The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  It is true that illusion, from Greek tragedy to horror comics, is also capable of generating fear and anger, palpitations and cold sweat, which seems to contradict its cathartic function. But the emotions thus generated are vicarious emotions derived from the spectator's participation in another person's existence, which is a self-transcending act (cf. pp. 278-9). Consequently, however exciting the action on the stage, the anger or fear which it generates will always carry a component of sympathy, an irradiation of unselfish generosity, which facilitates catharsis -- just as a varying mount of high-voltage current is always transformed into heat. At a later stage, when the climax of the drama is passed, and the tension ebbs away, the whole mount of the current is consumed in a gentle inner glow.

  The Dynamics of Illusion

  In the comedy, the accumulation of suspense, and its subsequent annihilation in laughter take place at distinctly separate stages (although the two may overlap in the smiling, anticipated pleasure of the joke to come). In the tragedy, on the other hand, exaltation and catharsis are continuous. Laughter explodes emotion; weeping is its gentle overflow; there is no break in the continuity of mood, and no separation of emotion from reason. The hero, with whom the spectator has identified himself, cannot be debunked by slipping on a banana-skin or by any sudden incongruity in his behaviour. The gods of the Greek and Hindu pantheon might change into any shape -- a swan, a bull, a monkey, a shower of coins -- and yet their paramours would lovingly surrender to them. On the bas-reliefs of Indian temples, Shiva is often seen making love to Parvati while standing on his head, without appearing ridiculous. When the events in epic or drama take an unexpected turn -- Odysseus's companions transformed into swine or chaste Ophelia singing obscene songs -- emotion, if aggressively tainted, refuses to perform the jump and explodes in laughter; if sympathetic, it will follow the hero through all viscissitudes. The abrupt change of situation which required an equally quick reorientientation of the mind to a different associative context, led in the first case to a rupture between emotion and reason, in the second to a transfer of emotion to the new context whereby its harmonious co-ordination with reason is preserved.

  Thus incongruity -- the confrontation of incompatible matrices -- will be experienced as ridiculous, pathetic, or intellectually challenging, according to whether aggression, identification, or the well-balanced blend of scientific curiosity prevails in the spectator's mind. Don Quixote is a comic or a tragic figure, or a case-history of incipient paranoia, depending on the panel of the tryptich in which he is placed. In all three cases the matrices of reality and delusion -- of windmills and phantom-knights -- confront each other in the reader's mind. In the first case they collide, and malice is spilled in laughter. In the second, the two universes remain juxtaposed, reason oscillates to and fro between them, compassion remains attached to it and is easily transferred from one matrix to the other. In the third case, the two merge in a synthesis: the (emotionally 'neutral') diagnosis of the clinician.

  Thus compassion, and the other varieties of the participatory emotions, attach themselves to the narrative told on the stage or in print, like faithful dogs, and follow it whatever the surprises, twists, and incongruities the narrator has in store for them. By contrast, hostility, malice, and contempt tend to persist in a straight course, impervious to the subtleties of intellect; to them a spade is a spade, a windmill a windmill, and a Picasso nude with three breasts an object to leer at. The self-transcending emotions seem to be guided by the maxim "tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner"; the self-asserting emotions are designed for assertion, not comprehension. Hence, when attention is suddenly displaced from one frame of reference to another, the self-asserting impulses, deprived of their raison d'être, are spilled in the process, whereas the participatory emotions are transferred to the new matrix.

  The physiological considerations which lend support to this view I have already discussed (pp. 56 ff; 274, 283). Anger and fear owe their persistence and momentum to the sympathico-adrenal machinery, which causes them to become occasionally dissociated from reasoning. The self-transcending emotions, on the other hand, are accompanied by parasympathetic reactions which are in every respect the opposite of the former; since they are devoid of massiveness and momentum, there is no cause for their falling out of step with the higher mental activities, and the normal co-ordination of thought and emotion will prevail. If your mind has the nimbleness of migrating, at a moment's notice, into Romeo's in sixteenth-century Verona, then you will also be capable of shedding tears at Juliet's death.

  We must remember, however, that emotions are complex mixtures; our amusement at Charlie Chaplin's adventures is full of compassion. All that is required for a mildly comic effect is that an aggressive factor should be present of sufficient strength to provide a certain inertia of feeling -- or anaesthesia of the heart.

  Escapism and Catharsis

  Illusion, then, is the simultaneous presence and interaction in the mind of two universes, one real, one imaginary. It transports the spectator from the trivial present to a plane remote from self-interest and makes him forget his own preoccupations and anxieties; in other words, it facilitates the unfolding of his participatory emotions, and inhibits or neutralizes his self-asserting tendencies.

  This sounds like an escapist theory of art; and in spite of its derogatory connotations, the expression contains a grain of truth -- though no more than a grain. The analysis of any aesthetic experience requires, as said before, a series of steps; and the escape offered by transporting the spectator from his bed-sitter in Bayswater to the Castle of Elsinore is merely the bottom step of the ladder. But, nevertheless, it should not be under-estimated. In the first place, if illusion offers escape it is escape of a particular kind, sharply distinguished from other distractions such as playing tennis or bingo. It teaches us to live on two planes at once. Children and primitive audiences who, forgetting the present, completely accept the reality of the events on the stage, are experiencing not an aesthetic thrill, but a kind of hypnotic trance; and addiction to it may lead to various degrees of estrangement from reality. The aesthetic experience depends on that delicate balance arising from the presence of both matrices in the mind; on perceiving the hero as Laurence Olivier and Prince Hamlet of Denmark at one and the same time; on the lightning oscillations of attention from one to the other, like sparks between charged electrodes. It is this precarious suspension of awareness between the two planes which facilitates the continuous flux of emotion from the Now and Here to the remoter worlds of Then and There, and the cathartic effects resulting from it. For when interest is deflected from the self it will attach itself to something else; when the level of self-assertive tension falls, the self-transcending impulses become almost automatically dominant. Thus the creation of illusion is in itself of cathartic value -- even if the product, judged by more sophisticated standards, is of cheap quality; for it helps the subject to actualize his potential of self-transcending emotions thwarted by the dreary routines of existence. Liberated from his frustrations and anxieties, man can turn into a rather nice and dreamy creature; when he changes into a dark suit and sits in a theatre, he at once shows himself capable of taking a strong and entirely unselfish interest in the destinies of the personae on the stage. He participates in their hopes and sufferings; his frustrated cravings for communion find their primeval outlet in the magic of identification.

  To revert to Aristotle, the cathartic function of the tragedy is 'through incidents arousing horror and pity to accomplish the purgation of such emotions'. In cruder terms, a good cry, like a good laugh, has a more lasting after-effect than the occasion seems to warrant. Taking the Aristotelian definition at face value, it would seem that the aesthetic experience could purge the mind only of those emotions which the stage-play has created; that it would merely take out of the nervous system what it has just put in, leaving the mind in the same state as before. But this is not so. The emotion is not created, but merely stimulated by the actors; it must be 'worked up'
by the spectator. The work of art does not provide the current, like an electricity company, but merely the installations; the current has to be generated by the consumer. Although this is obvious once we remember it, we tend to fall into the mistake of taking a metaphor at face value and believing that the stage 'provides' us with a thrill against cash payment for a seat in the stalls. What we buy, however, is not emotion, but a sequence of stimuli cunningly designed to trigger off our latent participatory emotions which otherwise would remain frustrated or look for coarser outlets, and to assure their ultimate consummation. Life constantly generates tensions which run through the mind like stray eddies and erratic currents. The aesthetic experience inhibits some, canalizes others, but above all, it draws on unconscious sources of emotion which otherwise are only active in the games of the underground.

  Thus the concept of catharsis assumes a twofold meaning. Firstly, it signifies that concentration on the illusory events on the stage rids the mind of the dross of its self-centred trivial preoccupations; in the second place it arouses its dormant self-transcendent potentials and provides them with an outlet, until they peacefully ebb away. Peaceful, of course, does not necessarily mean a happy ending. It may mean the 'earthing' of an individual tragedy in the universal tragedy of the human condition -- as the scientist resolves a problem by showing that a particular phenomenon is an instance of a general law. It may dissolve the bitterness of personal sorrow in the vastness of the oceanic feeling; and redeem horror by pity. Tragedy, in the Greek sense, is the school of self-transcendence.

  Identification and Magic

  The projections of a single cine-camera with its rotating Maltese cross arouse anger, terror, and righteous indignation in up to five successive audiences on a single day, as if it were a machine designed for the wholesale manufacture of adrenalin. Yet the emotions aroused even by a cheap thriller-film are vicarious emotions derived from one of the primordial games of the underground: the transformation of one person or object into another (Chapter VIII, p. 187 f). The fear and anger experienced by the audience is experienced on behalf of another person; the adrenalin secreted into their bloodstream is secreted to provide another person with excess energy for fight or flight; the magic of identification is at work.

  It enters into illusion in two stages. The first is the partial identification, in the spectator's mind, of the actor with the character he is meant to represent; the second is the partial identification of the spectator with one or several of the characters. In both cases the identification is only partial, but nevertheless the magic is powerful enough to provide the palpitations and activate the supra-renal glands. And when I speak of magic, I am not speaking metaphorically; the 'magic of the stage' is a cliché which originates in the sympathetic magic practised by all primitive and not-so-primitive cultures, rooted in the belief in the substantial identity of the masked dancer with the demon he mimes; of the impersonator with the power he impersonates. The unconscious self, manifested in the beliefs of the child and the dreams of the adult, is, as we saw, immune to contradiction, unsure of its identity, and prone to merging it with others'. 'In the collective representations of primitive mentality, objects, beings, events can be, though in a way incomprehensible to us, both themselves and something other than themselves.' [2] This description of tribal mentality by a Victorian anthropologist could be applied almost without qualifications to the audiences of Coronation Street.

  I have taken a short-cut from primitive to contemporary magic, but the development is in fact historically continuous: the latter is a direct descendant of the former. Dramatic art has its origin in ceremonial rites -- dances, songs, and mime -- which enacted important past or desired future events: rain, a successful hunt, an abundant harvest. The gods, demons, ancestors and animals participaring in the event were impersonated with the aid of masks, costumes, tattooings and make-up. The shaman who danced the part of the rain-god was the rain-god, and yet remained the shaman at the same time. From the stag dances of the Huichol Indians or the serpent dances of the Zuni, there is only one step to the goat dance of the Acheans, the precursor of Greek drama. 'Tragedy' means 'goat-song' (tragos -- he goat, oide -- song); it probably originated in the ceremonial rites in honour of Dyonysius, where the performers were disguised in goat-skins as satyrs, and in the related ceremonies in honour of Apollo and Demeter. Indian and Chinese stage craft have similarly religious origins. Etruscan drama derived from funeral rites; modern European drama evolved from the medieval mystery plays performed on the occasion of the main church festivals. But though the modern theatre hardly betrays its religious ancestry, the magic of illusion still serves essentially the same emotional needs: it enables the spectator to transcend the narrow confines of his personal identity, and to participate in other forms of existence. For -- to quote for a last time the unfashionable Lévy-Bruhl, to whom Freud, Jung, and others owe so much:

  The need of participation remains something more imperious and intense, even among people like ourselves, than the thirst for knowledge and the desire for conformity with the claims of reason. It lies deeper in us and its source is more remote. During the long prehistoric ages, when the claims of reason were scarcely realized or even perceived, it was no doubt all-powerful in all human aggregates. Even today the mental activity which, by virtue of an intimate participation, possesses its object, gives it life and lives through it -- finds entire satisfaction in this possession. [3]

  The Dawn of Literature

  The dawn of literature, too, was bathed in the twilight of mysticism and mythology. 'The recitation of the Homeric poems on the Panathanaea corresponds to the recitation elsewhere of the sacred texts in the temple; the statement of Phemios that a god inspired his soul with all the varied ways of song expresses the ordinary belief of early historical times.' [4] But the earliest literati -- priests, prophets, rhapsodes, bards -- had less direct means to impress their audiences than their older colleagues, the masked and painted illusion-mongers. They had to 'dramatize' their tales, by techniques which we can only infer from hints. The dramatization of an epic recital aims, like stage-craft from which it is derived, at creating, to some extent at least, the illusion that the events told are happening now and here. Perhaps the oldest of these techniques is the use of direct speech, to make the audience believe that it is listening not to the narrator but to the characters themselves; its use is still as frequent in the modern novel as it was in the Homeric epos. In the ancient forms of oral recital it was supplemented by imitation of voice and gesture -- another tradition still alive in the nursery room. The minstrels and troubadours, the joculators or jugglers, the scôps and the chansonniers de geste, were direct descendants of the Roman mimes -- actors who, having lost their livelihood when the Roman theatre decayed, became vagabonds and diverted their patrons with dancing, tumbling, juggling and recitals as much acted as told. The early minstrels were called histriones, stage-players; the bard Taillefer, who sang the Chanson de Roland during the battle of Hastings, is described as a histrion or mimus.

  There is hardly a novelist who had not wished at times that he were a histrion, and could convey by direct voice, grimace, and gesture what his characters look like and feel. But writers have evolved other techniques to create the illusion that their characters are alive, and to make their audience fall in love with a heroine who exists only as printer's ink on paper. The real tears shed over Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary are the ultimate triumph of sympathetic magic.

  XVI

  RHYTHM AND RHYME

  Pulsation

  The effect of the rhythm of a poem, wrote I. A. Richards, 'is not due to our perceiving pattern in something outside us, but to our becoming patterned ourselves'. [1] Rhythmic periodicity is a fundamental characteristic of life. All automatic functions of the body are patterned by rhythmic pulsations: heart-beat, respiration, peristalsis, brain-waves are merely the most obvious ones. For there is also an inherent tendency in some parts of the nervous system, particularly on its phylogenetically older
levels, to burst into spontaneous activity when released from the inhibitory control of the higher centres by brain-damage, toxic states, or by patterns of stimuli acting as triggers.

  Perhaps the most striking example of such a trigger-effect is the experimental induction of fits in epileptic patients by shining a bright flickering light into their eyes, where the frequency of the flicker is made to correspond to a characteristic frequency in the patient's electro-encephalogram. This, of course, is an extreme example of a trigger-effect by direct physiological stimulation; moreover, the incoming rhythm is synchronized with an inner rhythm to produce an unholy resonance effect. The convulsions of voodoo-dancers, on the other hand, which have been compared to epileptic fits, are certainly not caused by the rhythmic beat of the tom-tom alone; other factors, of a psychological nature, must be present to produce the effect. But it is nevertheless true that our remarkable responsiveness to rhythmically patterned stimuli and our readiness 'to become patterned ourselves' arises from the depths of the nervous system, from those archaic strata of the unconscious which reverberate to the shaman's drum.

  Needless to say, even the contemporary Rock-'n'-Roll or Twist are restrained and sublimated displays compared to the St. Vitus's dance which spread as an infectious form of hysteria through medieval Europe. Likewise, if rhythm in poetry is meant, as Yeats said, 'to lull the mind into a waking trance', that entrancement carries only a faint, remote echo of the incantative power of the muezzin's call, or of the recitation of the Homeric poems on the Panathanaea. On the other hand, we do experience a common kind of 'waking trance' when we keep repeating a silly phrase to the rhythm of the wheels of a railway carriage; hypnotists used to rely on metronomes, flickering candles, monotonously repeated orders or passes; and the rocking motions accompanying the prayers of Oriental religions and mystic sects serve the same purpose. Thus experience, both of the exalted and trivial kind, indicates that the mind is particularly receptive to and suggestible by messages which arrive in a rhythmic pattern, or accompanied by a rhythmic pattern.