The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  But in between these dramatic turning points one can observe a more gradual evolution of styles which seems to proceed in two opposite directions -- both intended to counteract saturation. One is a trend towards more pointed emphasis; the other towards more economy or implicitness. The first strives to recapture the artist's waning mastery over the audience by providing a spicier fare for jaded appetites: exaggerated mannerisms, frills, flamboyance, an overly explicit appeal to the emotions, 'rubbing it in' -- symptoms of decadence and impotence, which need not concern us further. The opposite trend is towards economy and implicitness in the sense previously defined (p.82 et seq.); it has been eloquently described by Mallarmé in a passage which outlined the programme of the French symbolist movement:

  Je pense qu'il faut qu'il n'y ait qu'allusion. La contemplation des objets, l'image s'envolant des rêveries sucitées par eux, sont le chant: les Parnassiens, eux, prennent la chose entièrement et la montrent; par là il manquent de mystère; ils retirent aux esprits cette joie délicieuse de croire qu'ils créent. Nommer un objet, c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème, qui est fait du bonheur de deviner peu à peu: le suggérer, voilà le rêve. C'est le parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitue le symbol: évoquer petit à petit un objet pour montrer un état d'âme, ou, inversement, choisir un objet et en dégager un état d'âme, par une série de déchiffrements. . . . (Enquéte sur l'Évolution Littèraire) (It seems to me that there should be only allusions. The contemplation of objects, the volatile image of the dreams they evoke, these make the song: the Parnassians [the classicist movement of Leconte de Lisle, Heredia, etc.] who make a complete demonstration of the object thereby lack mystery; they deprive the [reader's] mind of that delicious joy of imagining that it creates. To name the thing means forsaking three quarters of a poem's enjoyment -- which is derived from unravelling it gradually, by happy guesswork: to suggest the thing creates the dream. Symbols are formed when this secret is used to perfection: to evoke little by little, the image of an object in order to demonstrate a mood; or, conversely, to choose an object and to extract from it a mood, by a series of decipherings.)

  However, it was not the French symbolists who invented the trend from the explicit statement to the implicit hint, from the obvious to the allusive and oblique; it is as old as art itself. All mythology is studded with symbols, veiled in allegory; the parables of Christ pose riddles which the audience must solve. The intention is not to obscure the message, but to make it more luminous by compelling the recipient to work it out by himself -- to re-create it. Hence the message must be handed to him in implied form -- and implied means 'folded in'. To make it unfold, he must fill in the gaps, complete the hint, see through the symbolic disguise. But the audience has a tendency to become more sophisticated with time; once it has mastered all the tricks, the excitement goes out of the game; so the message must be made more implicit, more tightly folded. I believe that this development towards greater economy (meaning not brevity, but implicitness) can be traced in virtually all periods and forms of art. To indulge in a little lawmaking, let me call it the 'law of infolding'. It is the antidote to the law of diminishing returns in the domain of the emotions.

  Greek tragedy, as far as we can tell, starts with the 'goat song', derived from the worshipful ceremonies in honour of Bacchus-Dionysius. These in turn originate even further back in the past, in rituals accompanied by human sacrifice, which the Bacchantae enacted in symbolic ways, that is, by implication; their traces can still be found in Euripides. At some stage, the epic recital of events branched off from their direct representation by actors in disguise. The early bards were probably still impersonating their heroes by voice and gesture, as the mimes and histriones did in medieval days; but economy demanded that histrionics be banned from recitation -- it is practised now mainly by artistically minded nannies, and on the B.B.C. children's hour. And even legitimate histrionics, the art of acting, shows a trend towards less emphasis, more economy. Not only do Victorian melodramatics strike one as grotesque; but even films no more than twenty years old, and highly valued at the time, appear surprisingly dated -- overdone, obvious, over-explicit.

  Somewhere around 600 B.C. the Homeric epics were consolidated in their final version, disguised in written symbols, and folded into parchment. The actor in his mask impersonated the hero; the bard imitated his voice; the printed book evokes the illusion that somebody is talking by a pair of inverted commas -- yet we can almost hear Karenina's whisper or Uriah Heap's ingratiating whine.

  We have gone a long way in learning to create magic by the most frugal means. Only a hundred years ago the average Victorian novelist did not shrink from crude methods of dramatization: printed illustrations, the use of the historic present, invitations addressed to the gentle reader to follow the narrator to a certain house in a certain town on a winter evening of the year 183 . . ., and peep through the window. Here, as in pre-Raphaelite painting, we find emphasis sans economy at work -- a safe criterion of bad art.

  One method of economy is 'leaving out' -- firstly, everything that by the writer's standards is irrelevant, in the second place everything that is obvious, i.e. which the reader can and should supply out of his own imagination. 'The more bloody good stuff you cut out the more bloody good your novel will be,' Hemingway advised a young writer. Modern prose had to accelerate its pace, not because trains run faster than mailcoaches, but because the trains of thought run faster than a century ago, on tracks beaten smooth by popular psychology, the mass-media, and torrents of print. The novelist no longer needs to crank up the reader's imagination as if it were a model-T car; he pushes the button of the self-starter and leaves the rest to the battery. A glance at the opening lines of 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 progre
sses 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. Vis
ual 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?