The Act of Creation (57 page)

We can no more escape the pull of magic inside us than the pull of
gravity. Its manifestations may take a more or less dignified form; but
the value we set on the peach from the Earl's estate or the splinter
from the saint's bone, on Dickens's quill or Galileo's telescope, is
derived from the same source of sympathetic magic. It is, as the little
girl said, jolly nice to behold a fragment of a marble by Praxiteles --
although it has been battered out of human shape, with a leper's nose
and broken ears. The contact with the master's hand has imbued it with
a kind of effluvium which has lingered on, and emanates the same thrill
as the real blood on Nelson's shirt -- or the real ink from Picasso's pen.
The inordinate importance that we attribute to the original and
authenticated, even in those borderline cases where only the expert can
decide on questions of authenticity, has its unconscious roots in this
particular kind of fetish-worship. Hence its compelling power -- who would
not cherish a lock from an Egyptian mummy's head? Yet, as every honest
art dealer will admit, borderline cases are so frequent as to be almost
the rule. I am no longer referring to forgeries, but to the classical
practice of the master letting his pupils, apprenticed to his workshop,
assist in the execution of larger undertakings; and 'assistance' could
mean anything from the filling in of background and minor details, to
the painting of a whole picture after the master's sketch. We are made to
realize how common this practice was by the emphasis which Michelangelo's
admiring contemporaries put on the fact that he painted the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel 'alone and unaided'. If we remember that even the experts
were at a loss to tell the Caracci portrait from its contemporary copy --
probably by a pupil -- we must conclude that for the great majority of
mortals, including connoisseurs, the difference between an authenticated
masterpiece, a doubtful attribution, and a work 'from the school of', is
in most cases not discernible. But the fact remains that an 'attribution',
perfect in its genre but not authenticated, is held in lower esteem than
a work of lesser perfection, guaranteed to have come from the ageing
master's hand. It is not the eye that guides the museum visitor, but
the magic of names. The English nation forked out a million pounds to
prevent the sale to America of a Leonardo sketch to which it had never
paid any attention; and the hundreds of thousands of good citizens who
queued to see it could not have told it from a page in an art-student's
sketchbook; they went to see Nelson's shirt.
The Antiquarian Fallacy
The second 'interfering system' is period consciousness. A Byzantine
icon, or a Pompeian fresco is not enjoyed at its face value, but by a
part-conscious attunement of the mind to the values and techniques of
the time. Even in paintings from periods whose idiom is much closer to
ours -- a Holbein portrait, for instance -- such externals as costume
and headdress drive it mercilessly home to us that the man with the
unforgettable, timeless face belonged to the court of Henry VIII. The
archetypal quality is there, but period-consciousness intrudes; and the
danger is that it may dominate the field.
Thus we look at an old picture through a double frame: the solid gilt
frame which isolates it from its surroundings and creates for it a hole in
space; and the period-frame in our minds which creates for it a hole in
time, and assigns its place on the stage of history. Each time we think
we are making a purely aesthetic judgemerit according to our lights, the
stage-lights interfere. When we contemplate the Gothic wall-paintings on
the church in Lübeck for the first time, believing them to be authentic,
and then a second time, knowing that they were made by Herr Malskat,
our experience will indeed be completely changed, although the frescoes
are the same as at the time when they were hailed as masterpieces. The
period-frame has been changed, and with it the stage-lights.
Apart from being unavoidable, this relativism of aesthetic judgement
has its positive sides: by entering into the spirit and climate of the
period, we automatically make allowances for its crudities of technique,
for its conventions and blind spots; we bend over the past with a tender
antiquarian stoop. But this gesture degenerates into antiquarian snobbery
at the point where the period-frame becomes more important than the
picture, and perverts our scale of values. The symptoms are all too
familiar: indiscriminate reverence for anything classified as Italian
Primitive or Austrian Baroque (including its mass-produced puffy, chubby,
winged little horrors); collective shifts of period-consciousness (from
anti-Victorian to pro-Victorian in recent years); the inanities of fashion
(Fra Angelico is 'in', Botticelli is 'out').
The Comforts of Sterility,
The mechanism responsible for these perversions is the same as discussed
previously, and provides us with a handy definition: "snobbery is
the result of a mix-up between two frames of reference, A and B,
with different standards of value; and the consequent misapplication
of standard A to value-judgements referring to B". The art-snob's
pleasures are derived not from the picture, but from the catalogue; and
the social snob's choice of company is not guided by human value, but by
rank or celebrity value catalogued in the pages of
Who's Who
. The
confusion may even affect his biological drives -- his taste and smell
preferences, his sexual inclinations. A hundred years ago, when oysters
were the diet of the poor, the snob's taste-buds functioned in a different
manner. In the days before Hitler there was a young woman in Berlin who
worked for a publisher and was well known in the literary world for a
certain peculiarity: she had carried on a number of affairs with authors,
regardless of age or sex -- but only with those whose books had sold more
than 20,000 copies. Her own explanation was that with less successful
authors she was unable to obtain physical satisfaction.
It is a depressing anecdote because it has a ring of clinical
authenticity; at the same time it displays the familiar pattern of the
comic: the clash of two incompatible contexts. But to the poor heroine of
the story it was no joke, because she could not see their incompatibility;
the
Kama Sutra
and the best-seller list were hopelessly mixed
up in her mind. The reader may have wondered why I have devoted a whole
chapter of this book on human creativity to the seemingly trivial subject
of snobbery. The answer is in the question: snobbery is, I believe,
by no means a trivial phenomenon, but a confusion of values which,
in various forms, permeates all strata of civilized societies, present
and past (see, for instance, Petronius's
Banquet of Trimalchio
);
and it is in many respects a negation of the principle of creativity.
We have seen how laughter is sparked off by the collision of matrices;
discovery, by their integration; aesthetic experience by their
juxtaposition. Snobbery follows neither of these patterns; it is a
hotchpotch of matrices, the application of the rules of one game to
another game. It uses a clock to measure weight, and a thermometer to
measure distance. The creative mind perceives things in a new light, the
snob in a borrowed light; his pursuits are sterile, and his satisfactions
of a vicarious nature. He does not aim at power; he merely wants to
rub shoulders with those who wield power, and bask in their reflected
glory. He would rather be a tolerated hanger-on of an envied set than a
popular member of one to which by nature he belongs. What he admires in
public would bore him when alone, but he is unaware of it. When he reads
Kirkegaard, he is not moved by what he reads, he is moved by himself
reading Kirkegaard -- but he is blissfully unaware of it. His motions
do not derive from the object, but from extraneous sources associated
with it; his satisfactions are pseudo-satisfactions, his triumphs
self-delusions. He has never travelled in the belly of the whale; he
has opted for the comforts of sterility against the pangs of creativity.
One cannot discuss the act of creation without devoting at least a
few pages to the act of desecration. Snobbery is a poor word with too
specifically modern connotations for that benightedness, due to the
confusion of values, which is one of the leitmotifs of the history of
man; he always seems to be groping his way through a labyrinthine world,
armed with a compass which always points in the wrong direction. The
symbol of creativity is the magic wand which Moses used to make water
come out of the rock; its reverse is the faulty yardstick which turns
everything it touches into dust.
BOOK TWO
HABIT AND ORIGINALITY
INTRODUCTION
So far I have discussed creativity in science and art, that is to say,
the highest forms of mental activity, with only occasional references to
the humbler routines of existence. I started at the roof, as it were --
what remains to be done is to build up the walls which support it.
The main purpose of this somewhat perverse procedure was to deal first
with those subjects which are of primary interest to the general reader
and to establish a wider theoretical framework afterwards. But there
exist additional considerations to justify this reversal of order.
At the Hixon Symposium in 1948 K. S. Lashley quoted with approval
a French author writing in 1887. 'The study of comparative grammar,'
Lashley said, 'is not the most direct approach to the physiology of the
cerebral cortex, yet Fournié has written, "Speech is the only
window through which the physiologist can view the cerebral life." '
[1] The word 'only' is, of course, an unwarranted exaggeration, but
perhaps no more unwarranted than the opposite claim, that the 'only'
legitimate window is that through which we watch the workings of the
salivary reflex in dogs or the behaviour of rats in mazes. To repeat an
argument from the
Preface
to Book One: in the
history of most sciences we find alternations between the downward
approach from roof to basement, from the complex to the elementary,
and the upward approach from the elementary to the complex; until
the two finally merge. It was the study of complex electro-magnetic
phenomena which provided the due to sub-atomic structures. Torn out
of the larger context in which the 'elementary part' functions, it
ceases to be a true elementary part -- whether we speak of electrons,
tissue-cells, or 'elements of behaviour'. Genetics started with
morphological classifications and comparisons of whole organisms long
before anything was known about chromosomes, genes, and nucleic adds. The
use of undefined, 'dirty' concepts as black boxes in theory-making has
led into many cul-de-sacs in the history of science, but was nevertheless
indispensable for its progress.

 

 

In experimental psychology the pendulum oscillated in the course of the
last century between the 'upward' and the 'downward' approach: from
the atomism of the English associationists to the introspectionism
of the Würzburg school; from the chain-reflex theory of Watsonian
behaviourism to the Holism of Gestalt, and back again to the more
sophisticated behaviourism of the forties and fifties. But there are
signs which indicate that the controversies between 'cognitive' versus
'stimulus-response' theories of behaviour have become sterile, and that
a new synthesis is in the making.

 

 

So much by way of justification for the order of the two parts of this
book. The methodological approach of the second is meant to be the
reverse of the first. It starts 'from the bottom' with some elementary
considerations which are non-controversial. Yet gradually, I hope,
a structure will emerge which makes contact with and lends support to
the controversial theories of creative activity outlined in
Book One
.

 

 

 

I

 

 

PRENATAL SKILLS

 

 

Organic life, in all its manifestations, from embryonic development
to symbolic thought, is governed by 'rules of the game' which lend it
coherence, stability, and an appearance of purpose (or 'goal-directedness'
if you prefer that term). These rules or codes, whether phylogenetically
or ontogenetically acquired, function on all levels of the hierarchy,
from the chromosomes to the neuron-circuits responsible for verbal
thinking. Each code represents the fixed, invariant aspect of an adaptable
skill or matrix of behaviour. I shall take the stylistic licenee of
using the word 'skill' in a broad sense, as a synonym for 'matrix',
and shall speak of the morphogenetic skills which enable the egg to
grow into a hen, of the vegetative skills of maintaining homeostasis,
of perceptual, locomotive, and verbal skills.

 

 

We shall find as a fundamental characteristic of codes on all levels
that they function on the trigger-release principle, so that a relatively
simple signal releases pre-set, complex action patterns. The signal may
be mechanical, as in artificial parthenogenesis induced by a pin-prick;
chemical (e.g. inducers and evocator substances); or neural (Tinbergen
and Lorenz's Internal Releasive Mechanisms). But the pre-set action
pattern activated by the code is generally an elastic pattern, not
a rigid automatism (such as suggested, for instance, in Tinbergen's
schema). Skills have varying degrees of flexibility. The restraints
imposed by the code do not exhaust the degrees of freedom possessed
by the matrix; there are usually various alternative choices left to
provide for a flexible strategy according to the 'lie of the land' --
i.e. guided by feedback from the environment. Matrices thus function under
the dual control of an invariant code and a variable environment. These
two factors jointly determine which members of the matrix should enter
into action and in what order.

 

 

The members of the matrix are sub-matrices governed by their
sub-codes. Facing 'upward' and 'inward' in the organismic hierarchy,
they act as dependent parts; facing 'downward' and 'outward', they
act as relatively autonomous sub-wholes. On every level of structure
and function in the living organism we find the same phenomenon of
Janus-faced entities which behave partly as wholes, yet wholly as parts,
as it were. The 'irreducible, elementary particle' has turned out to
be a will-o'-the-wisp, even in inorganic chemistry; in the organism,
the firing of a single nerve-cell turns out to be not an event, but a
complex, autonomous pattern of events.