The Act of Creation (53 page)

Chapter XXIV
).

 

 

But whether the rules of the game were imposed by convention or
originally designed by the artist, they have an equal sway over
him. Rubens'
puttis
sometimes look mass-produced, and even some
of the portraits of his children seem to obey the same formula; similar
blasphemies could be uttered about Renoir's pneumatic nudes, Henry Moore's
convexities and concavities-with-a-hole, or Bernard Buffet's obsessive
angularities. One cannot help feeling that artists who spend the rest of
their lives exploring the possibilities of a single formula which they
discovered in their truly creative period, resemble the 'one-idea-men'
in the history of science. The difference is that the concrete language
of the painter's brush permits endless variations on a single theme
without losing in enchantment -- which the abstract symbol-language of
science does not.

 

 

The reader may have felt, in following the last few pages, an uneasy
suspicion that I was deliberately confusing the tricks and formulae
for drawing a pussycat with the artist's vision of the pussycat, and
the history of painting with a history of seeing. But in fact the two
interact so intimately in the artist's mind (and in the responsive
beholder's mind) that they cannot be separated. Take seeing first;
already Pliny knew (what Behaviourist psychology managed to forget)
that 'the mind is the real instrument of sight and observation' and the
eyes merely act 'as a kind of vehicle, receiving and transmitting the
visual portion of consciousness'. [18] But the mind is also the real
instrument of manual dexterity, in a much deeper sense than we generally
realize, including those quirks of manner and style which can be 'left
to the muscles' to be taken care of. Renoir, when his fingers became
crippled with arthritis, painted with a brush attached to his forearm,
yet his style remained unchanged. It would be psychologically just as
absurd to assume the reverse -- that a pattern of expression so deeply
ingrained should have had no effect on his pattern of perception, as it
would be to assume that his perception had no influence on what his hand
was doing. The two activities are bisociated; in the terminology of the
communication engineer, the medium 'in terms of' which the artist must
think, influences by feed-back his pattern of vision.

 

 

An obvious example is provided by the way in which the study of anatomy --
even if merely demonstrated by a lay-figure -- transforms the artist's
perception of the human body. A less obvious example is the following --
which I again owe to Gombrich. Cozens, the eighteenth-century painter
who advocated the ink-blot technique to inspire his pupils to paint
'Rohrschach' landscapes, also drew for their benefit a series of schemata
of various types of cloud-formation -- as Guercino had given recipes for
drawing various types of ears. Constable studied and faithfully copied
these crude schematizations of 'streaky clouds at the top of the sky'
or 'bottom of the sky' or clouds 'darker at the top than the bottom'. By
learning to distinguish different types of cloud-formation -- acquiring
an articulate cloud-vocabulary as it were -- he was able to perceive
clouds, and to paint clouds, as nobody had done before, His brush, like
the poet's pen, 'turned them into shapes, and gave to airy nothing a
local habitation and a name'. The result is that Constable addicts see
real clouds in Constable's terms, as Van Gogh addicts see the fields
of Provence in Van Gogh's terms -- and in either case much to their
benefit. Some French authors -- Lalo, I believe was the first, and among
contemporaries, Malraux -- have proposed that our aesthetic appreciation
of nature is derived from having seen landscapes in paint. That may be
the case with many of us, but it only means -- as suggested already at the
begining of this chapter -- that man has always looked at nature through
a frame. Through the painter's frame, or the frame of mythology, or the
frame of science; through half-closed eyes or eye glued to the lens of
the telescope. Constable called landscape painting an inquiry into the
laws of nature; and Richardson, discovering that the difficulties of his
pupils were caused as much by their unskilled eye as by their unskilled
fingers, drew the conclusion:

 

For it is a certain maxim, no man sees what things are, that knows
not what they ought to be. That this maxim is true, will appear by an
academy figure drawn by one ignorant in the structure, and knitting
of the bones, and anatomy, compared with another who understands these
thoroughly . . . both see the same life, but with different eyes. [19]

 

 

NOTES

 

 

To
p. 366
. I am speaking of Europe: landscape
painting in China has a much older tradition.

 

 

To
p. 378
. Incidentally, there is a bridge waiting
to be built between an criticism and the physiology of gesture. To
give an example: the neurologist Kurt Goldstein (1947) has made a study
of the way in which people point with their arms at an object. If the
object is to the front and to the right, the person will point with the
extended arm, which will form with the frontal plane of the body an angle
of approximately forty-five degrees. If the object is moved further to
the right, the person will start turning his trunk to the right, so that
the angle between body and arm remains 45 degrees. But if the object is
placed straight in front of him, he will turn his body to the left and
the angle will still be the same. There are obvious anatomical reasons
for this. But if you make your figure point an
accusing
finger
straight ahead. fully facing his adversary, you get a 'pathos-formula'.

 

 

 

 

 

XXII

 

 

IMAGE AND EMOTION

 

 

The trouble with putting into words the aesthetic experience aroused by a
picture is, as we saw, that so much is happening at the same time; that
only a fraction of it becomes conscious, and an even smaller fraction
verbalized. 'The forceps of our minds', to quote H. G. Wells again,
'are clumsy things, and crush the truth a little in the course of taking
hold of it.' Wells was talking of the difficulties of putting ideas into
words; when it comes to putting aesthetic experiences into words, nothing
short of a caesarian will help. The surgical tool that I proposed was
'bisociation'; and the operation consisted in disentangling the various
bisociative, or bifocal, processes which combine in the experience. I
have mentioned a number of these; I shall have to mention one or two more,
and discuss briefly the emotional reactions which they call forth.

 

 

 

Virtues of the Picture Postcard

 

 

The essence of the aesthetic experience consists, as I have tried to show,
in
intellectual illumination
-- seeing something familiar in a new,
significant light; followed by
emotional catharsis
-- the rise,
expansion, and ebbing away of the self-transcending emotions. But this
can happen only if the matrix which provides the 'new light' has a higher
emotive potential or 'calory value' (
pp. 321-31
);
in other words, the two matrices must lie on an ascending gradient.

 

 

Let us see in what manner the various bisociative patterns mentioned
earlier on fulfil this requirement. Take illusion once more, which enters
art in a variety of guises and disguises, on its most naive level: the
discovery that something can be itself and something else at the same
time. A small child, fascinated by dad's amateur efforts as a draftsman,
will beg '
make
me a donkey', '
make
me an elephant',
thus unconsciously evoking Pygmalion's power. I shall not hark back to
Altamira and the witch-doctor -- merely dot my i's by pointing out that
the gradient leads in that direction.

 

 

Or take the simplest illusion of space: the delighted shock of looking for
the first time through fieldglasses, and seeing the distant church-spire
leap to within grasp. Here again unconscious analogies, echoes of sorcery
enter into play: the power to be in two places at once; the conquest of
space by magic carpet; action-at-a-distance. The reverse experience is
the illusion derived from a perspective landscape -- or a Chinese silk
painting which, with a few brushstrokes, makes the horizon recede
into infinity. To call perspective and trompe l'oeil 'magic' is a
cliché, because their genuine magic has succumbed to the law of
diminishing returns; but to the unsophisticated eye the hole in the wall
through which it looks into a different world has the dream-like quality
of Alice stepping through the looking-glass; dream-like, because the
creation and annihilation of space is a favoured game of the underground.

 

 

I have made a slighting mention of the 'prettification' of nature on
picture postcards, which bring the whole scenery within the range of
focal vision. But there is a genuine appeal to the emotions in the fact
that a landscape painting can be taken in almost at a glance, without the
half-conscious, constant scanning which the real scenery requires. To
have it all there simultaneously laid out before his view, gives the
beholder a kind of naïve Olympian feeling, a sense of power entirely
harmless, since his only aim is passive contemplation; enhanced by the
circumstance -- and here the next bisociation enters into the process
-- that he is looking at the scenery not through his own, but through
Claude's or Courbet's eyes.

 

 

Another facet -- or pair of facets -- of the many-sided
experience of looking at a picture is synesthesia (
p. 321
). Berenson's dictum 'the painter can accomplish
his task only by giving tactile values to retinal impressions' does
not only mean that the bisociation of vision with touch lends an added
dimension to experience and more solidity to illusion. Berenson's emphasis
on tactile values also indicates that the sense of touch had a special
appeal to him -- as it had to Keats (
p. 321
). But
neither of them was exceptional in this respect; after all, the adjective
'touching' -- that is, emotionally moving -- is derived from touch; and
'touching' in the verbal sense is a primary impulse not only among lovers;
the texture of silk or polished stone also provides minor pleasures. The
brocade fineries of Van Eyck's figures have a strong tactile appeal;
the impact of the gangrened flesh of Christ in Grünewald's Isenheim
altar is one of horror redeemed by pity. It is perhaps only matched in
power by Flaubert's rendering of the legend of St. Julian sharing his
bed with the leper.

 

 

 

Taste and Distaste

 

 

This brings us to a subject which I have not mentioned so far, although
it used to play an important part in aesthetic theories of the hedonistic
type, and was a wonderful source of confusion: I mean the polarity of
agreeable and disagreeable, attractive and repellent sense-impressions.

 

 

The first necessity, if we wish to avoid similar confusion, is to make a
clear distinction between tastes and distastes directly affecting the
senses
(the tongue, the nose, the ear); and the pleasure-unpleasure
tone of complex
emotional states
mediated by the autonomous nervous
system. The distinction may seem pedantic, and a sharp line cannot always
be drawn, because the different levels in the nervous system interact
with each other; the palate can be 'educated' to delight in rotten
Chinese eggs, and the smell of honeysuckle can become nauseating to the
rejected lover. Whether the selective codes which govern our spontaneous
reactions of taste and distaste are inborn or acquired in early childhood
is irrelevant in this context; and the fact that these reactions can
be altered in later life does not affect the argument. What matters is
to distinguish between the aesthetic experience -- or the experience of
beauty if you like -- on the one hand, and sensory gratification on the
other; and to get away from such definitions as the "Concise Oxford's"
of beauty: 'Combination of qualities . . . that delights the sight;
combined qualities delighting the other senses', etc. Evidently, by
these criteria not only Grünewald, but the vast majority of works of
art would be beyond the pale of beauty and could never give rise to
aesthetic experience -- defined by the "Concise Oxford Dictionary" as
'the appreciation of the beautiful'.

 

 

I do not mean to flog the dead horse of hedonist aesthetics but to
emphasize the difference between sensory gratification and aesthetic
satisfaction -- a difference of levels deriving from the hierarchic
organization of the nervous system (
Chapter XIII
and
Book Two
). Take an obvious example from
music. Periodic sounds -- musical tones -- are more pleasing to the
ear than a-periodic noises; and some screeching noises -- rubbing a
blackboard with a dry sponge for instance -- are so offensive that they
give gooseflesh to some people. Again, among musical chords, the octave,
fifth, and major third are more agreeable to the European ear than others;
and some dissonances, heard in isolation, can put one on edge. But the
flattery or offensiveness of individual chords has only an indirect
bearing on the emotional effect of a string quartet as a whole. There
is no numerical relation between the number of consonances and our
aesthetic appreciation. The pattern of alternation between sweet and
bitter sounds is merely one among several relevant patterns interacting
with each other in the multi-dimensional experience.

 

 

Sensory preferences -- the discrimination between sensory stimulations
which 'agree', and those which 'disagree' with our innate or acquired
dispositions -- do not provide the clue to the nature of aesthetic
experience, but they provide one of the clues: particularly those
preferences which are part of the human heritage, and shared by
all. The Chinese taste for music differs from ours considerably; but
all men are subject to the pull of gravity and prefer keeping their
balance to losing it. A leaning tower, or a big head on a thin neck
give rise to disagreeable sensations mediated by projective empathy
(