us are not
so very different from our apparently solid memories of Joe Smith and
Peter Brown; both varieties are made of the same stuff. In one of Muriel
Spark's novels, a wise old bird asks his woman friend: 'Do you think,
Jean, that other people exist? . . . I mean, do you consider that people
-- the people around us -- are real or illusory? Surely you see that here
is a respectable question. Given that you believe in your own existence
as self-evident, do you believe in that of others? Do you believe that
I for instance, at this moment exist?' [1]
The only certainty that other people exist, not merely as physical shapes,
but as sentient beings, is derived from partly conscious, but mostly
unconscious, inference, i.e. empathy. We automatically infer from minute
pointers in a person's face or gestures -- which we mostly do not even
register consciously -- his character, mood, how he will behave in an
emergency, and a lot of other things. Without this faculty of projecting
part of one's own sentient personality into the other person's shell,
which enables us to say 'I
know
how you feel', the pointers would
be meaningless. Lorenz has shown that the various postures and flexions
of the wolf's tail are indicative of at least ten different moods. As we
have lost our tails we cannot empathize with these moods -- but since our
labial muscles are not very different, we feel at once the significance
of bared teeth.
The semi-abstract schematizations which we call 'general impressions'
of appearance, character, and personality, are intuitive pointer-readings
based on empathy. It is by this means that we assign reality and sentience
to other people. Once more, the process differs from bringing a fictional
character alive in our minds mainly by the nature of the pointers. A
bland face at a cocktail party uttering the conventional type of remark
may provide less pointers for empathy and imagination than the cunningly
planted hints of the novelist, specially designed to produce positive or
negative identifications. Some phantoms can be more real to the mind than
many a bore made of solid flesh. The distinction between fact and fiction
is a late acquisition of rational thought -- unknown to the unconscious,
and largely ignored by the emotions.
Conflict
Drama strives on conflict, and so does the novel. The nature of the
conflict may be explicitly stated or merely implied; but an element of
it must be present, otherwise the characters would be gliding through
a frictionless universe.
The conflict may be fought in the divided heart of a single character; or
between two or more persons; or between man and his destiny. The conflict
between personalities may be due to a clash of ideas or temperaments,
to incompatible codes of behaviour or scales of value. But whatever its
motif, a quarrel will assume the dignity of drama only if the audience is
led to accept the attitude of both sides as valid, each within its own
frame of reference. If the author succeeds in this, the conflict will
be projected into the spectator's or reader's mind, and experienced as
a clash between two simultaneous and incompatible identifications. 'We
make out of our quarrels with others rhetoric, but of our quarrels with
ourselves poetry,' said Yeats.
Dramatic conflict thus always reveals some paradox which is latent in
the mind. It reflects both sides of the medal whereas in our practical
pursuits we see only one at a time. The paradox may be seemingly
superficial, as when our sympathies are divided between Hamlet and
Laertes, two equally worthy contestants, with the resulting desire to
help both, that is to harm both. But at least the double complicity in
the double slaughter is prompted not by hate but love, and we are made
to realize that it was destiny, not their own volition, which made them
destroy each other; the paradox is 'earthed' in the human condition.
Thus the artist compels his audience to live on several planes at
once. He identifies himself with several characters in turn -- Caesar,
Brutus, Antony, projecting some aspect of himself into each of them,
and speaking through their mouths; or introjecting them, if you like,
and lending them his voice. He presents Brutus and Caesar alternately
in situations where they command sympathy and impose their patterns
of reasoning, their scales of value, until each has established his own
independent matrix in the spectator's mind. Having acquired these multiple
identities, the spectator is led to a powerful climax, where he is both
murderer and victim; and thence to catharsis. In the
Bhagavid Gita
the Lord Krishna appears on the battlefield in the role of charioteer to
his disciple Arjuna, whom he cures of his pacifist scruples by explaining
that the slayer and the slain are One, because both are embodiments of
the indestructible Atma; therefore 'the truly wise mourn neither for the
living nor for the dead.' I doubt whether this doctrine, taken literally,
had a beneficial effect on the ethics of Hinduism,* but to be both Caesar
and Brutus in one's imagination has a profound cathartic effect, and is
one way of approaching Nirvana.
Brutus is an honourable man; so is Caesar; but what about Iago? Through
pitying Desdemona, and sharing Othello's despair, we are compelled to hate
Iago; but we can hate Iago only if he has come to life for us and in us;
and he has come to life in us because he too commands our understanding
and, at moments, our sympathy -- the resonance of our own frustrated
ambitions and jealousies. Without this unavowed feeling of complicity, he
would be a mere stage-prop, and we could hate him no more than a piece of
cardboard. Iago, Richard II, Stavrogin, the great villains of literature,
have an irresistible appeal to some common, repressed villainousness in
ourselves, and give us a wonderfully purifying opportunity to discover
what it feels like to be frankly a villain.
But true-black villains are limit cases; the more evenly our sympathies
are distributed among the antagonists, the more successfully the work
will actualize latent aspects of our personalities. Caliban and Prospero,
Faust and Mephisto, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Christ and the Great
Inquisitor -- each pair is locked in an everlasting duel in which we act
as seconds for both. In each of these conflicts two self-contained frames
of reference, two sets of values, two universes of discourse collide. All
great works of literature contain variations and combinations, overt or
implied, of such archetypal conflicts inherent in the condition of man,
which first occur in the symbols of mythology, and are restated in the
particular idiom of each culture and period. All literature, wrote Gerhart
Hauptmann, is 'the distant echo of the primitive word behind the veil of
words'; and the action of a drama or novel is always the distant echo
of some ancestral action behind the veil of the period's costumes and
conventions. There are no new themes in literature, as there are no new
human instincts; but every age provides new variations and sublimations,
new settings and a different set of rules for fighting the old battles
all over again. To quote G. W. Brandt: 'There is basically only a limited
number of plots; they can be seen, in different guises, recurring down
the ages. The reason is in life itself. Human relationships, whilst
infinitely varied in detail, reveal -- stripped down to fundamentals --
a number of repetitive patterns. Writers straining to invent a plot
entirely fresh have known this for a long time. Goethe quoted Gozzi's
opinion that there were only thirty-six tragic situations -- and he
added that Schiller, who believed that there were more, had not even
succeeded in finding as many as that.' [2]
Integrations and Confrontations
If the individual act of discovery displays essentially the same
psychological pattern in science and in art, their collective progress
differs in one important respect. We have seen (
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